Speaker 1:

Tonight on Special Assignment as Wouter Basson goes on trial, we meet the scientists who tried to develop the ultimate biological weapon in his laboratories. And we expose the Belgian professor who collaborated with the man they call doctor death.

Speaker 2:

The South of England where the clash of swords and the hymns of angels still rise from ancient castles and graveyards. It was to this part of the United Kingdom that special assignment came in September. Our mission, to unravel one of the best kept secrets of South Africa's chemical and biological warfare programme. We knew that somewhere between thousands of pages of truth commission evidence and countless news reports was a story untold, of a project to breed the ultimate biological weapon, small, undetectable and lethal.

In a manor house on an estate near the hamlet of Hook, we spoke to Dr. Don Goosen, a distinguished clinical pathologist and veterinarian who became a professor at the age of 28. At one stage he headed South Africa's biological warfare laboratories.

Dr Daan Goosen:

An irresponsible person could have killed millions of people. Millions of people. It could have had devastating consequences.

Speaker 2:

It was in a secret laboratory 15KM north of Pretoria that Daan Goosen and his team of scientists hatched their killer bugs. South Africa's chemical and biological warfare programme, code named Project Coast, was based at the Roodeplaat Research Laboratories. Inside the complex was a huge containment laboratory where work on the most lethal bacteria and germs was conducted. It was behind steel gates, a double row of electrified fencing, and specially bred guard dogs, that the scientists achieved their terrifying breakthrough.

Dr Daan Goosen:

To get to this stage took about seven, eight, nine years.

Dr M. Odendaal:

It's so small we have to look at it under a microscope and you have to look at it at least at a thousand times magnification. Then you will see a small little speck.

Dr Daan Goosen:

This is like splitting the atom, exactly the same thing. But we were [inaudible] by the possibilities should this be applied in a war situation, yes.

Dr M. Odendaal:

And it looks very much like a brick, small brick like organism.

Dr Daan Goosen:

So it's unbelievable when you see it to think that this can potentially kill a million or two people. It's unbelievable.

Speaker 2:

Project Coast was born in the early 80s out of the total onslaught paranoia of former state president P. W. Botha. About a billion rand and staff of nearly 200 were allocated to Project Coast. The project carried on into the early 90s and was only disbanded shortly before F. W. de Klerk handed power to Nelson Mandela. At the time, the chief of the South African Defence Force was General Constand Viljoen.

Gen. C. Viljoen:

So in the [inaudible] situation we came across certain indications, according to intelligence reports, of the possibility of chemical warfare.

Dr. Potgieter:

We all received training in counter chemical warfare. We were equipped with basic protective clothing.

Gen. C. Viljoen:

We were dead sure that the possibility of this kind of weapon was a real danger to Angola and to South Africa.

Dr. Potgieter:

Those weapons never showed anywhere in Angola. I don't think there ever was chemical weapons in Angola.

Gen. C. Viljoen:

But there is a report of one case where there were certain explosions by bombs that caused the type of gas which is a reminder of the old type of mustard gas situation.

Speaker 2:

The report referred to by General Viljoen was drawn up by a Belgian toxicologist, Professor Aubin Heyndrickx. The report claimed that the MPLA and the Cubans poisoned UNITA soldiers with chemical weapons. This video shows Heyndrickx dressed in protective clothing and a gas mask collecting samples of a so-called chemical nylon bomb in Angola. Throughout the 80s the reports of Professor Heyndrickx were submitted to the generals to motivate for more money for Project Coast.

Dr Daan Goosen:

[inaudible] was is in establishing a legitimate reason for the South African government and the taxpayers, the army, to get involved in the risk scale in the chemical biological programme.

Speaker 2:

There was another reason for establishing Project Coast. By 1993 the townships were burning, the ANC had embarked on a campaign to make the country ungovernable. The war was coming to the townships.

Gen. C. Viljoen:

So I then said, "Let us develop a type of gas that will calm people down, that would take away aggression from people."

Speaker 2:

And so Project Coast was born. Wouter Basson, a doctor and commandant in the defence force was hand picked to develop a chemical and biological capacity for his apartheid masters. 15 years later Basson is now standing trial on 67 charges, ranging from fraud to drug dealing to murder.

Gen. C. Viljoen:

We regarded him a very trustworthy man, and man of high integrity, and I thought this would be the man to do this.

Dr Daan Goosen:

Basson and I had long discussions over a period of months on this issue, and it was quite clear that he conveyed it to me that the ... we are going into a total war situation. And I felt very positively towards Basson. He visited me at home, he was a soft spoken gentleman, and he was quite nice to my family, and this was to me a ... I had a very positive feeling towards him.

Speaker 2:

Soon afterwards Basson started recruiting scientists for Project Coast. Daan Goosen was one of his most trusted allies and was appointed as the managing director of Roodeplaat Research Laboratories.

Dr Daan Goosen:

We could have employed whoever we wished. We could have gone head hunting, recruited the top scientists in the country, we could have put up the best facilities and we could really be involved in leading and very very sophisticated science.

Dr M. Odendaal:

I was asked by Daan Goosen to join the company as head of the microbiology department.

Dr Daan Goosen:

Guidelines were clear from the beginning, it should be products which are preferably not detectable and not traceable.

Dr M. Odendaal:

I was promised good equipment, good facilities, and the best people that money could buy at that stage.

Dr Daan Goosen:

We had over 600 organisms in the culture bank. Not all of them were suitable for biological weapons, but I would say about 20/30 of those organisms was very ... and the classical type of biological weapons.

Speaker 2:

At the Roodeplaat Research Laboratories, Daan Goosen and his scientists got working. All the programmes, microbiological work and experiments, were performed at Roodeplaat. Project Coast was divided into a chemical and biological section. The chemical laboratory was called Delta G Scientific and was rigged with state of the art equipment. In 1986 a Rand Afrikaans University academic and organic chemist Professor Johan Koekemoer was approached by Basson.

Dr. Koekemoer:

Doctor Basson made an incredible impression on me. I found him a very intelligent person and also as a doctor, as a specialist in his field. He also created the impression that he was extremely proficient in what he was doing and what he could do.

Speaker 2:

Delta produced and analysed poisons and powerful tear gases. Several people were allegedly killed with these toxins.

Dr. Koekemoer:

We were quite a happy bunch of scientists doing some interesting work.

Speaker 2:

Johan Koekemoer embarked on probably the most bizarre aspect Project Coast. He was allegedly ordered by Wouter Basson to manufacture a tonne of the drug ecstasy. He believed it would be used in the townships to calm or incapacitate blacks during riots.

Dr. Koekemoer:

I had my doubts about the use of ecstasy as an incapacitant because I would not like to make any people that I was fighting against happy and contented. I would rather have them disorientated.

Speaker 2:

Forensic science Dr. David Klatzow finds the suggestion laughable, that drugs like ecstasy or Memorex could be used to subdue angry people.

Dr. D. Klatzow:

How do you deliver it? How do you monitor the deaths? How do you make sure that the wind doesn't blow the aerosol? You presumably have to administer it in an aerosol form, presumably in the situation where you've got an unruly crowd. How do you make sure that the wind doesn't blow it away?

Dr. Koekemoer:

We probably produced about 900 kilos of ecstasy for the army in pure crystalline form. We officially had an order of a tonne of this material.

Dr. D. Klatzow:

How do you make sure that people get sufficient dust to incapacitate them, as opposed to just make them merry?

Dr. Koekemoer:

That tonne of material cost the taxpayer around three million rand to produce.

Speaker 2:

Doctor Klatzow also finds a list of poisons that the chemical scientists produced to be crude and insignificant. Although they were extremely toxic and dangerous they were relatively easy to obtain.

Dr. D. Klatzow:

If this was what we spent 100 million rand on developing, then we're not dealing with scientists, we're dealing with buffoons. If this is the best that they can come up with after the expenditure of 100 million rand, I mean you're dealing with intellectual Neanderthals.

Speaker 2:

Back at Roodeplaat, Daan Goosen and his team of biologists were hatching the world's most lethal biological substance. It's called botulinum.

Dr. D. Klatzow:

It certainly is a substance which is lethal to a large number of people. It will kill in fractions of a microgram level per kilogramme. Very [inaudible]. It's one of the most toxic substances known.

Speaker 2:

The scientists developed a technique to extract the poison from the organism in order to purify it. It was the first time this had been done in South Africa.

Dr M. Odendaal:

Now what we do is you grow it artificially, you collect the fluid in which the organisms grow, and then you make an extraction of that to get to the purified product.

Dr Daan Goosen:

Very inconspicuous, very non-threatening, it's a little bottle, about four/five centimetres in height, two/three centimetres in diameter.

Dr M. Odendaal:

We produced at least three to five grammes of the purified substance, of this botulinum toxin.

Dr. D. Klatzow:

Five grammes is probably enough to kill about a million people.

Dr M. Odendaal:

It would be as a result of asphyxiation, paralysis of the muscles that assist with the breathing process.

Speaker 9:

[inaudible]

Dr M. Odendaal:

I would imagine so, yeah.

Dr. D. Klatzow:

That's an offensive weapon. You would introduce that into a food supply or into a water supply.

Speaker 2:

Then, in the middle 80s, the Roodeplaat scientists started to develop the ultimate biological weapon. To engineer genetically a botulinum organism. It would make it even deadlier because it would be undetectable.

Dr Daan Goosen:

The most scary part of our project was this genetic manipulation, manipulation of organisms. It is a very powerful tool.

Dr M. Odendaal:

They produce higher quantities of toxins, you need less of the toxin to main or to kill people, and that the detection of those toxins would be [inaudible].

Dr Daan Goosen:

So we transferred information from the DNA from one organism, transferred that information to another organism.

Dr M. Odendaal:

You can infect water supplies, and that will take them a bit longer than what is necessary to determine what the actual cause is.

Dr Daan Goosen:

A tonne or two of a chemical weapon will kill about 100,000 or 200,000 people. But these toxins we spoke about here, about three/four grammes would kill millions of people.

Dr M. Odendaal:

I don't have first-hand experience on the effect on humans, but in laboratory animals it is lethal.

Speaker 2:

But how advanced was the science really? And how dangerous was a genetically engineered bug? We travelled with Daan Goosen to the north of England, to the University of Leeds. There he discussed their biological programme with chemical pathologist Dr Alistair Hay, a leading expert in chemical and biological warfare.

Dr Daan Goosen:

What it was is we produced e-coli clones with the ability to produce toxins from two organisms. One is the botulinum toxin, the other one was toxins from the clostridium perfringens, and that was clear.

Dr. A. Hay:

And it seems that they were using some very common bugs and they were engineering these bugs to make them more toxic. And they were putting little bits of genetic material into these other bugs so that if those bugs, in the event, poisoned somebody, the bugs would produce far more serious toxins.

Dr Daan Goosen:

The number, not much, a few strains or a few strains of organisms, but that's not the significance. The significance was that we've achieved this technology.

Dr. A. Hay:

So if you had e-coli, which produced this botulinal toxin, someone would get ill with the bacteria and the doctor would try and treat the e-coli infection, but might be completely bemused as to why this individual was also paralysed. This is really cutting-edge bacteriology, it's biological warfare in quotes, which you would be extremely concerned about. It's a sort of programme that you wouldn't want any government or any individual to be involved in.

Speaker 2:

The genetically engineered bugs were freeze dried and stored in Roodeplaat's safety fridge. According to the generals all the viruses and bacteria were destroyed in an incinerator when Project Coast was closed down in the early 90s.

Dr. A. Hay:

The destruction of the programme seems to have been in the hands of Dr Basson, the one person that seems to have had the most involvement in the programme, and the one that people are most concerned about.

Dr Daan Goosen:

I cannot assure you what happened to it because I wasn't around at that stage anymore, but supposedly, according to testimony of some scientists, it was all destroyed.

Dr. A. Hay:

I don't know whether those agents were destroyed or not, but it does seem that there was very little auditing of the destruction, and that isn't very reassuring.

Dr M. Odendaal:

I don't know what happened to that. I presume or I hope everything was destroyed.

Speaker 2:

Daan Goosen and Mike Odendaal might have brought South Africa to the brink of a disaster, but they are back in civilian life today. Instead of hatching bugs they produce animal vaccines. Roodeplaat is now dedicated to plant research.

Ghent, the intellectual capital of Belgium. The city is also home to toxicologist Aubin Heyndrickx, the maverick professor who has become one of the most controversial figures in the shadowy world of chemical and biological warfare.

His first report on the presence of chemical weapons in Angola in 1982 helped motivate the launch of South Africa's own chemical and biological warfare programme. Subsequent reports by Heyndrickx in the 80s instilled further fear into the hearts of the generals. As a result, more and more money was allocated to Project Coast. According to the charge sheet against Wouter Basson, Heyndrickx sold 12 NATO embargoed chemical agent detectors to him. In 1988 Basson allegedly paid the Belgian professor nearly 600,000 rand for his services.

We found Heyndrickx only a day after he had returned from Kosovo, once again on the hunt for chemical weapons.

A. Heyndrickx:

Here I show you some samples from toxicated dead people, that we took in the [inaudible]. Gases used by Rwanda. This is human hair, also from dead people, that we took. We found Sarin, which is another toxic gas. We found phosphate, we found an organic cyanide.

Dr. D Draulans:

Angola of course was his big case because it was his story. So he went to Angola, and I think he has been there at least four times, and almost every time he came back with a new chemical weapon that he has found.

A. Heyndrickx:

There is 100% proof that chemicals were used by the government of Rwanda.

Speaker 2:

Dr. Daan Goosen accompanied us to Ghent to study Heyndrickx's Angolan reports.

Dr Daan Goosen:

With these claims we are familiar since the early 80s when they were first used to create the motivation for establishing a chemical and biological ability for the South African government.

Dr. D Draulans:

He is one big fraud. I don't think he has done anything solid in his life apart from misleading people about his own capabilities and about the situations in which he has been running. He's one big fraud.

Dr Daan Goosen:

At best you can't even say it's scientific jargon, there's no scientific base for the conclusions made in all of these reports.

A. Heyndrickx:

This is Jamba General Hospital.

Speaker 2:

Heyndrickx frequently travels to conflict areas. He is paid by rebel movements like UNITA to discover chemicals, and [inaudible] phone reports which they use in their propaganda wars. He is also a personal friend of the UNITA leader Dr. Jonas Savimbi. Yet he has no credibility. Heyndrickx is a disgraced former professor at the University of Ghent. He was asked to resign after he was convicted of fraud. His reports on chemical warfare have been rejected by credible scientists all over the world. In Angola for example, no evidence has ever been found that the MPLA, the Russians, or the Cubans, used chemical weapons.

In this video Heyndrickx finds, yet again, what he claims is a new Russian chemical bomb in Angola.

Dr. D Draulans:

He went to the Kremlin himself so he went to Moscow to discuss his case about this Russian chemical warfare with the Russian authorities. Then he goes on in the media, our media, he comes back and he says, "This is the formula of the new chemical weapon that I've discovered in Angola and the Russians have admitted this."

Speaker 2:

Professor Andre de Leenheer is the vice rector of the University of Ghent and a former colleague of Heyndrickx.

Prof. Leenheer:

He has invited me to his laboratory because I was one of the privileged persons, according to him, to whom he should disclose the nature, the chemical structure, the identity, of those chemicals weapons used by the Cubans.

Dr. D Draulans:

Our people, our military people, they even said that what he describes in here, this intoxication that he describes, it could have been food poisoning or it could have been a viral infection. There's no proof of a confrontation of these people with a chemical weapon.

Prof. Leenheer:

He did not realise what kind of structure this was, because it had nothing to do with a fire bomb or a chemical bomb. It was the structure of an industrial chemical component that is recognised by each second year chemical student at university as nylon 6.

Dr. D Draulans:

Of course this evidence that it was nylon 6 is so obvious that you can't deny it, but he went even so far of during months he has been going on that he found a new chemical nylon bomb in Angola.

A. Heyndrickx:

So if it's only common nylon I don't worry about it, but-

Speaker 14:

The formula that the Russians gave you is the formula for nylon.

A. Heyndrickx:

Okay, that's their problem. It's not my problem.

Speaker 2:

Basson and Heyndrickx met one another in the early 80s. They were seen together at a chemical and biological warfare conference in Ghent in 1984. Heyndrickx said he had spoken to Basson only once or twice then and never again.

Speaker 14:

According to the records of the University of Ghent, you make telephone calls to Basson in 1987 and 1988.

A. Heyndrickx:

To Basson, I never called him.

Speaker 14:

For example on the 3rd of January 1988 you tried to phone Dr. Basson on the telephone number Pretoria 467 123. You made a telephone call.

Speaker 2:

At around the same time Heyndrickx bought 13 chemical agent detectors for the toxicology department at the University of Ghent. Then they disappeared. He allegedly sold them to Basson.

A. Heyndrickx:

This was not the case.

Speaker 14:

You didn't sell it to him?

A. Heyndrickx:

No no no no, no no.

Dr. D Draulans:

And it's only in the end, when you people started investigating the Project Coast, that they find the same machines somewhere in South Africa. We had the serial numbers of the machines that he brought, they're matching exactly with the one that you have down there. There's only 12, so he kept one of them, but 12 he sent out to South Africa.

A. Heyndrickx:

This is not the problem. Did they make doubles of it, did they cheat with it? I don't know, because you can buy that equipment all over Europe as you want it.

Dr. D Draulans:

I do generally believe that he actually is convinced of what he's writing, because it's clear by now that he has never been a good scientist, so he has never worried about scientific conclusions sort of being supported by scientific data.

Prof. Leenheer:

The research is non existent. There is no research here. We have no research.

A. Heyndrickx:

I told de Leenheer, "Go with Mr [inaudible], go to UNITA territory. And if you come back alive then you are right. If you come back intoxicated I am right." But they'll never see them, they're just talk.

Speaker 2:

Last year Heyndrickx was visited by South African justice officials. He denied any knowledge of Basson, money, or the chemical agent detectors.

A. Heyndrickx:

Yes they told me that he was standing trial for drugs and chemical warfare and everything. More details I cannot give because I don't have many and I didn't have the possibility of talking to him about it.

Speaker 2:

With Wouter Basson in the dock, the men in white coats will again tell their stories when they take the witness stand against the former master.

Daan Goosen, Mike Odendaal, and Johan Koekemoer will all be there.

Dr. Koekemoer:

At the stage that I made this compound I still believed quite a lot in the integrity of the people I was dealing with.

Dr M. Odendaal:

Wouter Basson wanted us to put together certain things, and we did.

Dr. Koekemoer:

But I'm not sure now after having read in the newspapers about Dr Wouter Basson's case and so on.

Dr M. Odendaal:

I pity Basson, I feel sorry for him. Whether he's convicted or not I think he's anyway to some extent been exposed and that will be punishment for him enough.

Speaker 1:

Join us again next week for another Special Assignment.