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doctor death
by janine stephen |
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busted for ecstasy, tried for hi-tech, drug-based genocide, wouter
basson LEAVES A legacy THAT’S A prime example of science gone very wrong
When police arrested
a short, trim, balding man during a drug bust in January 1997 for attempting to sell 1,040 capsules of the drug Ecstasy (MDMA), they had no idea that he was one of the apartheid government’s best-kept secrets.
As it turned out, Dr. Wouter Basson, a physician and cardiologist, had been the head of South Africa’s covert chemical and biological weapons program, Project Coast, for 12 years before being hastily dismissed in 1993 during the dying days of apartheid. After the arrest, a police search turned up four locked trunks crammed with classified military documents and, despite the best efforts of the
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National Intelligence Agency and some highpowered South African Defence Force (SADF) generals to keep the past under wraps, facts began to spill out.
Charges for drug dealing were dismissed in the midst of the resulting criminal trial that ultimately saw Basson, nicknamed Dr. Death, tried on 46 counts of theft, murder, and fraud (he was accused of stealing millions of rands from the government). For more than two years, from October 1999 to April 2002, he calmly sat in court as 153 witnesses provided information about his recent past.
What emerged: Scores of scientists had been employed at two front companies in South Africa called Delta G Scientific and Roodeplaat Research laboratories, where they produced toxins such as cholera, botulinum, and anthrax — and turned some of these into murder weapons. A document found in one of the locked trunks records the sale of cigarettes |
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pretoria, south africa, 2001
a confident wouter basson walking into his trial. within a year the high court would clear him of all 46 charges of theft, murder, and fraud.
PHOTO BY THEMBA HADEBE |
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dosed with anthrax, chocolates spiked with anthrax or botulinum, and beer contaminated with thallium and other toxins.
More revelations: Scientists who worked at Delta G and Roodeplaat testified that they were ordered to find a way to make black people infertile. One researcher claimed that Basson ordered his team to develop race-specific biologic weapons — poisons that when dropped on a crowd would work only on black people. Scientists who worked in the two laboratories later reported hearing about Project Coast’s botched assassination attempts: There was a plot to poison Nelson Mandela before his release from prison. An anti-apartheid activist landed in a hospital after his underwear was impregnated with organophosphates, the poisonous ingredients in pesticide (he survived the attempt), while poison-tipped umbrellas and screwdrivers were designed to kill African National Congress (ANC) leaders Ronnie Kasrils
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| Scientists who worked in the two laboratories later reported hearing about Project Coast’s botched assassination attempts: There was a plot to poison Nelson Mandela before his release from prison. |
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and Pallo Jordan in London (an umbrella was actually used in a failed assassination attempt).
A former intelligence officer told the court how hundreds of detainees from SWAPO, a Namibian liberation group, were injected with Tubarine and Scoline, muscle relaxants that in large doses cause the lungs to collapse, and loaded into airplanes; their bodies were dumped 100 miles (160 kilometers) offshore into the ocean. The poisons, he said, were provided by Wouter Basson. And during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings on Project Coast, members of a government hit squad testified that they “were aware of the capacity of the SADF doctors to provide them with toxins,” according to the commission’s final report. “This was corroborated by a member of the Directorate of Covert Collection [military intelligence] who explained to investigators that there was an understanding in their unit that
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they could get toxins from Dr. Basson.”
But how did a man who had supposedly visited chemical and biological weapons programs from the US to Iraq, from Britain to Taiwan; who had dealings with the Libyan, East German, and Russian governments; who knew arms smugglers, sanctions busters, and spies from around the world — how did this man end up accused of selling street drugs? Basson claims he was framed.
The trial revealed that during the 1980s, Project Coast focused in particular on the development of a substance that could “influence the state of mind of crowds.” To this end, the head of the police forensic laboratory provided Basson with confiscated drugs: tons of marijuana, 5,000 LSD tabs and between 100,000 and 200,000 mandrax (methaqualone) tablets. Basson claims that mortar bombs containing mandrax were tested on humans and animals, but the effects
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| THE SCIENTISTS WERE ORDERED TO FIND A WAY
TO MAKE BLACK PEOPLE INFERTILE, TO DEVELOP
RACE–SPECIFIC BIOLOGIC WEAPONS —
POISONS THAT WHEN DROPPED ON A CROWD
WOULD WORK ONLY ON BLACK PEOPLE. |
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were disappointing: the drug seemed to increase tension levels rather than calm anyone down. Still, Delta G Scientific, one of Project Coast’s labs, produced a ton of the stuff in 1988 and pressed it into tablets, supposedly to infiltrate “drugs-for-arms routes used by the ANC’s military wing.” Nobody really knows where these substances ended up.
The same goes for 912 kilograms of 98-percent-pure MDMA produced from June 1992 to January 1993. Only a few scientists knew that Ecstasy was being manufactured. A pharmacist named Steven Beukes encapsulated pills for Delta G, including pills that the prosecution in Basson’s trial claimed were MDMA and Mandrax. Basson argued that Beukes was encapsulating placebos for use in military training. Beukes testified that “having made some funny things previously, I didn’t want to know [what I was making], but it wasn’t Disprin.”
Project Coast also procured four tons of the
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hallucinogenic BZ. Basson explained that some of it was mixed with 80 kilograms of cocaine that had been smuggled into the country in a shipment of bananas from Peru for the “bargain price” of about $300,000. And Basson allegedly obtained a further 500 kilograms of methaqualone from the Croatian government — paid for using stolen Vatican bearer bonds — in 1991.
According to Basson and his superiors, when the project was told to wind down in December 1992, all the drugs produced and purchased were loaded onto aircrafts and dumped into the ocean. But, as with so much information at the trial, the only evidence that this happened was that Basson and his cronies said it did.
His word was enough for Judge Willie Hartzenberg. After the longest trial in South African history, Basson walked free on all charges. The judge couldn’t decide whether
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the Ecstasy found during the drug bust was the result of a “slipup” or a “setup,” but he seemed convinced that the good doctor was entirely innocent.
Basson himself had already planned a celebration party. Throughout the trial, he remained as unflustered as he was on the first day he testified at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings in 1998. On that day, he was asked whether he had ever been tempted to sell the huge quantities of drugs manufactured at the front laboratories for profit. He answered,“ For the last three days, I was tempted by the girl behind me. We’re all subject to temptations. The fact the temptation was there does not mean that I succumbed to that.” And later that evening, during a visit to a coffee shop, Basson whipped out a pen and wrote, “TRUTH OVER ALL” on the wall. He signed his offering “DR. DEATH.”? 
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