Trial Report: Twenty-Eight

This report covers the period Monday 4 September - Friday 8 September 2000

Note of correction: please note that in the 29th weekly report Hennie Bruwer was erroneously mentioned as having taken over the questioning of witnesses when prosecutor, Anton Ackerman temporarily withdrew from the case, in fact junior prosecutor, Werner Bouwer, played this role.

Monday, 4 September

The first witness of the day was former Office for Serious Economic Offences investigator Etienne Lambrechts who testified about the existence of Chemical Agent Monitors allegedly purchased by Basson with the assistance of Belgian academic Aubin Heyndrickx and Roger Buffham (Charges 2,3 and 4 refer). Lambrechts said that he had been unable to find evidence of any more than 13 CAMs ever being in South Africa. During cross examinations Adv. Cilliers focussed on an apparent discrepancy in invoice numbers for the CAMs and suggested that there were two channels for the import of the monitors. Cilliers also said that Heyndrickx would go to any lengths to hide his links to Project Coast, including perjury because he could not afford to let this become public knowledge.

The next witness was Dr Brian Davey, now head of health and safety at the Organisation for Protection against Chemical Warfare (OPCW) in The Hague. Davey qualified as a medical doctor at Wits University in 1981, performed National Service in 1982 and joined the Permanent Force in 1983. During 1984 and 1985 he was the base doctor at 5 Reconnaissance Unit's headquarters in Phalaborwa, transferring in 1986 to the forerunner of 7 Medical Battalion, Special Forces Special Operations. His post was that of consultant to the surgeon-general on chemical weapons, and was not filled when he left the SADF in 1988.

Davey told the court that from 1986 he was responsible to devising a chemical defense course for the defence force, which up to then had been non-existent. Defensive training was broken down into three levels: basic survival, which all troops in the field would be required to undergo, instructor training and chemical-biological cell training, designed to make a staff adviser available to commanders in the field on the question of how to manage troops in an area contaminated by chemical attack. The earliest courses were confined to basic training and were strictly internal.

Davey said the SADF did not have any CAMs until April or May 1988 - shortly after conclusion of the long-running operations Modular, Hooper and Packer. He personally took delivery from Basson of 12 or 13 CAMs, one of which was sent to Protechnik for reverse engineering research. He said he was certain that at no time was he aware of more than 13 CAMs in the SADF.

Davey told the court that CAMs are not disposable items. They are specifically designed for repeated use, and the only circumstances in which he could envisage them being dumped, would be if an exceptionally high level of exposure to a chemical agent occurred. He was not aware of the dumping of any CAMs. Davey was deployed in Angola throughout operations Modular, Hooper and Packer, specifically as a CBW cell adviser for field commanders in the event of a chemical attack. However, his services in this role were never required.

Davey testified about the work conducted at the company, Lifestyle Management, which he said was not a, SADF front company. Initial work done at the company focussed on the physiological aspects of chemical defence.

Davey said that he had no knowledge of any NBC suits supplied to Unita. Suits used for training during Modular-Hooper-Packer were taken from 7 Medical Battalion stores - none, to his knowledge, were issued to troops on the ground. The 7 Medical Battalion store had between 40 and 50 NBC suits on its shelves. During his tenure, the only NBC suits he saw in the Operational Area or Angolan theatre of conflict were those he took there. They were among the earliest suits obtained by the SADF, of Belgian origin, foam-lined. Davey never saw troops in protective suits at any other time.

During cross examination Davey confirmed that he did not know the origin of the CAMs.

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The third witness of the day was Tim Otter, international business development manager of Graseby Ionics, a division of Graseby Dynamics in Watford, England. Otter produced various documents relating to the sale in August 1987 of 13 CAMs to the University of Ghent via Heyndrickx. Because the CAM is such a sensitive piece of equipment, control of export licenses is heavily policed. Nevertheless, permission was granted to sell the 13 CAMs to Heyndrickx at a discount of A3220 each on the normal price of A3 3 990, and the end user certificate was issued in favour of the university.

Otter said that over the years, both he and Graseby have been questioned many times about the CAMs that went missing from the University of Ghent. At one conference, attended by both Otter and Heyndrickx, the professor publicly declared that he had buried all of them in Angola because he was unhappy with their performance.

In cross-examination, Adv. Cilliers established that since Otter joined Graseby only in 1989, he was not the author, nor could he have personal knowledge of, the documents relating to the Heyndrickx purchases. Cilliers suggested that because the Graseby documents show that Heyndrickx stipulated that he wanted two sets of invoices - a pro forma invoice for a single CAM and another for 12, plus a final invoice for 13 CAMs - someone at Graseby was complicit in helping Heyndrickx draw up false documentation with a view to defrauding the university in respect of the discount offered. Hartzenberg intervened, observing that the documents certainly suggested that something underhand had taken place.

Tuesday, 5 September

Cross-examination of Tim Otter from Graseby Ionics continued with testimony that the documents relating to the sale of 13 CAMs to Professor Aubin Heyndrickx had been extracted from Graseby's files as part of the investigation by the Belgian authorities in the last few months of 1987. Cross-examination focussed on the controls exercised by Graseby over equipment sold.

The next witness was Lieutenant-General Deon Ferreira, currently Chief of Staff Joint Operations in the SANDF but from 1979 to the end of 1982, commanding officer 32 Battalion. Ferreira was called to the Angolan Operational Area to participate in Operations Modular, Hooper and Packer. He had earlier taken part in the 1981 Operation Protea, designed to clear Southern Angola of all Swapo bases. From September 5, 1987 to December 15, 1987, Ferreira served as commander of 20 Brigade in Southern Angola. After December, he returned to the area from time to time as a staff officer for General Willie Meyer.

Ferreira said he never saw a CAM or wet detection kit at his field head quarters nor with any of the troops under his command. He had no knowledge of any protective clothing or detection kits issued to Unita. During cross-examination Cilliers said it was not strange that Ferreira had not seen detection apparatus in Angola since they were only issued in 1988.

The next witness was Colonel Paul Fouche, an SADF member from 1967 to January 1999. He also testified about conditions in Angola, where he was stationed until May 1988. He said he never saw detection equipment in Angola nor had troops been issued with protective clothing. In cross-examination, Cilliers established that Fouche had not been involved in the logistic support of Unita.

In re-examination, Fouche said if between 12 000 and 15 000 NBC suits had been issued during Modular-Hooper-Packer, he would have expected to see one at some point. He said that no more than 7 000 SADF and Unita troops took part in the operations. This in contrast to the claim by Cilliers during the cross-examination of Gen. Knobel that there were three national service call-ups during the three operations, and that all 12 000 to 15 000 troops involved received NBC suits.

The next witness was Arthur Boettcher, formerly a physicist with the CSIR, Eloptro and the National Institute for Aerodynamic Systems and currently deputy director of chemical and biological controls at the Department of Trade and Industry. While working for NIAS, he met some of the Delta G Scientific staff and was offered a job there. He was employed at Delta G from September 1984 until mid-1987. Boettcher said he was involved in the attempt to reverse engineer a Chemical Agent Monitor at Protechnik. Boettcher claimed that all the technology for the development of a prototype CAM came from South Africa. The defence claims it was imported from abroad.

The next witness was Pieter Goede, a physicist, and the man who ran the CAM project at the Atomic Energy Board (AEC). Specifications for the CAM were provided to AEC by Boettcher on behalf of Protechnik and the development project stretched from 1988 to 1993. Goede says they produced a demonstration model, a prototype and two pre-production models, all of which were delivered to Protechnik. As far as he is concerned, the objective of the project was achieved. Goede also disputes the involvement of foreign electronics blue prints for the project.

As Goede stepped down, Judge Willie Hartzenberg asked prosecutor Dr. Torie Pretorius to explain why he had led the evidence of Boettcher and Goede. Pretorius said it was designed to refute Basson's claim that Project Coast funds had been used to pay for the clandestine acquisition of a blueprint for the electronic circuit boards which were a problem during reverse engineering of the CAM.

The last witness of the day was Dr Andries Leuschner, who managed the CAM project at the AEC from 1990 until he left in 1993. The project was taken on by the AEC during its commercialization phase. Leuschner did not know of a blueprint for the electronic circuit board being supplied to the AEC. He said the researchers involved in the project were given an operating manual for the Graseby CAM, which contained basic information on the instrumentation as well as basic diagrams of the circuits. They also had access to other literature.

Wednesday, 6 September

The first witness of the day was Col. Ben Steyn, who took over as Project officer of Project Coast when Basson was asked to retire in December 1992. He was at 1 Military Hospital from 1978 to 1980 and served as head of the South West Africa Medical Command from July 1980 to 1982. Steyn attended a staff course in 1989 and in 1990, was posted to the research department at SAMS headquarters. In January 1991, he succeeded Deon Erasmus as officer commanding 7 Medical Battalion, Erasmus having followed Basson into this post in 1987. Steyn was Commanding Officer until 1994, when Dr William Mutlow took over.

As an anaesthetist, Steyn is familiar with Tubarine, Scoline and Ketelaar. He explained that Scoline takes effect within 30 seconds of being injected and total paralysis follows within two to three minutes. Tubarine is a skeletal muscle relaxant which can only be used in conjunction with a ventilator. It takes effect within three minutes and lasts between 50 and 70 minutes. He said Ketelaar is one of the safest and easiest anaesthetics, hence its widespread use in field surgery. It is also an analgesic and can be administered in a single full dose or several smaller ones. The problem with Ketelaar is that hallucinations are a known side-effect. He confirmed that all three substances were in the Special Forces headquarters stores, to which Basson had unrestricted access. Sodium Pentathol - the so-called truth serum - was also available, but only at 1 Military Hospital.

Steyn said he had no personal experience of chemical interrogation, but accepts that like Sodium Pentathol, other substances could be used to induce a semi-comatose state in which the subject's resistance to interrogation would be broken down. He warned that this would require specialised medical knowledge.

When he assumed command of 7 Medical Battalion in 1990 the battalion had no logistics officer or stock control system, and the first few months of 1990 were devoted to registering the "huge" volume of equipment lying around both the Speskop stores and at other SADF units. Among the equipment found, but which was not recorded anywhere in the SADF books, were NBC suits, medical equipment, even vehicles - and 10 CAMs. Later, Steyn received two more CAMs from Protechnik. Each piece of equipment had to be evaluated for functionality. The wet detection kits he found were in poor condition, the chemicals having long since passed their use-by dates, and they were dumped.

Steyn did not take part in operations Modular, Hooper and Packer, but did make several trips to Angola. Some time after 1991, he went to Jamba, where he managed the hospital serving the Southern Angola operational area. His last visit to this hospital was in December 1993. Over the entire period, he never saw a CAM or wet detection kit anywhere in Angola. During his time as Commanding Officer of 7 Medical Battalion CAMs were only issued against the signature of the user, and if the equipment was lost or damaged as the result of negligence, the repercussions would have been extremely serious for the culprit, as CAMs were classified as highly sensitive equipment.

Steyn told the court that he attended meetings of the Co-ordinating Management Council where the project to capture the technical data of Project Coast on CD-ROM was discussed. At one meeting, Gen. Knobel issued a specific order that Steyn and Basson should ensure that the documents were destroyed. Basson took Steyn to the Centurion premises where the operation was conducted, two or three times. Steyn found two women scanning documents onto the CD-ROMs under Kobus Bothma's supervision. On completion of the task, the CD-ROMs were handed to Steyn, who in turn turned them over to Knobel for safekeeping. A certificate was received from Delta G Scientific stating that all documents had been destroyed as ordered.

In Steyn's opinion, the information captured on the CD-ROMs can in no way contribute to proliferation. His assessment is based on the hard copy documents he saw during the CD-ROM capture process. His opinion was challenged during cross-examination, when defence counsel Jaap Cilliers asked him which documents from the trunks he regarded as a potential proliferation danger. Steyn said the files and documents related to the Army project involving weaponisation of CR at Swartklip Products, which was not a Coast project.

Steyn said that when he took over as Project Officer from Basson he was tasked with dismantling the project. He received no briefing or information from Basson about foreign matters. He was never told about a consortium of Libyans, East Germans and Russians which had supplied equipment to Coast, or that there were any matters involving this group which had to be finalised. He was not told that David Webster "handled the interests" of this group. Steyn was also not told anything by Basson about foreign "front" companies, foreign bank accounts or assets bought on behalf of the consortium.

Steyn gave evidence about the NBC suits saying he was not aware of a shipment of suits to Unita and was not aware of large numbers of suits being purchased for the SADF.

During cross-examination Adv. Cilliers put it to Steyn that it is not unusual that he would not have personal knowledge of the existence or use of NBC suits since he was not in a position where such information would have been relevant to him at the time of their purchase or distribution. Cilliers also put it to Steyn that he took over a highly sophisticated project run according to the highest standards, Steyn agreed that the scientific levels achieved had indeed been high.

The next witness was James May who is a former member of the Rhodesian Light Infantry. Due to the shortage of qualified doctors during the Rhodesian bush war, May was among those who received advanced medical training, attending various courses in order to qualify as a medical assistant specialising in anaesthesia. He served in a number of hospitals in this role. On May 13, 1980, he joined the SADF, being appointed at the SAMS College in Voortrekkerhoogte to train operational medical orderlies. May was posted to Special Forces Headquarters where he was in charge of the medical stores. He was also involved in the sanitisation of medical supplies for Unita to disguise their origin. In due course, Steven Beukes was assigned to the stores and assisted May.

May said he was meticulous about keeping a register for the issue of scheduled drugs and that while he was in charge of the medical stores at Speskop, access was restricted. Only on the orders of one of the doctors would he release scheduled drugs - but he never gave any to operator, Johan Theron. In cross-examination, May said Johan Theron had very little to do with the medical stores, and although he sent representatives to check on security measures from time, he cannot remember ever seeing Theron himself in the stores, to which he did not have keys.

Thursday, 7 September

The first witness of the day was Major-General Roland de Vries, who served in the SADF from 1963 to 1999 and is a mobile war specialist. During Operation Modular in Angola, De Vries was second-in-command to General Deon Ferreira, Commanding Officer of 20 Brigade, from October to December 1987, and also served as adviser on mobile operations. All operations were conducted in conjunction with Unita, and although De Vries was conscious, purely through hearsay, that special protective clothing had supposedly been supplied to Unita, the only items he ever saw among either SADF or Unita troops were gas masks - and they were apparently in short supply, since De Vries himself did not even have one.

Shown the NBC jacket in court, he said he had never seen one anywhere in Angola. His brigade had no detection equipment of which he was aware. Shown a photograph of a CAM, he again said he had never seen one. During cross-examination Adv. Cilliers said that De Vries was only in Angola for a limited period of time and would therefore have been unlikely to have encountered protective clothing.

The next witness was Colonel George McLachlan. During 1987 and the first month of 1988, McLachlan was officer commanding 71 Brigade in Cape Town, but from February 7, 1988, he assumed command of Operation Hooper until March 8, which was the start of Operation Packer, the "wrap-up" phase that led to withdrawal of all SADF forces from Southern Angola. Although not under his direct command, he said Unita troops took part in combined operations with SADF troops.

Regarding the threat of chemical attack, McLachlan said the field commanders believed intelligence reports that claimed the Angolan and surrogate forces had the capacity to launch such attack. During planning and assessment of the situation, it was generally accepted by the commanders that if they had the ability, the Angolans and surrogate forces might resort to chemical weapons. Despite this threat, McLachlan said his troops, and Unita, had nothing more than gas masks and standard Army-issue thin plastic raincoats as protection.

Under cross-examination McLachlan said the closest he and his troops ever came to a chemical attack was a radio report from the commander of a front-line unit who had seen a suspicious-looking cloud and ordered his men to don their raincoats and gas masks because he believed they were under chemical attack. They were not, and that was the last McLachlan heard of chemical warfare in Angola.

Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Fox was the next witness. Fox joined the SADF in 1974 and was trained in air logistic supply. During Operation Savannah in 1975, he was stationed at Grootfontein in then South West Africa as logistics officer for SADF support in Angola. From 1978, he served as personal aide to Constand Viljoen for two years and was then recruited by Military Intelligence to join the Directorate Special Tasks, responsible for all logistical support to Unita, Renamo and the Lesotho Liberation Army.

Fox was physically involved on a daily basis in getting logistic support to Unita. He operated from a vast warehouse in Pretoria West, where "mountains" of equipment were sanitized and repacked before being taken to Rundu in convoys of powerful trucks with trailers. Fox kept records of all equipment dispatched which were handed to Military Intelligence's Counter-Intelligence section when the operation was shut down. He said deliveries were checked by Unita teams in Rundu, Katima Mulilo and the San Michelle base on arrival.

Fox said he had never seen a CAM, as shown to him on the photographs in court, and never took or sent any such equipment to Unita. Nor were they ever stored in his vault prior to dispatch. Shown a pair of NBC pants and the jacket in court, he said he had never seen such items nor supplied them to either SADF or Unita units in the Operational Area or Angola. If 12 000 to 15 000 such suits had been sent to Unita, he would have been responsible for detaching them. During cross-examination Fox said he did not believe that Col. Schutte would have supplied Unita with protective clothing independently. Schutte has previously been mentioned by the defence as having been personally involved in the supply of protective clothing to Unita.

The last witness of the day was Geoff Candy (MSc in Biochemistry) who joined the Department of Agriculture in 1979, then did his national service before working at the CSIR, where his task was to design a kit that could be used to measure toxins in water. Candy gave evidence about the production of wet detection kits for use by the defence force in determining the presence of toxic agents. During cross-examination he confirmed that at some stage wet detection kits must have been bought from a foreign source.

Friday, 8 September

Witness, Dr Philip Coleman, formerly of the CSIR's National Chemical Research Laboratory and presently at Protechnik, was recruited by Basson at the end of 1981 for Delta G Scientific, where he was to do research and development into chemical warfare defence. Coleman was called to give evidence about the reverse engineering of Chemical Agent Monitors at Protechnik. He was the only witness called on Friday and his evidence brief.

This report has been prepared by Chandr� Gould and Marlene Burger. Chandr� Gould is a research associate at the Centre for Conflict Resolution working on the Chemical and Biological Warfare Research Project. Marlene Burger is monitoring the trial as part of the CCR Chemical and Biological Warfare Research Project. The Chemical and Biological Warfare Research Project is funded by the Ford Foundation, the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung and the Norwegian Government.

Centre for Conflict Resolution, UCT, Private Bag, Rondebosch, 7701, South Africa Tel: (27) 21-4222512 Fax: (27) 21-4222622 Email: [email protected]