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Wouter Basson: Apartheid's specialist in biological warfare
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Ecstacy and the
apartheid Strangeloves
The astounding Truth Commission evidence this week of the apartheid-era
chemical warfare programme, verged between horror and farce. DAVID BERESFORD reports
HE difficulty was in deciding whether it was tragedy, or farce that was
being played out on the 10th floor of the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission's headquarters in Adderley Street this week.
The farce was inescapable. It was there in the face of the former professor
of organic chemistry at the Rand Afrikaans University, Dr Johan Koekemoer,
as he confessed to his bewilderment as to how the South African Defence
Force intended using up to a billion rands worth of the "love drug"
ecstasy. By kissing the enemy to death?
The tragedy was less easy to discover. But a hint of it was to be heard in
the rustling of the ghosts of those who fell victim to the pursuit of a
chemical Holy Grail by South Africa's Dr Strangeloves.
As the veterinarian, Dr Schalk Van Rensburg, put it: "The most frequent
instruction" from the head of the chemical warfare project Dr Wouter Basson
was for the development of a compound which would kill, but make the cause
of death appear to have been natural. "That was the chief aim of the
Roodeplaat Research Laboratory."
Cholera organisms by the tens of millions; anthrax planted in the gum of
envelopes, in cigarettes and chocolates, thallium, cyanide, umbrellas and
walking sticks firing fatal "bee-stings" which X-rays would struggle to
discover ...
The lists - "murder lists", as Van Rensburg acknowledged them - were
painstakingly enumerated. Hideous trinkets offered up from the Roodeplaat
treasure trove - a "bomb-proof" store-room of toxins next to the office of
chief scientist, Dr Andre Immelman - in pursuit of a warped scientific
quest for a means to create innocence out of murder.
But they were only ghosts of the victims - their individual tragedies
robbed of substance by the unanswered question: Who died? Who enjoyed the
attentions of the 32 bottles of cholera issued to unidentified operatives
of state "security".
It would be most effectively used in the water supply, offered the
micro-biologist, Mike Odendaal, sweating in the glare of national attention
far removed from the safe anonymity of "the lab".
Check if there were any outbreaks of cholera at the time, shrugged Van
Rensburg with the confidence born of a life-time's familiarity with
immutable logic.
There were survivors. Like the Reverend Frank Chikane, who was meant to die
an anonymous death in Namibia far from the prying eyes of sophisticated
pathology. But the killers, who planted the lethal chemicals in five pairs
of his underpants, had got their intelligence wrong and he flew into the
arms of American doctors who not only saved his life, but spotted the
toxins.
For the rest, though, the questions remained unanswered. To some extent
they went unasked, by an audience hypnotised at the final emergence of the
ultimate obscenity of apartheid-rule. Mengele reincarnated. Did they
succeed in planting thallium in Nelson Mandela's medication? Was that
heroic last struggle of Steve Biko with his tormentors a chemically-induced
rage?
As the hearings wore on evidence of the fundamental corruption of a society
oozed out, pus from a wound. For Van Rensburg it was a story which started
in 1984, when he was recruited to Roodeplaat after being told that South
Africa faced a serious threat in the form of a new generation of biological
weapons being developed by the Russians - based on lethal fungoids - which
they believed were being tried out in the Angolan war.
Van Rensburg told the commission that his major project at Roodeplaat
involved attempts to develop a vaccine to counter human fertility. He said
Basson motivated the project by saying that Unita leader Jonas Savimbi had
a problem in that his most efficient soldiers were women, but they kept
falling pregnant. They were also having problems with births in refugee
camps.
Van Rensburg said this explanation was transparently "silly". But the
development of a vaccine was recognised by the scientific community as the
most promising way forward where birth control was concerned and he had
thrown himself into the project.
He had warned Basson that such a vaccine could not be racially-based, it
could not be administered covertly and it could easily be reversed. But
Basson had insisted they proceed with it.
The fertility project took up about 30% of the time for staff at the
Roodeplaat laboratory which, he rationalised, was time well saved from the
alternative, of dreaming up ways of surreptitiously killing people. But the
killing, or at least attempts at it, had gone on.
Immelman had told him the military were furious over their failure to kill
Chikane, "They made a lot of mistakes", he said, including the way they had
applied the toxin to his clothes. There had also been an intelligence
blunder, because he was expected to be travelling to Namibia - "they were
counting on very little forensic capability in Namibia" - but instead he
had gone to the USA.
South African agents had been more successful in planting anthrax spores in
the food of three Russian advisors to the ANC, while they were in Lusaka.
One of them had died.
There was a possibility that an attempt had been made to poison Mandela as
well as Biko. Immelman had been "very confident" that the ANC leader's
brain function "would be impaired, progressively, for some time." Van
Rensburg said he believed the comment was related to plans to lace
Mandela's medication at Pollsmoor Prison with the heavy metal poison,
thallium.
Basson - a cardiologist and personal physician to the former state
president, PW Botha - had said at one stage that they had administered
thallium to Biko. This might have been an "idle boast", he conceded, but "I
don't think so, Dr Basson had been talking to a small group of us technical
people when he had made the remark."
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Van Rensburg said thallium poisoning could account for Biko's irrationally
aggressive behaviour during the police interrogation when he had been
fatally injured.
Earlier in the week assassination instruments worthy of the Borgias were
produced. A bio-engineer who worked in the weapons programme, Dr Jan
Lourens, told the commission that killing devices produced by government
scientists included walking sticks and umbrellas which fire lethal pellets
into a victim. Syringes were disguised as screw-drivers and finger-rings
with a hidden cavity which a killer could be used to pour poison into a
target's drink.
Lourens described how he had delivered one of the weapons to a man he
believed to have been a South African assassin in England. He had nearly
killed himself demonstrating it to the killer in a South African safe house
near Ascot.
He told the commission that he had been transferred from the South African
Air Force to a "special operations" unit within the army's special forces
in 1984. The unit was staffed almost entirely by doctors. He recalled how
he had put together a special radio network for members of the unit, as
well as supplying them with souped-up cars and compact assault rifles.
The engineer said he had been personally involved in the production of the
assassination instruments which he described as "applicators". Several of
the devices - screw-drivers and "needle tubes" - were produced at the
hearing as exhibits.
Lourens said they were "spring-loaded" and used to inject poison. The
needle tubes could be incorporated into an umbrella, or walking stick. A
second version of the weapon had been developed which fired a poly-carbon
ball.
"This ball would have a number of holes drilled into it, so you would be
able to pack a toxic substance into the ball." The ball would be fired into
the back of the victim's leg. "The person being shot would feel something
like a bee-sting." Poly-carbonate was used, because it was difficult to
pick up with X-rays.
Lourens told the truth commission that he had been involved in negotiations
with foreign buyers for the sale of South African weapons technology. One
was a customer who wanted a binary nerve agent called "VX", The deal had
fallen through. He did not know the identity of the would-be buyer, or what
country he came from.
He had also met a Syrian who was buying technology. He had introduced him
to another South African scientist who, he believed, had subsequently
visited Syria.
The hearings into the weapons programme got under way after the government
had failed to persuade the truth commission to stage them behind closed
doors.
President Nelson Mandela's legal advisor, Fink Haysom, argued that there
was a danger that the hearings, if held in public, would lead to the
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and this would be in breach of
South Africa's responsibilities under international treaties.
But a truth commission panel chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu ruled that
they should be held in public for the sake of transparency. It was agreed,
however, that some sensitive documentation would be withheld from the
public.
The hearing continues.
-- Electronic Mail&Guardian, June 11, 1998.
