Basson’s world of cloaks and daggers

Wouter Basson was found guilty of breaching the Health Professions Council of SA's ethics code last week.

Wouter Basson was found guilty of breaching the Health Professions Council of SA's ethics code last week.

Published Dec 23, 2013

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Pathetically little of how our security underworld operates has been revealed, writes Brendan Seery.

Johannesburg - In any other situation, it would have been bad melodrama or farce. But I knew I had to take this man very seriously, even though his obvious false beard, sunglasses and bush hat bordered on comical.

On the phone, when we set up the meeting for lunch time at the Lynnwood Road campus of Pretoria University, I asked how I would recognise him.

“Don’t worry. I know you…”

That was worrying. I’d been threatened before and clearly someone had been doing his homework on me. These people – those involved in apartheid’s covert programmes – had taken out people better protected and a lot more situationally aware than an investigative reporter.

My colleague Peta Thornycroft, part of our small Sunday Tribune team (the others were the late Jean LeMay in Cape Town and Sam Sole, now investigations editor of the Mail & Guardian), had received telephone threats.

And even now we had only had glimpses of a maze of front companies and individuals which were part of the SA Defence Force’s Project Coast, its chemical warfare programme.

It was only a year or two after Nelson Mandela had been released and the old guard were still in charge. Yet, slowly, some of apartheid’s secrets had started leaking out… and we were out there sniffing.

The man handed over a brown A4 envelope.

“Turn around and f*** off back to your car. No questions. Open the envelope once you’re clear of here. Don’t look back either. And forget this meeting ever happened.”

I didn’t look back. But I did look constantly in my mirror and made a number of idiotic changes of direction as I drove away.

Once I was satisfied I was alone, I pulled off under some jacaranda trees in Sunnyside and opened the envelope.

There were three or four pieces of paper inside, all photocopies, most bearing the company insignia of Delta G Scientific, one of the Project Coast front companies. All were marked “Secret” or “Top Secret”. One was an invoice.

It detailed an order of activated charcoal… for a company in Libya.

It was rumoured that Libya had a chemical weapons programme and, it was later alleged, there was a South African connection. After the ANC took power in 1994, Dr Wouter Basson (now labelled “Dr Death”) and others were the subject of some high-level straight talk between Washington and Pretoria. The Americans did not want his expertise put at the disposal of the Libyans and, some say, didn’t want the ANC using him either to re-start the chemical weapons programme.

Activated charcoal, we discovered, is used as a filter ingredient in gas masks.

I never met Wouter Basson, although I was one of the first to come across his name in the Project Coast connection. At that time, he was a brigadier in the SADF and commander of 7 Medical Battalion, the unit formed to provide specialised medical support to the country’s Special Forces. He was also involved in what Project Coast’s official head, former surgeon-general (the head of medical services in the SADF), Lieutenant-General Niel Knobel, told us was an effort to develop a “defensive” chemical weapons capability.

This was because the SADF claimed that chemical weapons were either used, or were available, on the battlefields of Angola in the mid- to late-1980s.

Interestingly, national service troepies involved in fighting against Cubans and the Angolan FAPLA forces were advised at one stage to use their raincoats as protection should chemical weapons be fired at them.

Raincoats would have been next to useless against modern chemical weapons – as used by Cuban forces in Ethiopia in the late 1970s – so the SADF at that stage clearly needed some protection.

At the time, though, South Africa had nuclear weapons and could well have used those in retaliation had chemical weapons been used on its forces in any large-scale way. However, it is also plausible that battlefield tactical chemical weapons might have been developed – or at least the threat of them – as a deterrent.

We found Basson and others in a very mundane way – through the records of company liquidations at the High Court in Pretoria. Even front companies cannot avoid the requirements of the Companies Act and this was our backdoor. With my background as a court reporter, I went ploughing through files and painstakingly wrote down anything and everything, which helped us to identify the links in the web.

That web literally covered the world – made easier to navigate because one of the front companies bought a long-range Cessna executive jet. The Project’s operatives also swanned around Europe with false passports and identities and carrying bearer bonds (certificates which are instantly negotiable anywhere in the world) in denominations of $1 million. We heard they bought expensive properties both in South Africa and abroad, ostensibly as safe houses. Ironically, one of them, in Pretoria, ended up being bought by the Zimbabwe High Commission.

My recollection, at the end of it all, was that Project Coast was a golden opportunity for a select few to get their hands on millions of rands of covert funds.

Elements of it were certainly dreadful. Such as the story about the company based outside Hartbeespoort which made up a small batch of sarin nerve agent (as used in terror attacks on the Tokyo underground in the mid-1990s and which killed a number of people). This was then, so we were told, transported across Pretoria to another facility in Centurion – in an ordinary vehicle and in rush-hour traffic.

As we probed, the tales got more bizarre – and none more so than with Roodeplaat Research Laboratories (RRL), which was ostensibly an animal research facility. The research they did was with animals (mainly primates like baboons and monkeys) into the effects of poisons which were to be used in assassinations.

We got a lot of our information and tips about what was taking place at RRL from animal rights activist Beatrice Wiltshire who, at great personal risk, somehow managed to get information. We wrote about the agonising deaths of baboons who were poisoned with both slow and fast-acting compounds. I remember one account of a baboon which took six days to die, in agony every second.

The experiments were done to determine the lag time between the ingestion of the poison and the first sign of effects.

Sam Sole tracked down two of the veterinarians involved and, perhaps in the spirit of the times, or worried they would be called to account, they agreed to talk.

They spoke frankly about their use of organo-chlorines as poisons and how some of these were actually used operationally.

Thus it was, some weeks later, on a warm Pretoria afternoon, that Sam and I and the two vets sat in a wood-panelled office in the Union Buildings in Pretoria.

When Reverend Frank Chikane (then an advisor to president Thabo Mbeki) walked in, Sam did the introductions: Sir, meet the people who tried to kill you.

In 1989, Chikane had been on his way to a conference in New York and flew via Windhoek, as Namibia was moving towards independence under UN supervision. While he was going through customs, his luggage was intercepted and the organo-chlorine was used to impregnate his underpants.

A few days later, he fell gravely ill in New York and almost died. No doubt the RRL experiments had allowed the poisoners to put enough time between them and Chikane falling ill that any number of things may have been blamed for his condition.

The story was amazing enough – but the way Chikane smiled and forgave was stunning.

“All I want to know is the truth,” he said as we sipped tea out of cups no doubt used in the past by the people who gave the go-ahead to Project Coast and others like it.

Interestingly, the work at RRL appeared to have no link to Basson, although it was part of Project Coast.

But, as I looked at Basson’s trial before the Health Professions Council of SA (which last week found him guilty of improper conduct), I wondered how much of the truth we did uncover.

Certainly, Sam, Jean, Peta and I turned over many rocks and we were fortunate to have editors, like Jonathan Hobday on The Sunday Tribune and Weekend Argus, who allowed us carte blanche to dig… and then risked his own career by running pieces about the business of the apartheid weapons industry. These pieces were not only unpopular with the government but also with its close buddies in Big Business (the Rand Club mafia, as Peta labelled them) who aided and abetted the Nat government.

Yet, even though others followed after we broke the story and added further to the evidence around Project Coast, much of it is still shrouded in mystery.

Some of what has emerged is ridiculous – like the claim that Basson was involved in “weaponising” mortars by filling them with teargas. Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of things military will tell you that mortars are standard lethal weapons and fitting them with teargas warheads actually makes them non-lethal.

Yet, the stories of poisons for assassinations are chilling and I wonder how many people who died, even of seemingly natural causes, may have been the victims of Project Coast – and its counterpart in the police, run by the late general Lothar Neethling (lest we forget him in our haste to pillory Basson alone…).

I haven’t forgotten that strange meeting in Pretoria.

I never will. I still wonder about the motives of the man: conscience, settling a score, spreading the blame?

There were enough of those leaks – and enough personal and political vendettas within the ruling Nat clique – that we were afforded some glimpses.

And, no doubt, those doing the leaking had their own agenda… where are they now and what are they doing, I occasionally wonder…

But, in the end, I think we were allowed to reveal only so much. Perhaps to protect the even bigger secrets (as, sadly, happened with the big exposures of the Civil Co-operation Bureau – CCB – which generated lots of coverage but revealed pathetically little about how the underworld security apparatus operated)?

I remember an ex-Rhodesian, connected with the murky world of intelligence, sitting in a dingy bar in Durban, showing me his small-calibre Beretta pistol, which he removed from a pigskin clutch bag.

“See this? Exploding head rounds. If we want to take you out, we will.”

The Star

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