WOUTER Basson, apartheid South Africa’s germ warfare mastermind, faces judgment on Thursday after a 30-month trial on charges ranging from murder to fraud and drug dealing.
Basson (51) told the Pretoria High Court that his sources in East Germany and Libya and in various foreign intelligence services had put him in touch with drug dealers.
”My Libyan and East German principals, the English, Russians and Swiss intelligence services — I contacted every source I knew in the world,” he said.
In 1992, Basson said, he bought 80 kilograms of cocaine from a military intelligence officer in Peru for $250 000 and smuggled it into South Africa in a shipment of bananas with the help of the police.
Basson admitted that he laundered money in the Cayman Islands, set up a safe-house in Britain and bought a laboratory in the then East Germany. He said he obtained classified documents from the US Library of Congress by posing as a draft dodger on the run from the apartheid army.
Basson testified that South African soldiers were used as guinea pigs in 1989 to test the narcotic drug Mandrax and a new form of tear gas, and said he had bought a zoo to test whether animal hormones could be used to control crowds.
Former soldier Johan Theron testified that Basson had given him deadly muscle relaxants to kill liberation fighters from the South West Africa People’s Organisation (Swapo), a charge Basson denied, and which Judge Willie Hartzenberg threw out on technical grounds.
Theron claimed that hundreds of Swapo fighters captured by the apartheid military in what is now Namibia had been smeared with the substances so they would suffocate before being dumped in the Atlantic Ocean from an aircraft.
Basson’s arsenal was said to include bottles of cholera, cigarettes and envelope-flaps contaminated with anthrax, and poisoned beer, whisky, chocolates and sugar, and witnesses testified that Basson and his team had concocted drugs designed to sterilise or kill black people only.
Basson, dapper, bearded and balding, is known in South Africa as ”Doctor Death” for his work as chief of white-ruled South Africa’s chemical and biological warfare programme, Project Coast.
He has been free throughout his trial, working as chief heart surgeon at the armed forces’ principal hospital in Pretoria until he suffered a minor stroke in February.
Basson ran Project Coast as an army brigadier during the apartheid regime’s fight in the 1980s and early 1990s against what it described as a ”total onslaught” by black nationalists.
The case started in October 1999, after a hearing by the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which probed atrocities committed under white rule.
Retired archbishop Desmond Tutu, who chaired that commission, described the project as ”diabolical”. Plans were even drawn up to put thallium, a heavy metal that can permanently impair brain function, into the medication of Nelson Mandela, who was to become South Africa’s first black president, before he was released from prison in 1990.
Prosecutor Anton Ackermann asked judge Hartzenberg in February last year to recuse himself, arguing that he had pre-judged the case in favour of Basson, whom the court ”revered as the Virgin Mary”. Hartzenberg, an Afrikaner, as is Basson and the lawyers on both sides, refused.
Evidence presented amounted to 30 000 pages of transcripts, leaving Hartzenberg with the complex task of unravelling an intricate network of front companies used by Project Coast in acquiring supplies from intelligence organisations and pharmaceutical companies around the world.
The judge must also look at the allegation that Basson defrauded the apartheid army of R36-million ($3,2-million at current rates).
By the time Basson took the stand in his own defence in July last year, the original 67 charges against him had been pared down to 46.