under the
microscope
Stories emerging at the truth commission this week of the apartheid government’s `chemical warfare’ sound farcical, but the results were sometimes deadly, writes David Beresford
The 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, Cape Town, 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 his bewilderment about how the former 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 to be – were painstakingly enumerated. Hideous trinkets were offered 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 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 lifetime’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, 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. Joseph 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 his major project at Roodeplaat involved attempts to develop a vaccine to counter human fertility. He said Basson motivated the project by saying Unita leader Jonas Savimbi had a problem because 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 insisted they proceed with it.
The fertility project took up about 30% of the time of staff at the Roodeplaat laboratory which, he rationalised, was time well saved from the alternative – 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 Chikane was expected to be travelling to Namibia – “they were counting on very little forensic capability in Namibia” – but instead he had gone to the United States.
South African agents had been more successful in planting anthrax spores in the food of three Russian advisers to the African National Congress, while they were in Lusaka. One of them died.
There was a possibility 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 of former 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 made the remark”.
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, said killing devices produced by government scientists included walking sticks and umbrellas which fire lethal pellets into a victim. Syringes were disguised as screwdrivers and finger-rings with a hidden cavity could be used by a killer 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 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 -screwdrivers and “needle tubes” -were produced at the hearing as exhibits.
Lourens said they were “spring-loaded” and were 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 polycarbon 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.” Polycarbonate was used because it was difficult to pick up with X-rays.
Lourens said 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 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 hearing continues.