Sun Laiyong’s references to organized crime pointed to one of the most disturbing aspects of the illegal timber trade: the violence that supports it. Last December, the body of a Russian banker with close ties to the timber industry was found at the bottom of his swimming pool, near Moscow. A bag had been pulled over his head, and his arms had been tied to his ankles. In a sloppy attempt at a coverup, a suicide note had been left at the scene, prompting a law-enforcement official to say, “He’s not Harry Houdini.” I heard of a similar “suicide” not far from Vladivostok earlier this year: an activist working with the World Wildlife Fund was found at a remote hunting cabin, fatally shot, an unconvincing note by his side. This type of violence can be found elsewhere. Earlier this year, in Peru, a community leader who tried to report a shipment of stolen timber was shot to death in a government office. Three years ago, in Brazil, a missionary and community organizer from Ohio, Sister Dorothy Stang, was murdered in the state of Pará, where a third of the Brazilian Amazon’s deforestation is occurring and where she had made enemies of loggers.
In 2001, experts with the United Nations in the Democratic Republic of Congo coined a phrase, “conflict timber,” to describe how logging had become interwoven with the fighting there. The term is apt for a number of other places. In Burma, stolen timber helps support the junta and the rebels. In Cambodia, it helped fund the Khmer Rouge, one of the most brutal rebel factions in history. Charles Taylor, the former President of Liberia, distributed logging concessions to warlords and a member of the Ukrainian mafia, and the Oriental Timber Company—known in Liberia as Only Taylor Chops—conducted arms deals on his behalf. The violence tied to Taylor’s logging operations reached unprecedented levels, and in 2003 the U.N. Security Council imposed sanctions on all Liberian timber. (China, the largest importer of Liberian timber, tried to block the sanctions.) Shortly afterward, Taylor’s regime collapsed. An American official told me that the U.S. intelligence community “absolutely put the fall of Taylor on the timber sanctions.”
When von Bismarck discusses this type of violence, there is emotion in his voice. He once told me that he looked up to his grandfather Klaus, who had written in his memoirs of defying an order to execute captured Soviets during the war: it “contravened everything I had been taught and was incompatible with my conscience.” When Hitler’s regime collapsed, Klaus joined Allied programs designed to erase the Nazi legacy. Martín Escobari, von Bismarck’s Harvard roommate, told me, “This is something that clearly had an impact on Sascha. He is very proud of his grandfather, who had been part of the reconstruction of Germany, making up for very evil stuff. Sascha’s family comes from a long history of military service. I think he has also tried to make up for previous wrongs.”
Not long ago, von Bismarck testified in Congress about timber smuggling and about activists who had been attacked in countries where he had gone undercover. “We’re not talking about fuzzy technicalities,” he told me. “We’re talking about people getting killed, and poor people’s livelihood stolen.” Some of the people had worked with E.I.A., such as a reporter in Indonesia who had been attacked by thugs carrying machetes. At the hearing, he said, “We are the unwitting financiers of this crime.”
Von Bismarck often argues that illegal logging is as much a problem of global demand as it is of supply—which isn’t necessarily obvious. Today, the worldwide sales of forest products are worth about a trillion dollars annually, but more wood is used locally, for fuel, than is traded for industrial purposes; in Africa, nearly ninety per cent of all wood harvested is for energy. Moreover, many developed countries import raw timber from places that do not have substantial illegal-logging problems. But wood can be chopped, sliced, and pulverized in countless ways, by any number of middlemen, and large quantities of stolen timber end up in the West as finished products. The United States is the world’s largest consumer of finished wood items. In a year, every American uses the equivalent of seventy-two cubic feet of wood. Despite advances in recycling and technology, the per-capita consumption of wood in the United States has risen since the mid-nineteen-sixties.
It is rising elsewhere, too. Wood consumption in China is about fifteen times lower than it is in the United States. For centuries, the Chinese have made paper from bamboo, rice straw, and other non-wood fibres, but the central government recently decided to push the country’s papermaking industry away from those raw materials, because the quality was poor, and the process polluted too much water. The authorities closed down thousands of factories, and, between 1980 and 2002, the proportion of non-wood fibre used in Chinese papermaking fell by half. Meanwhile, the over-all amount of paper consumed increased. If it ever grows to the level of American consumption, then China alone would end up using double the planet’s current paper production—if that level of demand could ever be met. In India, too, the use of paper is expected to double by 2015. Improving standards of living, combined with population growth, have created a twofold pressure on forests: more people are demanding wood, and people are demanding more of it.
No one has attempted to calculate what it would cost to restrict all wood products to sustainable forests and plantations. Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, once defined sustainability as “living on nature’s income rather than its capital.” As a planet, then, if we are consuming the world’s forest capital—and deforestation suggests that we are—everything we use that is derived from wood is undervalued. Von Bismarck told me that an economy that structurally undervalues wood is bound to accept illegal timber without much resistance, because the excess black-market supply only reinforces the misconception that wood is cheap and the supply nearly inexhaustible. (According to one estimate, there is enough illicit timber traded worldwide to depress global prices for wood by as much as sixteen per cent.) The notion is reinforced by the murkiness of the timber economy. Very few companies take the trouble to discover where the wood in their products originates. To do so would be expensive, and consumers don’t demand it of them. Indifference has become the norm.
From the docks and tall buildings of Dandong, one can see, across the Yalu River, a North Korean metropolis called Sinuiju, enveloped by smog. On the Chinese side of the border, Dandong is surrounded by hills covered in chestnut trees. The city is home to a firm called Dandong Maisafu, China’s largest exporter of toilet seats. The company sends its entire stock to Wal-Mart. Many of its toilet seats are made from oak, and von Bismarck was trying to find out where the wood came from.
An unexpected discovery by David Groves brought von Bismarck and Wu to Dandong. Groves had been combing through an enormous customs database called PIERS, which, every day, gathers more than twenty-five thousand bills of lading from around the world. Looking into PIERS is a bit like looking into the Matrix: there are thousands upon thousands of rows of numbers—tracking codes, shipping codes, container I.D.s. Wal-Mart generally chooses to remove its shipments from the publicly available version of PIERS, but, by chance, the company left on the record forty thousand entries on wood imports from China—including Russian oak toilet seats from a company called Dandong Anmin. When von Bismarck and Wu visited Anmin, they were told that it was no longer dealing with Wal-Mart. (Later, they learned that Anmin was selling some of its products, through a middleman, on Amazon.com.) A senior manager at Anmin referred them to Dandong Maisafu, which was run by one of the owner’s relatives.
As the investigation progressed, von Bismarck found that this type of reshuffle was common. “We had been given the gift of this data,” he told me, referring to the PIERS information. “But then we found there was an added challenge: the turnover in Wal-Mart suppliers. It was the ‘Wal-Mart phenomenon’ that we were bumping into, the phenomenon of leveraging suppliers by dumping them at a high frequency.” He and Wu would encounter factory owners who had just shipped Wal-Mart goods made with Russian wood but could or would no longer settle for Wal-Mart’s price. “That made our investigation difficult, but it also made it difficult for Wal-Mart to get reliable wood,” he said. “It created incentives for suppliers to get bad wood.”
Von Bismarck and Wu called the offices of Dandong Maisafu, again posing as commodities traders, and met with Chunshou Zhuo, a garrulous, potbellied man in his late fifties, who wore a plaid shirt, jeans, and a trucker’s cap. Zhuo said that he owned Maisafu with his daughter, and that they entered the toilet-seat business about eight years ago. His company made two million dollars a month, and exported furniture made from oak and other species to Wal-Mart. When Wu asked where the oak came from, Zhuo said that it was Chinese—“from here, in the mountains”—but Wu learned from a Maisafu floor manager that some of the toilet seats were made from Russian timber. Zhuo’s daughter later confirmed that the company used Russian hardwood for about a fifth of its products.
That afternoon, von Bismarck and Wu visited Dalian Huafeng, one of the largest furniture manufacturers in China. From the PIERS data, von Bismarck learned that Huafeng manufactured cribs for an American company called Simplicity for Children, which was, in turn, a Wal-Mart supplier. Huafeng, it turned out, was buying wood from Longjiang Shanglian—the importer in Suifenhe that paid protection money in Russia. Slowly, the pieces of Wal-Mart’s wood-supply chain began to come together.
Von Bismarck asked a Huafeng manager, “Big clients like Wal-Mart, they don’t ask where the wood is from?”
“No, no, never,” she said. “Never.”
While there are international treaties designed to protect the oceans and the planet’s biodiversity, and to address climate change and the ozone layer, there are no corresponding agreements on how best to manage the planet’s trees. This has not been for lack of trying. In 1992, at the Rio Earth Summit, such a convention was proposed and debated, but the talks faltered on the question of who should bear the cost of keeping the planet’s forests intact—the countries that consume so much of the world’s wood or those who own it? No one could agree. It did not help that more than eighty per cent of the world’s forests are under state control, and that governments tend to regard them as sovereign resources.
The only treaty that governs the global trade in forest products is the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species—what one American official described to me as a kind of “emergency room” for rare plant and animal species at the threshold of extinction. When von Bismarck was investigating ramin, which is protected by the convention, law-enforcement agents could, in theory, confiscate shipments of goods made from the wood if they did not have the proper permits. (No commercially traded Russian timber has this level of protection.) In practice, the system does not always work very well. Von Bismarck once tipped off the authorities about undocumented ramin headed to a crib company called Baby Trilogy, in Lubbock, Texas. The owners, friends of the Bush family, enlisted the office of Senator John Cornyn, of Texas, to help get the shipment released, and it was. (They say that they did not understand the law, and that this was their last shipment of ramin.) Several years ago, a study found that large volumes of mahogany—the only other commercially significant tree protected by the convention—were entering the United States without permits.
During the past several years, von Bismarck and his colleagues have been campaigning for a new way to control timber imports: an amendment to a curious law called the Lacey Act, which, for more than a century, has been a cornerstone of nature protection in America. John F. Lacey, a Civil War veteran and congressman, introduced the legislation in 1900, banning the interstate trade of illegally hunted game. Over time, the Lacey Act was expanded to cover the international trade of wildlife.
John Lacey was a passionate advocate for forests, but, for reasons that are unclear, the law that bears his name fell short of protecting plants the way it did animals. Von Bismarck told me that in 2005 he began “bouncing from Hill office to Hill office, looking for a champion to move forward an amendment” that would expand the act. A congressional aide told him that he would have to get the support of timber-industry associations, but to do that he had to overcome decades of antagonism. “To say there was animosity is an understatement,” the aide told me. A member of the Hardwood Federation, which is made up mostly of family-owned businesses, said, “The industry is, really, full of very conservative, rural, property-rights-oriented Republicans, who have been deeply suspicious that the environmentalist community’s only interest was to put them out of business.” Illegal logging is not only a foreign phenomenon: in the nineteen-nineties, it was estimated that a hundred million dollars’ worth of trees were stolen from public lands every year. Von Bismarck was asking the timber industry to lobby for tougher regulation of its own business.
As it happened, a number of American companies believed that they were being hurt by illegal wood—“especially coming out of China, the numbers made no sense to us,” said Harry Demorest, who was then a board member of the Hardwood Federation and the C.E.O. of Columbia Forest Products. “We knew what the market price was for logs, and the products were being sold at less than cost.” Another industry group, the American Forest and Paper Association, estimated that the trade in stolen wood was costing the domestic forest-products industry a billion dollars annually. Both groups—along with some large retailers—eventually agreed to support the amendment. (The Bush Administration declined to do so.) It was sponsored in the Senate and in the House by two Democratic legislators from Oregon, Senator Ron Wyden and Representative Earl Blumenauer, but much of the bill’s fine-tuning occurred in conferences off the Hill.
Following months of negotiation, an amendment took shape: it would prohibit taking any plant or plant product out of any country in violation of its natural-resource laws. There would be no “innocent owner” defense, which meant that importers who claimed not to know they had bought illegal wood, or items made from it, would still be subject to penalties. This provision generated strong opposition from some industry groups, but it was central to the bill’s design. “The idea is that you want to stop illegal plants from being in the market, the same way you don’t want illegal art in the market—it can be seized wherever it is found,” von Bismarck told me. But the bill’s greatest strength was also its greatest weakness: while it used the American legal system to reinforce the laws of other countries, forestry codes in some countries are so vague and contradictory that they are hard to follow, even for loggers with good intentions, and even more difficult for American judges to interpret. When I asked von Bismarck about this, he told me, “We want to get to a point where the rules matter, then we want to fight to have them be the right rules.”
Just before the amendment was up for a vote in the House, lobbyists from Monsanto and a trade group called the Biotechnology Industry Organization, or BIO, suddenly expressed their unease about it. “It was late in the game,” von Bismarck told me. “Everybody was saying, ‘Oh, my God, they’re going to kill this thing.’ ” It turned out that BIO and Monsanto had only one major request: to be exempted from the law. At a meeting convened in the Capitol to discuss their concerns, Jen Daulby, Monsanto’s representative, argued that the amendment would prevent companies from using genetic samples it acquired overseas. She said that foreign laws could be unreasonable. A timber lobbyist who was there recalled, “It looked pretty bad. We all thought the same thing: Did they just say that they wanted to take plants out regardless of whether the particular country wants them to?”
Daulby told me she was concerned that Monsanto “would be violating the Lacey Act” if the amendment covered all plants and plant products, and that the bill would “prohibit the research materials that were coming back.” She said these things on a conference call with two other Monsanto officials listening in, and only a bit later, after a reminder from the company’s press officer, did she add, “As Brad mentioned, we are following other countries’ laws, but having a bill in the United States that endorses those is a totally different thing.”
Ultimately, the biotech industry obtained its exemption. Von Bismarck told me, “They are arguably stealing the intellectual property of poor countries, and there exists the whole debate about that, which is an interesting debate, because they will try to claim the high ground and say, ‘We all happily benefit from some of those medicines.’ ” But the bill’s supporters did not want to risk getting the amendment killed over an exemption that, as Monsanto pointed out, was unrelated to the timber trade. Still, von Bismarck said, when the biotech lobbyists joined in, “it was a big, eyeopening moment in terms of how government works.”
Von Bismarck decided to publish the results of the Wal-Mart investigation in December, in a report that drew upon eight undercover meetings in China and upon Groves’s research. It stated that two hundred thousand cribs made from high-risk Russian poplar and birch were being sold to Wal-Mart by Simplicity for Children, and noted that “at least thirty-one thousand trees reach Wal-Mart each year in the form of solid wood toilet seats made in Dandong.” Von Bismarck compared Wal-Mart’s fastidiousness about pricing with “the company’s inattention to the legality of its raw materials,” and noted that “Wal-Mart’s customers currently risk financing criminal timber syndicates.”
Simplicity for Children denied using illegal Russian wood. Wal-Mart’s response was surprisingly less confrontational. The company told von Bismarck that it had already been examining its supply chain, and had just created a new position—senior manager for strategic sourcing—to oversee its forest products. During a conference call with several E.I.A. campaigners, Tom Flynn, who had been assigned to the position, said that his job had been created in part because of the report.
Flynn is a soft-spoken man with a disarming nature. “I’ve been with Wal-Mart for just about four years,” he told me. “My background—and you’ll find this a little peculiar—is in the apparel industry, denim sourcing. When I was first approached about this job, I said, ‘You know, I don’t have a Ph.D. in forestry,’ and they told me, ‘Well, that’s not what we are looking for.’ ” He added, “Fifteen or twenty years ago, people were never checking their factories in the apparel world. You go back to the days of articles about children being chained to machines, and the industry basically said, ‘This is not acceptable.’ ” Flynn said that he had begun pretty much the way David Groves had, by grabbing a legal pad and walking through a nearby Wal-Mart. “I got to the fourth page, and I gave up,” he said. Instead, he worked with what he called a “risk assessment” team to build a database of every wood-based product in Wal-Mart’s inventory, and identify the ones he should worry about. Flynn was explaining this by speakerphone, with a Wal-Mart press officer listening in; she, too, conceded that the company had “a learning curve in all of this.”
In July, Wal-Mart signed an agreement with the World Wildlife Fund to eliminate illegal wood from its furniture within six years, and to work together on Flynn’s risk assessment. “It is a very important signal, but it will only be as important as its follow-through,” von Bismarck said. The company had good reason to act quickly. Its announcement followed the passage into law of the Lacey Act amendment, and similar legislation had already been introduced in the British Parliament and was being considered by the European Union. Wal-Mart began advising its suppliers to meet with attorneys about the new law.
Earlier this year, von Bismarck trav elled to the Russian Far East to document the timber theft at its source. He flew to Vladivostok and met with Denis Smirnov, the forestry director of the World Wildlife Fund’s branch office in the Russian Far East. Smirnov is thirty-eight, and has been living in Vladivostok since 2002, but he was born in Leningrad, and at times demonstrates the haughtiness of an urbanite in one of Russia’s most remote provinces. (“In my nightmares, I did not imagine that I would spend my life on illegal logging,” he said.) The two men planned to drive through the winter night, to see if they could catch gangs of illegal loggers deep in the taiga the following morning. In daylight, they feared, scouts might see them.
By seven in the evening, the sky had turned dark, and von Bismarck and Smirnov were heading north on the M-60, a two-lane highway running along the Ussuri River, which divides the Russian frontier from northern China. For long stretches, the road was paved, but in places it was completely caked over with snow. Elsewhere, the pavement had crumbled away entirely, leaving behind raw, frozen earth. A few Chinese-made tractor-trailers heading north left clouds of white powdery snow in their wake.
Smirnov drove. He had picked up a special officer from a regional police unit devoted to fighting “economic crimes.” The officer, a taciturn man in his early twenties, who wanted to be known only as Vladimir, sat in the passenger seat. He was dressed in camouflage, but over his uniform he wore a puffy black jacket. “He is not yet corrupt,” Smirnov said. “It’s not ordinary for a policeman.” Small, impoverished villages drifted by in the darkness. In the taiga many homes used wood stoves for heating and for cooking. Smirnov drove past timber depots with enormous stockpiles of logs headed for China, but soon they, too, disappeared.
Not far from a logging town called Dalnerechensk—an area where Longjiang Shanglian acquires some of its timber—Smirnov described how loggers had once sabotaged his car. “For me, it is painful to see this wilderness disappear—and it is useless, actually, because nobody is profiting from the disappearance,” he said. “It could be justified if our country, our people, would get some real profit from this harvesting. I think the head of these gangs, they are only thinking about their pockets. They are not thinking about the future, and the people who are living here. These guys can move to—I don’t know where, Hawaii or the Bahamas. But other people have no such opportunities.”
Sometime after midnight, he drove into a labyrinth of narrow forest trails. Wherever a trail forked, loggers had hung bottles or boxes on branches as markers. Roughly half of the trails crossed frozen bogs, impassable in spring and summer. The car finally stopped in a clearing, and Smirnov, von Bismarck, and Vladimir spent the rest of the night there. For a time, they kept the engine running, but eventually turned it off. Frost formed on the insides of the windows. In the morning, Smirnov drove down snow-covered trails, and soon found one with fresh treads. It led to a pile of cut linden in the snow, and von Bismarck filmed the scene. There were shavings near the logs. He listened for the sound of chain saws, but the forest was quiet.
The search continued fruitlessly until midafternoon, when someone saw a flash of color behind a row of trees. In the distance, several men were standing near a pile of logs that was worth several thousand dollars. Vladimir and von Bismarck made their way through the woods to them. It is difficult to describe the sense of uncertainty that precedes a confrontation among strangers who are so far removed from civilization. At the turn of the last century, an imperial Russian geographer wrote, “In the Ussurian taiga, one must expect at times to meet with a wild beast, but the most dangerous meeting of all is with a man.” As Vladimir drew near, he removed a handgun from a holster and transferred it to his jacket pocket. Von Bismarck saw this. “I was still worried about them being armed,” he told me later. “I did have some kind of sense that Vladimir knew what he was doing, but he was very young.”
Vladimir approached the men, but, as they spoke, another logger about fifty feet away powered up a chain saw and cut into a tree. It must have been the final cut, because the tree came crashing into a blanket of snow. “So a tree fell down, and, for me, when you hear a tree falling it is like the Holy Grail,” von Bismarck said. “Because when we are trying to catch these guys, I mean, just the visual of an illegal logger in action, actually cutting down a tree—we have really only gotten it once, in Indonesia, and we have used that image a lot.” The logger was dressed in an outfit made from thick pieces of beige felt or wool. With one foot, he stabilized the felled tree, and with a bright-orange chain saw he began to sever it into logs. Vladimir approached him. “The logger looked up and his face went numb, and then you could see him making a kind of fight-or-flight decision,” von Bismarck recalled. For an instant, nothing happened, and then the logger began to run. Vladimir yelled, in Russian, “Where are you going?”

The man kept running, and Vladimir raised his gun over his head and fired a shot, but the man did not slow down. Vladimir was now running, too, through the snow, which was knee deep in places, and von Bismarck, with his camera, was not far behind, attempting to photograph the arrest. The chase seemed to move in slow motion. In winter, when the vegetation is brittle and devoid of leaves, there are not many places to hide in a forest. Still, the logger, middle-aged and visibly out of shape, ran with startling alacrity. In one hand, he was carrying his chain saw. Twigs snapped against his body. “Where are you going?” Vladimir yelled again as he drew nearer, and for a moment the uncertainty of real violence hung in the air. Von Bismarck plunged into the snow after the men; the cold air pinched his lungs as he ran—he later said that he felt as if his chest had been submerged in ice water. “I was eager to stay right with Vladimir, right over his shoulder, to get the shot,” he said. The logger continued running, so Vladimir fired his gun into the air again, and an instant later he grabbed the logger by the arm, and the chase came to an abrupt end.