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20 April 03 Entry: "Bioweapons for sale"

S. African scientist offered U.S. agents cache of pathogens. Daan Goosen’s calling card to the FBI was a vial of bacteria he had freeze-dried and hidden inside a toothpaste tube for secret passage to the United States. FROM AMONG hundreds of flasks in his Pretoria lab, the South African scientist picked a man-made strain that was sure to impress: a microbial Frankenstein that fused the genes of a common intestinal bug with DNA from the pathogen that causes the deadly illness gas gangrene.
“This will show the Americans what we are capable of,” Goosen said at the time. On May 6, 2002, Goosen slipped the parcel into the hands of a retired CIA officer who couriered the microbes 8,000 miles for a drop-off with the FBI. If U.S. officials liked what they saw, Goosen said he was prepared to offer much more: An entire collection of pathogens developed by a secret South African bioweapons research program Goosen once headed.

$5 MILLION ASKING PRICE
Goosen’s extraordinary offer to the FBI, outlined in documents obtained by The Washington Post and interviews with key participants, promised scores of additional vials containing the bacteria that cause anthrax, plague, salmonella and botulism, as well as antidotes for many of the diseases. Several strains, like the bacterial hybrid in the toothpaste tube, had been genetically altered, a technique used by weapons scientists to make diseases harder to detect and defeat. All were to be delivered to the U.S. government for safekeeping and to help strengthen U.S. defenses against future terrorism attacks.
U.S. officials considered the offer but balked at the asking price - $5 million and immigration permits for Goosen and up to 19 associates and family members to come to the United States. The deal collapsed in confusion last year after skeptical FBI agents turned the matter over to South African authorities, who twice investigated Goosen but never charged him.
Participants in the failed deal differ on what happened and why. But they agree that the bacterial strains remain in private hands in South Africa, where they have continued to attract attention from individuals interested in acquiring them.
The episode throws new light on the extraordinarily difficult task of preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. South Africa, which built nuclear, chemical and biological arsenals under apartheid, renounced its weapons in 1993, and sought to destroy all traces of them, including instruction manuals and bacterial seed stocks. But like other countries that have attempted such a rollback, such as Ukraine and Kazakhstan, South Africa finds itself in a gray zone where weapons of the past pose serious dangers for the present.
“The weapons programs were ostensibly terminated, yet clearly they weren’t able to destroy everything,” said Jeffrey M. Bale of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, which is carrying out a study of South Africa’s weapons programs. “The fact that Goosen and others are providing samples and being approached by foreign parties suggests that these things never really went away.”
To disarmament experts, the case is especially troubling because of the kinds of terrorist-ready weapons produced by Project Coast, a top-secret biological and chemical program created by South Africa’s white-minority government, which came to light in the late 1990s. Unlike U.S. and Soviet programs that amassed huge stockpiles of bombs and missiles for biological warfare, Project Coast specialized in the tools of terrorism and assassination-including 'stealth' weapons that could kill or incapacitate without leaving a trace. The program’s military commanders also researched anti-fertility drugs that could be clandestinely applied in black neighborhoods, and explored-but never produced-biological weapons that would selectively target the country’s black majority population.
Even if all of Project Coast’s bacterial strains are secured, the know-how and skills acquired by dozens of its scientists may be impossible to contain, South African officials acknowledged in interviews. Several key scientists have pursued business interests overseas since the program was disbanded shortly before South Africa’s transition to democracy. Others, including Goosen, have acknowledged they were approached by recruiters claiming to represent foreign governments or extremist groups. While the United States has spent tens of millions of dollars to re-train and re-employ weapons scientists in the former Soviet Union, many Project Coast scientists have been shunned by their peers and left to try to support themselves any way they can.
“It would have been galling to most South Africans to see their government take care of these scientists, after all the revelations about them,” said Chandre Gould, an investigator for South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the late 1990s and now the co-author of an official United Nations study on Project Coast. “They were part of a program that tried to kill people in this society.”

NOVEL WEAPONS
The failed deal with the South African scientist is documented in hundreds of pages of memos, contracts and reports. Many of the documents were provided by Don Mayes , a former CIA operative who acted as go-between in the deal, and helped arrange for the bacterial sample to be brought to the United States for testing. Mayes, Goosen, and several other South African participants were also interviewed at length for this article.
The FBI and CIA, which were jointly involved in the encounter with Goosen, declined to speak about it on the record. However, U.S. government officials, who asked not to be identified by name, have provided details of the negotiations. They say the agencies were troubled by Goosen’s claims but suspected the scientist and his partners were more interested in cashing in than helping out. They viewed Goosen and his partners as naive, at best, for expecting to be rewarded for turning over what they viewed as 1990s-vintage biological material-products that could be duplicated in any well-equipped, modern microbiology lab.
“If they thought we were going to put out good money for that kind of stuff, they came to the wrong group,” said one U.S. law-enforcement official who reviewed Goosen’s proposal. “Thanks for being good citizens, but no thanks.” Goosen acknowledged that he had hoped to benefit financially, and sought permission to work in the United States, where he wanted to start a new business. But he says the FBI misjudged both his intentions and his ability to help them defend against future bioterrorism.
“At minimum, they should have copies and DNA fingerprints for each of the strains from Project Coast,” he said. “If one of the strains were to turn up in Iraq, at least they would know where it came from.”
Goosen, an affable 51-year-old who became a veterinarian like his father, was picked in 1981 as the founding director of Roodeplaat Research Laboratories, the bioweapons research arm of Project Coast.
Project Coast’s notorious military commander, Wouter Basson, used the lab to create novel weapons for use against anti-apartheid activists and the black communities that supported them, according to documents and testimony in a murder and fraud case that ended last year in Basson’s acquittal. One of Goosen’s first assignments, he has said, was to harvest highly lethal venom from the black mambo snake for use in secret assassinations. Fangs from a dead snake were used to make impressions in the victim’s skin so the death would appear accidental.
A widening rift between Goosen and Basson over the lab’s direction ended with Goosen’s resignation in 1986. But he continued to work as a consultant for the lab and maintained close ties with its scientists, some of whom would later work for him in his private laboratory. After Project Coast was disbanded, Goosen was among the first scientists to publicly acknowledge and condemn its offensive weapons research.
South African officials claimed to have destroyed all of Project Coast’s biological materials in 1993, several months before the outgoing government of Frederik W. de Klerk revealed the secret program to Nelson Mandela, the first president of post-apartheid South Africa. But Goosen says many scientists kept copies of organisms and documents in order to continue work on ‘dual-use’ projects with commercial as well as military applications. Goosen’s vaccine production lab, ended up with hundreds of strains, at least half of which were from Project Coast. At his home in Pretoria, he showed a visiting reporter two trays of what he described as vaccine strains that he kept in a freezer. “The products should have been destroyed. The products were not destroyed,” he said.
After the U.S. anthrax attack in October 2001, at the urging of American friends, Goosen approached the U.S. Department of Defense with an offer of “open cooperation” in sharing Project Coast’s extensive research in anthrax vaccines and novel antidotes known as antiserums. The Pentagon was sufficiently interested to arrange a meeting in January 2002 between Goosen and Bioport Corp., the Michigan company that produces anthrax vaccines for the military. But interest from the U.S. side evaporated quickly, to Goosen’s amazement. “At that time there was a massive amount of good will toward the United States, and a feeling that we could contribute,” Goosen said. “My thinking was: If George Bush had contracted anthrax, our technology could have cured him.”