INLSA

BACK IN COURT: Dr Wouter Basson, former head of the apartheid governments chemical and biological warfare programme, is facing charges of unethical or unprofessional conduct. Picture: Thobile Mathonsi

Wouter Basson couldn’t stop coughing in the witness stand. He was ill and struggling to keep talking, but determined to testify at his bail application. Some would have said it was poetic justice that a man so familiar with testing toxic and deadly substances on other people had an undiagnosed illness that had depleted his immunity.

The chemical warfare expert, who had already been behind bars for a week, knew all about botulism-infused beer cans, poisoned screwdrivers, salmonella sugar, anthrax-tipped cigarettes and chocolate that could kill you. Most of those noxious concoctions had been mixed to the tune of millions of rand at the shady Roodeplaat Research Laboratories, a place outside Pretoria which he knew only too well.

They were usually kept in a fridge at the South African Defence Force (SADF) front company until it was time to use them against enemies like Reverend Frank Chikane, whose poisoned clothes nearly killed him, and activist Siphiwe Mthimkulu, who was first poisoned with thalium, before disappearing and then being murdered.

When Basson stood in the dock at the Pretoria Regional Court in October 1997, coming down off a two-year post-apartheid power trip, he was facing charges not of producing and being in possession of killer confections, but of significant amounts of the recreational drug ecstasy, more intimately known to scientists like him as methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or the euphoric MDMA. But the proper reason for Basson’s appearance in court on that occasion was that he had been arrested on fraud charges involving R30 million.

There had been questions about a payment for an overseas transaction and the connection of 37 companies – in which Basson was suspected to have had a personal interest – to apartheid’s ultra-sophisticated top-secret germ warfare campaign, Project Coast, which he had headed.

No doubt there would have been a certain resentment on his part – just as there must have been this week, with Basson effectively back in the dock for the umpteenth time. All the intrigue and adrenalin of that first court appearance came roaring back, but, 15 years later, it’s still the case of the evil scientist who cannot be brought down by the system.

You’ll wait more than a month to get an appointment to see Basson at his offices at the Mediclinic Hospital in Durbanville, Cape Town. His is a thriving surgery, his patients apparently untroubled by his reputation. Yet there is no argument that this innocuous practice in a well-off northern suburb is nowhere near the size of the enterprise Basson was running during apartheid.

This time, he is in a disciplinary hearing of the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA) as it tries for the second time in five years to have him struck from the roll of medical practitioners. But there’s no certainty that its new probe into whether he acted unethically and unprofessionally when he ran Project Coast will have a happy, or appropriate, ending either.

Project Coast was a programme aimed at developing a chemical defensive capability for South Africa in the early 1980s after it became known that surrogate forces in Angola had such capability.

Basson’s favourite counsel, Jaap Cilliers, has hectored expert witness Professor Steven Miles of the University of Minnesota, and so it’s been more of a droning epic than an adventure, with the two men chasing frustrating principles of logic. However, it would at least be fair to say that Miles, who has examined military medicine in the US’s war on terror prisons and is a world expert on medical ethics, has performed a whole lot better than the HPCSA’s last expert witness in 2007.

Professor Solomon Benetar of UCT so embarrassed the prosecution during the last run that he almost brought down the entire case. Advocate Marius Helberg said Benetar had “made concessions regarding ethical issues (which) we are of the viewpoint he should not have made”. In plain English, Benetar crumbled under cross-examination, eventually admitting to Cilliers that Basson had not done anything unethical. Not surprisingly, Cilliers was amazed.

The last time Basson faced a verdict in a courtroom was nearly 10 years ago when the Pretoria High Court cleared his name of the 46 charges he faced at that time. Although the charges ranged from drug dealing to murder, the court ruling stated quite clearly that Basson held the rank of brigadier when he was head of Project Coast. Yet Cilliers downplayed that in the first HPCSA hearing, saying Basson was a junior officer following orders.

That’s been Basson’s public take on his death laboratories ever since the state first tried to nail him. It’s apparently allowed him to be blithe about many things, including giving cyanide capsules to SADF operators to commit suicide if they were caught behind enemy lines. He also confirmed providing drugs to subdue victims of international abductions.

In May 2000, Johan Theron, a former information officer of apartheid’s Special Forces, confessed to a packed courtroom that he was involved in the deaths of more than 200 anti-apartheid political prisoners between 1979 and 1987. He said he was simply following orders from Basson, who was his superior.

Theron reflected on a peculiarly grotesque story of three prisoners tied to a tree overnight, their bodies smeared with jelly-like lethal toxins to test whether the agent was capable of causing death. But the men did not die “as easily as expected”. Theron would further claim Basson had supplied him with a lethal drug which he had used on the majority of his victims.

Unforgettable news reports at that time regaled with tales of how Basson was allegedly involved in about 24 “death flights” between 1979 and 1987. These involved prisoners – mostly Swapo guerrillas – being loaded on to a plane, given paralysing drugs and then being tossed out of the aircraft thousands of feet above the Atlantic.

It was in October 1999 that Basson was finally put on trial at the Pretoria High Court for the attempted murder of three men thrown from such a plane. That was when he also faced the murder, fraud, embezzlement, drug possession and trafficking charges, but all for nothing.

Nearly 15 years ago, when Basson was coughing his way through that first bail application, he was an embarrassment to a system which had long had its last encore. He had been axed by former President FW de Klerk at Christmas in 1992, although it was called “early retirement”, for his alleged involvement in so-called Third Force activities. But then, causing amazement to activists and democrats everywhere, his fortunes had changed.

An ANC government under Nelson Mandela had rehired him in 1995, just a year after the first democratic vote.

The reason, it was believed, was that Basson knew too much, and the only way to make sure that his extensive knowledge did not fall into the wrong hands was to keep him on its payroll. The wrong hands were, of course, all over the show.

Standing in the dock a mere two years after that must have irked the germ warfare boss who had a penchant for bringing a handbag to court. The defence force, the very institution which had feted him for so long, was now desperately trying to distance itself from him.

At the time, Basson – who would earn the moniker Dr Death and become known as one of the world’s most notorious torture scientists – had already been barred from 1 Military Hospital in Pretoria where he had been chief cardiologist and head of the organ transplant programme.

This didn’t mean he wasn’t still within the state’s ambit, continuing to work for it as a cardiologist at Pretoria Academic Hospital.

The thing was that there were plenty of other high-level people who would have done anything to keep him at bay. Among those who didn’t want the details of Project Coast to go public was the then minister of defence Joe Modise, for whom the thought of piles of deadly chemicals listed by the International Chemical Weapons Convention, acquired with the help of some high-level global players, must have been a special nightmare.

Things started to heat up when Switzerland’s Sonntagszeitung newspaper alleged that a Swiss Army secret service agent was suspected of helping the apartheid government via Basson to produce weapons of mass destruction. It further claimed the agent had been given legal power over Swiss bank accounts in the name of Project Coast.

Facing off against the government in the matter in 1997 was the media, in particular the Sunday Times and Business Day, which wanted access to classified military documents found at Basson’s home. The old Protection of Information Bill came in very handy for a recalcitrant defence minister, who also had the Internal Security Act and the non-proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction Act at his disposal.

Even though a new, optimistic post-1994 cabinet had approved a decision to lift the secrecy surrounding Project Coast, Transvaal attorney-general Jan d’Oliveira, then minister of foreign affairs Alfred Nzo and the South African Council for Non-Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction would do anything in their power to stop newspapers from getting their eyes on those papers. And, to this day, it is not known whether large sums of money allocated to Project Coast did not perhaps land in the pockets of some of its champions. That may have something to do with why the chemical and biological warfare programme was regarded as the “skunk” of the SADF.

Still, there were affidavits from some of the key players which offered a tantalising, if terrifying, glimpse into what apartheid’s tsars had authorised, apparently to stop its enemies from winning the battle for freedom. Former US ambassador Princeton Lyman was reported to have said in 2007 that the US and Britain had urged the party to re-employ Basson because they were specifically concerned that he was sharing information about chemical and biological weapons with Libya in the early 1990s.

It was believed that Basson was once so powerful that not even the SADF’s surgeon-general, Lieutenant-General Niel Knobel, knew who the doctor had used as middlemen or agents to gather technology, equipment and raw materials. Right now, much of that information is still kept locked in Dr Death’s head.

And if the HPCSA’s case ends in yet another acquittal, it seems impossible that he can again face charges. The secrets seem to run so deep.