The horrifying tale of Dr Wouter Basson's campaign trail of death has been unfolding in the Pretoria High Court since 4 October 1999 when his trial began. He faces 46 charges ranging from murder to fraud and drug dealing arising from his role as head of the chemical and biological warfare programme of the apartheid South African government. One of his former colleagues has said Basson "killed the blacks big time", but the army doctor has denied everything in court without calling as much as a single witness in his defence. In contrast, the prosecution called nearly 200 witnesses over two years. Basson finished his sole-witness testimony on 26 September, spending two months in the dock. We have an 18-page "special report" here on the trial. Please have a seat as this could knock you off your feet. It's truly mind boggling. Overview by Osei Boateng.

His real name is Dr Wouter Basson, but South Africans call him "Dr Death". He is 50, and a decorated army brigadier. In civilian life, he is an eminent cardiologist. To some supporters of the old apartheid order, he is even a hero. As the head of the apartheid regime's clandestine chemical and biological warfare programme codenamed "Project Coast", he is alleged to have "killed the blacks big time". Dr Daan Goosen, the first managing director of Roodeplaat Research Laboratories, the South African Defence Force (SADF's) front company in the north of Pretoria where Project Coast was based, is on record to have said: "There are many people who think Basson was a war hero - because he killed the blacks big time".

After Basson appeared before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) headed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu in 1998, the cuddly archbishop described Project Coast as "the most diabolical aspect of apartheid".

Over a period of 10 years (from 1983), Basson is alleged to have applied his medical/military training and skill to eliminate opponents of the apartheid regime in a most diabolical fashion. Some of the revelations in court appear to confirm fears by certain Aids-watchers who have, in the past, pressed for a second look by governments in Southern Africa (or the former "Frontline States") into the current high incidence of HIV and Aids infection in the region as reported by UNAIDS and WHO.

The Aids-watchers have urged the Southern African governments to "look beyond sex" as "there could be something more to the extremely high rates of HIV infection and death in the region". They have cited such clandestine chemical and biological warfare (CBW) programmes as the one headed by Dr Basson and the other operated by the Rhodesian regime during the liberation war in Zimbabwe. "Did the two white-supremacist regimes use the region as one big laboratory to test the CBW weapons they developed, or were developing?" the Aids-watchers have asked.

There is enough circumstantial evidence showing this could have been done, but of course nobody would own up to it. The lack of hard evidence has left many vital and searching questions as the white South African writer, Ben Geer, poses in his 1997 book, Something More Sinister, (see Ben Geer's Epilogue on p30), begging for answers.

Dr Mike Odendaal, a microbiologist on Project Coast, who "did ghastly things at Roodeplaat, including putting anthrax spores in cigarettes, chocolates and lipstick", was reported on 15 January this year by the American magazine, The New Yorker, as saying:

"Angola would have been the ideal situation in which to test these [CBW] weapons. But Basson wanted to use them against our domestic opponents as well - to impress the generals. But one of the major tenets of chemical warfare is that you don't use these things on your own soil." William Finnegan, who wrote The New Yorker's 15 January piece, said: "I asked [Dr Odendaal] about the charge, often heard that the drinking water in the Eastern Cape district, a centre of political resistance, had been deliberately infected with cholera in the late 1980s. "Odendaal nodded. 'If that happened, the cholera in the Eastern Cape probably came from my lab, and it probably did kill old people and kids,' he said. "I only read about it in the papers and then was confronted about it at the TRC [Truth and Reconciliation Commission]. No details have come out but it was probably put in the water. That, again, is something you produce to use in enemy territory, not on your own people.

'And it doesn't make any sense, if you want to make a dent in the black population, to poison a couple of hundred people, putting a strain on your own health services. You need to kill 10 million to make a difference'," Odendaal added.

Basson at the TRC

In 1998, South Africa's TRC held a special round of hearings on Project Coast and offered Wouter Basson amnesty in exchange for the whole truth. Basson duly appeared before the TRC on 10 June 1998 but rejected the amnesty with contempt. He was being investigated at the time, after his arrest in a sting operation in January 1997 for allegedly selling illegal drugs to a police undercover agent.

That investigation snowballed into the opening of a very special can of worms. And so, since 4 October 1999, Basson has sat in the Pretoria High Court and listened as his former comrades from Project Coast have told about the harrowing tale of death, assassinations, poisonings, attempted murder and fraud. After the TRC hearings, Archbishop Tutu wrote that he found the stories "devastating" and "shattering".

The New Yorker's excellent piece published on 15 January on Basson's trial covered 18-pages. It is a veritable collector's item. In it, William Finnegan, reported the evidence led in court thus far: "There [have been] revelations of research into a race-specific bacterial weapon; a project to find ways to sterilise South Africa's black population; a discussion of deliberate spreading of cholera through the water supply; large-scale production of dangerous drugs; the fatal poisoning of anti-apartheid leaders, captured guerrillas, and suspected security risks; even a plot to slip thallium - a toxic heavy metal that can permanently impair brain function - into Nelson Mandela's medication before his release from prison in 1990."

Wouter Basson has denied everything in court. He was initially charged with 67 counts of murder, attempted murder, conspiracy to murder, fraud and drug offences. At the beginning of the trial, his defence lawyer, Jaap Cilliers, argued that six of the charges - covering conspiracy to murder - be dismissed. The six charges involved 200 "surplus" SWAPO prisoners killed with muscle relaxants.

Cilliers argued that the alleged crimes had occurred in Namibia ("the operational area"), and therefore could not be prosecuted in South Africa. Moreover, they were covered by the indemnity granted by the South African administrator of Namibia at the time of the country's independence in March 1990. The presiding judge, Willie Hartzenberg, ("red-robed and white-haired, he runs his court with gruff good humour, adjourning, as he always has, at noon on Thursdays in favour of his golf game", according to The New Yorker), had a good think about Cilliers argument, even delaying the trial as he considered the motion. A week later, he dismissed all six charges to public outcry in South Africa.


The witnesses

In court, the prosecution - headed by state attorneys Torie Pretorius and Anton Ackermann - has led evidence, from nearly 200 witnesses, showing how Project Coast was financed, the research it conducted and the "abuse" that spun from it.

It has been a torrid trial for all concerned - the judge, the prosecution, the defence and the witnesses. As The New Yorker reported: "Many of the trial's witnesses are caught between their roles in the old regime, where they often worked closely with Basson, and their new situations - though some have not changed jobs...

"In a twist that typifies the incestuous opacity of the trial," The New Yorker said, "Dr Niel Knobel (the former surgeon-general) who was Basson's nominal supervisor at Project Coast, took the stand as a witness against his former comrade (and one time anatomy student) only weeks after undergoing triple-bypass heart surgery partially under Basson's care... Knobel continues to describe Basson as "cool, calm, and collected, and a gentleman'... "A police officer who participated in the drug sting against Basson," the magazine said, "was testifying for the prosecution when he suddenly announced that he was in fact sympathetic to [Basson], for they had served together in the army in Namibia."

Basson was sacked on Christmas eve 1992 by President F.W. de Klerk but was rehired by Nelson Mandela in 1995 and given the job of chief cardiologist and head of the heart-transplant programme at the main military hospital in Pretoria - a post he held until recently when he was suspended (on full pay) by the Mbeki government until the outcome of the trial.

Before his suspension, Basson was free to practice medicine even as the horrifying revelations were falling from the mouths of his former comrades in court. Even after the suspension, he is still free to practise, and continues to practise, privately.

The witnesses have told the court that strains of deadly bacteria like anthrax, cholera and botulinum were cultivated by Project Coast to be used as weapons against opponents of apartheid. Other weapons included cigarettes laced with anthrax and screwdrivers hiding hypodermic syringes filled with poisons.

As Basson was the sole witness for his defence, the court will have to judge his testimony against the weight of the evidence of the nearly 200 prosecution witnesses. In a case of this magnitude, many will be amazed to hear that there is no jury. Judge Hartzenberg, thus, has the sole responsibility of weighing the evidence of 200 witnesses against the testimony of one man.

When Basson finished his testimony on 26 September, the court adjourned till 8 October, and again to 5 November, for the prosecution and the defence to give the judge an indication of how they intended to proceed with final arguments. It is possible that the final arguments might not even be concluded this year.

Which will mean more expense. The South African government is paying for the costs of both the prosecution and defence. At one point, in August last year, the prosecution ran out of money, and one of the state prosecutors, Anton Ackerman, had to pay from his own pocket for a Belgium businessman to fly to Pretoria to testify for the prosecution. The government eventually found money to repay Ackerman and for the trial to resume.


Basson the man

Basson was drafted into the army as a medical student. A paratrooper, he was promoted Major at 30, and his career was on the up. He was later awarded the Order of the Southern Cross, and became a famous cardiologist who accompanied President P.W. Botha on his tours "to the operational area" (Basson's own admission in court).

"The operational area" is the apartheid regime's euphemism for South Africa's military escapades outside its borders, notably in Namibia, Mozambique and Angola where the Africans were killed without compunction. As The New Yorker reported: "Basson's extreme freedom to spend and improvise derived from the support he enjoyed at the highest levels of the South African government", including President Botha.


Project Coast

At Project Coast, Basson "relied on a global network of spies, ex-soldiers, sanctions-busters, smugglers, and biological-warriors to obtain the chemicals, toxins, viral cultures, specialised equipment, and expertise necessary to develop his programme - and then, according to witnesses, on a string of assassins to deliver the goods".

Basson himself has admitted in court that his foreign contacts did not know about his SADF connections. "At times, he was a medical researcher - that worked well enough, in 1984, to persuade the Centres for Disease Control, in Atlanta [USA], to send eight shipments of Ebola, Marburg and Rift Valley viruses to South Africa (and, thus, to Roodeplaat)", according to Tom Mangold in his book, Plague Wars.

Basson himself is quoted by The New Yorker as having modelled Operation Coast on the American chemical weapons programme, which he first managed to penetrate in the early 1980s.

"He also had great success, by his own (and his military superiors') account, penetrating the [chemical and biological warfare] programmes of Britain and the former Soviet Union". "He attended international conferences of forensic toxicologists in Western Europe and aerospace medical officers in the US; befriended key scientists, military men and programme administrators, particularly those who seemed interested in his battlefield tales of fighting communism on the frontline in Southern Africa". "[He] claims to have gained entrance to world-renowned facilities such as Fort Detrick in Maryland {USA], or Porton Down [UK]; and energetically expanded his work as he went along."

Basson is alleged to have played East against West during the Cold War, "offering intelligence, however dubious, about the Soviet bloc's bio-warfare capacities to Western agents in return for information or equipment he wanted, some of which he could then turn around and trade to a growing list of contacts in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland and the Soviet Union."

"He also travelled frequently to Libya, North Korea, Syria, Iraq and Iran - countries known to be trying to develop their own nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. According to the evidence in court, Basson also used former East Germany, Pakistan, Croatia, Taiwan, China and Israel to great effect for Project Coast".

"Basson [also] found that some NATO officials and former officials were as well willing to sell their countries' military secrets as their communists counterparts were," says The New Yorker. "Some ex-intelligence agents also proved happy to come out of retirement to help defend, for a fee, the last beachhead of white supremacism in Africa."



Thallium for Mandela

Interestingly, the evidence in court shows Basson to have done very little of the actual scientific work at Project Coast. As the head, his job had been to issue orders and liase between the funders, overseers in the military leadership, and the Special Forces/police operatives who used the products of Project Coast.

"Most of his time was spent elsewhere - cultivating an international network of allies and supplies." Basson himself has confirmed his large network in court, after some of them were persuaded by the prosecution to testify against him. It has been said that South Africa's CBW programme was "second in sophistication only to that of the Soviet Union".

Basson's scientists were well paid and well looked after. Some of them came forward to testify against him, thanks to the amnesty granted by the TRC. One of them, Dr Dan Goosen, the first managing director of Roodeplaat, has said Basson ordered him "to research the possibility of developing a race-specific bacterial weapon after the South African embassy in London received a letter offering the formula for such a thing.

"The letter, it was decided might be a trap, but Goosen completed his assignment - and concluded that it was theoretically possible to build a germ weapon that would target only blacks. He does not know what became of his report."

Another Basson ex-associate, Dr Schalk van Rensburg, who worked as director of laboratory services at Roodeplaat, has said he heard references around Roodeplaat to a plan to poison Nelson Mandela with thallium in his cell, before his release.

After Mandela's release, Rensburg said he was told by Dr Andre Immelman, Project Coast's chief toxicologist, who also testified in court against Basson, that "the thallium would soon begin to show signs of working and that Mandela would be "impaired progressively'.

"Immelman now says he was just testing van Rensburg's discretion, seeing if his remarks surfaced anywhere. In any event, according to Rensburg, prison doctors balked at poisoning Mandela". There had also been plans, at Roodeplaat, to distribute T-shirts poisoned with euphoria-producing drugs in black townships. Dr Van Rensburg remembers "merriment among the operational types at Roodeplaat when a poisoned T-shirt meant for a black soldier they disliked, was borrowed by a friend of the target, and the friend died instantly.

Van Rensburg also told the court that he "heard Basson repeatedly boast that he was now in a position "to rewrite the world's toxicology textbooks', suggesting that he had been observing the effects on human beings of controlled doses of deadly poisons, effects that were not always as predicted." Project Coast also manufactured poisoned beer, chocolate, and envelope flaps.

Another former associate of Basson, Johan Theron, an ex-intelligence officer, told the court how he and others, with Basson's assistance, killed "hundreds" of black people and dumped their bodies in the sea off Namibia using a small aircraft.

Theron said the South African army had captured too many SWAPO prisoners of war than they had room to cater for. A decision was therefore taken by the military leadership to reduce the overcrowding by killing some of the SWAPO soldiers. At first, Theron said, they tried to strangle the prisoners. When that proved too difficult and traumatic even for the killers, the military settled for lethal injections. That was where Brigadier Wouter Basson came in.

Theron said Basson supplied him with vast quantities of Scoline, Tubarine, and syringes. He told the court that between 1979 and 1987, he murdered "hundreds" of SWAPO prisoners by these means. The bodies of his victims were then loaded into a small plane, three at a time, at a remote airstrip on the Skeleton Coast of Namibia and dumped into the Atlantic ocean, from an altitude of 12,000 feet. Theron said it was on only one occasion that Basson actually came to supervise the execution of a group of prisoners.

But several members of one of South Africa's notorious police units, the East Rand Murder and Robbery Squad, who had gone on courses offered by the equally notorious killer unit, the Civil Cooperation Bureau, testified in court that "it was common knowledge that, if poisons were needed for a job, "Doc Wouter' was the man to see".

Basson denies all this.


Nervous foreign governments

For months, many foreign governments nervously followed Basson's trial from afar as it threatened to expose the network and the maze of deeply embarrassing and shady deals between South Africa's CBW programme and the intelligence services of a host of nations, including America, Britain, Germany, Switzerland, East Germany, Croatia, Libya, China, Israel, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Taiwan and others.

In January this year, Mike Kennedy, the then deputy director of South Africa's National Intelligence Agency (NIA), who testified against Basson and yet was in charge of protecting him during the trial, told The New Yorker that "his biggest concern was a kidnapping or assassination attempt by one of the foreign intelligence agencies that wanted to see Basson silenced".

It is reported that President Mandela rehired Basson in 1995 because "British and American intelligence agents talked (and frightened) him into it."

"M16 and the CIA had been watching Basson closely since his dismissal, and had become alarmed by his frequent trips to Libya," The New Yorker reported on 15 January. "Everyone knew that for years Col Gaddafi had been trying to develop a biological warfare capacity. Basson, now working as a "consultant', could obviously be of great and dangerous service to Gaddafi."

The magazine said: "The Americans and the British gave [President F.W] de Klerk a joint demarche, demanding that he tell them everything about Project Coast; end the programme and destroy its records; inform Nelson Mandela, who would soon become president; and make a public declaration about the matter.

"De Klerk resisted at first, but eventually complied with most of these demands. The demarche led also to South Africa's nuclear disarmament. Unwilling to hand over the country's nuclear arsenal to Mandela, De Klerk allowed the US to come in and remove it.

"Basson, made available by Mandela, was interrogated by American and British experts, who were apparently impressed with his knowledge of chemical and biological warfare, especially his familiarity with international procurement channels.

"When he was later observed taking yet another trip to Libya, officials in London and Washington decided that he simply could not be allowed to sell his services on the open market.

"British and American representatives met with President Mandela, told him in forceful terms about the dangers as they saw them, and recommended returning Basson to government service, where his movements could be monitored.

"Mandela bought the argument, rehiring Basson "in the national interest'." Thus, when Basson was not required in court as his trial went on, and despite the frightening revelations by the nearly 200 witnesses, he still practised as a medical doctor until his suspension by the Mbeki government.


Basson's staff

Roodeplaat Research Laboratories (RRL) employed a staff of 70. The high security facility built into a hillside in the north of Pretoria had departments covering toxicology, microbiology, biochemistry, molecular biology and an animal unit.

According to the evidence before the TRC, RRL's scientists worked on "anthrax, cholera, salmonella, botulinum, thallium, E.coli, racin, organophosphates, necrotising fasciitis, hepatitis A and HIV, as well as nerve gases (Sarin VX) and the Ebola, Marburg and Rift Valley haemorrhage-fever viruses".

Dr van Rensburg, the RRl's former director of laboratory services, told the TRC that: "Within two weeks of joining them, I realised this is not defensive work, this is offensive work. The most frequent instruction we obtained from Dr Basson...was to develop something with which you could kill an individual which would make his death resemble a natural death, and that something was not to be detectable in a normal forensic laboratory." Rensburg said he thought about leaving RRL, but was told that: "If you let the side down, you're dead."

Basson, again, denies this. He insisted in court that the work done at the RRL was for defensive not offensive purposes. But as The New Yorker reported: "Project Coast operated on a strict need-to-know basis, with only one man, Basson, in a position to know much at all. Instructions were often oral, and sometimes deliberately obscure. Paperwork on hard projects were destroyed when the possibility of investigation loomed. The scientists, working on their assignments, had, in many cases, never heard of "Project Coast', and among Basson's superiors only the state president and a handful of generals knew even vaguely what he was doing."

In fact Project Coast's chemical weapons were not produced at the Roodeplaat, but at Delta G Scientific (another of the SADF front companies) in the south of Pretoria, "where a potent new form of tear gas (CR) was developed, and large quantities of illegal drugs, including Ecstasy and Mandrax - an addictive sedative, were produced." They also produced "crude toxins (and some strange delivery systems) at Roodeplaat for use by the military and police, and they were genetically engineering extremely dangerous new organisms - creating that is, biological weapons".

A list introduced as evidence before the TRC hearings had: 21 bottles of cholera; 14 doses of chocolate spiked with thallium and botulinum; cigarettes spiked with anthrax; beer bottles spiked with thallium and botulinum; salmonella hidden in bleach, whisky and sugar; deodorant infected with paratyphoid; anthrax spores sprinkled on the gum of envelope flaps, etc.

Dr van Rensburg has said "scientists at Roodeplaat heard complaints about killings that went wrong such as a series of bungled attempts to poison the Rev. Frank Chikane, the anti-apartheid leader, by saturating his underclothes with organophosphates, the deadly ingredients in pesticides. "Chikane was hospitalised four times," reported The New York, "and he survived the most harrowing episode only because he happened to be visiting the USA when he was stricken - his poisoners, who had tampered with his luggage, thought he was leaving for Namibia - and American doctors correctly diagnosed his symptoms."

Basson has, again, denied Chikane's attempted murder. But even his own lawyer, Cilliers, cross-examining one witness, Dr Knobel, the former surgeon-general, could not help saying Project Coast had researched into brain function, including the use of a machine called a "peptide synthesiser". This research, according to Cilliers, "terrified the world" because it was possible, through the manipulation of peptides, to alter brain function, perhaps permanently, either rendering previously normal people passive or turning them into "uncontrollable monsters".

Archbishop Tutu said after the TRC hearings: "There is something particularly horrifying about crimes that have been well thought out by white-coated men in clinically spick-and-span laboratories, subverting science for such nefarious ends." But Basson and his scientists are not the first to dapple in such "horrifying" things.


What the others did

"Laboratory germ warfare," according to The New Yorker, "got its start during the Second World War, when projects were launched in Germany, Britain, Canada, the US and Japan. "The Japanese worked to weaponise anthrax, cholera, plague, and typhoid, among other diseases, and did extensive experiments on human beings, in some cases tying people to stakes and measuring the effects of different types of bombs and poisons, and on several occasions aerial-bombing cities and towns in China with plague-infested fleas and then monitoring the outbreaks of bubonic plague that followed.

"The US developed a large scale secret biological warfare programme, which eventually made eager use of the captured Japanese research on human subjects. By 1969, the [US] Army had weaponised anthrax, tularemia, and botulinum, which is the most deadly bio-toxin known, and had stockpiled more than two million biological bombs, bomblets, spray tanks and other munitions. "Then, without warning, President Richard Nixon terminated the project, ordering its arsenals destroyed. In 1972, 79 nations, including the US, Soviet Union, Britain, and South Africa, signed a treaty outlawing biological weapons."

Yet all the countries that signed the agreement continued to produce offensive biological weapons clandestinely. Naturally, the apartheid regime in South Africa did not want to be left behind. So Project Coast was born.

According to The New Yorker, "Project Coast's most noteworthy contribution to this dismal field - apart from its achievements on the chemical side, which included a high-tech gas mask that was in great demand among the Allied forces during the Gulf War - was a genetically engineered E.coli bacterium that produces botulinum toxin. "Since the Roodeplaat labs produced, according to the microbiologist Mike Odendaal, between three and five grams of purified botulinum, and since five grams is enough to kill, at least in theory, a million people, this was not a happy achievement. [But] there is no evidence that botulinum was ever weaponised at Roodeplaat."


Basson 'the great'

"Basson's true strength when it comes to his legal defence," according to The New Yorker, "is his readiness to drop hints that he knows much more than he is saying - and the implied threat is to embarrass or destroy powerful people if things should start going against him in a meaningful way. "In the first weeks of his trial, Cillers served notice in this area by repeatedly mentioning Basson's purported links to the ANC, particularly to Nelson Mandela. He even asserted, without challenge, that Basson collected funds in Libya to help pay for Winnie Mandela's defence during her 1991 trial for her role in the death of a young activist, and that Basson had personally delivered the money to the Mandelas home in Johannesburg."

"Basson had already put the fear into American intelligence during the TRC appearance, where he handed over 14 pages of notes from a visit to the US in 1981. American Air Force officers had been eager to develop joint "medical projects' with South Africa, he wrote... "Other countries have also shown signs of panic. The Swiss government launched a formal investigation of General Peter Regli, the former head of Swiss intelligence, who allegedly dealt with (and was double-dealt by) Basson in a quest to obtain South African nuclear secrets."

Some multinational chemical and pharmaceutical companies have also spent sleepless nights, wondering what lay in store for them. For they were all involved in Basson's world. "Household names" according to Project Coast scientists - that apparently had agreements with the South African army under which expired drug stocks were not destroyed but were given to the army for distribution to the rebel forces sponsored by Pretoria in Angola [Unita] and Mozambique [Renamo]."

These fears had earlier, during Basson's bail hearing, led the state to "argue that parts of the bail hearing should remain secret because allowing them to become public would violate South Africa's treaty commitments to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction". Doing so would also "jeopardise relations between South Africa and other countries", the South African ministry of foreign affairs added for good measure.

Basson, apparently, is a man you toy with at your peril. "He has the goods on almost everybody," says The New Yorker. ).

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