the rollback of south africa's biological warfare program

contacts appear to have been legal ones between Project Coast scientists and
other scientists and consultants in Europe. Most of the substances and
knowledge relevant to biological weapons were not controlled in the 1970s and
1980s as there was not the same level of concern with the possible use of
biological agents and chemical substances that emerged during the 1990s. 108
However, Basson and Knobel subsequently claimed that Basson visited Iraq
and Iran, the Philippines, North Korea, Croatia, and met with members of
Colombian drug cartels, making contacts and collecting information. What was
obtained or exchanged during these visits has not yet emerged.
Corruption and the Deterioration of Project Coast
Basson took advantage of the loose financial oversight and accountability
requirements to ensure that he would acquire large sums of money from the
project several years before the actual decisions were made to privatize these
state-owned corporations. Starting in the mid-1980s, if not before, Basson was
reported to have offered his friends and trusted employees the opportunity to
invest in a number of these official front corporations. Basson and other early
investors made overnight fortunes, when these corporations were privatized in
the late 1980s. 109 The magnitude of these profits, perhaps more than any other
action, caught the attention of a non-military agency, the Office of Serious
Economic Offenses, who started investigating the financial flows associated
with Project Coast soon after these corporations shares were sold on the open
market.
Basson was the central figure in coordinating the funds and the whole
program. He was the central point of contact between the scientists, the army,
and the government sponsoring Project Coast. As the project expanded into
sophisticated research into genetic engineering and the manufacturing of large
amounts of Mandrax and Ecstasy (which may have been sold on the black
market), millions of dollars were siphoned off into a series of elaborate holding
companies. While Basson continues to maintain that the large amounts of
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