SOUTH AFRICA'S DIRTY SECRETS HAVE ECHOES

Tales of biological warfare against its blacks, are appalling, but the U.S.
record isn't clean.

The dirtiest secrets of South Africa's apartheid regime are now spilling
out in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings in Cape Town. It's
a pity that the chilling stories haven't made much of a commotion in the
United States, whose own intelligence agencies have traveled along the same
path.

In 1997, press reports detailed a South African agent's description of drug
smuggling to raise money for terrorist schemes, including chemical
experimentation on blacks. He said he had done this on behalf of the
Directorate of Covert Collections, a super-secret unit within South
Africa's military intelligence apparatus. The drugs---ecstasy and
mandrax---were manufactured in labs run by Wouter Basson, one of the
chieftains of South Africa's chemical and biological weapons program.
Basson was arrested in 1997.

Hearings this month at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission offered
vivid insights of what went on at Roodeplaat Research Laboratories; a
military installation where Basson oversaw production of infamous
materials. Dr. Schalk van Rensburg testified that "the most frequent
instruction" from Basson was for development of a compound that would kill
but make the cause of death seemingly natural. "That was the chief aim of
the Roodeplaat Research Laboratory."

The laboratory manufactured cholera organisms, anthrax to be deposited on
the gummed flaps of envelopes and in cigarettes and chocolate, walking
sticks firing fatal darts that would feel like bee stings. Van Rensburg
took his riveted audience painstakingly through what he called "the murder
lists" of toxins and delivery systems. These included 32 bottles of cholera
that, one of the lab's technicians testified, would be most effectively
used in the water supply.

There were plans to slip the still imprisoned Nelson Mandela covert doses
of the heavy metal poison, thallium, designed to make his brain function
become "impaired, progressively," as Van Rensburg put it. In one case,
lethal toxins went from Roodeplaat to a death squad detailed by the
apartheid regime te, kill one of its epponents, the Rev. Frank Chikane. The
killers planted lethal che nieak in his clothing, expecting him to travel
to Namibia, where they reckoned there would be "very little forensic
capability." Instead, Chikane went to the U.S., where doctors identified
the toxins and saved his life.

The big dream at Roodeplaat was to develop race-specific biochemical
weapons, targeting blacks. Van Rensburg was ordered by Basson to develop a
vaccine to make blacks infertile. Van Rensburg told theftruth commission
that was his major project. There also were plans to distribute infected
T-shirts in the black townships to spread disease and infertility.

Americans need not entertain feelings of moral superiority. In 1960, in one
of the CIA's frequent attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, the agency
planned to put thallium salts in Castro's shoes before he addressed the
United Nations. Years later the Nicaraguan government reported that a
CIA-supplied team tried to assassinate its foreign minister by giving him a
bottle of Benedictine laced with thallium

U.S. military researchers of biochemical warfare in the 1950s conducted
racespecific experimentation. In 1980, the U S Army admitted that Norfolk
Naval Supply Center was contaminated with infectious bacteria in 1951 to
test the Navy's vulnerability to biological warfare attack. The Army
disclosed that one of the bacteria types was chosen because blacks were
known to be more susceptible to it than whites.

One of the investigators for the truth commission, Zhensile Kholsan has
been reported as saying that there is a strong suggestion that "drugs were
fed into communities that were political centers, to cause socioeconomic
chaos." Black communities in the U.S. have expressed similar suspicions,
particularly about the arrival of crack cocaine in South-Central Los
Angeles }n the early 1980s, allegedly imported by CIA-sponsored Nicaraguans
raising money for arms.

In March, CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz finally conceded to a U.S.
congressional committee that the agency had worked with drug traffickers
and had obtalned a waiver from the Justice Department in 1982 (the
beginning of the Contra funding crisis) allowing it not to report drug
trafficking by agencycontractors.

Was the lethal arsenal deployed at Roodeplaat assembled with advice from
the CIA and other U.S. agencies? There were certainly close contacts over
the years. It was a CIA tip that led the fSouth African secret police to
arrest Nelson Mandela.

A truth commission here wouldn't do any harm.

Checked-by: (Joel W. Johnson)