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CNN Live Saturday
South African Scientists Have Experience With Anthrax Development
Aired November 03, 2001 - 17:08 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
LEON HARRIS, CNN ANCHOR: As America steps up the fight against anthrax at home, information of efforts to use it abroad are coming to light now.
CNN's Charlayne Hunter-Gault reports on South Africa's link to the use of anthrax as a weapon.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): When South Africa's White minority regime was trying to hold back the anti- apartheid activists of the 1980s, government scientists worked in secret to develop anthrax as a weapon of terror.
MICHAEL ODENDAAL, SCIENTIST PROJECT COAST: I was given a pack of Camel cigarettes, and I was requested to drop some of the drops onto the filter of the organism -- on the cigarettes.
HUNTER-GAULT: Michael Odendaal made that admission before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1998. Scientists also said they put anthrax in peppermint chocolates, and developed over 45 strains of virulent anthrax, part of a search for the deadliest poisons nature and science could produce.
The hearings retold the project at the super-secret Rudeplatte Research Laboratories was sponsored by the South African military. Code-named Project Coast, it was led by a noted heart surgeon, Wouter Basson, nicknamed Doctor Death. He and his aides were trying to find a killer without a trace.
SCHALK VAN RENSBURG, SCIENTIST, PROJECT COAST: The most frequent instruction we obtained from Doctor Basson and Doctor Swanicol (ph) was to develop something with which you could kill an individual, which would make his death resemble a natural death, and that something was to be not detectable in a normal forensic laboratory.
HUNTER-GAULT: Daan Goosen is a veterinarian and pathologist who worked under Doctor Death.
DAAN GOOSEN, SCIENTIST, PROJECT COAST: We were in a war situation, and a weapon is a weapon.
HUNTER-GAULT: Before the new post-apartheid government took over, the military ordered the scientists to destroy their work, all their documents, all the specimens, all the anthrax stored in the deep freeze.
The new government says it took the officials of the old government in good faith, and believes the anthrax and other germ warfare threats were destroyed, but...
MOSIUOA LAKOTA, MINISTER OF DEFENSE: One has to accept that there is always a remote possibility in anything; a remote possibility that one or the other elements might not have hit the light of day.
HUNTER-GAULT: As the Truth and Reconciliation hearings were told...
FAZEL RANDERA, TRUTH & RECONCILIATION COMMITTEE, 1998: A culture is produced that goes into somebody's fridge, and nobody knows what happens.
HUNTER-GAULT: Wouter Bisson is now on trial for a number of charges, including attempted murder related to his research, and for manufacturing designer drugs. CNN asked for an interview, but Bisson so far declined the request.
So long in scientific exile, Goosen has become a long-distance Sherlock Holmes, following the anthrax murders in the U.S. by TV and Internet.
GOOSEN: The technology -- the level of technology used in these attacks in the United States is not of the most sophisticated ones. My deduction from that is that the scientific devices behind these attacks are about the 1970 technologies.
HUNTER-GAULT: In the secret labs, Goosen and his fellow scientists also worked to develop antidotes to anthrax; work he'd like to resume.
GOOSEN: And we would absolutely die to be involved in the controlling or preventing these types of things at the moment. It's, for me, personally, very traumatic for now about 20 years being involved with biological and chemical weapons. I can tell you it's a strain. And it's sometimes difficult to bear. But it would definitely be -- we would be happy to now assist in solving some of the problems here.
HUNTER-GAULT (on camera): No one pursuing the anthrax story is allowed to videotape inside the former Rudeplatte Research Laboratories just down this road, where a new generation of scientist is working on how to protect the nation's food supply from the common pests of Africa.
Those in charge insist the past is the past and should be left there. The scientists who worked there in the past disagree, arguing that past just may help fight against the kind of biological weapons they pioneered.
Charlayne Hunter-Gault, CNN, Rudeplatte. (END VIDEOTAPE)
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