PROJECT COAST
“Project Coast” was the code name for a top secret chemical and biological weapons (CBW) programme developed in 1981 by the South African apartheid regime for use against its enemies. While some of apartheid’s CB weapons were relatively innocuous—tear gas, for example—others were designed for the extermination of individuals, even whole groups. Coast numbered among its satanic armoury an infertility toxin to sterilize the black population of uppity townships and—shades of the CIA’s wackiest plans to whack Castro—poisons that could be concealed within chocolates. And cigarettes. Needless to say, Coast explicitly violated every international agreement you could shake a pipette at, chiefly the 1925 Geneva Convention and the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention.
Ordered up in 1981 by Prime Minister P. W. Botha, Coast was headed by Wouter Basson, of whom it might be said that he honoured the Hippocratic Oath only in the breaching: he was also a medical doctor, Botha’s personal heart specialist, and a member of the 7th South African Medical Service’s Battalion. To maintain secrecy and make it difficult to link CBWs with the South African Defence Force, Coast operated through four front organizations: Delta G, Roodeplast Research Laboratories, Protechnik, Infladel. Coast’s annual budget was $10 million, which was strictly off the treasury’s books.
Under Basson’s tutelage—allegedly—Coast was involved in lethal covert operations “Barnacle” and “Duel” in the 1980s in which hundreds of regime opponents, notably captured ANC guerrillas, were murdered by use of toxins, their bodies then dumped at sea. Coast has also been linked to biochemical experiments on captured ANC members and the mass killing of Marxist rebels in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) by providing the government there with cholera and anthrax. In 1979, the world’s largest outbreak of anthrax took place in Rhodesia. Eighty-two people died.
When F. W. de Klerk became South Africa’s president in 1989 he quickly scuppered Project Coast’s offensive programme, since it hardly sat well with his desire to end apartheid. Numerous Coast officials were fired, incriminating documents and CBWs destroyed. Thereafter, Coast was devoted to manufacturing crowd control substances, some of which were drugs more usually associated with recreational use. Between 1992 and 1993, more than 900 hundred kilos of a crystalline form of Ecstasy was produced under Project Coast.
Old, murderous habits, it seems, died hard. In January 1992, Mozambican government forces were purportedly attacked with CBWs by the South African apartheid regime; several hundred soldiers claimed to have been exposed to a substance released from a plane flying above them. Four of them later died. It was widely suspected that the Coast front company Protechnik was the likely source of the lethal agent; the UK and US afterwards heavily pressured South Africa to terminate Project Coast, partly for humanitarian reasons, partly because it was feared that Coast’s know-how would fall into terrorist hands.
Basson was given a one-year contract to dissolve Project Coast, after which he became an independent CBW consultant, but his subsequent globe-trotting occasioned the US and Britain to make demarches expressing their concern that the good doctor was selling his knowledge of CBWs to pariah states such as Libya. To keep Basson under control, the South African Government hired him as the head of an uncontroversial official department in 1995. As a method of keeping the dog on the chain, this was not entirely successful; two years later, after a tip-off from the CIA that Basson was about to flee the country, Basson was caught with a thousand Ecstasy pills and four trunks full of secret documents related to Project Coast. The Es were almost certainly from stock manufactured by Coast for non-lethal crowd control. After some heavy persuasion, Basson testified before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 1998; he was the TRC’s last witness and gave limited, evasive testimony, with his lawyers making frequent interjections. Enough was heard, however, for Dr Wouter Basson to be tried on sixty- seven charges, ranging from fraud to murder whilst working on Coast. Basson denied all charges, and the judge, one Mr Hartzenberg, dismissed many of them, ruling that because they had occurred in Namibia and other foreign terrains, Basson could not be tried on them. Then, after thirty months of trial, Hartzenberg grandly rejected the testimony of all of the prosecution’s 153 witnesses (which included Coast scientists and operatives) and granted “Dr Death”, as the media had nicknamed Basson, amnesty
To date, there remain concerns over whether or not Basson actually destroyed the CBW agents or merely relocated them. Hundreds of kilos of chemicals and agents were unaccounted for when inventory was later taken by the Government.
South Africa continues to have a CBW programme but says it is strictly defensive. The country is now a member of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention and the Chemical Weapons Convention.
Stephen Burges and Helen Purkitt,
Chandre Gould, Peter I. Folb et al
PROJECT MONTAUK
Or, fast forward to the future without a Delorean car.
Conspiracy wonks believe that a series of top-secret experiments conducted in a vast cavernous underground laboratory built beneath the Montauk Air Force Station on the eastern tip of Long Island enabled teleportation and time travel.
Whispers about strange happenings at Montauk began circulating in the early 1980s when one Preston Nichols claimed to have recovered suppressed memories of his involvement with the lab. Around the same time, a man called Al Bielek began lecturing on his own recovered memories which linked Montauk to the Philadelphia experiment, the US Navy’s supposed invisibility experiment in the forties. Bielek maintained that the USS
The secrets of Montauk contain some other conspiracy favourites. Genetic engineering? Tick. PSI ops experiments? Tick. The giant Surface Air Ground Environment (SAGE) radar on the site was reportedly used for mind-control tests on abducted teenagers.
Alas, there is no documented evidence that Montauk is, or ever has been, a lab for a real-life version of TV’s
You’ll also pay a high price if you want to know more about his adventures. His PC-DVD costs $39.99. Visa and Mastercard both accepted.
The Montauk base closed down several years back. The site is now home to Camp Hero State Park.
PROJECT PAPERCLIP
