These are the Cardamom Mountains in Cambodia, one of the largest pristine forest areas in South-East Asia. Three sanctuaries meet here to form a protected area of almost 1 million hectares. But for these men, this is no sightseeing trip. David Mead, a retired Australian Army colonel, is now working for the environmental group Conservation International and today, he's on the hunt for illegal logging operations.
They've spotted a fully loaded logging truck and pretty soon it's traced back to the saw mill from where it came. As the plane buzzes overhead, the loggers below run for cover.
DAVID MEAD, CONSERVATION INTERNATIONAL: They're running away. Look at them running away.
PILOT: I don't know whether they think we're going to drop something on them. At least if they're running away, they're not...
DAVID MEAD: Boy, look at the timber there. They're not pointing something in this direction. They're running away.
DAVID MEAD: Oh, that's good.
A Vietnam War veteran, former jungle warfare instructor and once the Australian Defence attache in Cambodia, David Mead makes an unlikely forest activist. But several years ago he helped establish the Cardamom Mountains Reserve, one of the largest in the country.
The Cambodian Forest Administration has also asked for David's help to protect the reserves from loggers and poachers, so he's put together these hand-picked teams of armed rangers and military police. It's just before midnight and these men are getting ready to raid the same saw mill that was spotted from the plane.
DAVID MEAD: Well, it's the logistics aspects of... preparing for an operation that will start at night to try and take out a saw mill which we've seen from the air. So these are the guys and they're getting their kit together - normal stuff for soldiers and MPs and so on, to prepare their kit to get ready to go, which is mainly on motorbikes, so they've got to pack them up, make sure they've got spares, water, rations, that sort of stuff.
REPORTER: How long will you be likely to be gone for?
DAVID MEAD: Twenty four hours plus.
Usually the only way into the forest is a lengthy trip on the back of a small motorbike.
REPORTER: And who do you think's going to be at the mill? Any idea who will be at the other end?
DAVID MEAD: Some may have flown the coop. We might find an empty mill except for a lot of timber. Or we might find them operating. It just depends how quickly we can move to the location.
After eight hours ride, David's team have come across several ox carts laden with timber. They look like they've come from the saw mill but the loggers have either been tipped off or heard the motorbikes coming. They've left behind everything - even the buffalos that were pulling the carts.
This wood pigeon was destined for the Phnom Penh markets, where there's a brisk trade in protected wildlife.
On motorbikes, it's impossible to confiscate the timber and carry it off, so they slash the tyres and set the ox carts on fire. This is effectively a guerilla war between these armed rangers and the loggers and it's one that David is well equipped to fight.
DAVID MEAD: I think all the skills that I learned soldiering - and more - come to bear. So from training, influencing actually rangers on the ground, it's not much different to being a platoon commander. The enemy has changed. The enemy are either loggers or they're hunters. But it's still an enemy. And of course, protection, which involves hard enforcement - in other words, guns, even though you never want to fire a gun but you've got to take the guns along, then that's a difficult thing for a lot of conservationists to come to grips with.
These soldiers are the reason that David's teams of rangers are heavily armed. These are regular Cambodian army troops and their commanders essentially run the illegal logging trade. After decades of civil war, the country still has a huge standing army, but many are badly paid and have found a more profitable sideline.
DAVID MEAD: They're businessmen. You couldn't class many of them military. As military they're just a poorly paid business with guns. And they are run from bon toms, bigger people up the chain, so the guy at the front is told what to do, usually, and he's there to make money. And if others get in the way, yeah, people get killed all over the country.
Sometimes the Cambodian army itself is forced to pretend to crack down on the loggers. These troops are on their way to the Thai border to raid some sawmills. The irony is that they're raiding an operation that's almost certainly run by another arm of the military. The troops are armed to the teeth with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. And international observers and the local media have been invited along to watch. But the sawmill operators are usually tipped off well in advance. Left behind as a sacrifice for the cameras are the lowly-paid timber cutters. The operator of the mill knows that to avoid this spectacle next time, he'll need to pay more protection money to the right army officers.
MIKE DAVIS, CAMBODIAN MANAGER, GLOBAL WITNESS: What are Cambodia's military doing? Well, they are essentially plundering those natural resources that the country actually has. That's their modus operandi and that's what they're good at. There's no immediate external threat to Cambodia. There's no strategic justification for having these military units in a lot of the areas where they're posted. It's allowed to happen, because there's this implicit threat of violence which lies behind everything they do.
The frustration for David Mead is that while the military do most of the logging, according to Cambodian law, they're supposed to be stopping it.
DAVID MEAD: The forest law says under article 100 or 101, "If I catch you, Mr Corporal, Lieutenant, Captain or Major, you can be charged with an offence. If you don't report illegal forestry activity, because you're the military and you're supposed to be preventing it, you can be charged with an offence, and it's punishable by jail. Now little of this is happening, but the law exists, so everyone knows the law.
Dateline dropped in unannounced at this army base on the edge of the Cardamom Mountains. When we spoke to the local commander, he claimed to be ignorant of the logging taking place all around him. He told us his men had a contract to provide security for a Chinese company planning an ecotourism development in the sanctuary.
ARMY MAJOR: This is the agreement between the Chinese company and myself. It's a full signing by the representative of the company. It means that I protect the forests from cutting.
But as we talked, a constant stream of timber trucks drove past his front gate.
ARMY MAJOR: The agreements are that if anyone cutting the timber and the company will fine me.
REPORTER: There's a logging truck behind us, though, going past?
ARMY MAJOR, (Translation): We must inspect that truck for illegal timber. We confiscate any we find and report it to the authorities.
We follow the truck on the road out of the sanctuary and it was one of a convoy. Hidden in the middle of the loads were huge logs of luxury-grade hardwood. According to Mike Davis, this is part of a highly organised operation directly run by the military.
MIKE DAVIS: In terms of who's doing what, you've got much of the labour being supplied by the local military battalion actually based inside a protected area, that's 313, so they are actually directly engaged in cutting. A lot of them own their own chainsaws. They also provide protection from tree stump to main road for others who've been doing logging. And then separate from that you've got riel falling under the overall system of extortion being run by the military region three command.
These charcoal traders are working a few kilometres down the road from the army base and are victims of this extortion racket. The trailers are being loaded up with timber from the sanctuary, and on the trip back to Phnom Penh, they'll be stopped many times by corrupt officials who want their cut.
NARA, (Translation): How much did you pay the official for this charcoal? 10,000 riel?
LIM MO, (Translation): From here I paid 10,000 and at each stop 2000 riel.
NARA, (Translation): 2000 at each stop...so how many places?
LIM MO, (Translation): Four or five places.
NARA, (Translation): Were you ever arrested?
LIM MO, (Translation): No, so long as I pay them. If I dont they will.
NARA: I know that cutting timber in the wildlife sanctuary is illegal, but if we did not cut the timber, the people don't have anything to eat.
These traders operate on a fairly small scale, but they're not the only ones working in the sanctuary. When we asked around at this village about who the main logging operators were, no-one was keen to talk. One man pulled us aside and agreed to speak as long as he wasn't asked to provide any names.
MAN, (Translation): The logger here are not normal people, but they are powerful people. They have guns.
REPORTER: Is he frightened of the loggers?
MAN, (Translation): I was very, very afraid of them. And I nearly dare not to speak out about them. If they know that I am speaking, they will kill me.
REPORTER: Does he know people that have been killed by the loggers for talking? Does he know that's happened before, that loggers have killed people?
MAN, (Translation): Before it happened already. They shot the forester. And then the ministry of environment ranger shot the people who were hired to transport the timber.
We later found out that after the shooting the area became a no-go zone for rangers who've been battling the loggers. The rangers have now pulled out until their security can be guaranteed and according to David, if the military can't be persuaded to stop shooting at them, overseas aid money for the sanctuaries may dry up.
DAVID MEAD: We've got international donors who've come to the fore to do this, but they're not going to pay for people to get hurt or killed, so they took a decision to withdraw and then negotiate their way back in by saying, "We won't go back in unless we've got a guarantee of security." Now where that guarantee comes from, it has to come from all sorts of levels, from the top down to the province, down to the district level and that's what they're working on at the moment.
This is not the first time that David has tried to save Cambodia from itself. In 1997, despite being the Australian defence attache, David became an active participant in the civil war.
DAVID MEAD: So I sort of passed a few messages back and forth. So I was doing what a defence attache shouldn't be doing, trying to alter the course of events and not just report them, so that didn't make my government very happy.
REPORTER: You became a player effectively?
DAVID MEAD: Yeah, sure I did. I didn't like to see people, particularly innocent people, killed for nothing, and there were too many innocent people dying. Quite simply I'd burnt the candle at both ends and tried to put my hand in stopping a civil war and broke down, you know, burnt out.
David left Cambodia, retired from the army, and put together a book of poetry and photographs.
DAVID MEAD: People think a book of poetry, a colonel in the military, doesn't sort of make a lot of sense, but then when they read it, it makes a bit of sense. But it was a way of me getting it out so I could move on, I suppose.
For David, moving on has meant throwing himself back into the field. His team of rangers are finally closing in on the large sawmill they've spotted from the air. It's clear that it's an industrial-scale operation. According to map coordinates and photos, it's not the one seen from the air. There's another mill the same size around here somewhere. These mills take only a few days to set up, but they operate for months at a time.
A huge diesel powered saw runs down these tracks. It's the most valuable part of the operation and it's already been spirited away. In this war between the loggers and the rangers, David's team will destroy whatever they can.
REPORTER: What happens here now? What can you do here in terms of the working?
DAVID MEAD: Burn, bash and bury - or burn and bash is about all we can do with the resources we have. This one we'll burn.
Before they move on, they'll burn down the huts that the loggers have been living in.
REPORTER: Are you disappointed there's no culprits at all, no people around?
DAVID MEAD: Not overly surprised. I think there were a couple as we came in who ran away. We do have a dog here, which is probably a prize find. But the culprits at this level, don't forget, are just, you know, the subbies. They're not the big guys. We're not going to find Mr Big out here running his sawmill. The best we could hope for is the local manager to point to someone bigger. And then we have the issue of the judiciary anyway.
We actually now get cases to court, but the judiciary either doesn't hear the cases or are corrupted to the extent that the guy pays money and leaves. You know, you thought you had him and he cut the timber and he had the truck and you had him to rights, but you get to court and nothing happens.
The next air surveillance flight can actually record this and check it and see if something has started up again, or how long it took to start something up again if you've got a surveillance flight running about once a month. You'll pick up that either it's moved, stopped or it's kicked off again.
REPORTER: So it's a slow, steady task. You just keep going, keep chipping away?
DAVID MEAD: Yeah, we're chipping away at it. We can do little more. On to the next mill.
REPORTER: Thom Cookes
SBS Australia
They've spotted a fully loaded logging truck and pretty soon it's traced back to the saw mill from where it came. As the plane buzzes overhead, the loggers below run for cover.
DAVID MEAD, CONSERVATION INTERNATIONAL: They're running away. Look at them running away.
PILOT: I don't know whether they think we're going to drop something on them. At least if they're running away, they're not...
DAVID MEAD: Boy, look at the timber there. They're not pointing something in this direction. They're running away.
DAVID MEAD: Oh, that's good.
A Vietnam War veteran, former jungle warfare instructor and once the Australian Defence attache in Cambodia, David Mead makes an unlikely forest activist. But several years ago he helped establish the Cardamom Mountains Reserve, one of the largest in the country.
The Cambodian Forest Administration has also asked for David's help to protect the reserves from loggers and poachers, so he's put together these hand-picked teams of armed rangers and military police. It's just before midnight and these men are getting ready to raid the same saw mill that was spotted from the plane.
DAVID MEAD: Well, it's the logistics aspects of... preparing for an operation that will start at night to try and take out a saw mill which we've seen from the air. So these are the guys and they're getting their kit together - normal stuff for soldiers and MPs and so on, to prepare their kit to get ready to go, which is mainly on motorbikes, so they've got to pack them up, make sure they've got spares, water, rations, that sort of stuff.
REPORTER: How long will you be likely to be gone for?
DAVID MEAD: Twenty four hours plus.
Usually the only way into the forest is a lengthy trip on the back of a small motorbike.
REPORTER: And who do you think's going to be at the mill? Any idea who will be at the other end?
DAVID MEAD: Some may have flown the coop. We might find an empty mill except for a lot of timber. Or we might find them operating. It just depends how quickly we can move to the location.
After eight hours ride, David's team have come across several ox carts laden with timber. They look like they've come from the saw mill but the loggers have either been tipped off or heard the motorbikes coming. They've left behind everything - even the buffalos that were pulling the carts.
This wood pigeon was destined for the Phnom Penh markets, where there's a brisk trade in protected wildlife.
On motorbikes, it's impossible to confiscate the timber and carry it off, so they slash the tyres and set the ox carts on fire. This is effectively a guerilla war between these armed rangers and the loggers and it's one that David is well equipped to fight.
DAVID MEAD: I think all the skills that I learned soldiering - and more - come to bear. So from training, influencing actually rangers on the ground, it's not much different to being a platoon commander. The enemy has changed. The enemy are either loggers or they're hunters. But it's still an enemy. And of course, protection, which involves hard enforcement - in other words, guns, even though you never want to fire a gun but you've got to take the guns along, then that's a difficult thing for a lot of conservationists to come to grips with.
These soldiers are the reason that David's teams of rangers are heavily armed. These are regular Cambodian army troops and their commanders essentially run the illegal logging trade. After decades of civil war, the country still has a huge standing army, but many are badly paid and have found a more profitable sideline.
DAVID MEAD: They're businessmen. You couldn't class many of them military. As military they're just a poorly paid business with guns. And they are run from bon toms, bigger people up the chain, so the guy at the front is told what to do, usually, and he's there to make money. And if others get in the way, yeah, people get killed all over the country.
Sometimes the Cambodian army itself is forced to pretend to crack down on the loggers. These troops are on their way to the Thai border to raid some sawmills. The irony is that they're raiding an operation that's almost certainly run by another arm of the military. The troops are armed to the teeth with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. And international observers and the local media have been invited along to watch. But the sawmill operators are usually tipped off well in advance. Left behind as a sacrifice for the cameras are the lowly-paid timber cutters. The operator of the mill knows that to avoid this spectacle next time, he'll need to pay more protection money to the right army officers.
MIKE DAVIS, CAMBODIAN MANAGER, GLOBAL WITNESS: What are Cambodia's military doing? Well, they are essentially plundering those natural resources that the country actually has. That's their modus operandi and that's what they're good at. There's no immediate external threat to Cambodia. There's no strategic justification for having these military units in a lot of the areas where they're posted. It's allowed to happen, because there's this implicit threat of violence which lies behind everything they do.
The frustration for David Mead is that while the military do most of the logging, according to Cambodian law, they're supposed to be stopping it.
DAVID MEAD: The forest law says under article 100 or 101, "If I catch you, Mr Corporal, Lieutenant, Captain or Major, you can be charged with an offence. If you don't report illegal forestry activity, because you're the military and you're supposed to be preventing it, you can be charged with an offence, and it's punishable by jail. Now little of this is happening, but the law exists, so everyone knows the law.
Dateline dropped in unannounced at this army base on the edge of the Cardamom Mountains. When we spoke to the local commander, he claimed to be ignorant of the logging taking place all around him. He told us his men had a contract to provide security for a Chinese company planning an ecotourism development in the sanctuary.
ARMY MAJOR: This is the agreement between the Chinese company and myself. It's a full signing by the representative of the company. It means that I protect the forests from cutting.
But as we talked, a constant stream of timber trucks drove past his front gate.
ARMY MAJOR: The agreements are that if anyone cutting the timber and the company will fine me.
REPORTER: There's a logging truck behind us, though, going past?
ARMY MAJOR, (Translation): We must inspect that truck for illegal timber. We confiscate any we find and report it to the authorities.
We follow the truck on the road out of the sanctuary and it was one of a convoy. Hidden in the middle of the loads were huge logs of luxury-grade hardwood. According to Mike Davis, this is part of a highly organised operation directly run by the military.
MIKE DAVIS: In terms of who's doing what, you've got much of the labour being supplied by the local military battalion actually based inside a protected area, that's 313, so they are actually directly engaged in cutting. A lot of them own their own chainsaws. They also provide protection from tree stump to main road for others who've been doing logging. And then separate from that you've got riel falling under the overall system of extortion being run by the military region three command.
These charcoal traders are working a few kilometres down the road from the army base and are victims of this extortion racket. The trailers are being loaded up with timber from the sanctuary, and on the trip back to Phnom Penh, they'll be stopped many times by corrupt officials who want their cut.
NARA, (Translation): How much did you pay the official for this charcoal? 10,000 riel?
LIM MO, (Translation): From here I paid 10,000 and at each stop 2000 riel.
NARA, (Translation): 2000 at each stop...so how many places?
LIM MO, (Translation): Four or five places.
NARA, (Translation): Were you ever arrested?
LIM MO, (Translation): No, so long as I pay them. If I dont they will.
NARA: I know that cutting timber in the wildlife sanctuary is illegal, but if we did not cut the timber, the people don't have anything to eat.
These traders operate on a fairly small scale, but they're not the only ones working in the sanctuary. When we asked around at this village about who the main logging operators were, no-one was keen to talk. One man pulled us aside and agreed to speak as long as he wasn't asked to provide any names.
MAN, (Translation): The logger here are not normal people, but they are powerful people. They have guns.
REPORTER: Is he frightened of the loggers?
MAN, (Translation): I was very, very afraid of them. And I nearly dare not to speak out about them. If they know that I am speaking, they will kill me.
REPORTER: Does he know people that have been killed by the loggers for talking? Does he know that's happened before, that loggers have killed people?
MAN, (Translation): Before it happened already. They shot the forester. And then the ministry of environment ranger shot the people who were hired to transport the timber.
We later found out that after the shooting the area became a no-go zone for rangers who've been battling the loggers. The rangers have now pulled out until their security can be guaranteed and according to David, if the military can't be persuaded to stop shooting at them, overseas aid money for the sanctuaries may dry up.
DAVID MEAD: We've got international donors who've come to the fore to do this, but they're not going to pay for people to get hurt or killed, so they took a decision to withdraw and then negotiate their way back in by saying, "We won't go back in unless we've got a guarantee of security." Now where that guarantee comes from, it has to come from all sorts of levels, from the top down to the province, down to the district level and that's what they're working on at the moment.
This is not the first time that David has tried to save Cambodia from itself. In 1997, despite being the Australian defence attache, David became an active participant in the civil war.
DAVID MEAD: So I sort of passed a few messages back and forth. So I was doing what a defence attache shouldn't be doing, trying to alter the course of events and not just report them, so that didn't make my government very happy.
REPORTER: You became a player effectively?
DAVID MEAD: Yeah, sure I did. I didn't like to see people, particularly innocent people, killed for nothing, and there were too many innocent people dying. Quite simply I'd burnt the candle at both ends and tried to put my hand in stopping a civil war and broke down, you know, burnt out.
David left Cambodia, retired from the army, and put together a book of poetry and photographs.
DAVID MEAD: People think a book of poetry, a colonel in the military, doesn't sort of make a lot of sense, but then when they read it, it makes a bit of sense. But it was a way of me getting it out so I could move on, I suppose.
For David, moving on has meant throwing himself back into the field. His team of rangers are finally closing in on the large sawmill they've spotted from the air. It's clear that it's an industrial-scale operation. According to map coordinates and photos, it's not the one seen from the air. There's another mill the same size around here somewhere. These mills take only a few days to set up, but they operate for months at a time.
A huge diesel powered saw runs down these tracks. It's the most valuable part of the operation and it's already been spirited away. In this war between the loggers and the rangers, David's team will destroy whatever they can.
REPORTER: What happens here now? What can you do here in terms of the working?
DAVID MEAD: Burn, bash and bury - or burn and bash is about all we can do with the resources we have. This one we'll burn.
Before they move on, they'll burn down the huts that the loggers have been living in.
REPORTER: Are you disappointed there's no culprits at all, no people around?
DAVID MEAD: Not overly surprised. I think there were a couple as we came in who ran away. We do have a dog here, which is probably a prize find. But the culprits at this level, don't forget, are just, you know, the subbies. They're not the big guys. We're not going to find Mr Big out here running his sawmill. The best we could hope for is the local manager to point to someone bigger. And then we have the issue of the judiciary anyway.
We actually now get cases to court, but the judiciary either doesn't hear the cases or are corrupted to the extent that the guy pays money and leaves. You know, you thought you had him and he cut the timber and he had the truck and you had him to rights, but you get to court and nothing happens.
The next air surveillance flight can actually record this and check it and see if something has started up again, or how long it took to start something up again if you've got a surveillance flight running about once a month. You'll pick up that either it's moved, stopped or it's kicked off again.
REPORTER: So it's a slow, steady task. You just keep going, keep chipping away?
DAVID MEAD: Yeah, we're chipping away at it. We can do little more. On to the next mill.
REPORTER: Thom Cookes
SBS Australia