Copyright 1998 Times Mirror Company  
                               Los Angeles Times
                     June 21, 1998, Sunday, Home Edition
SECTION: Opinion; Part M; Page 5; Op Ed Desk
LENGTH: 772 words
HEADLINE: COMMENTARY; 
COLUMN LEFT / ALEXANDER COCKBURN; 
SOUTH AFRICA'S DIRTY SECRETS HAVE ECHOES; 
TALES OF BIOLOGICAL WARFARE AGAINST ITS BLACKS ARE APPALLING, BUT THE U.S.
RECORD ISN'T CLEAN.
BYLINE: ALEXANDER COCKBURN, Alexander Cockburn is coauthor, with Jeffrey St.
Clair, of, "Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press," to be published next
month by, Verso  
 BODY:
  
	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 to kill one of
	its opponents, the Rev. Frank Chikane. The killers planted
	lethal chemicals 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 the truth 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 race-specific 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 in 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 obtained a waiver from the Justice
	Department in 1982 (the beginning of the Contra funding crisis)
	allowing it not to report drug trafficking by agency
	contractors.

	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 South African secret police to arrest Nelson Mandela. A
	truth commission here wouldn't do any harm.

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