After Sunday Justice left the Air Force, he returned to the valley, where, he said, he met a hardened Mark Owens. At first, he said, “Mark was interested in science.” But over time his focus changed. “He was very angry with poaching. He loves the elephants, so all the killing made him very upset.”

As Mark Owens assumed more authority over the valley and the game scouts, he extended his campaign against poachers beyond the borders of the national park. The Owenses now had a Bell helicopter as well as the Cessna, and the scouts were highly mobile, thanks to trucks provided to them by the Owenses’ conservation project. In “The Eye of the Elephant,” Delia described the first of a regular series of “village sweeps”: “The scouts raid villages all night—bursting into poachers’ huts while they sleep—and drive back to Mano in the morning, their truck loaded with suspects.”

The Owenses at one point asked the U.S. government to provide financial support for their village sweeps. In a proposal for funding submitted to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1994, they described their tactics: “Wildlife officers sweep into villages at night to seize poachers and their weapons before they can be used to kill elephants. More than fifty firearms were confiscated during a single sweep in August of 1993.” The proposal, which was unsuccessful, also refers to “Airborne Quick Response and Special Unit Scouts (trained in paramilitary tactics and to work with aircraft).”

“The Eye of the Elephant” does not provide many details about these raids, but, in villages around the park, residents told me that the scouts beat men they suspected of poaching. In a village near Mpika called Chita, residents awoke one night to the sound of truck engines. Scouts swarmed the village. They were armed with rifles. One villager, who asked to be identified only as Mutolo, described what happened: “The scouts took the men to one side of the village and they began to beat the ones they said were poachers. They beat them hard with their hands and rifles.”

Some of the villagers told me that scouts turned their houses upside down, searching under beds and sleeping mats for weapons and in the rafters for dried meat. (It is against the law in Zambia to raid a house without a warrant, but the villagers I spoke with said the scouts offered no documents that would have justified the raid.) Another witness, Agatha Chipole, said that her son was among the men the scouts were looking for. She admitted that he had poached in the North Luangwa park, but only to provide meat for his family. One man, who also asked not to be identified, said, “Two scouts held me up and a third one hit me in my penis area with his rifle. They were asking me, ‘Where are the guns?’ ” The villagers I interviewed said the scouts collected between ten and fifteen weapons that night. Four men, a villager told me, were taken to the hospital in Mpika for treatment after the raid.

The Owenses have denied harming poachers, or encouraging scouts to do so. Mary Dykes, of the Owens Foundation, wrote, “Had the Owenses adopted any policy that supported the abuse of poachers and poaching suspects, the many villages and their tribal leaders, not to mention corrupt officials needing an excuse to get rid of them, would have immediately had them arrested.”

But many scouts told me that poachers captured in the park, often local residents who were working as meat carriers, were taken to the Mano compound, or on occasion to Marula-Puku, for detention and questioning. One man, who described himself as an Owens scout and asked to be identified only as Mvulu, said that prisoners were sometimes brought to Marula-Puku, tied to a stake, and left out in the sun. “We would make them understand that poaching was not a good job for them,” he said. Another scout who worked in the park in this period, Henry Kampamba, said, “Mark Owens told us that anyone with meat or a weapon should have a beating.”

In interviews, scouts who say they once reported to Mark Owens, as well as former employees of the Owenses’ North Luangwa Conservation Project, defended the tactics used to suppress poaching. I asked Mutale Kasokola, who is depicted in “The Eye of the Elephant” firing cherry bombs at poachers, if he thought the rough methods were justified. “These poachers were very bad,” he said. “They were very dangerous people. They had to be stopped. Mark Owens said we had to do anything to stop them, or else the elephants would all die.”

In letters and e-mails to me, the Owenses and their advocates argued that Mark Owens’s militant persona in Zambia—as portrayed in “The Eye of the Elephant” and in the ABC documentary—was simply a performance designed to make poachers believe that he was dangerous. Owens says that during his cherry-bomb campaign he spread rumors in the valley that he was firing live ammunition. “I actively promoted the idea that these were more than firecrackers, with people I know who would leak this information to the poaching community,” he said. “I wanted them to think that these were RPGs or something more formidable because I thought we were on the verge of being killed.” But Kasokola, who described the Owenses as generous benefactors, told me that on occasion scouts fired live ammunition. “We only threw cherry bombs on the poachers from the airplane,” he said. “When we got the helicopter, the scouts would fire bullets at the poachers from the helicopter.” He explained, “The poachers had AK-47s and would fire at the plane and the helicopter.”

The Owenses also denied that poachers were held under arrest or questioned at Marula-Puku, or that anyone was tied to a stake in the sun or beaten. In a letter to me, Donald Zachary, one of their attorneys, wrote, “Scouts occasionally passed through or near their camp with captured poachers, and they would stop for water or a brief rest.” During those times, the scouts would handcuff prisoners to a tree, but only for a few minutes and “in the shade.”

But another former employee of the Owenses, Hammer Simwinga, who now heads a community-development program in Mpika, said that on occasion captured poachers were held temporarily in a small building in Marula-Puku, where, he said, scouts would “get information about who was coming into the park.” In his view, the antipoaching techniques of the scouts were necessary, even if they sometimes became “rough.” “The important thing is to extract information,” Simwinga said. And though the scouts’ work could cause controversy, “there is sympathy for the methods because they worked.” He said he heard of villagers having disappeared inside the park, but had no knowledge of killings. Simwinga later recanted much of what he had told me, and in an e-mail to Mark Owens, whom he refers to as “Dad,” he promised his continued support.

Like other supporters of the Owenses, Simwinga said that the couple’s achievements in the valley—the introduction of effective tactics to wildlife protection, and the projects in the villages that brought health care to people who previously had none—outweighed whatever harm may have come to subsistence poachers and their families. In an e-mail to a Zambian critic of the Owenses, Alexandra Fuller wrote, “Yes, people went missing while poaching when the Owenses were in Zambia and they still do—why do you think the Owenses have become a scapegoat for this? Poaching is, was and always will be a risky business.” She went on, “It’s a high-risk game and the Owenses cannot possibly take the heat for all the bodies left in that valley!” Fuller told me that she had investigated the various allegations against the Owenses while writing an article about Zambia, which was published in National Geographic in 2005, and had been unable to substantiate any of them.

The Owenses, through their attorneys, said that Mark Owens could not be responsible for what the scouts did, because he did not command them. “Once Mark transported the scouts to a poaching area, he flew away,” Zachary wrote. “What the scouts did on the ground with poachers was simply not Mark’s business.” Neither Mark Owens nor anyone associated with his project, they said, “ever recruited, commanded or paid salaries to any government game scout.” Malcolm Boulton, who worked for the North Luangwa Conservation Project, largely in the Mpika office, also says that Mark did not lead the scouts.

But scouts I spoke to in a number of villages in the Luangwa Valley told me that Mark Owens had clearly been their commander. And in “The Eye of the Elephant” Delia Owens wrote, of the scouts, “Mark creates special units for those who perform well, and they are issued extra equipment—new guns, jungle knives, binoculars, compasses.” Mark writes that though he would prefer not to assert his rank, “I have full authority over the scouts.” In a scene from Maryanne Vollers’s Sports Illustrated profile of the Owenses, Mark spots a poaching camp from the air. “Mark spends the next days orchestrating a manhunt,” she wrote. “He dispatches two patrols of eight scouts apiece to the site of the poachers’ camp. The scouts capture three poachers, but the main gang splits up and heads for the escarpment. Mark radios headquarters to set up ambushes along the exit routes from the park, but it is too late.”

On my three trips to North Luangwa, I made several visits to the Mano camp and interviewed a dozen veteran scouts about Mark Owens. They were complimentary, in part because the Owenses had outfitted them with superior equipment and rations. John Chibeza, an Owens scout, told me his fellow-scouts felt that they were élite soldiers. “He would call us shock troops,” Chibeza said. “The other scouts were jealous of us because Mark Owens was our commander. He was an expert in combat.” (Chibeza retracted this after speaking with Hammer Simwinga.) Although Owens did not serve in the U.S. military, several of the scouts I interviewed believed that he was a Vietnam veteran; in the “Turning Point” documentary, Owens says, in reference to North Luangwa’s troubles, “Frankly, it reminds me of—a little bit of Vietnam.”

P. J. Fouche, the hunter who manages a concession on the edge of the park, told me that scouts would salute Owens when he appeared. “Something happened to him over the years,” Fouche said. “He would be more threatening in person. He was always armed, and he always seemed ready to fight.” Fouche and Owens were once allies in the fight against poachers, but fell out over what Fouche said were disagreements about tactics. The Owenses maintain that Fouche was upset with them because their U.S. Fish and Wildlife grant application competed with his.

“They thought they were kings,” Fouche said of the Owenses. “He made himself the law, and his law was that he could do anything he wanted.” Fouche said that, before his disagreement with Mark Owens, scouts under Owens’s command would patrol Fouche’s concession. I asked him if the scouts killed suspected poachers in his area.

“Of course,” Fouche said.

“Did Mark Owens know that the scouts were killing people?” I asked.

Fouche handed me a letter that he said Owens had faxed him in 1994. It was written in part as a plea to Fouche to help raise funds for the Owenses’ project, and it listed some of Mark Owens’s antipoaching accomplishments. “To date I have flown eight airborne antipoaching operations over your area, including four in which I inserted scouts on ambush,” Owens wrote. “Two poachers have been killed and one wounded that I know of thus far, and we are just getting warmed up.”

In the letter, Owens described his plans to recruit more scouts for his “Airborne Special Operations.” “These officers will be used with the chopper on shock operations, in which we hit the worst poachers very hard and with lasting effect. This has worked to such a degree in the park that we have recorded only a single elephant poached in North Luangwa Park since the beginning of the year, and a buffalo and warthog as part of the same incident.” He went on, “Now that we have secured the park, our strategic plan is to keep pushing the poachers back until we have created a broad safety zone or buffer area on all sides of North Luangwa. In this way we not only take care of poachers attacking the park, but also the ones who are punishing the [game-management areas]. Believe me it is already working.”

He complained that he was being “stigmatized” as a preservationist—someone opposed to legal hunting. “We have secured, and are busy securing not only your hunting area, but that of Jones, and others as well,” he wrote, referring to Paul Tudor Jones, the hedge-fund manager. (Jones would not comment for this article, but his spokesman Steven Bruce said, “At the time, Mr. Jones had no knowledge of these activities. He abhors murder and would never condone such actions.”)

At the end of the letter, Owens asked Fouche, who was then in America, for help in equipping his scouts: “Anything you can do to help keep our anti-poaching efforts alive in your area will, I guarantee, pay big dividends for your safari business, and very soon,” he wrote. “On that note, would it be possible for you to bring back as much ammo as you can: 12 gauge 00B, 30.06, 300, 7.62 short (AK), and some cracker shells (for pest control)?”

Over the past several years, the Owenses and their attorney Robert Ivey have threatened legal action against a number of people in the U.S. and in Zambia who raised questions about their behavior in Africa. Mark Owens’s letter to Fouche has been a particular point of contention. Ten years ago, Sharon Healey, a graduate student at the University of Denver’s International Human Rights Advocacy Center, got a copy of the letter. She contacted the Owens Foundation about it, and said that Mary Dykes “justified the contents on the grounds that it was a war zone, that Fouche was being overrun with poachers and was begging Mark for help.” Some years later, Dykes resumed contact, Healey said, and told her that the letter was “dictated by Mark when he was out in the bush to an Owens employee” and that the contents might have been garbled in transmission. In 2005, Robert Ivey wrote Healey and claimed that the letter had in fact been written by an employee named Malcolm, under Mark’s name and in his voice. (This is an apparent reference to Malcolm Boulton, who has denied any knowledge of this letter or involvement in its writing.) Ivey sent a document from the Owens Foundation that argued that the Fouche letter contained “certain words such as ‘messieurs’ . . . that Mark Owens does not use.” Further, it said, “Mark has never used the phrase ‘all grin from ear to ear,’ ” which occurred in the letter.

Donald Zachary, another of the Owenses’ lawyers, recently gave me a slightly different explanation. He wrote, “We believe someone took bits out of a typed letter Mark actually did write but added some aggressive language and faxed it, possibly from the Owenses’ machine in Mpika when no one was in the office.” Zachary suggested that the person who sent the fax was involved in a conspiracy, orchestrated by officials opposed to the ban on ivory trading. Then, last week, Mark Owens wrote to say that he might have written the letter after all. Although he had no specific memory of the fax, he recalled that around the time it was sent he had talked to a group of scouts who had been fired on by poachers, and he surmised from their behavior that they had shot back. Not long after, he said, Fouche was frightened by an attack on his camp. “When drafting the fax to Fouche, if in fact I did so, my experience with the scouts on the Luangwa River must have been fresh in my mind,” Owens wrote. “Knowing Fouche’s very real fear that his concession area was under threat, I likely wanted to reassure him that we had done something significant to defend his camp and personnel.” He went on, “It appears that this fax states something that I did not know for certain—that two poachers had been killed and one wounded when scouts returned their fire while crossing the river. . . . I may have decided that it would be more satisfying to Mr. Fouche if I tried to ‘quantify’ the episode, or perhaps I simply stated my conclusion to a staffer who chose those words. I do not know. In any case, the ambiguous statement that ‘we are just getting started’ did not mean that anyone was just getting started shooting poachers, but only that we had just begun fielding antipoaching patrols in that area.”

There were three sets of gunshots in the killing shown in “Deadly Game.” The first shot, the one that knocked the alleged poacher down, was fired before the camera began rolling, according to Meredith Vieira’s narration. The second shot—the first to be heard in the video—came from a thin black man in a green uniform. The third came from offscreen, fired by an unidentified shooter. On my visits to the North Luangwa region, I had asked about the scout in the video, a man I eventually learned was named London Kawele, but I was told that he had been transferred to another part of Zambia, or that he was dead. The ABC documentary doesn’t indicate who fired the first and last sets of shots. In the absence of a witness’s testimony, there has been a persistent controversy about what actually happened on the video—who the other shooter was and, in some quarters, whether a killing happened at all.

Owens gives his interpretation of the shooting in his letter to the Zambian attorney general: “I have no direct evidence of what I am about to suggest, however, based on what I have been told by others, I believe that the following may describe what actually happened: I believe that one or more game scouts, excited by being filmed for international television, shot a poacher in front of the camera.”

In the intervening years, supporters of the Owenses have put forth various other explanations. Mary Dykes told me that the scene might have been filmed in Zimbabwe; she also suggested that ABC News could have staged the shooting with actors. Gordon Streeb, the former U.S. Ambassador to Zambia, also said that this was possible. “My judgment is that they more likely staged something that was fake for visual effect, and no one was killed,” Streeb said, adding that ABC “could have been in Zimbabwe.” Streeb said he found the film suspicious because “when you hear the gunshot go off, the body twitches, but you don’t see blood spattering. Beyond that gunshot, there’s no evidence.”

Andrew Tkach, the field producer of “Deadly Game,” who spent a month in North Luangwa in the late summer of 1994 and visited again in the summer of 1995, said that the documentary accurately portrayed events in the park. Janice Tomlin, who is now a freelance producer in Texas but was then serving as the senior broadcast producer of “Turning Point,” said, “I can categorically tell you that any project I’ve ever been involved with, any program—‘60 Minutes,’ any program—that there has been no staging of any event.” She was adamant that the killing was videotaped by a cameraman named Chris Everson as he accompanied scouts on patrol in the park. The executive producer of “Turning Point,” Betsy West, who became a top executive at CBS News (and who later resigned, with others, in the wake of the controversy that cost Dan Rather his job), told me that she had “the utmost confidence” in Tkach and Everson. “Andrew is very good, especially in Africa and other far-gone places, he’s very rough and ready, extremely reliable and honest, so I totally believe him,” she said. West, who now teaches at the Columbia School of Journalism, went on, “Chris Everson is one of the great cameramen based in Africa. I can’t imagine that anything they reported would be amiss.”