Operation Game Over | Investigation
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This episode features strong language throughout. Welcome to True Spies. Week by week, mission by mission, you'll hear the true stories behind the world's greatest espionage operations. You'll meet the people who navigate this secret world. What do they know? What are their skills?

And what would you do in their position? This is True Spies. And then he just jumped on the bag, grabbed the bag, then he sort of ripped a little bit the interior of the bag, he destroyed the bag, and he found the camera and the cables and he took out everything. That was a moment of terror, I would say. Episode 52: Operation Game Over

Traditionally, spies work for governments. As an avid True Spies listener, you'll already know that agents are subjected to years of intensive training with access to some of the best intelligence and technology on the planet. Not this one, though. This true spy doesn't work for any government. Technically, he doesn't work for anyone.

He relies almost entirely on donations, and yet he helped bring down one of the most high-profile illegal enterprises in the world. Zambezi was a little baby elephant that I met in an elephant orphanage in Zambia.

His family was, of course, killed and poached for the ivory. And as often happens, the baby elephant escaped this carnage, this slaughtering. Meet Andrea Kroster.

And I heard his story and I spent some time with his little elephant. And this is actually the moment when I thought, what am I doing? I mean, I was doing just business and business and business and money. And I thought, that cannot go on like this. I would be unhappy for the rest of my life. Andrea's epiphany isn't a midlife crisis. It's a calling. A return to his first love. Conservation.

And it couldn't be more timely. Environmental crime is the fourth largest criminal endeavor on the planet, up to $260 billion per year. It provides money and funds to the most dangerous organized groups in the world. They provide money to terrorist groups and militias. When we were losing 35,000, 40,000 elephants per year for the ivory, and I saw with my own eyes,

Andrea didn't mean to become a spy. In the late 90s, he needed to support his family after the loss of his mother. He was soon drawn into the booming high-tech business. By 1998, he's almost a millionaire after launching one of the first e-commerce sites in Italy. But his timing couldn't be worse. Just two years later, the dot-com bubble bursts, taking everything Andrea has built with it.

His internet dream might be in tatters, but Andrea's high profile in the Italian tech community means he isn't twiddling his thumbs for long. I went into other kind of technologies, mostly related to Homeland Security, investigation, intelligence, anti-terrorism, so forth. Government, intelligence agencies, anti-terrorism. No surprise then that Andrea isn't able to share specifics about this period of his life.

All you need to know is that he worked closely with high-profile politicians from Europe, Africa and Israel. At first, he's assisting them with their software and security, but his sharp wits and inquisitive nature soon see his role grow to include intelligence gathering. Not bad for a wannabe dot-com millionaire. The work often involves escorting his unnamed employers in Africa during some of its most volatile periods.

It was around 2010, during one particular assignment in Kenya, assisting a prominent politician, that he first saw the elephant corpses with his own eyes and witnessed the collective frustration about how to stop the poaching. I could almost see a question mark on their heads. They could not stop this thing. It was too much for them. They were just strangers and they do their best to protect the elephants.

The demand, the power of international traffickers was so big that there was no way to stop it. The depressing scenes left an indelible mark on Andrea.

I thought, okay, let's do something new. Let's do something game changing. I don't want to copy anyone else. I don't want to copy another NGO. There are plenty of NGOs, for example, doing anti-poaching. There are plenty of NGOs doing awareness and advocacy. What can I do differently? And I thought, okay, let's merge my two parallel careers, one in conservation and the other one in intelligence investigation and high-tech,

to create a new kind of a sort of hybrid NGO that can act, it can operate as an intelligence agency. So that's what he did. In 2012, he went back home to Europe and told his government clients that he was no longer offering his services as a contractor. A few months later, his new hybrid NGO, Earth League International, was born.

But this particular mission wouldn't take root until a year or so later. New NGOs can't just start poking around in Africa. You need funding and a team. I decided to start, to begin a very detailed intelligence gathering operation along the entire supply chain of illegal ivory from Eastern Africa to China through Southeast Asia.

You know, you cannot improvise something like that, so I needed to recruit the right people, of course, beginning with the undercover agents that we use to infiltrate trafficking networks. And after a few months, I found the people, I found the money, and then we started. It didn't take long for Andrea and his newly formed team to figure out what the problem was.

While international trade in ivory had been made illegal over two decades earlier, there was a massive, unplugable loophole. Despite agreeing to comply with the international restriction, China continued to allow the legal sale of any ivory obtained before the ban. Fair enough, you might think, but appetite for the material in China remained high.

To feed this demand, the Chinese government controversially bought tons of pre-ban ivory at auction. The plan being to release a fixed amount each year until that supply eventually ran out. You've spotted the problem, haven't you? This legal supply chain meant that all poachers and traffickers needed to do

was find someone willing to turn a blind eye or gently adjust some paperwork and hey presto, your illegal ivory is now clear to be sold in plain view. We're talking about, you know, official releasing five tons of ivory every year and actually the industry needs 100 or 200 or 300. So it was really the only way to do it from their point of view was of course to smuggle illegal ivory in the country.

and then sell it as legal. With no serious accountability mechanism or checking mechanism in place, they got along with this thing for years and years and years. So we're talking about 10, 12, 15 years of this incredibly damaging loophole that used to destroy elephant populations in Africa. It was time to get some of that vital intelligence. To achieve this, Andrea turned to what he knows best: the internet.

In 2014, we also launched White Leaks, which is the world's first whistleblowing initiative dedicated to environmental crime. So we push White Leaks pretty much everywhere on social media in the hope to receive anonymous tips, anonymous leads from people about different crimes, of course, different environmental crimes, not just ivory. It's not quite WikiLeaks for wildlife. They don't share their intel publicly, but you get the idea.

And it isn't long before tips actually start to come in. One day we received this very interesting leak, very interesting video also with the message. It was apparently was a video of a lot of ivory being transiting through Hong Kong, coming from Tanzania, going to China, but transiting through Hong Kong. And in the message was actually

This person explained that Hong Kong, because at that time in Hong Kong they had an even murkier and stranger legislation regarding ivory, was actually the perfect transit point to China, meaning if you can smuggle anything, pretty much, but especially ivory to Hong Kong, then it was very easy to re-smuggle it into mainland China. We'll come back to how later.

But for now, all you need to know is that Hong Kong's physical and political proximity to China makes it the perfect entry point for smugglers. China doesn't need to get its hands dirty, and Hong Kong's more progressive climate provides the perfect veneer for criminals to hide behind. André finally has what he needs: evidence. A lead. Which means it's time to get some boots on the ground.

We designed this operation that we call it Operation Game Over to collect intelligence on the most important players and on the modus operandi along the entire supply chain from Tanzania through Hong Kong, through Vietnam and then into mainland China. Meaning to have people on the ground, undercover in all those countries.

His previous consultancy work means he already has contacts in the countries where illegal ivory smuggling takes place. And this is critical if he hopes to gather any serious information, as Westerners tend to arouse suspicion in the world of elephant poaching. Andrea's new team of local agents and informants would be fundamental to Operation Game Over's success.

And it isn't long before they start coming up with the goods. One of his local spies has been tipped off that the port in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania is a key link in the supply chain. If they can understand why, or at the very least find some reliable indication that this is a main exit point for illegal ivory, they can follow the trail to the next step in the chain, which they believe could be Hong Kong or Vietnam.

Eager to follow up on this lead, he plans a reconnaissance mission in Tanzania. But this is East Africa, where he's learned that corruption isn't just common, it's often the norm. He'll need more than quick wits and a good story to avoid raising even a single eyebrow. Pretending to be someone else, we enter the port and we film inside Dar es Salaam port where you'll see all the containers. We find all the containers before being shipped to Asia.

Beneath all the loading cranes and towering stacks of containers, their spy senses are starting to tingle. Surely someone around here knows something. But this is a major international trading route. You can't just walk up and ask where the ivory is. Or can you? We met someone who worked for the port. Of course, we use a lot of deception here because he didn't know who we were. He thought we were actually executives from a mining company.

Deception? Excuse Andrea's nonchalant tone here. Imagine, you're in what you suspect to be a hub for international organized crime. Nobody knows you're there. You don't have the protection of your own government. They can't help you. You don't know if the workers are on the criminal payroll. Presumably some of them are. Could they be armed? Is it really wise to turn up unannounced and start asking questions? Apparently, sometimes it is.

And he explained to us how we should not be worried about getting checked at Dar es Salaam port. They don't check the containers. There is just a couple of scanners, but they are used just for the revenue service. So, you know, we started from there. Now, they have both the proof that the ivory is in the containers and they know why Dar es Salaam is the port of choice. The lax approach to inspections makes this the perfect location.

Next, they need to figure out where it goes from here. They already have intel that suggests it isn't always going to Hong Kong. Smuggling routes are routinely changed to keep ahead of law enforcement.

Their intelligence tells them that it often passes through Southeast Asia before moving onward to China. And this presents a small but significant problem. When you, like in this case, you work in China, Hong Kong and Vietnam, you need Chinese investigators in your team. Because to engage Chinese traffickers, you need a Chinese agent. They would never ever talk to me, for example, or anyone else. Once again,

Andrea's time on the ground in Africa is about to pay off. He remembers an encounter in Kenya with a Chinese journalist, an investigator called Hong, who had been making a name for himself in the world of environmental crime investigation. So Andrea calls him up. And it was a big ask. Hong would need to go undercover, possibly alone, deep in rural Vietnam. Their intel is pointing them to a village called Ni Cay,

a place notorious for its criminal underbelly. Thankfully, Hong agreed. I was suspecting, but I didn't know how important Vietnam was in terms of ivory and wildlife trafficking in general from Africa to China. Hong's job is to find out just that. But unlike in Tanzania, where the port was just an exit point, Vietnam's role is less clear. There are many places that ivory could go. Why here?

To get the answers they need, Hong would need to do more than just ask a few questions. He needs to have a meeting with the big players. He needs to earn their trust and be invited in.

Bear in mind that Hong isn't a big guy. "Bookish" might be the word.

and things would get very tense very quickly. Hong has barely taken a seat when one of the traffickers decides to go through his belongings before they start talking. Hong has no choice but to sit there and put on his best poker face and pray that they don't spot his hidden camera. Breathe in, breathe out. Will they find it? The pat-down probably only lasts 20 seconds, but likely feels like an eternity. These traffickers might be experienced, but apparently they aren't thorough.

Hong has hidden his camera too well and they don't find it. But it's a very close call. He actually uncovered the super important role of Vietnam as a transit country between Africa and China. We identify and engage directly some of the most important ivory traffickers in Asia based in Vietnam.

We understood from them how they do what they do, how easy it was actually to do it. It was because nobody was actually going after them, so they were actually very comfortable in what they were doing. It was really eye-opening, even for me. So far, Operation Game Over is going to plan. A clearer image is starting to emerge from what started out as little more than a handful of rumours and suspicions.

If they can complete the picture, they might just secure enough intelligence to present to governments both East and West, enough to force the Chinese to close their gaping loophole. But they're not there yet, figuratively and literally.

Remember that tip-off? The video of ivory passing through Hong Kong? In Hong Kong, the task of the mission was a little different because in Hong Kong, all the people involved in ivory trafficking are actually not criminals, are businessmen. What is the saying about China and Hong Kong? One country, two systems? That might be true for most things.

When it comes to crime and the ivory business, it turns out it's closer to one country, one system. But it's understanding that system, how illegal ivory gets legitimized via Hong Kong and into mainland China, that's key to the whole operation. Understand that, and you have a chance of unraveling it. Fail to secure that info, and the whole endeavor could be for naught. No pressure then.

Once again, it falls to Hong to take on the marks. This time, it's not criminal traffickers though. It's retailers and carving houses. Both a common sight in Hong Kong at the time. The task was to understand exactly how they were using the loopholes in their laws in order to import illegal ivory from Africa and then re-export it legally to mainland China to clean it, launder it. This time, at least, there's no thugs putting you down for hidden wires.

Just regular shop owners and carving factory managers. Although one might assume that criminal gangs are never too far away. You have to imagine the operation is about first of all meeting the targets or persons of interest or traffickers. And first of all you have to get their trust. You have to sort of become friends otherwise they would never tell you what you need to know. Fortunately if there's one thing Hong can do it's talk.

Quietly, casually, slowly disarming his targets, Hong leads the traders like a pro. And, smelling a potential sale,

It doesn't take long before they start talking candidly. They explained to us how they have, yes, they have a sort of a database with all the pieces of ivory and numbers and codes, but it was very easy to simply sell the illegal ivory, a piece of illegal ivory that they had, and then substitute with a piece of illegal ivory, but using the same number and the same tag. So, voila, it's magic that illegal ivory becomes legal.

A bigger problem appears to be the collective blind eye that everyone is willing to turn. You can play dumb. Convince yourself that you're only buying legal back stock, but the numbers really don't add up. Just 5 tons or so a year is officially released for sale. Yet the shelves are always full.

If the government will check, they will find, you know, a piece of ivory with that number. So all legal. So they were declaring to sell less, of course, but actually they were selling a lot by simply replenishing the warehouse with illegal ivory. That mechanism before then was not really understood. It was not known, actually.

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And I'm so excited to get back to it. Like I said, if you love a salacious little mystery, then give it a go. Discover your inner detective when you download June's Journey for free today on iOS and Android. Hello, listeners. This is Anne Bogle, author, blogger, and creator of the podcast, What Should I Read Next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week, I take all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read.

They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately. And I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years, and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment, whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change, or a frothy page-turner to help them escape the stresses of work, socializing,

school, everything. You'll learn something about yourself as a reader, and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for What Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and visit our website, whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more. Thousands of elephants butchered every year. A global enterprise encompassing militias and organized crime.

Yet, could this whole enterprise really come down to a few number-fudged spreadsheets? Andrea Hong and his team needed to be confident this is how all illegal trade is legitimized. So they visit multiple traders. Every single one gives the same story. But he can't just show up to the local government with a video. All of this information needs to be scrutinized, corroborated, and neatly filed into a report.

His team back in the US are about to get very busy. After the mission, our analysts work a lot. I mean, for every 10, 12 days of mission in the field, our analysts work three, four weeks on the amount of information coming from the field. With a good understanding of how the Hong Kong traders are manipulating their legal allocations, Andre and his team can start planning the final stage of the mission.

Their cache of intel is growing, but remains incomplete and it's a very China-shaped hole. If they're going to get what they need on the mainland, they're going to need more help. A new agent, known only by her code name Omega, is about to join the team and will prove to play a pivotal role in the final push.

Andrea knows that for all their close relations,

China is a very different beast to Hong Kong. The cultures share a lot, but when it comes to politics, government and law enforcement, the differences matter. If they are going to achieve their objective, to close the ivory trading loophole through intelligence, they're going to need to proceed very carefully. Local knowledge has never been more important, and it falls to Omega and her web of contacts to get there in time.

Of particular interest? A high-ranking Chinese official, who she knew was directly involved in the trading of illegal animals, including ivory.

We decided to collaborate and she agreed to work undercover for us, doing things that, for example, Hong could not do it for various reasons that I cannot explain now. But there are reasons related to, you know, their profile, their legend, their background, their family and so forth. The sheer size of this one illegal operation was alarming.

Amiga learned that they might be controlling as many as 300 small ivory workshops in the Beijing area alone. You only need to do some quick back-of-the-napkin calculations to work out that just this one outfit could be big enough to consume the official yearly supply of ivory on its own.

I don't want to point the finger to China because it happens everywhere in the world. Right now we are working, for example, a lot in Latin America and we are seeing exactly the same situation. So those traffickers always need support at the origin and at the destination, the support of government agencies, customs, police. So how do you manage this? By paying, of course. Ah yes, money. The true universal language.

Implicating the government was never the goal, but that didn't mean that they wouldn't catch its attention. Like any good spy would, they make sure to keep a low profile. They don't travel with their personal computers or mobile phones. They keep their heads down and try to fit in. From the moment you arrive, the assumption is they are watching you. But with an estimated 200 million CCTV cameras in operation, you're never too far from a careful watching eye in China.

And this became startlingly apparent barely hours after they arrived in Beijing. We check in the same hotel in different times, completely not as a group, different days even. And yet, I think I forgot something like a jacket or a t-shirt. Without telling them anything, they managed to bring me the stuff to my room.

So they know we were connected and we didn't tell them anything. Again, we check in different times, different days. We were three groups completely independently checking in and they knew. With a critical undercover mission coming up, this is unnerving. If even the hotel staff knows that they are traveling together as a group, what else is known about them? Has their cover already been blown? If there was ever a time to start being vigilant, this is it.

That was another example of, "Hey guys, be careful what you do here and with whom you talk, with whom you share." Mild paranoia aside, Omega has set up the meeting via her contact. If all goes to plan,

This should be the last link in the long chain from Tanzania. All they need to do is prove a connection between the laundered ivory in Hong Kong and China's legal market. And they can head home and start compiling confidential briefs to share with politicians. Simple, right? But the hotel incident has nerves running high. Their plans to go unnoticed fell at the first hurdle. It's more apparent than ever that they need to be prepared and they need a watertight cover story.

So the preparation, as you can imagine, is not easy. The objectives of the mission were to collect, because it was towards the end of our work, so it was very, very important to collect as much information as possible on how these people operate. By now, Andrea and his crew are practically old hands at these operations.

They decide to go in as a team to maximize the amount of intelligence they can gather. Of course, we need evidence, video and audio. So all the team was wired. So we were four people and all four of us, including myself, we were wired with hidden cameras and hidden mics on our body. I was also filming with my iPhone, so I was filming with different ways. Despite all their planning, there's a tension in the group. Sure,

There might be more moral support. With four of you, there's always someone to step in or create a diversion if things get tense. But that also means there are more tongues that can slip, more memories that can fail. Worse, for Andrea at least, he doesn't speak a word of Chinese, so he's going to have to rely on body language and audio cues. If something does go wrong and they start asking questions, he won't know until maybe it's too late.

I needed a fake profile also for myself, so I introduced myself as an Italian coral trader. You know, Italy is very famous for coral and carving coral, so it made sense to have this interest. But one thing's for sure: they're in the right place. You have to imagine a very big building right in the middle of Beijing, not far away from the Tiananmen Square. The only way to describe it was a sort of zoo of dead animals.

Just dead animals of all kinds, illegal wildlife products. Ivory and rhino and tiger and pangolins and timber and so forth. Before they can get up close to the illicit merchandise, however, there's a small matter of Chinese hospitality. I remember, I think we drank litres and litres of green tea. You sit and you start drinking tea.

Things seem to be going well, but Andrea soon hits the language barrier head first. And they start speaking in Chinese and I was just listening and filming. And while you drink tea, they start slowly. First, you know, first there is a bit of chit chat and, you know, there's all of the formalities. He has to be careful not to lose focus. Every instinct is telling him to look around, to make sure that his hidden cameras are capturing everything. But his hosts don't seem to be in a rush.

No one told him that the local custom is to take things slowly, very slowly. You have to imagine hours and hours of this kind of conversations. This is when you get tired.

You also stress because you know what you're doing. You're not there chatting. You know that you're fully wired, recording everything. So there is a lot of tensions going on. There is a lot of stress. Thankfully, the conversation is flowing almost as readily as the green tea at this point.

Omega and the other local operatives are slowly edging their way into the circle of trust. The traders start to brak, which is always a good sign. They had two beautiful art installations made of endangered butterflies from Brazil. And the guy explained to us that, yeah, they were all endangered, but they bribed people at the airport in Rio de Janeiro and also the staff working for the airlines so they could export these butterflies to China.

As convivial as this all sounds, and with his agents taking care of the assets, Andrea's mind starts to focus on his team. Unable to follow the conversation, bar the occasional update from Omega, he has a chilling moment of clarity, realizing just where they are, and what they're doing, and the dangers that come with it.

You're not doing what you're doing in the easiest country in the world. You can get away with this kind of stuff if something goes wrong in other countries or in other settings, for example, a public place or a restaurant or whatever. But that one was, we were right in, I mean, we were inside these big buildings with hundreds of rooms and basements and it was a labyrinth.

So you tell yourself, "Okay, if something goes wrong, I will never get out from here because it's impossible. Even if I start running, I will probably get lost." If the worst should happen, at least there's a plan B. We had a code word just to signal the team that it's better to end the meetings, find an excuse and leave.

The backup plan was to pretend that we were doing a research for the government of China on illegal wildlife trafficking, and then we have to report back to the police, basically. But not me, of course. He's a coral dealer, remember? And just like that, the conversation tapers off. The rest of the group stand up and start to move. One of them beckons to Andrea to follow them. So what happened is that they took us to another room, it was a big table, and they started to show us

more interesting stuff. I remember they were showing us a lot of products made with rhino horn, bracelets and statues and trinkets and stuff like that. After hours of grinding small talk and trust building, things are finally getting interesting. They've been presented with what can only be described as a buffet of illegal items.

They don't just show this sort of thing to anyone. And then if you have enough trust like we had, you can also start asking questions like, oh, where did you get it? How do you import? How do you go around the laws? And what if I want to ship it back to Hong Kong, for example? Can you do it for me? How you do it? And slowly they explain you the whole thing, basically, because they...

They feel comfortable, they felt comfortable with us. And so I was extremely happy how it was going. Andrea's Chinese-speaking colleagues are playing their role perfectly, asking more probing questions as they casually handle the illegal jewelry right where their hidden cameras will see it. Spirits are high and the mood is light, but not for long.

Suddenly, the atmosphere changes.

One of the traders barks something in Chinese, and it doesn't sound good. The angry man studies the group one by one, before telling a colleague in Chinese to close the door. That's never a good sign. You know the feeling. Time seems to slow down. A wave of cold washes over you. You intuit there's a problem deep inside long before your senses catch up. Then suddenly, it seems like everything whooshes back to normal speed, and there's audible commotion.

Not that you understand any of it. But you don't need to speak the language to grasp exactly what's happened. Not least because the very bag your team put a hidden camera in is now in the hands of one of the ivory traders. And he's inspecting it.

One of them noticed something weird in the bag. I think that the guy noticed probably there was a reflection in the lens of the hidden camera in the bag, in the purse. So he probably saw that and it was probably, you know, it was probably the movement of the team member. A track got his attention and then he looked better and he saw, what is that?

And then he just jumped on the bag, grabbed the bag, opened the bag in front of us, and then he sort of ripped a little bit the interior of the bag, he destroyed the bag, and he found the camera and the cables and he took out everything. And that was a moment of terror, I would say. Right there, you say, "Oh shit, we are in trouble."

Ask yourself, what would your strategy be? You're the one responsible for this operation, but you can't speak the language. One of your agents has potentially just blown your cover. They've found your hidden camera. There's no putting that genie back in the bottle. Is there? The traders are understandably furious, demanding answers. You can't run. They've lured you into the deepest part of an already labyrinthine building.

You can't call the police. They won't take too kindly to you being there either. What's the move? This is when Omega and I said, "OK, plan B. Remember plan B? OK, plan B is that we are not who we are. We are somebody else." By now, Andrea is relying entirely on the wits and charms of his team. They are about to deliver an audacious lie that they are actually representatives of the Chinese government.

If they can pull it off, they might just be able to secure themselves an exit route.

Time to call in the cavalry. To support our story, we call up our driver. And the funny story is that our driver in Beijing was also an actor, acting. She liked actors. So she put up the mother of all scenes saying, telling the traders, the traffickers, you don't know who they are. Oh my God, you are blocking these people now? Are you crazy? And this is when...

The traders started to believe the story that my team was really working for the Chinese government and was there to collect information because they could not find any other explanation for that. Call it luck, call it quick thinking. Either way, their scheme somehow seems to have worked.

Andrea successfully used the traders' own fears against them. They're not used to this kind of stuff. It's China. I mean, in the West, maybe you would think, "Oh, who are you? TV or this and that." But in China, you don't think about these things. But there's still a problem. Andrea's cover story. If the Chinese traders now believe that his Asian agents are working for the government, then what is he doing there?

Not to mention there's a more practical problem. Omega told me, you just leave now. You are well known. If they Google your name, they will find who you are.

Could the former internet entrepreneur, who uses the web as a device for catching poachers and traffickers, be about to have his whole operation undone by a single Google search? I asked to go to the bathroom and the only reason I went to the bathroom is to unwire myself. So I took out all the cameras and wires and I put it in my sockets and in my shoes. With his wire removed and the recorded evidence hidden, he's able to extract himself from the situation.

Meanwhile, the tables have turned and it's his Chinese agents that are having to calm the nerves of the traffickers. After I left, Omega and the team remained for another hour just to calm him down. And then Omega told me that before leaving, the guys, the Chinese guys, the traders wanted to have tea again, once again, tea together. If they were still unsure if their marks believed their new cover story,

They'd soon be left with little doubt. The guy was serving tea and his hand was shaking from fear because he was thinking, "Oh my God, if you are for real working for the government, I'm done because for the past six hours I showed you only legal stuff." Highly illegal in China, to the point that you go to jail in China if you sell this kind of stuff. They have very harsh laws in China on wildlife trafficking.

They don't use it often, but when they use it, you go to jail for a long time for ivory trafficking. After almost eight hours working their marks and a very, very close call, Andrea's team is able to safely exit the building. And while they were able to gather some vital intel, there's a sense of frustration. I was, of course, fuming because from an intelligence point of view, when something like this happens, you lose that part of the network completely.

You cannot go back. You cannot meet them anymore. You can also not meet their friends and their contact because probably they will talk about it among themselves. So from an intelligent perspective, it was a disaster.

We assessed the situation, we assessed the damages, so we understood that we could not meet other people we wanted to meet because they were linked to this group of people. So now they were, you know, not an option anymore, too dangerous. So we decided to cut short the operation and leave Mainline China the day after, immediately. The operation may be over, but there's still lots of work to be done.

His analysts have to pass the hours and hours of footage and recordings so they can present a report to both the Hong Kong and Chinese governments. After that, we wanted to do two things. One was to put together a confidential brief for Hong Kong authorities

to explain to the Hong Kong authorities how basically this illegal trade of ivory from Africa to China was actually facilitated by the weak laws and loopholes in Hong Kong. Once that's complete, Andrea meets a member of the Hong Kong parliament and presents his findings.

Hidden camera footage, English and Chinese transcriptions, the works. That was very successful because then she called for, you know, she was already organizing a press conference, a very strong press conference, asking both the Hong Kong government and the Chinese government to close the loopholes. Now, with pressure coming from the Hong Kong side, it's a waiting game.

The second thing we needed to do, but for that we needed time because I needed my analyst to work on it for a few weeks, was to put together a confidential brief in Chinese for Chinese authorities and then share with them. Despite all the spy games, Andrea's goal is always to be collaborative.

Our approach with governments, including China, is non-confrontational. We don't want to... It's counterproductive to be confrontational with those governments. After months of work and thousands of miles of travel, to complete numerous undercover operations, there's nothing left to do but wait. Wait for the briefing to be compiled and wait to see if the Chinese government will actually do anything with it. With Hong Kong now signalling it's ready to change,

Maybe, just maybe, China will be ready to follow suit. As for Andrea, he's already taking stock of what lessons he's learnt. Now we use different devices, let's put it this way. There's a postscript. In 2015, just months after Operation Game Over, China held a rare surprise media event to demonstrate how serious it was about closing down illegal trading.

1,500 pounds of ivory was destroyed to much public fanfare, but many still doubted how serious the government was about following through. Then, later that year, Chinese President Xi Jinping held a press conference with Barack Obama, standing side by side at the lecterns in the White House's Rose Garden. Both superpowers outlined numerous agreements between the two nations.

one of which was the enactment of a near outright ban on ivory trading. Thanks to the work of Andrea's team and numerous other NGOs, that ban took effect on January 1st, 2018. I'm Vanessa Kirby. Join us next week for another Brush with True Spies.

We all have valuable spy skills and our experts are here to help you discover yours. Get an authentic assessment of your spy skills, quoted by a former head of training at British Intelligence at spiescape.com. Disclaimer. The views expressed in this podcast are those of the subject. These stories are told from their perspective and their authenticity should be assessed on a case-by-case basis.