Wall Street Journal, May 20, 2002.
By ROBERT BLOCK, Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
RUSTENBURG, South Africa -- Mike Odendaal never imagined that his career as one of South Africa's most promising veterinary bacteriologists would one day find him standing ankle-deep in guts, frisking dead chickens for broken backs in a poultry-processing plant.
"As the vet on this farm, it's my job to make sure that chickens grow healthy and don't have weak bones," Dr. Odendaal shouted above the hum of a single production line that transforms 16,875 clucking white birds into bags of breasts, thighs and wings every hour. After pulling his hand out of an oven-ready broiler, he added: "It's really not my thing, though."
The problem for Dr. Odendaal is that his "thing" is germ research, and it once led him into a job far nastier than fattening birds for mechanized slaughter: developing biological assassination weapons for apartheid South Africa. That program was shut down, leaving Dr. Odendaal and his old biowarfare colleagues stigmatized and bitter for nearly a decade. Now, in the aftermath of Sept. 11 and the anthrax attacks in the U.S., Washington and the world are waking up to a potentially lethal combination: a glut of underemployed germ experts and the appetite of rogue groups and nations for biological weapons of mass destruction.
From 1985 to 1993, Dr. Odendaal headed the microbiology division at Roodeplaat Research Laboratories, or RRL, a company set up by apartheid South Africa's military to do conventional biological research as a front for a top-secret chemical and biological warfare program known as Project Coast.
Darker Purpose
Attracted by world-class facilities, a good salary and a chance to serve the apartheid system, which he supported then, Dr. Odendaal joined dozens of other scientists and technicians at RRL to do what he believed would be defense-related biological-warfare research. But it soon became clear that his work had a darker purpose.
According to his own admissions and findings by South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which looked into the excesses of apartheid, Dr. Odendaal and other scientists at RRL experimented with some of the most horrific bugs and naturally occurring poisons known to man. He collected at least 44 strains of anthrax from a local game park, tested them for resistance to antibiotics and then dusted the most lethal on cigarette filters, envelopes, lipstick and chocolates. He tainted bottles of beer with botulinum toxin, just two milligrams of which can kill 100 people. All of these were supposed to have been used against enemies of the South African state -- mainly blacks fighting the old white-minority government.
Then in 1993, amid negotiations for a transfer of power to black rule, and under pressure from the U.S. and Britain, then-President F.W. de Klerk closed down RRL. The authorities have never disclosed what weapons were developed by the lab and whether any were ever used. In a first official acknowledgment that Project Coast ever existed, South African Deputy President Jacob Zuma told Parliament last year that the country's biological-weapons program, and all dangerous substances related to it, were completely destroyed in 1995.
Asked if he knew whether the poisoned articles he created actually killed anyone, Dr. Odendaal shrugged. "I don't know. If I tell you yes or no it would be a wild guess. We were never informed of what the ultimate objectives were. I was asked to do things like put anthrax on cigarettes and I did it."
Out of work, Dr. Odendaal returned to the University of Pretoria, where he had worked before RRL. But his academic career suffered after he testified about his biowarfare work to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1998. The taint of the lab's work also affected other researchers, who declined to be identified. They told of losing jobs or being professionally marginalized or seeing research funding dry up because of their connection with the lab.
Dr. Odendaal says he has been passed over for jobs, squeezed out of academic life and briefly blacklisted by professional veterinary bodies. Afraid that his past was strangling his research career, he took the vet job at the factory farm, a two-hour drive northwest of Johannesburg, to fight many of the same germs he studied to use against people.
Now, after three years of doctoring chickens for dinner tables around Africa, Dr. Odendaal, 52, is gray-haired, unhappy and keen to end his scientific exile with a return to mainstream microbial research. And that worries some people.
Growing Concern
Since the anthrax attacks in the U.S. last year, containing scientists who once worked in chemical or biological warfare has become a growing concern. Russia, Yugoslavia and South Africa have all had such programs that were drastically scaled back or closed down in the past decade, putting thousands of qualified scientists and technicians out of work.
At the same time, the U.S. government and experts who monitor chemical and biological weapons programs suspect that several countries and some underground groups want to acquire expertise to develop or enhance their own clandestine chemical and biological weapons programs. These include Sudan, North Korea, Libya, Iraq and Iran, and terrorist organizations such as Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network. Earlier this month, the Bush administration added Cuba to that list. The suspicion that a former American germ-weapons researcher was behind the anthrax attacks in the U.S. last fall highlights the risks posed by such disgruntled workers.
In testimony in March before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Amy Sands, deputy director of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, said displaced scientists from dismantled germ-warfare projects are a huge threat. "Some may be enticed by high salaries and other inducements to work for foreign governments, sub-national groups and criminals to develop biological weapons," she warned. The Center for Nonproliferation Studies, which is in Monterey, Calif., is devoted to curbing the spread of weapons of mass destruction through education and research.
Ms. Sands singled out the biowarfare scientists from South Africa as being among those most vulnerable to recruitment. Although she didn't explain the characterization, others note the low salaries in South Africa and the stigma attached to the dozens of Project Coast scientists. Daan Goosen, a former managing director of RRL and the man who recruited Dr. Odendaal to Project Coast, agrees.
Sitting in his home office outside Pretoria, surrounded by books on animal pathology, a microscope and plastic-foam cold boxes used to store biological material, Dr. Goosen, 50, described his past and present life with a mixture of pride and disgruntlement. It was clear that he knows his value to anyone on either side of biowarfare, and there were times in his conversation when it was hard to tell whether he was presenting a resume or an ultimatum.
Dr. Goosen recounted how ever since his role in Project Coast was made public four years ago, he has been visited by scores of people looking for "stuff to kill the blacks." He said that in January a group of white Zimbabweans approached him to ask if he had any concoctions ready that they might use to "take out" Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's increasingly dictatorial president.
"I told them no. Full stop. There was nothing that I had to give them," said Dr. Goosen, who now runs his own private lab. He added: "Fortunately, no one asked for recipes" -- which would have raised the specter of proliferation.
Dr. Goosen also claimed to have been approached recently by a Chinese company looking for his help to develop vaccines for animal diseases. "The trouble with vaccine research is that germ-warfare programs are little more than vaccine programs in reverse," he said. Researchers need to produce and manipulate germs and viruses to produce vaccines.
Dr. Odendaal, the chicken vet, said he had received an e-mail message a few years ago from a stranger with a Muslim name from Indonesia, wanting details of his old research. "I just deleted the message and never heard from him again."
These overtures couldn't be confirmed, since neither scientist would offer proof of his contacts. However, Chandre Gould, a researcher at South Africa's Center for Conflict Resolution, an institute working on disarmament and peace studies, doesn't discount the stories. According to Ms. Gould, who has been investigating the activities of the Project Coast scientists for five years, in 1993 some former project scientists were approached by two Syrian military officers interested in biological warfare. The South Africans were keen to help but the contacts never went anywhere.
"The point is that these scientists were accessible," she said. "Not much has changed. Whether they will do anything depends on their financial situation, if they are gainfully employed and how they feel about their past."
Undervalued, Underpaid
The problem, according to Dr. Goosen, is that many of his old colleagues like Dr. Odendaal feel undervalued and often underpaid. "I'm not saying that any of my guys would want to work for Osama bin Laden, but they could be fooled into working for a front company," he said.
At this point in the conversation, Dr. Goosen's wife entered the room and the two had a brief argument about an overdue car payment. After she left, he picked up the thread, saying, "If you are not financially independent, it influences your moral decision-making."
In her testimony to the Senate, Dr. Sands said that if the U.S. is to be successful in its war on terrorism and the proliferation of chemical and biological weapons, it has to help support displaced scientists and make sure they are gainfully employed "doing constructive, socially beneficial projects."
Many Project Coast scientists said that their plight has been ignored by the West and their own government. Part of the reason may be the stigma of their work at RRL, much of which was aimed at assassination and at blacks.
Unlike programs in the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia that focused on delivering bioagents by missiles and bombs to cause mass death, South Africa's program was geared to using small amounts of bacteria and poisons to kill selectively. It also tried to develop a sterility vaccine for blacks.
Ten years ago, Washington and London were worried enough about Project Coast to demand its closure. They also insisted that Wouter Basson, the head of Project Coast, who was also a career soldier and a cardiologist, be retained in government service and monitored closely.
"It was our assessment that Basson was a one-stop shop for anyone interested in how to put a [bioweapons] program together," said a senior American diplomat who helped negotiate the end of Project Coast in the mid-1990s.
South African officials acknowledge that under U.S. pressure they appointed Dr. Basson in 1995 as a consultant physician and the head of the Department of Cardiology at a top military hospital in Pretoria, with the idea that his movements would be limited. But Dr. Basson still visited Libya on several occasions, angering U.S. officials. He has said the trips were devoted to business consulting for hospitals in Libya.
On Jan. 29, 1997, Dr. Basson was arrested on charges of drug dealing, murder and fraud in connection with Project Coast. Last month, after the longest and costliest trial in South Africa's history, he was acquitted on all counts by a single judge, who said the state had failed to prove its case.
After the trial, Dr. Basson said in a nationally televised news conference that while he planned to go back to practicing medicine, he would also consider what to do with his skills as an expert in chemical and biological weapons. "I am not sure how much those are in demand. I'll have to wait and see how many people phone me to ask," he said. He added that he believed that South African scientists still had a contribution to make to chemical and biological warfare. "We're a bit rusty, but we could take it up quite easily and carry on." Dr. Basson maintains a private medical practice in Pretoria as he awaits the outcome of a government appeal of the verdict in his trial.
South African officials say that there are no plans to restart the biological-weapons program. They say no final decision has been taken on whether they will continue to monitor Dr. Basson's activities.
Whatever happens, those who worked under him seem sure to be left to their own devices. Dr. Odendaal doesn't want the poultry company where he works, which knows all about his past, identified for fear that chicken consumers might worry about its association with a man who once laced food with lethal diseases. Taking a break from his duties checking on chickens, he sat on the hood of his car in the company parking lot and smoked a cigarette. "This is good work and important work to protect peoples' health. But it's hard. It's a reversal of my entire life's focus, which was research."
Dr. Goosen, aware of his old friend's frustration, from time to time uses Dr. Odendaal as a consultant for his own microbiology laboratory business, which he runs from the Pretoria Technikon University.
When asked if he thought the notion of old Project Coast scientists working together in a new germ lab should set alarms ringing in Washington, Dr. Goosen smiled. "Of course! That's what we want," he said, making yet another job pitch. "We don't want to be beggars or troublemakers. We just want to be scientists working under a responsible authority."