Death Flight. Michael Schmidt
Gould and Peter Folb’s official report for the United Nations mistakenly states that ‘Wouter Basson had joined the SADF in January 1979, as a medical officer … He held the rank of Lieutenant and worked at 1 Military Hospital until February 1981. During this time, he completed various courses and became a specialist in internal medicine.’7
In 1981, Commandant Basson was attached to Special Forces HQ (Speskop) as the project manager of Project Coast, the SADF’s chemical and biological warfare programme. In January 1985, as a commandant sporting a full, dark beard, he became head of the SADF’s new specialist combat medics unit, 7 Medical Battalion.
It was for his Project Coast role as a senior staff officer that over the period 1999–2002, Basson faced charges of conspiracy to commit mass murder, R30 million fraud, and other serious crimes. Acquitted on all charges, he was nevertheless found guilty in 2013 by the Health Professions Council of South Africa on four counts of unprofessional conduct related to his covert work, although this conviction would later also be set aside by the courts.
Evidence was presented at the criminal trial that Basson graduated as a medical specialist in April 1981. There are strong indications that he was both an active SADF medical officer and a medical student. It is telling that it appears as if Basson altered his own career timeline between his TRC and trial testimonies – both under oath – to try to make it impossible for him to have been involved in Rhodesia, a country that was not mentioned during his TRC hearing but to which he was repeatedly linked in his indictment via his relations with former Rhodesian pseudo-operators. However, he appears to have slipped up again in a 17 November 2011 email to CBW researcher Glenn Cross. ‘Dr Basson denies having any knowledge of Rhodesia’s CBW programme, but admits having worked in Rhodesia on “joint operations”,’ Cross states.8 The use of ‘Rhodesia’ implies Basson’s pre-independence presence in the country, before it became Zimbabwe, while the term ‘joint operations’ is suggestive of the sort of multi-unit combined operation witnessed by Pessarra at Buffalo Range on 5 March 1978.
The claim that Basson was not yet in the military was made in cross-examination of Neil Kriel by Basson’s counsel, Advocate Jaap Cilliers, SC, who stated: ‘[I]n 1979/1980, Dr Basson was still a medical student … Dr Basson was at that stage a full-time medical student for his intern exams at HF Verwoerd [Hospital] … he finalised his exams and practical period in December 1980 … then in the first quarter of the next year students received their degrees formally.’
Cilliers went on to produce Basson’s medical degree certificate, dated April 1981, and stated further: ‘I must put it to you in the seventies, Dr Basson here was a medical student and he was most definitely not part of any group visiting Zimbabwe or the then-Rhodesia.’ An undeterred Kriel riposted that he had indeed encountered Basson as a military officer in ‘the late seventies, 1978/1979, I am not sure exactly when,’ to which Cilliers responded: ‘Well, it does not matter. Till 1981 he was a medical student … He definitely did not visit Zimbabwe at that stage.’9
Basson and his counsel have failed to respond to several requests by this author to respond to Pessarra’s claims.10 Basson’s sole response over the past 20 years has been to approach this author during his trial – in defiance of the judge’s orders not to speak to the press – on 19 October 1990, after the Sunday Times published Pessarra’s allegations, saying, ‘That guy Pessarra’s mad, you know? He’s been treated in psychiatric hospitals.’
But the evidence for Basson operating in Rhodesia in the late 1970s – contrary to his denial in court – is strengthened by the interview the former medic gave for this book. He says Basson, whom he had previously met on one or two occasions at 1 Military Hospital, had visited his post at Messina in the far Northern Transvaal in October or November 1979. ‘It was a field hospital and triage set-up at Messina right next to the airport, on the runway in the grass.’ At the time of Basson’s inspection visit, the former medic was a 21-year-old national-service private.11 He later rose to become a commandant in the reservist Citizen Force and said he met Basson on several subsequent occasions at social and military events.
The field hospital at Messina had been set up in anticipation of an expected influx of Rhodesian refugees as the Bush War reached its climax. The former medic says Basson stayed for a couple of days. ‘I think he took a shining to me as I was a bit older than the other troopies and could hold an intelligent conversation.’
According to the medic, Basson asked him to accompany him as an aide on a covert flight into Rhodesia: ‘I went on one excursion sometime in November [1979] to meet with the Rhodesian security forces, but my memory fails me and it could have been October. We flew in a Dak from Messina; we were in civilian clothing – we never flew in uniform – and went in at night, flying low. I don’t know where we landed but there was no fanfare, and I wasn’t privy to the meeting as I was a troopie and was made to wait outside. We flew back the same night.’
He said it appeared as if Basson had made several such trips to meet with his Rhodesian colleagues. In addition, at Basson’s trial, a senior former Selous Scouts member, who testified on the condition that his identity be protected by the court, said that he had met Basson among a SADF delegation in the communal mess at the Scouts’ André Rabie base ‘in the late seventies …’12 Although this was challenged by Basson’s counsel, the witness was indemnified against prosecution by Judge Willie Hartzenberg, which means that the judge accepted his testimony as true. And yet, Bert Sachse strongly denied ever having seen Basson – whom he later got to know well at Special Forces HQ in South Africa – at Buffalo Range or in Rhodesia at all. Not only that, he said, but he had never seen any combat medics like Basson in Rhodesia, only the Recces themselves.13
Returning to his narrative, Pessarra indicated that there was evidently a flurry of telecommunications going back and forth at this time, presumably with the Selous Scouts HQ. The para fire-force pilot told Pessarra they wanted to have five Scouts jump out of the airplane. ‘But they didn’t want us to know anything about it, and Desblé was going to take care of the [jump] procedures and obviously bring in the [parachute lines], check in the equipment, the whole mess; just him and [a Scouts officer] and five Scouts.’
This was highly irregular, as the PJI always accompanied a parachute drop; that was his job. But Desblé was insistent – and they also ‘wanted to black out the first part of the aircraft … they didn’t want the pilots and crew seeing what was going on behind them.’ So Pessarra asked Desblé – Legionnaire to Legionnaire – what was going on. ‘Look,’ Desblé said, ‘the bodies are in the back, the terrs are in the back of the covered Land Rover; they’ve been doctored.’
‘Doctored’ was the Legionnaire way of saying they had been poisoned. However, according to Desblé, the men were ‘still alive, they’re just unconscious … they are going to throw them out on parachutes.’ Pessarra said it then became obvious to him that this was a CBW operation. The plan was apparently to drop the unconscious guerrillas, dressed and armed as Scouts, over enemy territory for them to be found by either FRELIMO or ZANLA forces, their infected bodies taken back, possibly ‘as a trophy into an echelon’s headquarters section … they are going to be taken someplace and this contamination would be continuous as they were passed down the line.’
At about 6:30 pm, the pilot informed Pessarra: ‘We’re going to capitulate, but we want you to get on the flight … and we want you to come with us and take care of our safety.’
‘Which I did. I simply got on the Dak through the navigator’s door [in the nose] when nobody was looking … [and] stayed pushed to one side; the two pilots got on, they came in, they sealed the door.’ Pessarra had said in an earlier tape-recorded message to me that the ‘aircraft interior windows were all blanked out. They had sealed the pilot’s cabin off with canvases so they could not see what was going on in the hold.’
In the primary tape, he continued: ‘And I told [the pilot] I wanted to sneak a peek … by this time, the pilot’s pretty pissed; I mean he’s been told to do this, he knows this is dangerous for the aircraft because he now knows there’s something pretty hinky; I haven’t told him that there’s five terrs there. Anyways, there’s a couple of screws on a plate that I pulled; even though they had a blanket over the door, I was able