Sunday Independent
January 27 2001 at 05:25PM
By Marlene Burger
If the Mad Hatter invited him to a tea party, Dr Wouter Basson could doff a different chapeau with every sip of Lapsang Souchong that crossed his lips. Or so one might deduce from the chiaroscuro portrait painted by the lawyers.
As the former military officer's trial enters its 16th month in Pretoria's High Court on Monday, a definitive defence against the 61 criminal charges he faces has yet to emerge.
But the picture sketched during cross-examination of the state's 130 witnesses to date in the world's first prosecution for alleged abuse of an official chemical and biological warfare programme is that of an extremely busy man who wore a variety of hats during his 12 years as head of Project Coast.
In challenging the testimony of witnesses ranging from urbane international financiers to self-confessed mass murderers, advocates Jaap Cilliers and Tokkie van Zyl have seldom strayed outside the lines of their paint-by-numbers technique: Basson denies all guilt, and all who implicate him in drug trafficking, fraud or murder are doing so only to save their own skins, hide a sanctions-busting past or because they hold a grudge.
But once in a while the legal artistry of the advocates adds a delicate nuance to the broad brushstrokes drawn from a rich palette of alibis and explanations.
Depending on which headgear he had on at the time: cardiologist's mopcap, trusted senior officer's army-drab cap with scrambled eggs, global wheeler-and-dealer's bowler hat, Special Forces doctor's twig-bedecked steel helmet, international spy's low-slung fedora, scientist's sterile white hood, property developer's hardhat, Disneylander's Mickey Mouse ears, Fancourt golfer's cloth cap, frequent flier's sleeping mask, germ-war expert's gas mask - Basson has been presented to Judge Willie Hartzenberg as:
The heroic bio-warrior, infiltrating chemical and biological warfare programmes wherever he could find them; making perilous journeys behind the Iron Curtain, buying Nato secrets from top-ranking officers; embroiling Croatian government officials in deals for street drugs allegedly needed to quell the rioting hordes during the 1980s; ordering scientists at secret laboratories to produce some of the most toxic substances known to man so that VIPs on foreign missions could be alerted to the dangers lurking in chocolates on hotel-room pillows, drinks offered by strangers, or cigarettes proffered during brief encounters. The state alleges that these and other items laced with poisons were, in fact, used by security force killers against apartheid's enemies.
The superspy who claims to have fooled the international intelligence community for more than a decade while he gathered information and surreptitiously acquired sophisticated equipment from nameless, faceless East German, Russian and Middle Eastern collaborators.
At times, this refrain has missed a beat, as in the case of what Basson claims were Iran's two top secret agents when he struck a $3,2-million (more than R24-million) covert deal with them to supply Project Coast with a peptide synthesiser, a piece of laboratory equipment so sensitive that not a single research scientist involved in the project ever saw it.
However, the testimony of Bernard Zimmer, a Luxembourg banker, exposed the two "agents" as notorious conmen who had absconded with Project Coast's millions and were arrested eight years later for defrauding a host of international businessmen.
The innocent victim of self-confessed state hitmen who hope to avoid criminal charges by implicating him in Operation Dual, the systematic elimination of Swapo prisoners of war and South African Defence Force members who posed a threat to covert operations.
One killer after another has told the court Basson either supplied, or arranged to supply, the lethal triple cocktail of powerful muscle relaxants with which they injected their victims before tossing their naked bodies into the sea from aircraft.
In their efforts to put as much distance between Basson and Operation Dual as possible, the defence claimed it was impossible for him to have supplied the substances used, as he was a "full-time medical student" until the end of 1981.
When veterans of the Namibian and Angolan conflict testified that they had encountered Basson in field hospitals during military operations as early as 1980, the defence offered an oral admission that he had spent about two months in 1978 at hospitals in the Caprivi.
Sunday Independent
May 06 2000 at 05:37PM
By Marlene Burger
Until this week, the innocuously named Operation Dual was one of the apartheid era's most closely guarded secrets. Now that its grisly details have been revealed, it will go down in infamy, as will the name of the South African Defence Force's (SADF) chief executioner, Johan Jurgens Theron.
The first victim was an unnamed Swapo freedom fighter who had murdered a farmer near Tsumeb. The last was Corporal Mack Anderson, a member of 5 Reconnaissance Regiment at Phalaborwa.
Between the deaths of these two men lie eight years and an untold number of bodies tossed into the sea in a calculated extermination programme sanctioned by a top-ranking military general.
As the mild-mannered fifty-something former intelligence officer reeled off one murder after another, a stunned silence fell over Pretoria high court GD, where chemical war expert Dr Wouter Basson has been on trial since last October.
Theron - whose nearest estimate of those he killed in cold blood is "hundreds" - eschewed the amnesty process offered by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission because he would not subject himself to the "humiliation and abuse" he believes was meted out to other former security force members who confessed their sins.
But after experiencing a spiritual rebirth four years ago, he decided to testify against Basson "because the truth will set me free". The possibility of securing immunity from prosecution in the process was merely a bonus, Theron claims.
Ironically, in order to place Basson at the scene of a single, albeit quadruple, murder in Namibia, for which he cannot be tried in South Africa, Theron has not only had to incriminate himself in a myriad "eliminations" but admit that he masterminded the top secret plan to empty "overcrowded" detention barracks of Swapo prisoners.
However, he claims it was Major-General Fritz Loots, inaugural commander of the SADF's Special Forces, who suggested lethal injections as the "most humane" mass murder weapon.
Basson - a military doctor from 1975 - supplied him with vast quantities of scoline and tubarine, legitimate muscle relaxants used in major surgery but fatal in overdose.
The brutal nature of Theron's earliest "disposals" in July 1979 left him traumatised, he says, but once he began using drugs to first sedate then kill his victims, "things went more smoothly ... they passed away more peacefully".
Operation Dual required military intelligence officers, members of the police anti-insurgency unit Koevoet or agents of Barnacle, the covert forerunner of the SADF's Civil Co-operation Bureau, to deliver "packages" - the codeword for victims - to Theron, usually at a landing strip in Namibia's Etosha game reserve.
They victims would be loaded into a six-seater aircraft and flown to one of several remote airfields along the Skeleton Coast.
There, the rear door of the Piper Seneca, piloted by the first head of Barnacle from 1979 to 1982, would be removed and buried in the sand. The victims, their hands bound, would be "put down" as Theron describes it, stripped naked and loaded back into the aircraft.
Then the pilot would fly up to 100 nautical miles out to sea and Theron would toss the bodies into the seas from 3 600m.
Sometimes, more than one run would be made, with a maximum of three bodies per trip.
Mission accomplished, Theron and the pilot would return to the desolate airfield, burn the victims' clothes with aviation fuel, refit the aircraft door and fly home.
While acknowledging that a human body hurled into the ocean from that altitude would "be in pieces" when it hit the water, Theron said he was not prepared to run "even the tiniest risk" of survival - and besides, it would be inhumane to hurl someone who was still alive, even if sedated, into the sea, since "he could regain consciousness on the way".
Humane death preyed heavily on Theron's mind after he had to manually strangle the first victims to death with plastic cable ties also used to restrain their hands.
It was after this, says Theron, that Basson began supplying him with drugs and syringes used until his last "operation" in December 1987.
Marlene Burger is a freelance journalist monitoring the Basson trial for the Centre for Conflict Resolution.
Sunday Independent
January 29 2000 at 04:37PM
By Marlene Burger
As prosecutors strip away layer upon layer of deceit and duplicity to get to the core of chemical war expert Wouter Basson's alleged multi-million rand fraud against the state, the question on many lips is: when the hell did he sleep?
A brigadier in the SA Defence Force until he was sacked in a November 1992 military purge, Basson's duties as head of 7 Medical Battalion saw him: accompanying Special Forces troops on military operations into neighbouring states; traversing the globe on secret missions to acquire information and equipment for Project Coast, the top-secret SADF chemical and biological warfare programme that he headed for 10 years; dispensing "pain pills" - as he told the truth commission - to members of the sinister Civil Co-operation Bureau; attending a full-time staff officers' course throughout 1985, a key year on the Coast calendar; allegedly entering into several "marriages of convenience" with foreign women in order to obtain citizenship of their countries; ensuring that callow national servicemen serving in the bush war would be safe against the putative threat of attack by nerve gas, anthrax or other deadly agents in the enemy arsenal; overseeing production of equally lethal substances and protective gear at facilities funded by taxpayers who didn't know such places existed; orchestrating the manufacture of a ton each of Mandrax and the rave drug, Ecstasy, allegedly for use as incapacitants against rioting hordes.
In between, the Pretoria high court has heard, he managed to fit in several clandestine trips to Libya.
On his Libya trips he acted as Nelson Mandela's courier when vast amounts of cash had to be collected to pay for Winnie Madikizela-Mandela's legal costs, and personally supervised the interior decoration of a Pretoria property, Merton House, later sold to Zimbabwe as an embassy for R6 million.
Now a forensic audit of some R80 million allegedly misappropriated by Basson from the Project Coast funds has shown that he also constructed and managed a multinational business empire with such diverse interests - on paper, at least - as aviation, property, travel, investment, leisure resorts, security equipment, pharmaceuticals, information technology, telecommunications, farming and shower enclosures. Basson's labyrinthine one-stop money-laundering network even included a liquor store and a vehicle service centre, along with a Belgian golf course and a corporate lodge at the exclusive Fancourt resort near George.
But, three years ago this weekend, the slightly-built, balding man who turns 50 in July, was arrested for drug trafficking, and since last October, Basson has been on trial in Pretoria on 61 criminal charges, including murder. It has taken teams of investigators six years to unravel the complexity of shareholdings and cross-holdings, corporations that begat companies, which in turn spawned close corporations, in America, England, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Jersey, South Africa and the Cayman Islands, notoriously hospitable to wheelers and dealers with money to hide.
The 26 fraud charges against Basson list 45 companies which he is accused of using as conduits for State funds that ended up in his own pocket. However, investigators have uncovered at least as many additional companies that were so deeply buried that only now, three months into his trial, are they trying to gain access to financial and banking records. As befitting an economic maze of this magnitude, the number of offshore bank accounts to which Basson had access is astonishing. While the bulk of the funds exported through secret military channels under the guise of payments for scientific equipment, chemicals and information travelled by circuitous routes into company accounts and three personal trusts in favour of Basson's wife, Annette, daughter Naomi and son Wouter Jacques, the audit has also uncovered deposits into personal bank accounts in his name in Switzerland, Luxembourg and England.
Seasoned forensic auditor Hennie Bruwer's quest for the truth has left him with no doubt that at all times, Basson was the substantive beneficiary of all subsidiaries set up under the aegis of the foreign holding company, the WPW Group, and the South African-based Wisdom Group, despite elaborate efforts to disguise his involvement through the use of nominees and a select group of directors.
These were drawn from a small and trusted coterie of friends and associates, including David Webster, formerly a senior partner in one of America's most respected law firms, Baker & Hostetler, Dr Philip Mijburgh, a nephew of apartheid-era defence minister Magnus Malan, Dr Wynand Swanepoel, a dentist who served under Basson in the military medical service, Chris Marlow, an advocate whose father was managing director of Sentrachem, the company that paid millions of rands for the SADF front company, Delta G Scientific, in 1993, Belgian businessman Charles van Remoortere, whose sister, Claudine, was one of Basson's marital passports to foreign citizenship, and Antoinette Lourens, who became Basson's mistress while she was still married to the scientist who ran Protechnic, where James Bond-type instruments of assassination - poison-tipped screwdrivers, walking sticks and umbrellas - were allegedly made for CCB agents.
It will be many months yet before Basson, described by medical colleagues as a "brilliant" cardiologist, knows his fate.
Sunday Independent
February 05 2000 at 05:52PM
By Marlene Burger
Just three months into the projected two-year trial of chemical war expert Wouter Basson, Judge Willie Hartzenberg has indicated that he is not convinced that the labyrinthine international business empire set up by Basson was designed for personal gain.
In an extraordinary and heated exchange with state prosecutor Anton Ackerman SC on Friday, Hartzenberg said his impression of the evidence so far was that the interests of the WPW group of companies, in which Basson was the majority shareholder, were "also the interests of Project Coast" and that the mere fact that Basson has consistently failed to disclose his role in the companies did not necessarily constitute fraud.
This is not the first time comments by the judge have taken prosecutors aback since the man who headed the apartheid government's chemical and biological warfare programme went on trial in the Pretoria High Court last October.
Ten days ago, while seasoned forensic auditor Hennie Bruwer was giving testimony about Basson's alleged R80 million fraud, Hartzenberg told Ackerman he was "bored to death" with the documents - many in Basson's own handwriting - being used to illustrate his instructions on the use of funds from the secret defence account by private companies under his control.
The judge, whose brother is Conservative Party leader Ferdi Hartzenberg, surprised observers when he chose to sit without assessors in the Basson trial, which covers not only myriad intricate financial transactions, but scientific research into biological agents allegedly used by agents of the sinister Civil Co-operation Bureau to assassinate "enemies of the state".
Friday's altercation came after an objection by defence counsel Jaap Cilliers to the use of documents outlining a 1988 scheme to privatise Delta G Scientific, the Midrand chemical plant funded by the SA Defence Force (SADF) to serve Project Coast.
The company was finally privatised in 1990, when majority shareholding was transferred to Medchem Consolidated Investments, in which evidence has shown Basson held a 50 percent share through WPW Investments Incorporated, one of three companies he set up in the Cayman Islands in 1986.
The original proposal would have seen another Cayman Islands company owned by Basson, PCM International, gaining control of Delta G.
While presenting evidence of the 1988 plan in support of a charge that Basson, in collaboration with Dr Philip Mijburgh - nephew of former defence minister Magnus Malan - deliberately concealed the fact that he would personally benefit from the privatisation of Delta G Scientific and another SADF front company, Roodeplaat Research Laboratory, Ackerman was interrupted by Hartzenberg, who asked abruptly: "Where are we going with this? This is a proposal that came to nothing. What on earth is wrong with this? Who were they trying to deceive? The entire privatisation process was an open one, approved by 10 people sitting at a meeting in Cape Town. Where is the deception here?"
Evidence by former surgeon-general Niel Knobel, Basson's immediate superior on Project Coast, has been that while it would have been acceptable to the SADF for Basson to use front companies to launder project funds in such a way that they could not be traced back to the SADF, he was not allowed to benefit financially in any way.
Basson had never disclosed the existence of the WPW Group or its South African arm, the Wisdom Group, let alone his interest in such companies, to the SADF generals who managed Project Coast, Knobel said.
Basson has pleaded not guilty to 61 charges, ranging from drug trafficking and fraud to murder. He has consistently and categorically denied any personal benefit from the more than 50 subsidiaries in the WPW and Wisdom groups, or that he had signing powers on any foreign bank accounts.
However, the forensic audit has uncovered numerous company accounts in Europe, America, England, South Africa and the Cayman Islands to which Basson had access. Two personal bank accounts in his name have also been found, one in Switzerland, the other in Luxembourg.
The first probe into alleged irregularities of Project Coast funds was carried out internally by the SADF in 1992. Since 1993, the Office for Serious Economic Offences has spent seven years - and millions of rands - unravelling the alleged misappropriation of taxpayers' funds for the purchase by the WPW/Wisdom companies of two aircraft, a condominium in Orlando, Florida, two apartments in Brussels, a corporate lodge at Fancourt golf resort near George, the Five Nations Club on the border of Belgium, a cottage near Queen Elizabeth's favourite weekend home, Windsor Castle, and a Pretoria mansion, Merton House, revamped for R10 million before it was sold to Zimbabwe for R6 million in 1994.
Despite being questioned extensively over the past six years, Basson has never offered any explanation for the investment of funds earmarked for a chemical and biological warfare programme.
Despite evidence showing several apparently bogus deals in which the actual beneficiaries were Basson's companies, Judge Hartzenberg said on Friday it was his impression, based on Knobel's evidence, that Basson had been given "a free hand to invest funds abroad in order to buy equipment" for Project Coast, and that the SADF's co-ordinating control committee had not wanted to know the details of how he was hiding the military origin of the funds.
"If WPW used these accounts secretly to the benefit of the project, I have a problem with the concept that by not disclosing the existence of the group, there was fraud or deliberate deception," he said.
While conceding that the companies allegedly used to launder the funds for Basson's benefit were never included in the annual report to the SADF of "official" front companies and bank accounts used by Project Coast, Hartzenberg said he "did not know" to whom Basson ought to have disclosed these details, but that it was his impression that the 1991 restructuring of the WPW/Wisdom group and such matters as setting up trust funds in the Channel Islands in 1993 had been part of the "finalisation" of Project Coast.
The court has heard that Basson set up three trust funds in Jersey. The largest, the Aries Trust, into which at least R1,6 million allegedly flowed from Project Coast, names his wife Annette and children Naomi and Wouter Jacques as beneficiaries.
Following Friday's altercation with the judge, the prosecution asked for an adjournment to Monday when it will respond to Hartzenberg's outburst.
Sunday Independent
December 02 2000 at 05:40PM
By Marlene Burger
For 12 years, working out of the Zanza building in Pretoria's Proes street, a small group of military officers ran one of the most secret and consistently denied covert operations of the apartheid era, which cost taxpayers millions of rands between 1980 and 1992.
Now, thanks to the trial of Wouter "Dr Death" Basson, the former South African Defence Force's (SADF) chemical warfare project leader, details are finally emerging of the SADF's support of Mozambican resistance movement Renamo.
So clandestine was the operation, called Operation Mila, that a national serviceman unmasked as an ANC spy was offered a five-year prison sentence if he pleaded guilty to possession of classified documents rather than risk him exposing the workings of military intelligence's Directorate Special Tasks (DST) in a public trial.
It implicates the postal authorities and an insurance company
But the document containing names, dates, places and financial details prepared for use in his defence by Roland Hunter, now the chief financial director of the Johannesburg Metropolitan Council, has finally been acknowledged as an accurate record of the SADF's role in a regional conflict that claimed 600 000 lives.
Hunter was the Renamo paymaster when he was arrested in December 1983 for passing classified documents to the ANC through Derek Hanekom, the former minister of agriculture, and his wife Trish.
Hunter's boss at DST was retired Brigadier Cor van Niekerk, who ran Operation Mila from inception.
Van Niekerk was one of more than 20 senior security force officers charged and acquitted with Magnus Malan, the apartheid government's minister of defence, with responsibility for the 1985 KwaMakhutha massacre. That case involved the secret training of Inkatha Freedom Party recruits in the Caprivi.
Hunter's document - filed with the Pretoria high court in support of charges linking Basson to the murder of the assassins of Orlando Cristina, Renamo's secretary-general - implicates both the South African postal authorities and insurance giant Sanlam in the covert support programme.
Hunter had direct access to hundreds of Renamo trainees and leaders
Senior Renamo officials living in South Africa under SADF protection had to pay 10 percent of their monthly allowances for compulsory life insurance. The premiums for Sanlam policies 00001 to 000014 were paid by Hunter to a Nedbank account in the name of JS Venter, "a former Bureau of State Security agent and pigeon breeder" based in Durban until he was transferred to Sanlam Centre in Johannesburg in January 1983.
Hunter was also in charge of special insurance policies for pilots who made covert flights to Mozambique, frequently to pick up Afonso Dhlakama, the Renamo president, or to make resupply drops.
A cover of R150 000 per pilot was activated by a telephone call to Sanlam on the morning of a flight. Daily premiums of R150 were paid for the duration of the trip.
Recruited in mid-1982 while doing guard duty at DST offices for what he was promised would be "much more interesting" work, Hunter had direct access to hundreds of Renamo trainees and leaders housed at secret bases inside South Africa, and to a plethora of information about Operation Mila.
His account of the military, financial, political and propaganda support for Renamo has been confirmed by witnesses in the Basson trial, including Van Niekerk.
Operation Mila - originally known as Operation Altar - was inherited by the SADF from Rhodesia within 72 hours of Robert Mugabe winning the March 1980 elections in the former Rhodesia.
The operation came with a number of former Rhodesian security force members who had been involved with Renamo since 1976 and were slotted into the SADF.
At its peak, aid to Renamo cost taxpayers more than R1 million a month. The DST at the time had an annul budget of R300 million.
This included the running of two bases at Phalaborwa - Savong, the operational headquarters to which access was across land owned by the Phalaborwa Mining Company - and Zobo City, a training base whose entrance was adjacent to the Phalaborwa gate into the Kruger National Park.
Dhlakama and his supreme military commander, Raoul Domingos, had semi-permanent residence at Savong until the camp was hurriedly evacuated under cover of darkness in February 1983 after it had been infiltrated by members of Mozambique's ruling Frelimo party.
While the apartheid government finally admitted in September 1985 that it had been supplying "humanitarian aid" to Renamo, military support was vigorously denied, both before and after the 1984 Nkomati Accord was signed by South Africa and Mozambique.
Date: 18 Feb 2000
Weekly Mail & Guardian
Marlene Burger
The marathon trial of Dr Wouter Basson degenerated into a clash of legal wills this week after the extraordinary demand by the state prosecutor that the presiding Judge, Willie Hartzenberg, step down.
After searching in vain for legal precedent, lawyers on both sides concluded that this was probably the first time in South African legal history that the prosecution in a criminal trial had sought the recusal of a judge.
At stake was nothing less than the projected two-year trial of Basson, the apartheid government's germ warfare boffin, who has pleaded not guilty to 61 criminal charges ranging from drug trafficking to murder.
In one corner was feisty senior state advocate Anton Ackerman, the man who successfully led the prosecution against police hit squad leader Eugene de Kock and put seedy Civil Co-operation Bureau agent Ferdi Barnard behind bars.
In the other, surprisingly, was the presiding judge, a man whose role is customarily that of umpire rather than contender.
Thrust into the limelight a fortnight ago, when he told the court it would take "very little" to convince him that a multinational business empire set up and secretly controlled by Basson was not, as the state alleges, used to defraud taxpayers of R36- million, Judge Hartzenberg shrugged off one body blow after another as Ackerman reeled off a litany of comments, rulings and incidents during the first three months of the trial which, he said, showed not only that the judge was biased in favour of the accused, but had prejudged the massive body of evidence amassed by the state over the past seven years.
At times, Ackerman confessed, he had felt like Judge Hartzenberg's "punchbag". At others, his perception of prejudice had been reinforced by slights from the Bench about ostensibly trivial matters such as his illegible signature, and sarcastic barbs directed exclusively at the prosecution.
But, despite the fact that Judge Hartzenberg dismissed the recusal application as frivolous, absurd, mind- boggling and unfounded "in totality", this was not a step taken lightly by the state.
Ackerman entered the arena with the full support of National Director of Prosecutions Bulelani Ngcuka, and his deputy, Jan d'Oliveira, who initiated the prosecution of Basson while still Transvaal attorney general three years ago.
Applications for judges to step down on grounds of bias are not uncommon in South African courts, but they are traditionally brought by the accused, and this is believed to be the first time a prosecutor has sought recusal in a criminal case.
Seen in isolation, Ackerman acknowledged, the incidents cited did not give undue cause for concern, but the cumulative effect had led the state to believe that it had "absolutely no chance" of gaining convictions in Judge Hartzenberg's court on any of the 27 fraud charges.
Ironically, the 60-year-old judge - younger brother of Conservative Party leader Dr Ferdi Hartzenberg - has built an impressive reputation in his 20 years on the bench as an astute arbiter in commercial cases.
Mind-numbing in its complexity, Basson's alleged fraud requires a seemingly endless ream of supporting documents - many in his own handwriting - to explain. On one occasion, this prompted the judge to tell Ackerman he was "bored to death" by repeated and detailed reference to correspondence, bank records and statements during testimony by forensic auditor Hennie Bruwer. There was "no need to prove your case three times", Judge Hartzenberg said, urging the prosecutor to confine himself to the auditor's summarised report "unless there is something earth-shattering you want to tell me".
Ten days later, the judge halted Ackerman in his tracks as he read out a letter dealing with a 1988 proposal for privatisation of Delta G Scientific, the Midrand chemical plant set up by the then South African Defence Force as part of the top-secret Project Coast, asking irascibly: "Where are we going with this? This is a proposal that came to nothing. What on earth is wrong with this? Who were they trying to deceive? Where is the fraud here?"
These and similar comments had given rise to mounting frustration and a growing perception that the state was "wasting its time ... and might as well pack its bags", Ackerman told Judge Hartzenberg.
In addition, the judge appeared to "slavishly" accept every suggestion made by defence counsel Jaap Cilliers to expedite proceedings, and at times even seemed to be offering "cues" on which a defence for Basson could be built.
Indeed, the state perception was that Judge Hartzenberg "constantly" sought and highlighted aspects of the case which could be used to illustrate the innocence of the accused.
At one point during legal argument, Judge Hartzenberg told Ackerman he had not realised "how many times you have been unhappy".
"Perhaps you should have looked at me more often, Your Honour," Ackerman replied laconically.
That Judge Hartzenberg was not taking the challenge to his honour lightly was evident throughout the legal argument, as he traded blow for verbal blow with the man who wanted him to step down, asking at one juncture: "At the end of the day, must this case be tried on the way the advocates act, or on the facts? How have I prejudiced you - except for bruising your ego?"
With more than 150 witnesses yet to testify against Basson, the end is still a long way off, but as he left court on Wednesday afternoon, Ackerman had elicited from the judge the categoric assurance that in accordance with his oath of office, he would weigh every shred of evidence in order to ensure that justice prevails.
And there, at least for now and on the question of bias, the prosecution must rest.
Weekly Mail & Guardian
Date: 05 Apr 2002
April 11 is judgement day for Wouter Basson, but it seems he may not have much to worry about, writes Marlene Burger
Catalogued among the myriad specious tales recounted in a Pretoria courtroom over the past 30 months is one in particular that veteran prosecutor Anton Ackermann cannot abide.
The stirring yarn has former military officer Wouter Basson bolting from one European hidey-hole to another over a three-month period in 1993. Travelling on foot or thumbing lifts from passing motorists, with American and British secret agents in hot pursuit, his desperate flight culminates in a secret meeting with his erstwhile South African Defence Force (SADF) boss � and his first hot meal in weeks, courtesy of surgeon general Niel Knobel's concerned wife.
Within a week Basson � and the world � will know if Judge Willie Hartzenberg shares Ackermann's disbelief in what he likens to "a story worthy of a World War II partisan", or whether the testimony of almost 200 state witnesses and thousands of supporting documents will be rejected in favour of Basson's sole explanation of events surrounding the remaining 46 criminal charges against him.
Hartzenberg's judgement, to be delivered in the Pretoria High Court from
April 11, will do one of two things:
� Vindicate a team of investigators who have spent almost 10 years uncovering an alleged R36-million fraud against a top-secret military project, as well as some of the most heinous murders perpetrated by agents of the apartheid government.
� Reinforce the perception � created by such failed legal exercises as the 1990 Harms Commission of Inquiry into state-sponsored hit squads and the 1996 trial of former defence minister Magnus Malan and a phalanx of top-ranking military officers for the KwaMakhutha massacre � that the top echelons of the former SADF appear somehow to be above the law.
Already burdened by the daunting logistics of presiding over Basson's trial � the transcript of proceedings runs to close on 30000 pages; the court travelled to the United States for 10 days of hearings; key witnesses had to be brought to South Africa from Canada and Europe; the vast majority of evidence was presented by alleged accomplices and is thus subject to specific cautionary rules �the judge has had to get to grips with one of the most sophisticated fraud scenarios ever placed before a South African court, and absorb the arcane intricacies of chemical and biological warfare.
For while the prosecution has emphasised from the start that one of the most costly criminal trials in South African legal history indicts neither the SADF nor its top-secret chemical and biological warfare programme, Project Coast, the charges of fraud, murder and drug trafficking against Basson arise from his alleged abuse of the project he led for 12 years.
The scope and complexity of the case, coupled with the passing of more than 15 years since many of the alleged crimes were committed, were enough to raise eyebrows when Judge Hartzenberg opted to act as sole adjudicator, eschewing the help of assessors who might, at least, have acted as a sounding board for his own impressions.
Even so, the prosecution has argued, the test of guilt amounts to nothing more taxing than "the reasonable man's" view. As Ackermann reminded the judge at one point, the British and American legal systems do not even require adjudicators of fact to be legal savants � a jury might include a plumber, housewife, factory worker or truck driver, required only to listen to the evidence and weigh the probabilities before delivering a verdict, on the basis of which an offender could even be sentenced to death.
All Judge Hartzenberg had to do, Ackermann urged, was place himself in the shoes of any one of 12 imaginary members of a jury of Basson's peers, and there would be "neither doubt nor ambiguity" about his guilt.
Three days after voicing this opinion, Ackermann effectively retired from
the arena, telling the judge it was blatantly obvious that despite the massive body of evidence before him, Judge Hartzenberg had not shifted one iota from the presumption of innocence that gave rise to an application for his recusal on the grounds of bias in February 2000.
In any other case, Ackermann's dramatic delegation of summation and final argument to a junior advocate would have made news headlines. In the Basson case, it passed all but unnoticed, the almost inevitable final act in a running battle between the Bench and the prosecution for which the stage was set on the very first day of the trial � October 4 1999.
Even before Basson entered a plea on the 67 charges he originally faced, the state suffered the first of a series of major setbacks. Defence advocates paid by the "new" defence force challenged the right of the Pretoria court to try him for crimes allegedly committed in Namibia during the border war. The first of many bombshells was dropped by Jaap Cilliers in the form of revelations � never before made public � that on the eve of independence, the administrator general of then South West Africa had granted amnesty to all members of the South African security forces for any acts, legal or not, carried out during the Angolan and Namibian conflict.
Furthermore, the defence sought exclusion from the trial of the transcript of Basson's October 1997 bail hearing, on the grounds that it contained extensive reference to his testimony during 39 days of interrogation by the Office for Serious Economic Offences (OSEO) during 1994. Like evidence presented to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, OSEO testimony may not be used against a defendant in a court of law.
As a result of the Namibian amnesty, six of the most serious charges against Basson � including the only murder charge that actually placed him at the scene of the crime � were dropped immediately. On the morning of November 15 the judge grant-ed the application for exclusion of the bail hearing, accusing the state of "ambushing" the accused and thus violating his right to a fair trial, then trying to "slip the record in through the back door".
It was a semi-nal moment inll the case. Retired surgeon general Knobel was about to start testifying and, as the manager of Project Coast, he was the first witness who would have been able to furnish thell court with detailsll of the project, official front companies and specific financial transactions that could be measured against the version previously of-l fered by Basson. Denied this opportunity to highlight possible discrepancies that would bolsterll its case, the state was at a decided disadvantage � and there was worse to come.
A year later the court also ruled the transcript of a four-day debriefing of Basson by the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) inadmissible. The document was crucial to the state's case, offering Basson's answers to many of the questions at the heart of the most serious criminal charges against him, including allegations of murder and the chronology of his contact with Libya, the pillar on which his ultimate defence would rest heavily.
Senior NIA personnel involved in the 1994 exercise were not even permitted to use the 166-page transcript as an aide-m�moire while testifying, because it could not be certified as correct, the NIA having meanwhile recycled the tapes used to record the session.
Towards the end of 2000 the state scored a rare and � at the time � significant victory, when the court agreed to move to Jacksonville, Florida, to hear the evidence of US attorney David Webster, the nomi-nal head of the WPW Group at the centre of the labyrinthine business empire allegedly used by Basson to defraud Project Coast. The defence had vigorously opposed this move, knowing that unless Webster and other key foreign witnesses testified, the state would not be allowed to rely on the reams of potentially damning documents retrieved from their files. Webster, former British secret agent Roger Buffham, Luxembourg businessman Bernard Zimmer and Swiss pharmacologist Dr David Chu � pivotal figures in the tangled financial web woven under the aegis of Project Coast � had all refused to testify against Basson in a South African court, some fearing prosecution as accomplices, others fearing for their lives.
The defence made much of their reluctance, repeatedly telling the judge they could not afford to acknowledge the roles they had played in helping Basson circumvent international sanctions and establish a chemical and biological warfare programme for the SADF, because to do so would almost certainly hold dire consequences for them in their own countries.
As it happened, all Basson's foreign associates vehemently denied any knowledge of Project Coast, or that the WPW Group was ever designed as anything but his personal international business empire. In the end, Zimmer and Chu did testify in Pretoria, but the judge refused to travel to England to hear testimony from Buffham � whom he summarily dubbed a liar on the basis of a single sworn statement in which Buffham denied supplying equipment for which the SADF paid millions of rands, but which the state alleges was never acquired by the project, the funds having been diverted by Basson to purchase private aircraft, valuable real estate on three continents and to finance the jet-set lifestyle he and his closest friends enjoyed at taxpayers' expense.
Months before judgement day, Judge Hartzenberg went even further, all but rejecting the evidence of the remaining foreign witnesses, along with that of those who made up Basson's inner circle, sharing his hedonistic pursuits in exchange for administering the WPW Group's extensive South African operations. Every witness Ackermann had called, "from America to South Africa � the lot of them", had underplayed his or her involvement in Project Coast, Judge Hartzenberg pronounced.
It was at this juncture, last November, that Ackermann, frustrated by two years of what appears to have been little more than paying lip service to the judicial process, told the judge there was no point to continuing, since lJudge Hartzenberg had obviously decided at least 18 months earlier that the accused was lllllinnocent, and the state now had a clear indication of "who in this court is revered as the Virgin Mary".
Ackermann's reference to a preconceived opinion echoed the sequence of events set in motion on February 4 2000 � Black Friday, as he calls it � when simmering tensions reached boiling point and the state brought an application, unprecedented in South African criminal courts, for the judge to remove himself from the Bench on the grounds of bias.
Several incidents were cited to support the claim that Judge Hartzenberg had prejudged the case, but the catalyst was his unequivocal statement, during presentation of a forensic audit report based on a seven-year international probe, that it would "take very little" to convince him that the WPW Group had not, in fact, been established to serve the interests of Project Coast rather than those of Basson personally, as the state alleged.
Judge Hartzenberg refused to step down and, by the time Basson began testifying in July last year, had granted him an interim acquittal on 15 charges across the spectrum covered by the indictment.
During the nine weeks Basson spent in the witness stand, eight of them under gruelling cross-examination, every aspect of his association with Project Coast came under the microscope. For the first time the court had the opportunity to hear and observe at first-hand the brilliant cardiologist universally known as Dr Death, the alleged purveyor of lethal toxins used by agents of the covert Civil Cooperation Bureau to "eliminate" enemies of the apartheid state, the former SADF's pre-eminent expert on chemical and biological warfare, the career officer sacked in a December 1992 purge of the military, the alleged mastermind behind a major fraud that went undetected for seven years.
The prosecutors were confident that any lingering doubts the judge might have after a parade of witnesses had pointed the finger of guilt at Basson � even though this demanded that they incriminate themselves in mass murder, drug-peddling and international fraud � would be laid to rest by relentless attention to detail and discrepancy, to say nothing of the highly incriminating documents that Ackermann produced at every turn, firm in his conviction that "the palest ink is always clearer than the best memory".
But if Judge Hartzenberg's judgement next week reflects his comments and observations during presentation of the state's final argument, the prosecutors will be forced to admit they miscalculated the impact of both Basson's testimony and demeanour on the man in the scarlet robe.
Liberally salted with jargon more readily found in best-selling spy thrillers than legal tomes, Basson wove a tapestry richly embroidered with apocryphal threads that even the most dextrous of fiction writers � Frederick Forsyth, John le Carr�, Tom Clancy and other masters of the genre � would be hard-pressed to stitch into a credible and coherent read. Ackermann later argued that while Basson displayed an "exceptional" gift for romanticising every situation, placing himself at the centre of derring-do escapades in selfless service to God and country, his elevation of "perfectly mundane business deals" to the level of heartstopping imaginary spy dramas served only to underline the absence of such adventure from his real life.
Co-prosecutor Dr Torie Pretorius was somewhat less charitable, pointing out that by his own admission, Basson's entire association with Project Coast had been built on lies, deceit, misrepresentation and the ability to manipulate situations to his own advantage. In the process he had acquired "a collection of persona", become a glib and highly skilled liar, wheeler-dealer, international drug dealer and especially adept at improvising plausible cover-ups in order to extricate himself from potentially tricky situations. Furthermore, Basson had proudly told the court that the most valuable lesson taught by Special Forces was how to withstand interrogation by employing deceit � a strategy and technique he had applied throughout the trial in order to deliberately mislead the court.
Exceptionally intelligent and highly qualified in his fields of expertise, phrases such as front companies, financial "engineering", cunning "manoeuvres" designed to create illusions, pseudo-deals, facades, "orchestrate events" and others in similar vein trip off Basson's lips as easily as another man might say "hello".
His academic qualifications are impressive: he is a double medical specialist in cardiology and internal medicine; holds an MSc in physiology and physiological chemistry, and a BComm, which he obtained part-time in the run-up to his trial; is a qualified military explosives llexpert; and founder and former commander of the SADF's Special Forces lllmedical support llbattalion. He has ltravelled the globe and has la working knowledge of several languages, has rubbed shoulders as comfortably with notorious international arms smugglers and drug lords as with the likes of PW Botha, Nelson Mandela, former French first lady Danielle Mitterand, a succession of SADF generals and senior Cabinet ministers in South Africa and Libya.
Articulate and eloquent, he has an ostensibly plausible answer for every question, and no scruples about denigrating anyone who dares level accusations at him, or attributing blame to dead men, such as former SADF chief general Kat Liebenberg and one of the SADF's true heroes, 5 Reconnaissance Regiment commander Corrie Meerholz, irrespective of how close they might once have been. When challenged on even the most minor of his avowed abilities Basson's inherent narcissism emerges, and his testimony is as littered with the "firsts" to which he lays claim as with scornful dismissals of those considered minnows in the murky waters where he alone swam as a shark.
Directors of Project Coast's front companies "didn't have a clue" that they were actually working for the military and fell "hook, line and sinker" for the cover story he spun. Scientists whom he handpicked for the project turned out to be not only "impossible to manage � supreme egotists who shamelessly stole one another's ideas", but simply not up to the advanced research that chemical and biological warfare demands, so that he had to carry out the most sophisticated and clandestine experiments himself.
Offered the job of leading the chemical and biological warfare project at the age of 30, with less than five years of military service under his belt, Basson accepted with alacrity, seeing this as both an "interesting mental exercise" and an "honour and privilege" if South Africa's fighting men were in danger of chemical attack by their enemies. Since "everyone" in the SADF at the time was utterly ignorant about this form of warfare, he alone, untrained in espionage though he was, had to penetrate existing chemical and biological warfare programmes in the US, Britain and former East Bloc countries, even Moscow, to obtain the information and equipment needed. Not only does he claim to have done so with great success, but also to have eluded detection by the world's top intelligence agencies for more than a decade.
Depending on what question was being put to him, Basson alternated between the imperious and the obsequious. Challenged about whether he had ever actually been in the heat of combat, he informed Ackermann that he had, in fact, been awarded the highest military decoration a non-general in the SADF could receive. Shortly afterwards, however, when pressed to explain why written responses to questions from the OSEO about questionable aspects of Project Coast's finances differed markedly from his answers in court, Basson effortlessly segued into the role of humble servant, claiming he had merely acted as a scribe � been "the lowly brigadier in the corner" � and had played no role in compiling the documents furnished by Knobel.
Despite a seemingly endless list of cardinal discrepancies between statements made by his advocates to one witness after another during cross-examination, and the version ultimately offered by Basson himself, the judge has already made it clear that during 40 days of listening to Basson, he saw no sign of an argumentative witness, merely one who "tried to lay the facts before the court" and that, in his opinion, there is no reason why Basson's version of events could not be reasonably, possibly true.
But two of the most telling indicators of what Judge Hartzenberg will do next week lie in particularly acrimonious, recent exchanges that appear to render impotent every effort made by the prosecutors to secure Basson's conviction.
From Ackermann, the judge demanded to know who exactly the complainant in this case was, specifically in regard to the fraud charges, since even now he is not clear who, "apart from the Office for Serious Economic Offences and the prosecution", believes there has been any fraud at all. In fact, Judge Hartzenberg told a visibly stunned Ackermann, it seems to him that not a single person from within the ranks of the SADF has ever suspected Basson of purloining funds for personal gain, and that the entire investigation launched by the OSEO at the end of 1993 and culminating in this trial has been a "huge embarrassment" to former SADF members, none of whom ever expressed concern or had "any problem" with Basson's activities.
Pretorius came in for an even more savage drubbing. It defied his comprehension, Judge Hartzenberg burst out at one point, that a man like Dr Basson had been the victim of an unrelenting witch-hunt, while a "repugnant" creature like Johan Theron � a former Military Intelligence colonel who implicated Basson in the supply of toxins used to systematically murder "hundreds" of Swapo prisoners of war before their naked bodies were flung into the sea from a light aircraft specially bought for this purpose � continues to walk around a free man.
In the annals of the Basson trial, it might just be comments such as these, recorded well in advance of his final judgement, that reserve a place in legal infamy for Judge Hartzenberg.
Marlene Burger is a freelance journalist who has monitored the Basson trial on behalf of the Centre for Conflict Resolution at the University of Cape Town.