The country is now the world’s largest importer of logs and exporter of finished wood products.

The town of Suifenhe, a former Russian imperial outpost on the Trans-Siberian Railway, has belonged to China since the nineteen-forties, and occupies a broad valley in northern Manchuria. From a distance, its homes and factories appear to cling to a rail yard, with tracks fanning out into a vast latticework of iron as they emerge from the Russian border. Suifenhe is a place of singular purpose. Nearly every train from Russia brings in just one commodity: wood—oak, ash, linden, and other high-value species. There is also poplar, aspen, and larch, and occasionally great trunks of Korean pine, a species that was logged by the Soviets until there was almost none left to cut down. In a year, more than five billion pounds of wood cross over from Primorski Krai, the neighboring province in the Russian Far East. Hundreds of railcars enter Suifenhe every day, many loaded beyond capacity with logs. The wood is shuttled between mills by hand, often six men to a log. Other workers, many of whom are migrants from elsewhere in China, operate cranes to empty the rail carriages, and at sundown they bring the machinery to rest, with beams pointing upward, like arms outstretched, waiting for the rush of timber that will arrive the following day.
On a warm afternoon last May, an environmental activist named Alexander von Bismarck and a man whom I will call Wu De entered Suifenhe by taxi. They had brought with them surveillance equipment; they were working for a nonprofit group called the Environmental Investigation Agency, which tries to uncover how plants, wildlife, and industrial chemicals are smuggled. Von Bismarck is the organization’s executive director, and one of the world’s leading experts on timber smuggling. He is thirty-six years old, trim and tall, with fiery red hair, but he possesses a quiet bearing that allows him to recede in a crowd. (Most people know him as Sascha, but a few friends call him RoboCop, because once, while in the tropics, he insisted on jogging in hundred-degree heat.) Wu is from Southeast Asia, but he is fluent in Mandarin Chinese. Both men had prepared false identities, as employees of Axion Trading—one of several companies created by E.I.A. as fronts.
Chances are good that if an item sold in the United States was recently made in China using oak or ash, the wood was imported from Russia through Suifenhe. Because as much as half of the hardwood from Primorski Krai is harvested in violation of Russian law—either by large companies working with corrupt provincial officials or by gangs of men in remote villages—it is likely that any given piece of wood in the city has been logged illegally. This wide-scale theft empowers mafias, robs the Russian government of revenue, and assists in the destruction of one of the most precious ecosystems in the Northern Hemisphere. Lawmakers in the province have called for “emergency measures” to stem the flow of illegal wood, and Russia’s Minister of Natural Resources has said that in the region “there has emerged an entire criminal branch connected with the preparation, storage, transportation, and selling of stolen timber.”

When von Bismarck and Wu arrived in Suifenhe, they saw traces of this immense crime—a destructive black market merging into the global economy. This is what they had come to investigate.
John le Carré once described a spy as a “silent spectator,” someone who builds himself a persona from “all the odd bits of his life that are left over after he has given the rest away.” When constructing his aliases, von Bismarck often draws upon his personal history. (He has asked me not to explain which bits, so as not to ruin his cover.) As the great-great-grandnephew of Otto von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, he can trace his genealogy back at least seven hundred years. He is the grandson of Klaus von Bismarck, a German military officer who fought during the Second World War but was a staunch anti-Nazi who later became president of the Goethe-Institut. Sascha’s father, Gottfried, is a business executive and engineer who helped equip West German submarines with sonar. His mother, Kai Maristed, is an American novelist—a daughter of James Abegglen, who served in the Pacific as a marine and later became a specialist on Japanese business culture and a vice-president of the Boston Consulting Group. Sascha was born in Munich, but his parents divorced soon afterward, and, following a difficult custody battle, he split his youth between Germany and the United States. He said, “There was this sort of existence of going back and forth between two poles, two very different worlds, and arriving in this other camp, and loving both sides, and speaking to both sides, and becoming very aware of the hurt on both sides.”
Von Bismarck developed a quiet manner and an unwavering earnestness. He entered Harvard in 1990, with an interest in biology, but he was restless and repeatedly took time off. He tried his hand at competitive horse jumping and thought that the Olympics might be a realistic goal. He assisted in a study of aquatic life in Lake Victoria. He joined the Marines, hoping to become involved in military intelligence, but left after two years. When he first learned about E.I.A., in 1995, from an article in a German newspaper, he immediately flew to its main office, in London, for an interview, again ready to suspend college. (He graduated from Harvard in 2002.) “The office was like a newsroom,” he recalled. “Everyone was running around and screaming and taking calls.” At the time, E.I.A. was a little more than ten years old. Its founders—Allan Thornton, an environmentalist from Canada; Dave Currey, a photographer from the United Kingdom; and Jennifer Lonsdale, a former cook—had ties to Greenpeace, and were influenced by its aggressiveness, but felt lost in its size. Thornton had considered calling their organization the Conservation Investigation Agency, he told me, but ruled it out because the initials “would be a never-ending joke.” Still, E.I.A. is sometimes mistaken for a government agency, “which is normally not to our advantage,” von Bismarck said. “Once, while going up a river in the Mosquito Coast, we tried to radio a pilot to tell him who we were: E.I.A. He told us that listening in on those calls were drug smugglers, and he was certain they thought we were American agents trying to stop the cocaine coming through. We had even seen cocaine floating in the lagoons.”
Not long after he joined the organization, von Bismarck began working on campaigns designed to curtail deforestation. Currently, a third of the world’s landmass is forested, which may seem substantial but represents a stark historical decline. During the past ten thousand years, the planet’s original forest cover has decreased by nearly half. While Rome grew, Horace wrote of the farmer who “subdues his woodland with flames and plow.” In medieval China, the poet Mencius described “bald” landscapes—a reference to forests cleared for fuel and grazing. In Europe and North America, deforestation occurred at a rapid pace centuries ago, but no cycle of forest loss has been as dramatic as that of the modern era. Much of the world’s forest cover has been destroyed in the past two centuries—since 1990 the planet lost nearly half a million square miles of forest, an area twice the size of France. Michael Williams, an emeritus professor of geography at Oxford and the author of “Deforesting the Earth,” refers to the period of deforestation following the Second World War as “the great onslaught.”
A fifth of the world’s wood comes from countries that have serious problems enforcing their timber laws, and most of those countries are also experiencing the fastest rates of deforestation. Until a decade ago, many governments were reluctant to acknowledge illegal logging, largely because it was made possible by the corruption of their own officials. As early as the nineteeneighties, the Philippines had lost the vast majority of its primary forests and billions of dollars to illegal loggers. Papua New Guinea, during roughly the same period, experienced such catastrophic forest loss that it commissioned independent auditors to assess why it was happening; they determined that logging companies were “roaming the countryside with the self-assurance of robber barons; bribing politicians and leaders, creating social disharmony and ignoring laws in order to gain access to, rip out, and export the last remnants of the province’s valuable timber.” In 1998, the Brazilian government announced that most of the country’s logging operations were being conducted beyond the ambit of the law.
E.I.A. began to focus on illegal logging after receiving a plea for help from scientists working in the jungles of Southeast Asia. In 1999, Biruté Mary Galdikas, a leading expert on orangutans and an acolyte of Louis Leakey, told Thornton that men with chain saws were cutting into protected Indonesian forests where she had been conducting her research. “It turned out that someone had just illegally redrawn the boundary of the park so that the local timber baron could have access to the trees,” Thornton said. Indonesia is home to more endangered species than any other place in the world, and logging was conducted in a state of near total anarchy. By the late nineteen-nineties, the government estimated that as much as seventy per cent of the country’s total timber harvest was illegal, and the World Bank calculated that Indonesia was losing three and a half billion dollars annually because of it. In a series of undercover investigations, E.I.A. and an Indonesian group called Telapak discovered that many loggers were targeting a tree called ramin, which had great strength, was easy to stain, and could be sliced into thin pieces. Ramin turned up in the West in countless cheap items: paintbrushes, two-dollar pool cues, dowels. Even after Indonesia banned the export of ramin, in 2001, the wood was still smuggled out of the country in large volumes.
Von Bismarck’s first undercover job, he told me, was “following the ramin trail.” By temperament and upbringing, he seemed well suited for clandestine operations. He once told me that his favorite book, which he had read in the fourth grade, was “All the King’s Men.” When I asked him why, he said, “In terms of how the world works, you have people interacting in a very sensible way, and in some cases it added up to corruption, and in some cases it added up to good things. The book presents a very complicated system, a muddled world, but also a very human world.” Von Bismarck’s family life was also complicated and muddled and very human, of course, and Gottfried, his father, told me that “as a result, I think, he has developed a great ability to integrate conflicting parties.” Occasionally, I heard von Bismarck speak empathetically about the very people he was trying to catch—“poor guys doing really hard work, destroying the natural resources of their own area, and getting arrested.”
In 2003, von Bismarck picked up the trail in Singapore, where he went undercover and met with a trafficker who boasted that profits from black-market ramin were “better than drug smuggling.” In Malaysia, he met with associates of an underworld figure known as the Ramin King, who described how the wood was given false Malaysian paperwork to obscure its origins. In Taiwan, he secretly filmed a baby-crib manufacturer named Jim Lee, who made products that were sold at J. C. Penney, and who said that he was shipping thousands of cribs made with ramin to Wal-Mart, “even though it is smuggled.” Von Bismarck presented this information to Taiwanese officials, who raided Lee’s facilities and barred half of his stock from export. (Lee now maintains that his wood was legal.) Von Bismarck also contacted J. C. Penney and Wal-Mart—both took steps to remove items made of ramin from their stores—and notified American authorities, who put imports from Lee’s factory on a watch list. A former customs officer told me, “He gave us the same kind of information that we would have expected from another agent. It was amazing to us that there was somebody out there who could keep track of that sort of thing.” This year, some of von Bismarck’s undercover footage—of a manufacturer in Shanghai who allegedly sold illicit ramin to American companies—helped bring about a U.S. federal indictment.
Lee had told von Bismarck that furniture manufacturers were leaving Taiwan in large numbers for mainland China, and after his workplace was raided he opened a factory there, too. While more and more manufacturers were moving to China, the forestproducts industry there was dramatically changing. In 1998, the Yangtze River watershed flooded, killing more than three thousand people and causing more than thirty billion dollars in damage. At the time, some Communist Party officials believed that the flood was exacerbated by soil erosion—the result of “over quota” cutting of trees—and the government banned logging throughout much of the country. In order to meet its immense demand for raw materials, China began to buy unprecedented quantities of wood from abroad; it is now the largest importer of logs and also the largest exporter of finished wood products. China began to act the way many developed countries in North America and Europe do: it had destroyed much of its primary forests, gained from doing so, and was now protecting the trees it had left by buying wood indiscriminately, often from “high risk” countries, like Indonesia. The year of the flood, China started importing large volumes of wood from Russia, which has more forest than any country in the world and was in a state of political and economic anarchy. The greatest traffic in illicit wood is now thought to be from Russia to China.
All investigations must begin with a plan, and von Bismarck had begun devising his operation in Manchuria months earlier, from an office in a small brick house near Dupont Circle, in Washington, D.C. The workspace is crammed into three small rooms. There are maps on the walls, reports piled on shelves, and a computer workstation to edit undercover video footage. Eight E.I.A. campaigners, and sometimes a dog, spend most of their daytime hours there, and some late nights, too. Their annual budget is nine hundred thousand dollars, an improvement from the organization’s earliest form of financing: credit cards. The most popular word in the office is probably “leverage,” because E.I.A. tends to use its undercover information to pressure governments and companies to change their behavior.
Von Bismarck had not been to northern China before, nor was he very familiar with Russian timber, but he knew that he wanted to frame his investigation around an American retailer that was enmeshed in the trade, and that he could leverage. He chose Wal-Mart. A tenth of China’s exports to the United States are sold by Wal-Mart; if the company were a sovereign nation, it would be China’s eighth-largest trading partner. “We knew that American demand for wood was causing forest destruction,” he told me. “If we could get the biggest company in the country to take note, then we thought we could make a difference.” He intended to chart the wood’s journey from the Russian forest to suburban store shelves through the complicated network of Wal-Mart’s Chinese suppliers—whose identities the company takes care to obscure. When he was done, he planned to show the company what he had discovered or release his findings to the media.
The first step was a physical audit of every wood product that Wal-Mart sold, to try to determine its precise origin. This was done in two stores by a twenty-eight-year-old E.I.A. campaigner named David Groves. “I probably put in four eight-hour days in each store,” Groves told me. “I would get there around ten in the morning and not leave until six. I ate what was in a Wal-Mart. I sustained myself on a laughable amount of cheeseburgers.” Evidently, one can walk into a Wal-Mart, systematically turn boxes on end, and take notes without interference from employees. “I actually got a lot more customers asking me stuff than Wal-Mart staff,” Groves told me. The size of the task became apparent early on. Groves began by including paper in his inventory, but soon became overwhelmed. “I was like, ‘That is completely undoable,’ ” he said. He confined his audit to wood, and ultimately collected data on more than nine hundred products, which von Bismarck used as a blueprint for his trip. Groves also studied two cities in China’s far north that serve as the main gateways for the trade in wood: Manzhouli, near Siberia; and Suifenhe.
In the nineteen-eighties, Suifenhe became a test city for what Party officials called “socialism with Chinese characteristics”—the gradual and controlled opening of Chinese markets. Russians would come to the city with furs or old military-issue goods and exchange them for Chinese-made products. The practice became known as dao bao, or “changing bags.” Largely because of its proximity to Russia and its distance from the central government, Suifenhe developed an energetic and violent shadow economy. Some Chinese “entrepreneurs” smuggled opium and ephedrine, which was widely available in China but forbidden in Russia. Local mobsters flourished, and reached out to their Russian counterparts. At times, they clashed. Marc Mooney, an American timber trader who recently tried to conduct business in Suifenhe, told me, “I’ve heard stories of Chinese men going on the other side of the border and just disappearing.” Occasionally, they were discovered: an entrepreneur who had travelled to Russia to buy trucks ended up floating off the coast of Vladivostok with bullet wounds in his head; two others were found fatally shot in a car that had been parked in a Russian forest.
The timber industry in Suifenhe is largely centered on “primary processing,” the most rudimentary type of production—cutting logs into sawn wood, for instance, which is then shipped to other cities in China for more refined manufacturing. Von Bismarck wanted to start at the base of the Wal-Mart chain—the suppliers to the suppliers—and the most logical target was the Shanglian Group. It belongs to Sun Laijun, who grew up in Harbin, the provincial capital, but began going to Suifenhe in 1991, in search of opportunity. “The first thing I did when I arrived in Suifenhe was to look for a Russian translator,” he recalled in an interview with CCTV. One of his first big barter deals involved swapping twenty railway cars of urea, a chemical used in fertilizers, for apples. In 1998, when China’s logging ban was enacted, he formed Suifenhe Longjiang Shanglian Import and Export Company, and became heavily involved in the timber trade. Longjiang Shanglian now imports one out of every ten logs that enter China from Russia.
The company has been the focus of a number of environmental investigations, and has grown suspicious of strangers. When von Bismarck and Wu, in their guise as representatives of Axion Trading, tried to arrange a meeting with Sun, a receptionist told them that he was in Russia and directed their inquiries to another executive, who asked right away if they belonged to an environmental group. “What groups?” Wu asked, and the executive said, “If you don’t know what that is, then you’re O.K.” A meeting was set up with Longjiang Shanglian’s manager, Sun Laijun’s brother Laiyong, the following afternoon. “To a certain extent, you have to consider security,” Wu later told me. “They own half of Suifenhe, probably, and, from what we know about the timber traders all around the world—some of them can be real nasty.”
“Let’s go,” von Bismarck told Wu, and they headed into Longjiang Shanglian’s headquarters, a gray building that towers over the city’s factories. Both men were wired with hidden video and audio equipment. After presenting themselves to a security guard, they went to the third-floor office of Sun Laiyong, who was surrounded by a coterie of senior managers. “The whole rail yard, stretching all the way to the mountainside, belongs to our family,” Sun Laiyong said. The men talked about the company’s operations in Russia, where it bought nearly all its wood. About forty minutes into the meeting, Wu attempted to steer the discussion toward illegality. He asked about problems that the company faced, and Sun Laiyong said, “There are transportation costs, customs fees, mafia protection money—”
“Mafia protection money?” Wu asked.
“Mafia protection money, and other miscellaneous costs. Russia is very—”
One of the managers interrupted. “Even the police is like the mafia,” he said.
Sun Laiyong continued, “Doing business in timber, you’ll have to pay protection money to them.”
“So when you go to Russia—”
“We don’t want to go there!” Sun Laiyong said. “We send others there instead.” He claimed that Chinese businesses were able to muscle out Japanese companies, which for decades have had a presence in the Russian Far East, because the business climate was “dark,” and often required payments made by the suitcase. “Small Japanese companies can’t buy any timber in Russia,” Sun Laiyong said. “They buy it here.” He gestured to von Bismarck, and said, “He will not be able to buy any timber in Russia. We bring cash there and pay up front. Cash trade. Anything happens.”
“Millions of dollars in cash?” Wu asked.
“Yes.”
Wu asked what kinds of mafia groups Longjiang Shanglian dealt with. “All kinds,” Sun Laiyong said. He described a contract murder he had heard about that took place in 2001, during a struggle to control Nakhodka, one of Russia’s largest ports, on the Pacific. “The manager didn’t want to sell it, and a few days later he was killed,” he said. Sun Laiyong mentioned the mayor of Vladivostok, a crime boss known as Winnie the Pooh, who was convicted on corruption charges. “Vladivostok’s mayor was caught,” Sun Laiyong said. “But he was the head of the mafia.”
After the meeting, von Bismarck and Wu got into a car and reviewed the encounter. They had obtained evidence that Longjiang Shanglian’s operations were enmeshed with corruption in Russia, and that Sun Laiyong regarded bribery as a mundane expense, but they had failed to learn how it affected the company’s supply. “When it came to the actual logging, he said, ‘Oh, yes, we have all the proper documents. Otherwise, how can you log?’ ” Wu said. “So, as soon as he said that, he kind of shut the door on me.”
Wu leaned back. “Ach, I’m disappointed,” he said.
“Yeah?” von Bismarck said.
“I should think that I did really poorly.”
“Don’t say that,” von Bismarck told him, and the two men sat in silence as the car rumbled across the uneven pavement, toward their hotel.