Speaker 1: It's podcast and time podcast Sno's damn it. I am
Speaker 1: Robert Evans hosted Behind the Bastards, trying to find a
Speaker 1: new UH strategy for introducing the show because I got
Speaker 1: tired of the old ways and I that was not
Speaker 1: a success. It was a miserable failure. UM and UH today, though,
Speaker 1: my guest is not a miserable failure. It's Mr Billy
Speaker 1: Wayne hon Airhorn Airhorn, How you doing, Billy? Good? Was
Speaker 1: that good? I liked? That was fine. I think a
Speaker 1: lot of people who have their their car stereos up
Speaker 1: high in the early part of the show are maybe
Speaker 1: frustrated with you. You might have caused a car record
Speaker 1: to aggressive apologize. I was just excited. Yeah, it's okay.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to find a new way to introduce my show,
Speaker 1: and I'm clearly terrible at it. Uh. Notes. You know
Speaker 1: you're a professional introducer. I know. I'm mean, it's basically
Speaker 1: I like the way you were doing it before because
Speaker 1: it was like the what's X in my wise? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's catchy, and I mean it's exhausting to come up
Speaker 1: with a new one every time, but it is I
Speaker 1: do like when I feel it My favorite part is
Speaker 1: when you can feel you making it up as you go.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm. Yeah, yeah, that's definitely the case. Every time
Speaker 1: I was I'm debating as to whether or not to
Speaker 1: stick to a format though, but one he won't use
Speaker 1: the one I wrote as a format. You wrote one? Yeah,
Speaker 1: what did you write? I said, what's salty my ex boyfriends?
Speaker 1: It's great? Right, no, nobody, all right, continue with your show.
Speaker 1: What's the salting your Okay? What's salt peppers? Already takes
Speaker 1: you in a direction you do not want to go
Speaker 1: off the bat. We're like, wait, what is that issue? Okay,
Speaker 1: because I don't I don't know what salting your ex boyfriends.
Speaker 1: I do know what's cracking my peppers. It's the pepper
Speaker 1: cracker that I have. Also, buy that shirt on t public.
Speaker 1: It's cute. Okay. Yeah, So we have some old business
Speaker 1: before we get into the episode today, Billy Uh. One
Speaker 1: of those pieces of old business is that a couple
Speaker 1: of of our fans found you at a comedy show
Speaker 1: and gave you a wonderful gift for me. It's in
Speaker 1: an odd gift. They did contact me and us before
Speaker 1: on Twitter, which was nice and very thoughtful because it
Speaker 1: is nice to know to expect this gift. And yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not a kind of gift you'd want to receive
Speaker 1: at random, no God, and especially at this show was
Speaker 1: like in a house basement in Louisville, So like, the
Speaker 1: show is in this guy's these people's basement. And then
Speaker 1: I was selling T shirts and just meeting people afterwards
Speaker 1: in their living room basically. And then yeah, these people
Speaker 1: stood in line very patiently and there like, hey, we
Speaker 1: like about a T shirt. That was cool, and then
Speaker 1: they're also here you go, and I was like, it's
Speaker 1: real and and what what what was this gift? Billy?
Speaker 1: It was it's a brown shirt, Uh, Nazi dagger and
Speaker 1: it's it's legit and uh. They reached out to us
Speaker 1: on Twitter beforehand and explained that it was like a
Speaker 1: family heirloom they didn't want to have anymore. And he
Speaker 1: was a brother and sister. Um that was so happy
Speaker 1: to give it to me. And I don't really know
Speaker 1: what to do with such a thing. Um, it is
Speaker 1: a piece of history, uh, and and an interesting one
Speaker 1: at that. Um. Definitely not the kind of thing you
Speaker 1: want to have out just in your living room because
Speaker 1: people will make the wrong conclusions. About it, and my
Speaker 1: wife and mother in law we're at my house when
Speaker 1: I opened it because I shipped it because I didn't
Speaker 1: want to fly with it. Yeah. Also I have blonde
Speaker 1: hair and blue eyes and I just family with it
Speaker 1: the yea. Yeah. So yeah, well, and it's the fact
Speaker 1: that it's a family heirloo of there's reminds me of
Speaker 1: one of my weird family moments. But my my dad's
Speaker 1: dad did something spooky for the US government, Like he
Speaker 1: was doing he was always over in Vietnam during the war,
Speaker 1: and nobody seems to know precisely what he was up to,
Speaker 1: Like there's like the thing that he said he was doing,
Speaker 1: but everybody in the families like, yeah, but it was anyway,
Speaker 1: and he was never dirty, do you know what I mean? No, no,
Speaker 1: I mean it was it was so like that was
Speaker 1: what he did in like the sixties. But he was
Speaker 1: in Germany right after the war. Um. And years after
Speaker 1: he died, we found like a little box that was
Speaker 1: just full to the brim with like Hitler youth arm
Speaker 1: bands and like penance and stuff like that, like a
Speaker 1: whole lot of them. Um. And it was always like,
Speaker 1: what the what's the story here? Like I'm certain it was.
Speaker 1: Just like he was in Germany after the war, they
Speaker 1: found a bunch of knots. He was like, oh, we
Speaker 1: should put this in a box. But it's weird. It's
Speaker 1: a weird thing to like find, right, like to find
Speaker 1: a bunch of them. Yeah, like fund and one. You're like,
Speaker 1: I could see about someone just I won't take that.
Speaker 1: That's pretty weird. But fund a bunch of them, Like
Speaker 1: did you do something with a bunch of them? And
Speaker 1: I don't think so, but it was. It's a strange.
Speaker 1: It's a strange thing to come across um. And I'm
Speaker 1: gonna guess it was something like that for our fans
Speaker 1: where that some somebody's grandpa was over in Germany and
Speaker 1: shoot some guy or is in some house. They're like, okay,
Speaker 1: I guess this is what I'm taking back it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was, I mean, I uh yeah, it's haunted for sure. Well, Billy,
Speaker 1: speaking of Nazis and speaking of racists, today's episode is
Speaker 1: about the racist chemical weapons engineer who probably cooked up
Speaker 1: the M D M A that you've used if you've
Speaker 1: done him. Yeah, So, I mean it's it's a fun one.
Speaker 1: He's doctor, so it's on brand for us. But I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm sure he is a doctor. But I mean I
Speaker 1: always assume when you're doing certain types of drugs, like
Speaker 1: there's just there's bad people who have touched this, like
Speaker 1: cocaine for sure. Um, like m d M A is
Speaker 1: made in a lot of different places. Like I've known
Speaker 1: some people who were, like what mad cooked m d
Speaker 1: M A in their like college lab while they were
Speaker 1: getting their PhD. Um and like I feel fine about that,
Speaker 1: you know, uh yeah, but I mean I just mean
Speaker 1: on the black market period, Yeah, there's always there's when
Speaker 1: you go to the black market, you're like, there's just
Speaker 1: that you have to accept. There's a persuage of like
Speaker 1: bad is involved in this, yeah, and bad people. You know.
Speaker 1: It's how like most good people accidentally do bad stuff.
Speaker 1: It sounds like this bad guy accidentally did some good stuff. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And it's like, so the extent to which this guy
Speaker 1: was selling m d m A is such that if
Speaker 1: you did ecstasy in the nineteen nineties during the height
Speaker 1: of the rave scene, or probably in the early two thousands,
Speaker 1: there's a very good chance you did this guy's ecstasy.
Speaker 1: Like if if you were if you were raving in like,
Speaker 1: n uh and you did. You came across a batch
Speaker 1: of fucking awesome e Like, there's like the odds are
Speaker 1: really good that it was cooked by this dude, Walter Bassan.
Speaker 1: So that's the guy we're talking about today. Um, and
Speaker 1: we're not talking about his mostly about his career making ecstasy.
Speaker 1: We're talking about his career as a chemical weapons engineer
Speaker 1: trying to exterminate the black race. Always boy. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: was like, I don't know, he sounds pretty fun. Okay, okay, okay,
Speaker 1: he's he's he's a genocider attempted genocider. Yeah. Um, So
Speaker 1: it's the story of Walter Basson is a really fucked up,
Speaker 1: an interesting one. But but to actually like tell it, Uh,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of background that I think people need
Speaker 1: about the history of chemical weapons. So we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about that a little bit. First. Do you a
Speaker 1: chemical weapons fan, Billy? No, I mean I understand them.
Speaker 1: You know, I've like all military stuff on some levels
Speaker 1: of right into it, but some of it gets real
Speaker 1: horrific so quick. Yeah, like in the yeah, torture kind
Speaker 1: of way, do you know what I mean? Yeah, Like
Speaker 1: it's like I can enjoy, like I can I can
Speaker 1: both understand, like the horror of trench warfare in World
Speaker 1: War One and how much artillery played into that and appreciate,
Speaker 1: like looking at a piece of artillery and how it
Speaker 1: functions in the way the mechanics work. And part of
Speaker 1: that is because like you can see, like you can
Speaker 1: go to a war reenactment, you can see canons being
Speaker 1: used and they're not hurting anybody. There's there's none of
Speaker 1: that with chemical weapons like that, there's no like displaying them,
Speaker 1: there's no appreciating the mechanics of it, Like it's purely
Speaker 1: designed to not just kill people, but to do it horribly, horribly,
Speaker 1: Like with firearms they do horrible things too, but we
Speaker 1: also get like fireworks out of that genealogy, Like there's
Speaker 1: fun things associated with Yeah, not with chemical weapons, Like
Speaker 1: this makes your insides be on your outside and you're
Speaker 1: just yeah, blow somebody up, man, come on, yeah, honest
Speaker 1: god fearing how it's er. Yes, there's just an instant death. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: instant death, and like death in a way that you know,
Speaker 1: we've been doing for a lot, Like people have always
Speaker 1: blown each other up in war and they've kept different
Speaker 1: ways of doing it. Yeah, but this chemical weapons are
Speaker 1: like pretty new. Um, and this is actually something like
Speaker 1: we talked about in the Fritz Haber episodes, And whenever
Speaker 1: I talk about like the birth of chemical weapons, like
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of people are gonna hit me up
Speaker 1: on Twitter and be like, no, the first use was this,
Speaker 1: and the first use is that. And at those stories
Speaker 1: about like mongols catapulting plague victims over walls or like
Speaker 1: something like that, and I get what they're saying. I
Speaker 1: don't think that stuff really counts, um, because like sickness
Speaker 1: has always been a part of war, and like cunning
Speaker 1: commanders have always found ways to spread illness among their enemies,
Speaker 1: because it makes sense. Chemical weapons in the modern sense
Speaker 1: are something really different. I think, um, just one immune
Speaker 1: mongol just running with the plague, so the first forefare
Speaker 1: over there. Yeah, there's a difference between that and like
Speaker 1: gassing a town with Sara in my view, Um, yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: because yeah, that's just more of like, hey, this is
Speaker 1: wish works. But being like yeah, someone in that their
Speaker 1: army being like we're going to gas them. You're like
Speaker 1: wait what, no, what Yeah, it's it's it's I mean,
Speaker 1: and this is like a personal line for everybody. So
Speaker 1: people may disagree with me, but I can we It's
Speaker 1: like it's complicated when you tried to talk about like
Speaker 1: where it all started. Like the first formal treaty that
Speaker 1: forbade something that you could call chemical warfare was probably
Speaker 1: the Franco German Treaty of sixteen seventy five, But that
Speaker 1: just banned the use of poison in war. So it
Speaker 1: wasn't really like like chemical weapons. It was more like
Speaker 1: you can't rub shit on your bullets and the shoot people.
Speaker 1: That's bad, you know. I's like that sort of thing. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Uh in eighteen seventy four, bunch of I mean you
Speaker 1: can and ship's gonna get in your bullet wounds anyway,
Speaker 1: because there's poop everywhere and war. That's one of the
Speaker 1: eternal truths of war is all the poop. Um. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And the what in a festival like a music festival, Yes,
Speaker 1: yet music festivals in warfare have a lot in common. Um.
Speaker 1: I'm actually more okay with the use of chemical warfare
Speaker 1: on music festivals, but I'm not a big fan of
Speaker 1: bonaru so no, it's la nation um so. In eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy four, about a dozen European states signed the Brussels Declaration,
Speaker 1: which banned poison gas and other poisons as weapons of force.
Speaker 1: It was the first time like a modern chemical weapon
Speaker 1: was banned. As eighteen seventy four UM and the Brussels
Speaker 1: Declaration was never ratified, But in eighteen nine the Hague
Speaker 1: Convention on the Laws of War was signed by every
Speaker 1: major European power and they agreed universally to avoid the
Speaker 1: use of poison. The convention included a declaration on asphyxiating
Speaker 1: gases and explicitly forbade the use of projectiles designed solely
Speaker 1: for gas warfare. Now, the first modern chemical weapons attack
Speaker 1: on a huge scale occurred at Ipra in Belgium on
Speaker 1: eighteen April nineteen fourteen. We talked about this on the
Speaker 1: Fritz Hyper episode. German soldiers emptied cans of chlorine gas
Speaker 1: and trusted the wind to carry them into the foe
Speaker 1: um and there were similar experiments wrong on that day.
Speaker 1: It was great, yeah, but afterwards it didn't work out
Speaker 1: so well for anybody. UM, So yeah, it's um. That
Speaker 1: was like the first kind of like modern chemical weapon attack,
Speaker 1: and by the end of World War One there's been
Speaker 1: a grand total of three thousand different chemical agents tested
Speaker 1: as potential weapons, so every side was guilty of this,
Speaker 1: even though they had signed a thing saying they wouldn't
Speaker 1: do it. Um. Something like a hundred and twenty four
Speaker 1: thousand metric tons of chemical weapons were delivered via sixty
Speaker 1: six million artillery shells over the course of the war,
Speaker 1: causing around a million casualties, and as you might notice,
Speaker 1: this clearly violates the letter and spirit of the Hague
Speaker 1: Convention Um. The way all the powers got around this
Speaker 1: was by arguing that their poison gas shells didn't violate
Speaker 1: the letter of the Hague convention Um because the the
Speaker 1: explosive shells they delivered them in didn't just kill people
Speaker 1: with gas since they exploded. They still killed people through
Speaker 1: explosions too, So their argument was like, well, the Hague
Speaker 1: Convention just banned shells that only dispersed chemical weapons, since
Speaker 1: our shells explode to technically technically we also, yeah, I
Speaker 1: hate you guys so much. It's so fucking shit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And it reminds me like, as a kid, I was
Speaker 1: a war gamer, Like I played a lot of those
Speaker 1: little games with models, and like the rules lawyering that
Speaker 1: you encounter in that hobby. It's just weird to realize, like, oh,
Speaker 1: the same thing happens in real war. Like there were
Speaker 1: a bunch of like overweight, shitty assholes standing around a
Speaker 1: table being like, no, it doesn't break the rules, because
Speaker 1: this is amazing. Just a just a bunch of bearded
Speaker 1: dudes who have never been near a battlefield yelling about
Speaker 1: like what doesn't break the letter of the law, will
Speaker 1: like actual soldiers get gassed. It's amazing. That's what I
Speaker 1: was thinking, Like while you were saying that there's every war,
Speaker 1: it sounds like there comes to a point where like, okay, okay,
Speaker 1: you can't do that anymore, God damn stop doing that.
Speaker 1: Like every war there's like something like wait, humans just
Speaker 1: figure out like okay, okay, what about this? And then
Speaker 1: it comes to the point where but it's like all right,
Speaker 1: it's just we gotta stop. You can't do that. Oh God,
Speaker 1: what what is that? Stop that? Every time? It's fun?
Speaker 1: So yeah, it it. World War one was ship chemical
Speaker 1: weapons made it worse. In the nine the Great Powers
Speaker 1: signed the Geneva Protocol and Asphyxiating, Poisonous and Other Gases UM,
Speaker 1: which would have banned all chemical weapons in warfare, like
Speaker 1: without any sort of exceptions in it um. The only
Speaker 1: two major powers who did not ratify the proposal where
Speaker 1: the United States in Japan, which is interesting. The US
Speaker 1: has a long history of advocating for rules in warfare,
Speaker 1: but then forbidding or refusing to sign onto them because
Speaker 1: it will limit what we can do with war. Um. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we should. We it's probably a good thing to sign. Um.
Speaker 1: I should say that, Like, the Geneva Convention was kind
Speaker 1: of bullshit um in some ways, just because like there
Speaker 1: was an exemption in it that if you were attacked
Speaker 1: with chemical weapons by a state, you could use chemical
Speaker 1: weapons in defense of your country. And there was another
Speaker 1: provision that allowed chemical weapons to be used on any
Speaker 1: states or groups that had not signed the Geneva Protocol um,
Speaker 1: which meant that colonial hours could continue to deploy mustard
Speaker 1: gas against their tribal enemies. So it was like, we
Speaker 1: can't use chemical weapons on other white people. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's that's basically the law that they agree on
Speaker 1: after World War One. We're not barbarians, but we're going
Speaker 1: to keep doing this to the people we call barbarias.
Speaker 1: We do need to keep some order because yeah, the
Speaker 1: Geneva protocols also made it legal to stockpile chemical weapons,
Speaker 1: so it's like you can't use them, but you can
Speaker 1: build up an arsenal of them, and you can use
Speaker 1: it if you're attacked or if you need to suppress
Speaker 1: people who don't have a country. So that's cool. That's
Speaker 1: like they've just given people like poker chips or you
Speaker 1: can't spend them unless you like really need it, unless
Speaker 1: you really want to. You kind of that's kind of
Speaker 1: always how rules about warfare are. Like nobody, it's it's
Speaker 1: I guess in part because it's usually not people who
Speaker 1: have are faced those weapons who are like signing onto
Speaker 1: the conventions about them at a bunch of politicians being
Speaker 1: like yeah, in generals, all sort of like debate, but well, okay,
Speaker 1: but what if we need to well then we'll have
Speaker 1: this exception and that we can still use them if
Speaker 1: we need to. Um. Yeah, but it is that, I mean,
Speaker 1: that is their job is to think like that. So
Speaker 1: so it's like that weird, yeah, yeah, and yeah they're
Speaker 1: all a bunch of lawyers. Now. The first nation to
Speaker 1: break with the protocols was fascist Italy and their colonial
Speaker 1: war with Ethiopia UM, which was a state at that
Speaker 1: point in time, Mussolini's troops dropped mustard gas bombs and
Speaker 1: mass on Ethiopian villagers and thirty six, killing and wounding
Speaker 1: more than fifteen thousand people. Mussolini's actions were a clear
Speaker 1: violation of the protocol, but the League of Nations refused
Speaker 1: to do anything. This would prove to be the last
Speaker 1: time an international organization failed to take action against a
Speaker 1: fascist gassing civilians. So that's good. It's never happened again, never,
Speaker 1: not not not once. Now. No, that's what's great out
Speaker 1: international governance is that it's a thing that really happens.
Speaker 1: It's not theater. Yeah, it's not at not at all theater,
Speaker 1: totally a real thing. Um. So, World War two wasn't
Speaker 1: a great time for anybody, um But one of its
Speaker 1: few bright spots is that in the European theater, at
Speaker 1: least chemical weapons were not deployed. Uh. This did not
Speaker 1: stop both the Axis and the Allies from manufacturing huge
Speaker 1: quantities of them um. And the failure of either side
Speaker 1: to use chemical weapons was not due to high minded
Speaker 1: ideals on anyone's part, but more due to a balance
Speaker 1: of terror that kept bare minimums of human decency in
Speaker 1: place in this one specific field of war. Um I'd
Speaker 1: like to quote from a Carnegie Council paper on the
Speaker 1: Rise and Fall of Chemical weapons about this quote. While
Speaker 1: the Allies refined older model gases like false gene and mustard,
Speaker 1: the Germans invented a new, far deadlier category of chemical weapons,
Speaker 1: nerve agents, in one of the greatest intelligence coups of
Speaker 1: the war. The Nazis successfully kept this development secret from
Speaker 1: the Allies until their surrender. If they had chosen to
Speaker 1: use these weapons on Allied true they might have altered
Speaker 1: the course of history once again. Germany had its superior
Speaker 1: chemical industry to thank. Chemists from I. G. Farban, then
Speaker 1: one of the world's largest corporations, stumbled on compounds of
Speaker 1: extraordinary potency while trying to develop potential insecticides for commercial use.
Speaker 1: What became Sarah Taboon and so Man All nerve gases
Speaker 1: which caused the cascading failure of body functions, including the
Speaker 1: body forgetting to breathe and then rapid death, were developed
Speaker 1: by German scientists working with their very mocked counterparts I. G. Farban.
Speaker 1: By the way, it's bear today, So that's cool. That's cool. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're aspirin is made by the people who invented saren cool.
Speaker 1: I mean they know what they're doing. They do, you know,
Speaker 1: I would I would argue that Sarah works better at
Speaker 1: its intended application than aspirin. Yes, yeah, I can attest
Speaker 1: to that from what I've seen and experience. But aspirin
Speaker 1: doesn't do like when you're worth like as you develop that,
Speaker 1: did you just go home and your wife's like, how
Speaker 1: was today? You're like it was in chance. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: imagine a lot of scientists like sitting out with a
Speaker 1: beer watching the sunset, like staring at their kids playing
Speaker 1: in the yard, and just like shaking their heads. I
Speaker 1: don't think we should have done that. This might go
Speaker 1: bad places just gonna buy us in the ass. I
Speaker 1: feel like there's all the best scientists wind up feeling
Speaker 1: like that at some point, Like we had a whole
Speaker 1: generation of them on the Manhattan Project who must have
Speaker 1: just gone home. You get this reading them where they're
Speaker 1: just sitting around being like, oh boy, maybe I shouldn't
Speaker 1: have done that, Probably shouldn't be doing this job. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they just know just enough of the I don't I
Speaker 1: think we should do this? You get okay, all right,
Speaker 1: I'm just not Okay, Yeah, it's like everybody spreads that
Speaker 1: Oppenheimer like that that anecdote about him reciting that line
Speaker 1: from the Bog of a Gida, I become Death, the
Speaker 1: destroyer of world. And I feel like, when you're talking
Speaker 1: about when you need to change your career, if you
Speaker 1: feel the need to quote that un ironically about what
Speaker 1: you're doing, maybe you need a new job. Yeah, maybe
Speaker 1: you're not in the right field. I'm like, I'm in
Speaker 1: over my head. I'm in over your head now. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna I just like science, that's all. I just like science.
Speaker 1: I bet his resume was fun, just like nineteen forty
Speaker 1: three to nineteen forty five. I became Death, destroyer of
Speaker 1: World's nine about me. You may have heard about me,
Speaker 1: you know, the guy who will ultimately be responsible for
Speaker 1: the end of human civilization. That was my day jobs.
Speaker 1: I figured it out. It was a problem, and I
Speaker 1: got it first. I got it right. Ah damn it.
Speaker 1: That is I mean when most scientists, I know, it's
Speaker 1: that the whole thing is like we don't know, so
Speaker 1: we're just honestly trying to figure out everything. Is like, oh,
Speaker 1: we don't really know, and that's what happens is like
Speaker 1: you guys keep asking questions. Man, Yeah, it's like doing
Speaker 1: too many drugs. Sometimes I don't go down that Hallwaite man. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're gonna go too far and you're not gonna be
Speaker 1: able to come back. But at least when people do
Speaker 1: that on acid, like it just leads to them following
Speaker 1: fish around for seven years when the military doesn't weaponize it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: not yet tried, That's for sure. They have tried. It's
Speaker 1: just hard to so. After World War Two, the US
Speaker 1: and the Soviet Union embarked on a dark and secret
Speaker 1: arms race to build more varied stockpiles of chemical weapons.
Speaker 1: In By seven, the U s stockpile of saren was
Speaker 1: so vast that we started developing a new series of
Speaker 1: nerve gases. The V for Venomous Agents VX nerve gas
Speaker 1: is probably the most famous of these. It's three times
Speaker 1: as toxic as saren when inhaled, and a thousand times
Speaker 1: as toxic when absorbed through the skin or the other.
Speaker 1: We gotta make it worse. I just make sure, and
Speaker 1: this isn't I forget, this isn't TV. I just threw
Speaker 1: my hands up and I was like, just Jesus, like,
Speaker 1: we have too much. Let's just makes some moment. Well,
Speaker 1: and if you follow the line of thinking there, it's
Speaker 1: remarkable because like in ninety five, like we see that
Speaker 1: the Nazis have like operated the most brutal regime in history,
Speaker 1: have gassed eleven million people to death and like the
Speaker 1: fastest massacre in the history of human murder. And when
Speaker 1: were like, oh, and these same people developed the deadliest
Speaker 1: poison anyone's ever developed. I guess let's take it and
Speaker 1: make more. That's the uh, we are so shitty, like
Speaker 1: everyone is, but even specifically the US post World War Two. Yoh,
Speaker 1: we won. We're gonna take everything. We won. The worst
Speaker 1: people ever designed the worst poison ever. Let's make it. Oh,
Speaker 1: we've made so much of it that there's no point
Speaker 1: in that's having more. Let's make a deadlier version of it,
Speaker 1: just in case somebody finds all ours. Yeah, now, Billy,
Speaker 1: you know what isn't a thousand times deadlier than Sarah
Speaker 1: and gas. No, the products and services that support this podcast,
Speaker 1: we don't know that I do. I do. I can
Speaker 1: guarantee you that if you if you deploy the products
Speaker 1: and services that support this podcast against say, a recalcitrant
Speaker 1: rebel village. Uh, it won't suffocate them. I hope you're right.
Speaker 1: I hope you're right. I suspect I am in this case. Anyway,
Speaker 1: here is our non weaponizable products. We're back. Okay, So Billy,
Speaker 1: we've been talking about poison gas a little bit this morning,
Speaker 1: and that's been fun um, and I should probably to
Speaker 1: talk a little bit here about what these chemicals we're
Speaker 1: talking about do. So saren nerve gas basically turns off
Speaker 1: the off switch for your muscles and nerves, which leads
Speaker 1: to constant muscle contractions, seizures, uncontrollable convulsion, and exhaustion that
Speaker 1: can cause respiratory paralysis, which is when your lungs forget
Speaker 1: to work, and of course death. But it doesn't turn
Speaker 1: off your nerves, so you get to feel No, it's
Speaker 1: you're in a horrible pain. Oh, it's terrible. One. That's fun. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's good. V X nerve gas works the
Speaker 1: same way, but at lower doses and it's much faster.
Speaker 1: One leader of VX nerve gas contains enough individual doses
Speaker 1: to kill a million human beings. WHOA, that's yeah, that's
Speaker 1: that's cool. That's helpful. Good much you can give a
Speaker 1: million people with this much. And again the dudes who
Speaker 1: did that went home and like watched fireworks with their families.
Speaker 1: It's amazing. Yeah, well, guys, we made a leader of
Speaker 1: this ship time to go home for the day. A
Speaker 1: million people. So, by the late nineteen fifties, the Soviet
Speaker 1: Union had also learned how to produce v X nerve gas,
Speaker 1: and they started making it too. Now, the USSR was
Speaker 1: in general a major distributor of horrific poisons throughout the
Speaker 1: Cold War. They sent a shipload of chemical weapons to Egypt,
Speaker 1: a nation who today still refuses to sign the Chemical
Speaker 1: Weapons Convention. In nineteen sixty three, Egypt deployed false gene
Speaker 1: and mustard gas against Yemeni forces. In nineteen sixty seven,
Speaker 1: they again used nerve gas and Yemen. Many of these
Speaker 1: weapons were likely supplied directly by the Soviet Union. In
Speaker 1: the mid nineteen eighties, Saddam Hussein's Iraq began producing its Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was deployed extensively throughout the Iran Iraq War. Now,
Speaker 1: the US did not approve of any of this directly,
Speaker 1: nor did we directly hand the Iraqi regime v X
Speaker 1: nerve gas, but we did use our intelligence apparatus to
Speaker 1: inform Iraq of the position of Iranian military units, knowing
Speaker 1: full well that Iraq would deploy chemical weapons against them. Um,
Speaker 1: and then we later use this as a justification for
Speaker 1: invading them. Um. I'm gonna quote from a great article
Speaker 1: in Foreign Policy quote. US officials have long denied acquiescing
Speaker 1: to Iraqi chemical attacks, insisting that Hussein's government never announced
Speaker 1: he was going to use the weapons. But retired Air
Speaker 1: Force Colonel Rick Francona, who was a military attache in
Speaker 1: Baghdad during the strikes, paints a different picture. The Iraqis
Speaker 1: never told us that they intended to use nerve gas.
Speaker 1: They didn't have to. We already knew. So that's cool. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So everybody's fine in the Cold War with using chemical weapons.
Speaker 1: Point cold chemicals warm people up. It's a cold war.
Speaker 1: We're not having a real war. We're just having a like, Hey,
Speaker 1: come on, it's chili. Warm up with this VX. It
Speaker 1: will make your muscles contract and that'll warm you up.
Speaker 1: You know what they say to people having fatal seizures
Speaker 1: are never chili. Hm. They sweat a lot. They sweat
Speaker 1: a lot. Uh. So I brought all of this up
Speaker 1: as background because the stuff we're about to talk about today, Uh,
Speaker 1: Walter Basson and South Africa is horrific. But it's important
Speaker 1: to understand the context of the global chemical warfare industry
Speaker 1: and its use in the nineteen seventies and eighties. UM.
Speaker 1: When we start talking about chemical weapons and the nations
Speaker 1: that use them, it's not a story that has any
Speaker 1: good guys, but there's definitely bad guys, and Walter Basson
Speaker 1: is one of the worst. UM. Mr Basson was born
Speaker 1: on July six, nineteen fifty seven years before the birth
Speaker 1: of the V series of nerve gases, and we don't
Speaker 1: know much about his early life. He grew up around
Speaker 1: Cape Town and became a cardiologist, and he seems to
Speaker 1: have excelled in his career. He practiced medicine in the
Speaker 1: suburbs of that city and the employee of the South
Speaker 1: African Defense Forces. He eventually rose to the rank of
Speaker 1: brigadier and became a trusted part of the military medical establishment. UM.
Speaker 1: So have you ever heard of Rhodesia, Billy Wayne or
Speaker 1: is it an herb? It's a it's a place. UM,
Speaker 1: it was a place. Rhodesia was essentially a call. It's
Speaker 1: like modern day Zimbabwe UM, but back when white people
Speaker 1: were in charge of it, it was called Rhodesia UM. Now,
Speaker 1: in the nineteen sixties and seventies, the European powers started
Speaker 1: to increasingly pull out of their African colonies, and this
Speaker 1: posed a problem for the parts of Africa that had
Speaker 1: sizeable white populations who had grown up basically controlling large
Speaker 1: chunks of land and ruling over large numbers of black people.
Speaker 1: Rhodesia was named after the arch colonialist Cecil Rhodes who
Speaker 1: will certainly have an episode of his own one of
Speaker 1: these days, UM. And so for years there was like
Speaker 1: this big conflict over Rhodesia UM. And basically like actually
Speaker 1: a lot of ore, like the modern military tactics that
Speaker 1: the U. S Military uses in Afghanistan and Iraq, like
Speaker 1: counterinsurgency tactics were invented by the white Rhodesian military to
Speaker 1: suppress the black population. Well, we're just you know, taking
Speaker 1: feeling good and keep doing the good, you know, yeah, exactly. UM.
Speaker 1: If you ever heard a soldier of Fortune magazine, I have.
Speaker 1: I used to read it when I was little, you know,
Speaker 1: I didn't know, Yeah, it was well, during like the seventies,
Speaker 1: they would put in ads for the Rhodesian military because
Speaker 1: Rhodesia would like solicit white people from America and Europe
Speaker 1: to come and fight as and become like colonial warriors,
Speaker 1: suppressing like the black population. It's super fucked up. The
Speaker 1: story of Rhodesia is incredibly fucked up. But they know
Speaker 1: where we grew up. People were like, y'all, you can
Speaker 1: go over you can go over there and get to
Speaker 1: shoot people. You can kill them and not racist there. Fine,
Speaker 1: it was I saw it in an ad. It was
Speaker 1: then sold you're a Fortune magazine. In the back of
Speaker 1: a magazine, you can go over and kill people and
Speaker 1: it's okay. All the best militaries advertised in the back
Speaker 1: of a magazine. Um So, the Rhodesian struggle for I
Speaker 1: don't know, colonial domination um ended in the early nineteen
Speaker 1: seventies in defeat and with the establishment of the nation
Speaker 1: of Zimbabwe racist Americans that we did. We ran out
Speaker 1: our racist I guess yeah. So that left just one
Speaker 1: power in Africa fighting for white supremacy, obviously South Africa.
Speaker 1: UM Now, the badly outnumbered white population of South Africa
Speaker 1: managed to maintain power via a brutal police state and
Speaker 1: oppressive laws that made Jim Crow look still pretty bad,
Speaker 1: but less bad. Uh, that's not the best way to
Speaker 1: frame it. It was even worse than Jim Crow, is
Speaker 1: what I'm saying about the apartheid state. You don't want
Speaker 1: to be You don't have that argument either way, we're like, hey,
Speaker 1: we're not. It was like you you take the most
Speaker 1: racist people in America and you make them more racist,
Speaker 1: and that was the government of South Africa in the
Speaker 1: mid nineteen seventies. Like, or maybe not more racist, but
Speaker 1: with more power to be racist is probably a better
Speaker 1: way to frame it, because I suspect a lot of
Speaker 1: racists in America in this period would have done what
Speaker 1: the South African government did, but they just weren't allowed to.
Speaker 1: They didn't they didn't have the Internet to like, you know,
Speaker 1: motivate them like, oh, they're getting it done down there.
Speaker 1: We could be more racist, I know, we wouldn't do
Speaker 1: it enough. So, Uh. In the mid nineteen seventies, South
Speaker 1: Africa got involved in a civil war and Angola fighting
Speaker 1: on the side of anti communist rebels. And this was
Speaker 1: a very complicated conflict, but the gist of the story
Speaker 1: is that South Africa believed that the cause of white
Speaker 1: supremacy was best served by supporting the United States and
Speaker 1: its allies in the Cold War, so they backed the
Speaker 1: anti community side in the civil war in Angola. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can make of that what you will. So Cuba
Speaker 1: came out on the side of the pro communist and
Speaker 1: Golan government, and in short order South African soldiers found
Speaker 1: themselves wildly outnumbered and outmaneuvered by the Cuban Army UM
Speaker 1: and their forces in the Angolan Army. Uh. They were
Speaker 1: forced to withdraw from the country, But before that happened,
Speaker 1: they captured a handful of Cuban military vehicles. Inside them,
Speaker 1: they found a variety of gas antidotes and gas masks.
Speaker 1: This convinced the South African defense forces that Cuban soldiers
Speaker 1: were preparing to use chemical weapons against them. Now, it's
Speaker 1: possible that this never happened. Everything I'm telling you now
Speaker 1: is based on war crimes trials conducted in the mid
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties, but the South African military establishment claims that
Speaker 1: fears of Cuban chemical weapons is what drove them to
Speaker 1: start developing their own chemical weapons program. So yeah, now,
Speaker 1: one thing I should note in terms of like determining
Speaker 1: whether or not this is true and whether or not
Speaker 1: they thought there was a really real military threat that
Speaker 1: inspired them to make chemical weapons, is that right around
Speaker 1: the same time their war worth Angola went to ship,
Speaker 1: the powers that be in South Africa also felt control
Speaker 1: of the domestic situation in their country slipping through their
Speaker 1: hands um see. At this point in South Africa, white
Speaker 1: South Africans basically held all political power in the country,
Speaker 1: despite making up only a small percentage of the population.
Speaker 1: Under Prime Minister B. J. Worcester. Throughout the mid nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: economic growth plummeted, urban and crowding grew worse, and it
Speaker 1: became increasingly clear to everyone that the black majority of
Speaker 1: the country was increasingly less willing to take this kind
Speaker 1: of ship. In nineteen seventy six, after the last South
Speaker 1: African troops left Angola, students in the Soetto township of
Speaker 1: Johannesburg protested against the mandatory teaching of Afrikaans and school. Now,
Speaker 1: Afrikaans is like a white kind of like I think
Speaker 1: it's a descendant of like German or in Dutch and
Speaker 1: stuff like it's it's the language that the white people
Speaker 1: in South Africa speak and black people in South Africa
Speaker 1: were not happy at being forced to learn a foreign
Speaker 1: occupier language. Um one not imagine. Yeah, it's truly mystifying, Billy.
Speaker 1: Normally people love being forced to learn the language that
Speaker 1: the people who regularly shoot them speaks. Gonna be a
Speaker 1: fun episode. Just learn our language. Why don't you want
Speaker 1: to learn? Is it the shooting you? Is that way?
Speaker 1: You don't want to learn our language because it's because
Speaker 1: this is your country and we came here? Is that?
Speaker 1: Why are you gotta let it go? Dude? You gotta
Speaker 1: let ye so? Um. The Sotto uprisings were put down
Speaker 1: by white police with live rounds. They killed a number
Speaker 1: of school children and it sparked an international incident. Um. So. Obviously,
Speaker 1: the late nineteen seventies was not a great time for
Speaker 1: racial awareness UH in the West, but things had progressed
Speaker 1: enough that black school children being mowed down by white
Speaker 1: cops did not play well, and since South Africa's political
Speaker 1: position was precarious at best, they really needed the support
Speaker 1: of western nations. Um. The head of the Defense Force,
Speaker 1: General Constant Ville Jean, later testified that the diplomatic backlash
Speaker 1: convinced the government that such bloodshed had to be prevented.
Speaker 1: So it all quote focus the attention of the military
Speaker 1: on the need to develop alternative crowd control agents. So
Speaker 1: this is what starts them on the road to developing
Speaker 1: chemical weapons. As they're like, boy, it looks bad when
Speaker 1: we just shoot people. We need an alternative. We need
Speaker 1: an alternative to shooting people. It's just democratis those were
Speaker 1: alternative crowd control. What's that mean? We can't shoot him anymore.
Speaker 1: So gases seem like a good call because you can't
Speaker 1: see those so well on a camera. What if we
Speaker 1: just put like invisible stuff that gets in their bodies
Speaker 1: and kills them that way. M hmm, Yeah, that's basically
Speaker 1: the thinking. So after so at, the South African Defense
Speaker 1: establishment becomes convinced that a total strategy is necessary in
Speaker 1: order to defend the country from the unrest that was
Speaker 1: increasingly sweeping the nation. And I feel like a r
Speaker 1: fault to start with, but we're going to have to
Speaker 1: do something awful about it. Now there's all this unrest.
Speaker 1: We gotta do something about it. Let's let's try to
Speaker 1: be the worst thing imaginable about it. Yeah, that's basically
Speaker 1: where this goes. So in nineteen eighty one, the South
Speaker 1: African government orders Brigadair Walter Basson, a young military cardiologist,
Speaker 1: to travel abroad and learn about the chemical and biological
Speaker 1: weapons programs of the Western world. Why a cardiologist, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess because he was just the best evil doctor
Speaker 1: they had. Like they looked at all the doctors in
Speaker 1: the military and we're like, you're the evilist. That's my guest.
Speaker 1: I don't know how this motherfucker is hollow and side.
Speaker 1: Let's get him. There is nothing behind this man's He's
Speaker 1: good at stuff, but I don't like it. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: um Woter and his name is I think w O
Speaker 1: T E r Um. So I'm not Wooter. It seems
Speaker 1: more like alter, which is why I think I've called
Speaker 1: him that a couple of times. But but Wood, we'll
Speaker 1: call him Wood. Wutta was a thirty years old at
Speaker 1: this point, and he took to his task with all
Speaker 1: the enthusiasm you'd expect of a young wunderkind. Given the
Speaker 1: chance to embark on an unprecedented project, Project Coast, as
Speaker 1: it was named, grew into one of the most ambitious
Speaker 1: and sinister weapons projects in human history. Its goals, if
Speaker 1: not its ends, may have even eclipsed the Manhattan Project
Speaker 1: and horrifying scale. So we don't fully know where Bassin
Speaker 1: traveled in order to learn the tools of his new
Speaker 1: deadly trade. The evidence we have shows he visited a
Speaker 1: dizzying variety of different destinations. A congress on Chemical and
Speaker 1: Biological Weapons in San Antonio in May of nineteen eighty one,
Speaker 1: a visit to Taiwan to see their chemical weapons factories.
Speaker 1: That same year, he made trips to Denmark, Switzerland, and
Speaker 1: he spent more than four weeks in the Russian Academy
Speaker 1: of Sciences in Moscow. We know he spent time working
Speaker 1: with British intelligence, and it's impossible for us to say
Speaker 1: exactly how much help or what precise sort of help
Speaker 1: these different nations provided, but it's fair to say that
Speaker 1: both sides of the chemical weapons industry, Soviet and UH
Speaker 1: and Western um contributed knowledge to voters like later development.
Speaker 1: So that's cool, right, everybody came together. Yeah, it's like
Speaker 1: how if you don't know, if you've ever been to
Speaker 1: a gun show, like like the fair ground, it is
Speaker 1: like all the time, I know you have this is
Speaker 1: more further people. But what always makes me laugh is
Speaker 1: like it's people that hate each other it's like base
Speaker 1: a gun shows like basse where they go get their
Speaker 1: weapons and then they go fight each other outside. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's pretty fun. Actually, it's the same thing going
Speaker 1: to gun rages and like seeing the different political patches
Speaker 1: on people's like bags and stuff and being like, ah,
Speaker 1: you all like a couple of bad years and you'll
Speaker 1: be using those on each other. Yeah, but you can't
Speaker 1: do it here yet, not yet, not yet. We know
Speaker 1: who your picture and when you put those targets up.
Speaker 1: So throughout the late nineteen eighties and early nineteen nineties,
Speaker 1: Basson developed a shocking array of conventional, chemical and biological
Speaker 1: weapons for South Africa. He designed rifle grenades, mortar bombs,
Speaker 1: and artillery shells with biological weapons capacity. Now, this was
Speaker 1: all pretty conventional within the dark standards of the arms
Speaker 1: industry at the time, but Basson quickly went beyond preparing
Speaker 1: South Africa's conventional forces for a shooting war that just
Speaker 1: involved chemical weapons. See Around the same time Project Coast started,
Speaker 1: the South African Special Forces launched Operation Barnacle. This was
Speaker 1: an action spearheaded by white former Rhodesian security operators to
Speaker 1: assassinate enemies of the apartheid government. Wood or Basson wound
Speaker 1: up at the heart of this enterprise to his goal
Speaker 1: in it was to clamp down on the Southwest African
Speaker 1: People's Organization in Namibia, a group the South African government
Speaker 1: considered terrorists but most people would probably call freedom fighters.
Speaker 1: Here's how The Guardian described what wood or Basson helped
Speaker 1: his government due to the SWAPO is the acronym the
Speaker 1: South African Southwest African PS Organization. I think SWAPO is fun. Quote.
Speaker 1: Particular favorites of his were muscle relaxings, which, when given
Speaker 1: to victims and large doses, caused their lungs to collapse
Speaker 1: and induced suffocation. The charge sheet alleges that are around
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty Basson provided the toxins to kill two hundred
Speaker 1: and Namibians SWAPO gorillas fighting for independence from South Africa.
Speaker 1: An aircraft was purchased for the purpose of disposing bodies
Speaker 1: in the sea. Yeah, it's it's fun stuff. Like he's
Speaker 1: just like, oh you think, like he watches people be
Speaker 1: like okay, man, that's terrible. He's like just white. He
Speaker 1: gets good. They're like no, no, we're good, and he's
Speaker 1: like no, no, I just cracked my knuckles. We're just now.
Speaker 1: Then we get an airplane and we dumped their bodies
Speaker 1: in the ocean, right, Billy. You know who won't poison
Speaker 1: freedom fighters to death and dump their bodies in the ocean.
Speaker 1: Derritos the probably Well actually they they're they're owned by
Speaker 1: I think Friedo La and I suspect fried to Lay
Speaker 1: absolutely would do that. Um, you're right, I'm with you
Speaker 1: on that. Yeah, but you know who won't are the
Speaker 1: products and services that support this show. Yes, we're back,
Speaker 1: so Billy. When we when we left off, we talked
Speaker 1: about how Bassin provided toxins that shut down the lungs
Speaker 1: of of swap O guerrillas and then they would throw
Speaker 1: them into the sea from helicopters. Um, and I'm gonna
Speaker 1: continue quoting from that Guardian article. It just sort of
Speaker 1: what things WoT Bassin got involved with as part of
Speaker 1: this operation to clamp down on an independence movement. Quote,
Speaker 1: bass and supplied quantities of tuberine and skoline muscle relaxans,
Speaker 1: which an overdose would cause suffocation. Basson requested feedback about
Speaker 1: the effectivity of these substances. The indictment reads Dr Jack Bothma,
Speaker 1: an orthopedic surgeon, who fled to Canada, is expected to
Speaker 1: testify that he handcuffed five minted trees and rubbed a
Speaker 1: poison gel into their body. He's on the orders of Basson,
Speaker 1: who is allegedly experimenting with new means of killing people.
Speaker 1: When it failed to have the desired result, the men
Speaker 1: were murdered with muscle relaxants. Botham has turned state's evidence
Speaker 1: in return for immunity from prosecution for the murders. His
Speaker 1: license to practice in Canada was recently revoked after he
Speaker 1: failed a qualification exam. In many cases, the naked bodies
Speaker 1: of the victims were dumped at sea from a plane.
Speaker 1: Basson is alleged to have sometimes gone along for the ride.
Speaker 1: On other occasions, the corpses were disposed of in blast
Speaker 1: furnaces or shallow graves. So that's great, good, Yeah, So
Speaker 1: what you get from that this is obviously there were
Speaker 1: trials about this later which we'll talk about. But this
Speaker 1: is a guy who number one, he's charged with helping
Speaker 1: South African special forces clamped down on this this black
Speaker 1: liberation movement basically, and he it's not enough for him
Speaker 1: to just help them kill people like he's he's a scientist.
Speaker 1: He's always experimenting. So he's testing out new drugs on
Speaker 1: these people to like see what works well. And there's
Speaker 1: like a kind of a perverse like like that I
Speaker 1: guess I and understand is sort of like a sociopathic
Speaker 1: Like he's a scientist. He's going to experiment with ship
Speaker 1: the writing along to watch the corpses get thrown into
Speaker 1: the sea. That is like, okay, this is beyond just
Speaker 1: like a soulless monster like this guy gets some sort
Speaker 1: of enjoyment. There is a yeah, well to me, Yeah,
Speaker 1: to me, what made it seem pleasurable is the lungs collapsing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that he's really focused on that. That is a that
Speaker 1: is a thing where it's like, oh, you're gonna live
Speaker 1: and know you're gonna know you're dying, You're gonna it's
Speaker 1: like you're drowned in in the like you're just drowning
Speaker 1: outside the water, which is awful. And it's like there's
Speaker 1: also clearly um like you think about it from a
Speaker 1: tactical standpoint, and the only reason to use chemical weapons
Speaker 1: for this is to freak people out. Is like the
Speaker 1: fear is to like scare them away from rebelling, because
Speaker 1: like you could you if you just are trying to
Speaker 1: kill insurgents, you can shoot them like you can execute people.
Speaker 1: That works very well and it's less horrible. Um. So,
Speaker 1: like there's an element of sadism present, and like the
Speaker 1: whole South African military establishment where it's like where these
Speaker 1: black people are not happy being ruled by us and
Speaker 1: we have to make we have to scare the ship
Speaker 1: out of them while we kill them. Um. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: fun stuff, fun story. Thanks for nice It's always a pleasure.
Speaker 1: But it is important that we talk about stuff like
Speaker 1: this because it's like Jesus, Yeah, it's it's wild. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and where where this story goes is pretty wild. So
Speaker 1: under bass direction, under Baston's direction, South African operators use
Speaker 1: poison to kill several hundred people all over the world.
Speaker 1: Not all of his victims were in surgeons in Africa,
Speaker 1: some of them were murdered in the UK and m
Speaker 1: I five later investigated at least six people who died
Speaker 1: of suspicious strokes and heart attacks, possibly as a result
Speaker 1: of Project Barnacle. So they're not just murdering like people
Speaker 1: who have taken up arms against them. They're killing like
Speaker 1: activists around the world, people who are like a danger
Speaker 1: to the apartheid regime. So that's cool. Well they've learned
Speaker 1: from other regimes. I mean we did empires and yeah,
Speaker 1: and they all do it. Yeah, we all do it.
Speaker 1: Um now. Bass And traveled over the world throughout the
Speaker 1: late nineteen eighties and early nineties, seemingly irrespective of the
Speaker 1: sanctions leveled against his nation. He attended conferences and spoke
Speaker 1: to chemical weapons experts in the US, Israel, and all
Speaker 1: across Western Europe, often while his agents were using his
Speaker 1: weapons to kill people in those countries. So that's really neat. Uh,
Speaker 1: nobody stopped this guy from traveling around to learn how
Speaker 1: to make better chemical weapons, even though like multiple nations
Speaker 1: that he traveled to had sanctions against South Africa for
Speaker 1: its race. Is hum well they wanted Yeah, you think
Speaker 1: it might have been a two way street. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it was like, oh, without a doubt. They're like,
Speaker 1: all right, we'll tell you some ship, but you've been
Speaker 1: practicing a lot and we want to learn some things
Speaker 1: from you that you get. Yeah, you get that feeling.
Speaker 1: And again like there's no way for there to be
Speaker 1: any evidence of that for me, Like, I can't say
Speaker 1: that happened, but like, fuck you look into this guy's story,
Speaker 1: and I am certain there were some sketchy motherfucker's and
Speaker 1: like the CIA and the Massad and m I five
Speaker 1: probably even who are like, yeah, well let him out
Speaker 1: of the country. Wudn't hear what he's gotta say? What
Speaker 1: does what kind of is he like? Vegan? What's he like?
Speaker 1: What does he want for lunch? Yeah? Yeah, no, I
Speaker 1: I assume that's how all that works, where at some
Speaker 1: point everything gets so confusing you're just like, yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean we're just learning how to do stuff. Yeah for him?
Speaker 1: And who's not. There's a great musician named Tom Lair
Speaker 1: who was like the weird Al Yankovic of like the
Speaker 1: fifties and sixties. I think he's a math professor at
Speaker 1: Harvard now, um, but he was like an early musical
Speaker 1: funny man. And he wrote a song about Verner von Brown,
Speaker 1: who designed V two rockets for the Nazis and then
Speaker 1: was instrumental in the U. S Space program. And there's
Speaker 1: a line in it that I think really sums up
Speaker 1: all of these people very well. Um, when the rockets
Speaker 1: go up, who knows where they come down? That's not
Speaker 1: my Department, says Verner von Brown. Um, it's just like
Speaker 1: I think a lot of these people are like that.
Speaker 1: It's like, yeah, he's killing people in our country too,
Speaker 1: but like that's not my problem. My problem is developing
Speaker 1: better chemical weapons. And he's good at it. So he's
Speaker 1: really good at this ship. Yeah. So, under Basin's direction,
Speaker 1: the apartheid government of South Africa developed a dizzying array
Speaker 1: of biological weapons Ebola ekoli, necrotizing fasciitis, and tracks and botulinum.
Speaker 1: That last one deserves a bit of special discussion. See bachulenum,
Speaker 1: which is like if you have if you have like
Speaker 1: a can that starts puffing up, like you gotta get
Speaker 1: rid of that thing very carefully because it has bachulin
Speaker 1: in it um. And bachulen um is like one of
Speaker 1: the deadliest things by weight in this planet. Um. It's
Speaker 1: what we use in botox treatments and very deluded measures, um,
Speaker 1: but in slightly less deluded form. It can kill people
Speaker 1: by the thousands. Basin's team is alleged to have synthesized
Speaker 1: roughly five grams have bauchu lenum, which is enough to
Speaker 1: murder five million people. So that's cool. You can see,
Speaker 1: like the scale of deadliness. No, though, you develop this
Speaker 1: like VX nerve gas, which a leader can kill a
Speaker 1: million people, and Bassin develops this bachulenum toxin that like
Speaker 1: the five grams can kill five million people. Um, cool,
Speaker 1: how science works like that? And it's like yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: everyone's trying to beat each other's like, oh they've got
Speaker 1: a million people with a leader, we can we could
Speaker 1: kill more people with less than that man. And it's
Speaker 1: it's the same thing like with your phones, where it's
Speaker 1: like we were all marveled at how quickly phones got
Speaker 1: smaller and faster, but like the same thing happens with
Speaker 1: murder poison. Yeah. Uh so Basson helped to direct the
Speaker 1: assassin Yeah, it is wild that we have. We're way
Speaker 1: slower on that ship. Uh So. Basson helped to direct
Speaker 1: assassination attempts against a number of African National Congress activists
Speaker 1: in London, which was like a group you know, advocating
Speaker 1: for like more racial justice and reform of the apartheid
Speaker 1: system in South Africa. He was behind the assault of
Speaker 1: at least two members of the a n C in London.
Speaker 1: He developed a special poison that was launched via a
Speaker 1: syringe described as a screwdriver. The only reason that the
Speaker 1: plot to kill these guys failed is that the scientists
Speaker 1: who tried to do the deed fucked up and almost
Speaker 1: stabbed himself instead. Then he panicked and threw the screwdriver
Speaker 1: into the Thames, so that one didn't work. Yeah. Basson
Speaker 1: was involved in at least one attempt on the life
Speaker 1: of Nelson Mandela. While he was a prisoner. Uh Wootoo
Speaker 1: developed a way to slip thallium, a toxic heavy metal
Speaker 1: that basically melts your brain in the Mandela's medication. Uh.
Speaker 1: These attempts failed, but for his gallantry, Wootoo Basson was
Speaker 1: awarded the Order of the Southern Cross, which even sounds
Speaker 1: like a racist And I was gonna say it was
Speaker 1: just like that sounds like the most It's it's like
Speaker 1: the most racist. It's the Cross. And you're like, go,
Speaker 1: I don't like it. Yeah, it's like what we we
Speaker 1: got to come up with an award for racists, but
Speaker 1: we want to make it sound even more racist than
Speaker 1: the Iron Cross. Anybody got suggestions? I got one. What
Speaker 1: do we just call it Southern? What do we call
Speaker 1: it the Southern Iron Cross? Now, Nelson Mandela was released
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety nine two, the A and C was
Speaker 1: an unbanned in the face of massive unrest. Suddenly the
Speaker 1: call as a black people having basic rights was legally
Speaker 1: legitimate in South Africa got hit. Yeah. Yeah, So basically
Speaker 1: the A n C had been like a terrorist group
Speaker 1: um prior to this, and like A and C members
Speaker 1: have definitely done some terrorism in South Africa, although it's
Speaker 1: terrorism in a pretty fundamentally justifiable cause, I would argue.
Speaker 1: But yeah, and after the A n C is like
Speaker 1: a legal political party and the cause of black people
Speaker 1: having basic rights was like legally legitimate to fight for
Speaker 1: in South Africa. Now, as you might imagine, Wouter Basson
Speaker 1: was not happy with this, uh, and he responded by
Speaker 1: spearheading a plan to distribute poisoned beer to black people
Speaker 1: at bus stops. So that's good, stop stopping from voting
Speaker 1: if you poison their beer. Fuck he's a real piece
Speaker 1: of shit. Yeah. Now, as I relate these stories, I
Speaker 1: don't want to discount the role of the South African
Speaker 1: government or military establishment in any of this, just because
Speaker 1: we're focusing on Wooter. His work enjoyed a broad base
Speaker 1: of support among the powers that be in his unspeakably
Speaker 1: shitty government. His work was directed and approved at high
Speaker 1: levels and supported by a variety of less technically sophisticated
Speaker 1: methods of repression. Some assemblages guys with Trunchean's beating protesters,
Speaker 1: but Wooter Basson was a unique man within the South
Speaker 1: African military and medical establishments. He did eventually go to
Speaker 1: trial for his many, many crimes, and because of that
Speaker 1: trial we have some knowledge of the extent of those crimes.
Speaker 1: Johan Thron, one of the operators who worked for Basson,
Speaker 1: admitted personally to the murder of several hundred SWAPO prisoners
Speaker 1: along with South African Defense soldiers identified as security risks,
Speaker 1: so they even killed soldiers in their own military. Multiple
Speaker 1: different government agencies managed Basson's chemical weapons project over the
Speaker 1: decade or so that he was active. In the late
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties, as resistance to the apartheid regime picked up,
Speaker 1: Basson's work increasingly focused on poisoning members of the African
Speaker 1: National Congress, the South African Communist Party, and the South
Speaker 1: African Council for Churches. Anyone who voiced displeasure with apartheid
Speaker 1: was subject to poisoning. The testing process for these poisons
Speaker 1: was as horrific as you'd imagine. The rude Plat Research
Speaker 1: Laboratory where most of this work was done, conducted numerous
Speaker 1: experiments on dogs and horses. In one study, they poisoned
Speaker 1: baboons to death over the course of several days. That. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but of course the killing of individuals could only go
Speaker 1: so far, and Wood or Bassin knew that. By the
Speaker 1: late nineteen eighties, the situation was dire enough for the
Speaker 1: government that they knew some sort of mass solution to
Speaker 1: the problem of black people wanting rights was necessary. Now
Speaker 1: it was accepted that there were too many black people
Speaker 1: in South Africa to kill. This was not a moral question.
Speaker 1: Many people in the government likely would have supported mass murder,
Speaker 1: but they simply did not have the technical capacity to
Speaker 1: do so. We logistically, it'll be a not marry you guys.
Speaker 1: We just can't. We just we don't have enough boats.
Speaker 1: We just can't make it work. Well, like we're sitting, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we we have to let most of them live. But Billy,
Speaker 1: they didn't have to let most of them continue to
Speaker 1: have babies. And this is where Woo tour Bassin. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so under Bassin, the South African military establishment embarked on
Speaker 1: a different scheme, an anti fertility vaccine. Oh god, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, can't you just see some bats in the
Speaker 1: United States want abortions? Is that what you want? We'll
Speaker 1: give you abortion. We'll give you one for laughs. Just what? No? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so fully eighteen percent of the projects Basson masterminded during
Speaker 1: his time in the military were focused on what we're
Speaker 1: referred to as fertility and fertility control studies. Scientists under
Speaker 1: Bassin later testify that they understood they were developing a
Speaker 1: vaccine which would be administered to black women without their
Speaker 1: knowledge or consent, in order to render them infertile. Damn it. Yes, Now,
Speaker 1: the initial goal of Basson and his fellow science this
Speaker 1: was to develop a vaccine that would only work on
Speaker 1: black women. This obviously proved to be impossible because black
Speaker 1: women are genetically the same as any other kind of women,
Speaker 1: and it just doesn't things don't work that way. It's
Speaker 1: impossible to target people by skin color in that way.
Speaker 1: So it's interesting to me, Billy that like these incredibly
Speaker 1: racist scientists start out by wanting to make a vaccine
Speaker 1: that will render black women infertile, and they realized that
Speaker 1: because black women are the same as every other kind
Speaker 1: of woman. They can't do it, and this doesn't lead
Speaker 1: them to like realize, like, oh, maybe this racism is
Speaker 1: based on nothing. Science says we're stupid. Science says what
Speaker 1: we're doing is idiotic. But no, they never at any
Speaker 1: point so they were rational enough to accept that their
Speaker 1: plan of a vaccine to render black women infertile would
Speaker 1: not do anything. But they refuse to give up on
Speaker 1: their plan of stopping black people from having sex while
Speaker 1: at least from having babies, and so things evolved. Uh So,
Speaker 1: one of like the scientists do worked under Bassin later
Speaker 1: testify it, as I've alluded to a few times, and
Speaker 1: one of them, a dude named Van Rindsberg, claimed the
Speaker 1: effort started back in nine um and he said he
Speaker 1: was told that the project initially existed at the request
Speaker 1: of Jonas Savimbi, the Engolan anti communist rebel leader and
Speaker 1: Paul Manafort client who was allied with South Africa. The
Speaker 1: story goes that Savimbi was concerned that his female fighters
Speaker 1: would get pregnant and wanted an anti fertility vaccine. This
Speaker 1: is widely believed to be complete horse ship designed to
Speaker 1: provide plausible deniability to the scientists. So basically scientists were like,
Speaker 1: it seems maybe like fucked up that we're trying to
Speaker 1: render all black people infertile, and if there's ever a
Speaker 1: war crimes trial, we're getting trouble. And so their leadership
Speaker 1: was like, no, it's not to it's it's for this
Speaker 1: guy's female soldiers. He just doesn't want him getting pregnant
Speaker 1: in battle. He needs him to because when they get pregnant,
Speaker 1: they can't do murder. Is good? Exactly better excuse Yeah,
Speaker 1: And it's like most of the scientists that were like
Speaker 1: talked to her like, yeah, we knew that was horseshit,
Speaker 1: Like it was you give people a little bit of
Speaker 1: plausible deniability and that that's all it was. So the
Speaker 1: Non Proliferation Organization has a good write up of the
Speaker 1: ensuing court case that includes an interview with one of
Speaker 1: Basson's men, and I'm gonna quote from it now. Of course,
Speaker 1: the scientists did not believe the cover story. Van Rindsburg
Speaker 1: testified that he could not think that an intelligent man
Speaker 1: could think we would spend a couple million on a
Speaker 1: project like this to control pregnancy, and a few of
Speaker 1: Savimbi's female soldiers Nonetheless, the project got underway and became
Speaker 1: central to work at the research laboratories. After the fall
Speaker 1: of the apartheid government, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission was
Speaker 1: convened to investigate the unspeakable crimes the white government had
Speaker 1: committed against its black citizens. And this is where, like
Speaker 1: all of our interviews from this come from one of
Speaker 1: Basson's employees, a guy named Gooson, gave fascinating detail into
Speaker 1: the plan. The interviewer was a fellow named Jerome Chas Killton.
Speaker 1: So Chas Colton said, Uh, it was decided that a
Speaker 1: front company would be formed. Uh. And he was asked,
Speaker 1: can you tell us what brief that you were given
Speaker 1: for what this front company was? Uh? And Goosen said,
Speaker 1: our final brief, or the other brief, was a very
Speaker 1: important one was to develop a project to curtail the
Speaker 1: earth rate of the black population in the country. So
Speaker 1: Goosen was asked to give more detail on this, and
Speaker 1: he said, the person who instructed us or asked it
Speaker 1: to do this was Dr Basson. Um. There was a
Speaker 1: lot of talk on the ethics of this, and Basson
Speaker 1: spent some time quoting to us the census figures of
Speaker 1: nineteen two or eighty one or whenever the census was.
Speaker 1: I can't remember exactly that the Census office stopped counting
Speaker 1: the black people when they reached forty five million, and
Speaker 1: the government decided that it was not feasible to make
Speaker 1: it known to the public that there were forty five
Speaker 1: million blacks. It was just too many. And this was
Speaker 1: mainly one of our big threats. And I think the
Speaker 1: figure of twenty eight million was made known. Now, if
Speaker 1: those were true facts, I wouldn't know up till today,
Speaker 1: I don't know, but that was presented to us by
Speaker 1: Dr Basson. So basically Basson's scientists are like, we feel
Speaker 1: a little bit questionable about this. And one of the
Speaker 1: things they're told is that you're working to sterilize these guerrillas.
Speaker 1: But they're also told that, like, there's twice as many
Speaker 1: black people in the country as the government's willing to
Speaker 1: admit on the official census forms, So like, if we
Speaker 1: don't solve this problem with black people breeding soon, we're
Speaker 1: going to be outnumbered and overwhelmed um or like com
Speaker 1: letely overwhelmed. So like this is like the scientists being
Speaker 1: told this are both simultaneously being told you're not trying
Speaker 1: to sterilize all the black people and also given evidence
Speaker 1: that like, we have to sterilize all the black people
Speaker 1: right away or we're fucked. So it's yeah, wild, I
Speaker 1: like the arbitrary numbers. To stop counting, that's to stop stop. Yeah,
Speaker 1: don't count anymore. We can't tell Yeah. And Goosen later testified,
Speaker 1: based on conversations he had with different South African generals,
Speaker 1: that he thought the anti fertility project was considered by
Speaker 1: the government to be the most important project for the country.
Speaker 1: So like, as a general rule, UM like the Anti
Speaker 1: Fertility Project when you like read stories about basting in
Speaker 1: his work is portrayed as like one horrible project among others.
Speaker 1: Um and generally like less awful than the nerve gases
Speaker 1: and assassination drugs he made. Um. And I don't think
Speaker 1: that's fair because the reality, once you like dig into
Speaker 1: the documents is that um Basson and his colleagues, like
Speaker 1: what they were trying to do with these drugs was
Speaker 1: attempted genocide. UM. Like, their their goal here was to
Speaker 1: wipe out the black population of South Africa. They just
Speaker 1: wanted to do it more peacefully than with gunfire. Um.
Speaker 1: It's like it's pretty staggering and do it silently, Yeah, silently,
Speaker 1: and like in a way that people don't realize it's
Speaker 1: happening because you're secretly dosing people with this anti fertility drug.
Speaker 1: Like that's that's the plan that's being made here, um
Speaker 1: gooson later testified by the government by the government, Yeah,
Speaker 1: to sterilize million people or so. Yeah. Uh. One thing
Speaker 1: I can remember which we spoke about was the effectivity
Speaker 1: then of the product which needed to be developed, whether
Speaker 1: it is permanent sterilization or whether it's temporary, or whether
Speaker 1: it's effective. You know how these things work. In fact,
Speaker 1: we discussed involving with statutions from the university, and we
Speaker 1: discussed getting them secret clearance that they can work on
Speaker 1: the project for us to work out models what will
Speaker 1: be the influence on population rate if the project was
Speaker 1: fifty effective for one year, sixty seventy whatever. So we
Speaker 1: realized that you cannot really you might not achieve a
Speaker 1: hundred percent effective sterilization, and it was not thought to
Speaker 1: be necessary. So he's they're they're saying, like, maybe we
Speaker 1: only stop seventy percent of them from breeding, is what
Speaker 1: he's saying. Like, uh, like that they they it's but
Speaker 1: like those are the numbers they're looking at, Like, this
Speaker 1: is a real effort to stop two thirds or more
Speaker 1: as many people as possible from breeding, as many black
Speaker 1: people as possible from breeding. And I think that that
Speaker 1: rises to the level of an attempted genocide like se sterilization.
Speaker 1: Like you know, the Holocaust wiped out like roughly half
Speaker 1: of the world's Jewish population, so you're talking about the
Speaker 1: goal was something that would have led to an even
Speaker 1: sharper decline in the population of South African black people.
Speaker 1: Like that was the end goal of this. It was
Speaker 1: a much slower project, but like that's what they're shooting for.
Speaker 1: It's pretty wild. Yeah, it's like they're they're they had
Speaker 1: a discussion over that. Well, I mean the Nazis were
Speaker 1: just like two loud and efficient about it. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: You can't kill him as fast as they did. That'll
Speaker 1: get you in trouble. Yeah, people get like real mouthy
Speaker 1: when you do it like that, So you gotta just
Speaker 1: do it. We'll get invaded. But if we can stop
Speaker 1: eight of them from having babies, well then yeah, pretty wild. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So thankfully the anti fertility vaccine was never distributed in
Speaker 1: mass uh and We have very little data on how
Speaker 1: it was tested, but we do know that the program
Speaker 1: was wound down in the early nineteen nineties when President F. W.
Speaker 1: Tw Clerk was elected and the death knell of apartheid
Speaker 1: was obvious enough for even people like bass into here.
Speaker 1: The new president ordered Project Coast to be gradually killed off,
Speaker 1: but he was not willing to give up on the
Speaker 1: dream of pacifying South Africa's black masses for domination by
Speaker 1: the white minority instead of sterilization or mass poisoning. Though
Speaker 1: President to Clerk started funding a kinder and gentler method
Speaker 1: of social control, he wanted Basson to test the use
Speaker 1: of quaaludes and m D m A to pacify the
Speaker 1: restless population. Uh so that's that's nice? Is it is better?
Speaker 1: I mean yeah, yeah, yeah, howe's gonna get along be
Speaker 1: a little looser. If it was for everyone in the country,
Speaker 1: I would say that's a great plan. Um, the racism
Speaker 1: is what ruins. Okay, I missed that part. They were
Speaker 1: just giving them to black people to stop them from
Speaker 1: wanting their rights. No, no, you thought they were just
Speaker 1: giving luds to everybody. Unfortunately. Yeah, if it was just
Speaker 1: like the army helicoptering kludes and m d m A
Speaker 1: to everybody, like, I'm fine with that project. That's a
Speaker 1: good use of the military. But no, this was racist,
Speaker 1: very racist. They always is always catch Yeah. So a
Speaker 1: scientist named Henny Jordan's um at, a company that acts
Speaker 1: as a front for Project Coast, is generally credited as
Speaker 1: the person who came up with the formula for what
Speaker 1: may have been the very best M d m A
Speaker 1: ever synthesized. Most sources suggest that it was over purity,
Speaker 1: which is pretty exceptional. Now, I can't say for certain
Speaker 1: whether or not I or you ever took this particular
Speaker 1: strain of ecstasy um, but like it's one of those
Speaker 1: things I started going through like my memories of the
Speaker 1: best ecstasy experiences I had in the early two thousands,
Speaker 1: and like wondering, like, yeah, that was a really good batch.
Speaker 1: Was that? Was that the genocide ecstasy um? Because this
Speaker 1: stuff was initially cooked up as a crowd control drug
Speaker 1: they wanted to do really sad, really fast. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: real bad. Um. This was initially cooked up. They wanted
Speaker 1: to basically dose millions of black people with m d
Speaker 1: m A to like stop them from revolting and stuff.
Speaker 1: But how were what was their delivery device? Well, I
Speaker 1: don't think they ever got that far because, like they started,
Speaker 1: they cook up a huge amount of m d M A,
Speaker 1: but I don't think they ever really figure out like
Speaker 1: how to distribute it to people. Um, And then the
Speaker 1: government shuts down the project before they can dose anyone
Speaker 1: with it. So there's such a big old tank of
Speaker 1: m d NA. Yeah. Yeah, So they have millions of
Speaker 1: doses of m d M A and no longer a
Speaker 1: government who's willing to like let them use it for anything. Um,
Speaker 1: And they kind of Basten in his colleagues all kind
Speaker 1: of aside that they should use it to fund their retirements.
Speaker 1: It's not the worst thing they've ever done. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: definitely not. Like I prefer them selling ecstasy to people
Speaker 1: to have for fun than murdering people doing a quiet
Speaker 1: genocide is not. Yeah. Yeah. So the data we have
Speaker 1: suggests that like at some point the priority like before
Speaker 1: the program got shut down entirely. But when they knew
Speaker 1: that Project Coast was going to get shut down completely,
Speaker 1: Assin and his colleagues stopped producing drugs for like crowd
Speaker 1: control purposes and started producing drugs to sell on the
Speaker 1: black market. Um, and what we know is that the
Speaker 1: bulk of the millions of doses of m d m
Speaker 1: A that Basson's labs cooked up wound up sold in Europe, India,
Speaker 1: in the United States. Um. So they just are like,
Speaker 1: we only got a year or two left before the
Speaker 1: government shuts this lab down completely. Let's manufacture and sell
Speaker 1: as much ecstasy as we possibly can so that we
Speaker 1: can retire, which is cool. What were they supposed to
Speaker 1: be doing in that lab, I don't I think it was.
Speaker 1: You know, it's a government project, so I think that,
Speaker 1: like it became clear that they weren't going to do
Speaker 1: anything with their research before the project actually got shut down,
Speaker 1: so no one was why. They were just like, we're
Speaker 1: just here for like seven more months. Yeah, how much
Speaker 1: can we make? Yeah, that's why when we yeah, where
Speaker 1: usually when government workers are like, all right, vacation starts now,
Speaker 1: but well, now we can finally get to work and
Speaker 1: makes them Yeah we can get paid now. We didn't
Speaker 1: succeed in genocide, but we can sell a lot of ecstasy.
Speaker 1: So um yeah. Obviously, like this is not the kind
Speaker 1: of thing you would ever have expected to have much
Speaker 1: detail about, and I do wish we had more, but like,
Speaker 1: we have a lot of information about like all the
Speaker 1: different things this project was trying to do, which is weird, right.
Speaker 1: It's a special like a secret special Forces plan for genocide.
Speaker 1: You wouldn't expect the South African government to have kept
Speaker 1: any files on this ship. Um, And in fact they didn't.
Speaker 1: So are you're wondering how all this information got out? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's because Dr Basson was a dumb shit. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So the government when the Aparthei regime fell, the government
Speaker 1: ordered all of the drugs cooked up as a result
Speaker 1: of these schemes and all the evidence of what they've
Speaker 1: done in Project Coast destroyed. But Dr Basson didn't do this,
Speaker 1: so obviously they can and you'd like manufacturing narcotics for profit. Um.
Speaker 1: But he also kept all of his files on the project,
Speaker 1: probably as like an insurance scheme because he was afraid
Speaker 1: that the government was going to betray him and he
Speaker 1: wanted to have evidence that other people had been involved
Speaker 1: because at that time, you made me try to kill
Speaker 1: all the black people. You guys are genociders. I don't
Speaker 1: like I feel like he'd killed me pretty easy. So
Speaker 1: Bassin keeps all of the private files for this genocide
Speaker 1: scheme in his house. And while he's keeping the ship
Speaker 1: in his house, he's hit personally, like hand to hand,
Speaker 1: selling millions of doses of ecstasy to drugs, doing a
Speaker 1: lot of the sales. Yeah, he's a he's a hands
Speaker 1: on fella. So one of the guys buying drugs from
Speaker 1: Basson in this period is Grant Wentzel, who's a commodity's
Speaker 1: broker from Johannesburg who also sold ecstasy on the side,
Speaker 1: and he's one of the guys that Basson is selling to.
Speaker 1: And in n seven, went Zell is busted by the cops,
Speaker 1: and you know, he agrees to roll over on his
Speaker 1: source and they set him up with a wire and
Speaker 1: run him through a couple of deals to test his connections.
Speaker 1: And then they realize, like, as they're like studying this guy,
Speaker 1: they realized that one of his connections is a kind
Speaker 1: of inexplicably wealthy cardiologist who lives in the city um
Speaker 1: and who seems to be the source of his drugs
Speaker 1: um And of course it turns out that this cardiologist
Speaker 1: is Wooter Basson. Is he still practicing cardiology too? Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you gotta have a cover man. I guess, so maybe
Speaker 1: he likes it. Yeah, I mean into originally, Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: go back to go back to basics. You know, it's
Speaker 1: the one of those things, you know, your career falls apart.
Speaker 1: You know, for most of us, it's because the industry
Speaker 1: changed or you know, some like that, rather than a
Speaker 1: genocide plan failing. But you go back to basics, you know,
Speaker 1: and you also start selling a I feel like that's identifiable. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's smart. Actually yeah yeah. The Vice has a fun
Speaker 1: article on the bust that caught Basson, and I'm gonna
Speaker 1: quote from that now. A white Nissan CenTra pulls up
Speaker 1: to Wintzell's car. Its occupant gets out and pops the trunk,
Speaker 1: pulling out a trash bag. Ellerson three other officers. These
Speaker 1: are South African police officers who recognize him immediately Dr
Speaker 1: Wooter Basson, the man the media would later dub doctor
Speaker 1: death for his alleged crimes and apartheid era South Africa.
Speaker 1: Basson gives the bag to Winzell, who hands him an
Speaker 1: envelope containing sixty thousand about fifty five thousand U S dollars.
Speaker 1: Basson's cut of the deal had gone down five days earlier,
Speaker 1: when Winzel had been arrested. So at this point Ellers
Speaker 1: makes his move. Basson tries to flee by ducking tops
Speaker 1: through the pond, a tactic that ends up slowing him
Speaker 1: down enough for the cops to catch up and make
Speaker 1: an arrest. The trash bag contained red and black capsule
Speaker 1: filled with d M A M d M A that
Speaker 1: research chemist Tim McGibbon would testify at Baston's trial was
Speaker 1: created by a unique synthesis and it was more than pure.
Speaker 1: So he's not a good drug dealer. He just has
Speaker 1: a sack of his ship in his trunk that he
Speaker 1: delivers by hand to a source. Um in a sack
Speaker 1: and in a s a trash bag. Yeah, because he's like,
Speaker 1: here's that ship, you know, going crazy about Yeah, yeah
Speaker 1: it is, but like dumber like white at least gets
Speaker 1: his gets like tries to remove himself from the hand
Speaker 1: to hand dealing. H he read some books about the
Speaker 1: business of drugs. Yeah, homeboy was just like, no here,
Speaker 1: it is not give me that monthy, Why would I care? Um?
Speaker 1: So he gets arrested. Baston gets arrested in this bus,
Speaker 1: and of course the cops searches home which is what
Speaker 1: the cops are gonna do when they catch you trying
Speaker 1: to sell a full trash bag of ecstasy um, And
Speaker 1: the police find more drugs in his house, but they
Speaker 1: also find his insurance policy against the old government, the
Speaker 1: boxes of folders containing the details of his plan to
Speaker 1: commit genocide. And I knew that will come in handy,
Speaker 1: I didn't think it was for this. So, Billy, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna guess. We've both had friends arrested for like simple
Speaker 1: marijuana possession, um, some of whom have done time. You
Speaker 1: would probably expect that when Wood Bassin gets caught with
Speaker 1: a trash bag of ecstasy and files in his house
Speaker 1: like going into detail about his complicity and hundreds of
Speaker 1: poison murders and an attempt at genocide, you would guess
Speaker 1: that would come with sizeable jail time, right Ah, No, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: You've done enough of these shows. So in the South
Speaker 1: African Truth and Reconciliation Committee held a commission held a
Speaker 1: public hearing into the chemical and biological warfare program that
Speaker 1: Basson had spearheaded. This was the first trial of its
Speaker 1: kind in history, and it brought out all the information
Speaker 1: we've discussed in this episode. It was heavily based on
Speaker 1: the files they'd taken from Basson's house, but it failed
Speaker 1: to actually punish him for any of his crimes. His
Speaker 1: official trial started in October of nine, where he was
Speaker 1: charged with sixty seven counts, ranging from drug possession and
Speaker 1: embezzlement to murdering two nine people. Basson called as the
Speaker 1: only witness in his defense himself. He claimed he had
Speaker 1: learned the secrets of chemical warfare from Saddam Hussein's government
Speaker 1: in Iraq, which was at that point backed up by
Speaker 1: the U. S Defense Establishment back in like the eighties
Speaker 1: when he was working there. He admitted basically everything we'd
Speaker 1: talked about today save the attempt at genocide, and was
Speaker 1: found not guilty on the ground that nothing he'd done
Speaker 1: had been illegal at the time. So that's cool, he's not. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's not wrong, but also like fuck that, like so
Speaker 1: now a freeman. Basson became a popular speaker on the
Speaker 1: international circuit. He was paid to deliver such headline events
Speaker 1: as Dr Wooter Basson a motivational talk from groups like
Speaker 1: the Kelvin Grove Club, an organization in South Africa that
Speaker 1: banns Jewish membership. So he's he's he's a hero to
Speaker 1: some people. I bet he. Yes. There have been numerous
Speaker 1: hearings in the years since as the some members of
Speaker 1: the government in South Africa have attempted to punish Wooter
Speaker 1: Basson for his numerous crimes. Uh, and he was eventually
Speaker 1: found guilty of professional misconduct um. But none of these
Speaker 1: trials have resulted in long term charges. In March of
Speaker 1: two thousand nineteen, a high court in South Africa found
Speaker 1: that even those charges were had been made by a
Speaker 1: biased court and the results were set aside. Dr Wooter
Speaker 1: Basson remains a free and unpunished man to this day. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's super cool that he's just out there because you know,
Speaker 1: he's just chilling. You know, he's not doing anything bad. Um. No,
Speaker 1: not at all. It's not in his nature. But here's
Speaker 1: my question, as someone that's read history and keeps up
Speaker 1: with how laws and politics and all that works. Uh,
Speaker 1: what files are they not talking about that he probably
Speaker 1: had that keeps getting him out off Like they were
Speaker 1: willing to admit the attempted genocide on South Africa's black population.
Speaker 1: What did they keep under wrap? That's the Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: my But when you're saying all that. I'm like, there's
Speaker 1: stuff in there they're not because that's my friend. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we did try to kill all the black people. Yes,
Speaker 1: we didn't try to. We tried to stop them all
Speaker 1: from breeding because we couldn't kill them. All that was
Speaker 1: we're this guy was trying to help us do that.
Speaker 1: But just nothing else. We didn't do anything else, nothing else,
Speaker 1: nothing else. There's nothing that's unspeakably and almost unimaginably evil
Speaker 1: waiting buried in a bunker somewhere in South Africa that
Speaker 1: WoT Basson invented. Trust us him anything else? Ye ah,
Speaker 1: it is you kind of do think like I'm not
Speaker 1: obviously familiar with the intricacies of South African law, so
Speaker 1: maybe it is just an understandable technicality and a necessary
Speaker 1: part of the reconciliation effort that like he wasn't Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's not what my heart, My heart says, they were
Speaker 1: like this guy has an other insurance policies waiting and
Speaker 1: if he does time, something unspeakable will be revealed. And
Speaker 1: he's so yeah, he's very smart. He got a dumb man.
Speaker 1: So if you did great ecstasy, like unbelievably good ecstasy
Speaker 1: in the late nineties early two thousand's. Uh, maybe like
Speaker 1: he made enough that it's circulated for a while after
Speaker 1: he got busted. I mean he is like a metaphor
Speaker 1: for every drug dealer, do you know what I mean?
Speaker 1: Like they're like, yeah, I mean, we know, we know
Speaker 1: what he does, but have you have you tried his
Speaker 1: have you have you tried his ship? It's crazy, I know,
Speaker 1: I know, And don't bring your sister around it. But yeah,
Speaker 1: because he does that thing. Yeah, but he's the only
Speaker 1: got in three counties that can Yeah, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it is one of those things. On like a personal scale,
Speaker 1: you'll accept the fact that your your drug dealer is
Speaker 1: like creepy and like says some like weird things every
Speaker 1: now and then, and like you don't you wouldn't want
Speaker 1: to be alone with him or let other friends be
Speaker 1: alone with him. You like traveling a group to go
Speaker 1: pick up your ship from his place. Do not meet
Speaker 1: him that guy? Yeah. Um, But like on a on
Speaker 1: a larger scale, I guess we're willing to accept genocide.
Speaker 1: I mean, nobody, none of the people buying that ecstasy
Speaker 1: knew it was genocide ecstasy. Um. I think probably there's
Speaker 1: some there's some traffickers or distributors that had a clue. Yeah,
Speaker 1: someone being like, where's this ship coming from? I don't know,
Speaker 1: South Africa. Oh god, it's probably not a good story. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like every time I've done cocaine, it's
Speaker 1: been like I wonder if someone was shot for this? Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: and not even like maybe where you think it's like
Speaker 1: I do I talk about that like with Heroin. Listen,
Speaker 1: it's awful, but it's also responsible for most of the
Speaker 1: most amazing music we've ever we've had, and people are
Speaker 1: not I'm like, no, I'm not saying that the singer
Speaker 1: of your favorite song, but someone that was working on
Speaker 1: that album, Yes, was on Heroin. Someone. It's someone it
Speaker 1: helps with music. It's not good, but it does. So
Speaker 1: if you're a musician, Billy's official advice is to pick
Speaker 1: up some Heroin. Uh, Sophie, are we sponsored by No?
Speaker 1: Not just a musician, a incredibly talented musician that has
Speaker 1: not broken through yet. But don't get addicted. No, and
Speaker 1: no should we edit that last? I don't know. I'll
Speaker 1: do it on live shows sometimes I do say that,
Speaker 1: but it's a live show, so they can't. You know
Speaker 1: what though, we can say about heroin. It was not
Speaker 1: manufactured by Wooter Basson that we know about. I don't
Speaker 1: know that we that we know about that. In fact,
Speaker 1: it very like I mean, I guess it's easier, like
Speaker 1: I think Bassin like, you don't need a doctor to
Speaker 1: make your heroin, right, No, No, you just need I
Speaker 1: think people hook cook it in their living rooms pretty
Speaker 1: regularly from what I've seen on that GEO channel. That's
Speaker 1: where that's where it comes from. Yeah, so yeah, he's
Speaker 1: sixty nine years old. Uh, he's probably I just I
Speaker 1: just think that's I like to imagine that's how he's
Speaker 1: just living just the six raven day and night. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think he has like a pet gerbil and it
Speaker 1: also does that dance all day, but definitely has a
Speaker 1: pet gerbil. I think he gives to as a couple
Speaker 1: of times a year with his pet gerbil. I don't
Speaker 1: know why you feel good that's because of me. If
Speaker 1: you've danced with a racist, racist South African cardiologist at Abiza,
Speaker 1: Uh it was it was Wood or Bassin. I mean,
Speaker 1: I wonder if he ever did ecstasy. I don't like
Speaker 1: the way he was delivering it in the bag is
Speaker 1: hilarious to show should I show what he looks like.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, he because he looks like the lobotomy doctor. Actually,
Speaker 1: this is why I said, I think he has a
Speaker 1: pet gerbil based on his face. Yeah, you can't see it, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: see he's got a pet jerbil. He looked way cooler
Speaker 1: in my head. He's not cool. No, he's not that cool. No,
Speaker 1: he looks like he you know what, he looks like.
Speaker 1: He makes syan gas and ship he does, right, yeah
Speaker 1: he does. He doesn't look like and he looks like
Speaker 1: he makes m D M A out of spite. I
Speaker 1: don't like his face. I'm just gonna put it out
Speaker 1: there if that makes sense. Yeah, Like he's not trying
Speaker 1: to get laid maybe by his gerbil. Yeah that's true everything. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and he looks like some on that young photo winking. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he rides in the plane to watch the bodies get
Speaker 1: jumped out. Yeah he's that guy. Yeah he does. Look
Speaker 1: I don't I don't enjoy his I like that. My
Speaker 1: mind goes to like a softer person, but it's not
Speaker 1: what he is. Just trying to give him a bit
Speaker 1: from a doubt. I do like that. I would love
Speaker 1: to see the footage of him getting busted though with
Speaker 1: that sack of peels. Yeah, yeah, that would be fun.
Speaker 1: I want to see him like running from the cops
Speaker 1: because you know, it was hilarious and he was really
Speaker 1: bad at Yeah, there's not in him, Like it's amazing
Speaker 1: for how smart this guy is that he would be like, well,
Speaker 1: but I'm gonna keep all of my genocide files unprotected
Speaker 1: in my in my home along with piles of illegal drugs.
Speaker 1: This seems like a good idea. Well, he does seem
Speaker 1: very unfamiliar with drug culture and with crime. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: think it's because he was doing all these horrible things
Speaker 1: for years and he was being supported by the government,
Speaker 1: so he never worried about it. And there's like an
Speaker 1: email and memos involved. It's not like, Hey, meet me
Speaker 1: in a park and we're going to make a rocket. Yeah.
Speaker 1: There's a real learning curve to to to crime. And
Speaker 1: while he was good at committing the kind of crimes
Speaker 1: that aren't crimes because a government tells you to do them,
Speaker 1: he was bad at committing crimes that are crimes because
Speaker 1: the government tells you not to do Yeah. Amazing Wouter Bassin.
Speaker 1: So you can go find him in South Africa, say hi,
Speaker 1: see if he's gotten the e hanging around. I bet
Speaker 1: he's friendly, you guys, I bet he's very nice if
Speaker 1: you have a certain complexion. Yeah, I'm gonna guess he's
Speaker 1: not not nice to everyone. Um. There was like a
Speaker 1: weird story that like one of the people who was
Speaker 1: part of the prosecution against him, he gave heart surgery
Speaker 1: to like before the trial. Uh, and it was fine. Uh.
Speaker 1: But it's like, it's pretty weird. That is so weird.
Speaker 1: What has like what their boundaries are very strange? Yeah,
Speaker 1: the compartmental is it? I guess it's kind of like
Speaker 1: like Ben Carson obviously hasn't committed crimes on this scale,
Speaker 1: but he's not someone I like or think is a
Speaker 1: particularly good person. But if I needed brain surgery, I'm
Speaker 1: sure he's like everything I hear is he's great at it.
Speaker 1: So what do you do, well, Billy, this has been
Speaker 1: a fun story about a guy who tried to commit
Speaker 1: genocide and who did make a lot of people drown
Speaker 1: in their own lung fluid, uh, and then sold ecstasy
Speaker 1: and got off scot free. I would if we're doing
Speaker 1: silver linings, someone try and fail at genocide and end
Speaker 1: up making ecstasy for everyone then someone trying to make
Speaker 1: fun drugs and end up committing genocide on accident. I
Speaker 1: guess you could say that Wood or Basson is actually
Speaker 1: the best case scenario for someone who attempts to commit genocide,
Speaker 1: like failing to commit gent That did not make Anderson happy. No,
Speaker 1: it's a good dog, is a good jog. Yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: but I mean, like, normally, when people try to commit genocide,
Speaker 1: they kill a lot of people, and he failed to
Speaker 1: kill a lot of Well, he killed a lot of people,
Speaker 1: but then he made ecstasy, So I guess that's better
Speaker 1: than killing a lot of people and not. I don't
Speaker 1: really know where I'm going with this. I think it
Speaker 1: is going to be one of those like if there's
Speaker 1: an afterlife, and it's like what your grandma thinks. Saint
Speaker 1: Peter's up there, He's like, Ah, you got a lot.
Speaker 1: He made a lot of people really fucked up. I'm
Speaker 1: happy that you did some killing. I mean a lot
Speaker 1: of killing. I think attempted genocide outweighs the ecstasy. But yeah,
Speaker 1: who boy. Maybe there's not anything to learn from the
Speaker 1: story of Wood or bassin Um other than that apartheid
Speaker 1: was garbage and the South African nation under apartheid was
Speaker 1: one of the worst countries that ever existed. And I
Speaker 1: hope Wood or Bassin gets hit by a car soon. Yeah,
Speaker 1: with a bag appeals in his hand, with a bag
Speaker 1: of pill in his hand, trying to sell a trash
Speaker 1: bag of drugs and they just go everywhere and everyone
Speaker 1: gets them for free. Yeah, it's kind of the best
Speaker 1: case scenario. Well, Billy get any plug to plug uh not?
Speaker 1: I mean yeah, I'll be on tour coming up soon. Um,
Speaker 1: we're booking all that right now. But just at Billy
Speaker 1: Wayne Davis is my Twitter and I'm on the new
Speaker 1: season as with Billies, so check that out. And at
Speaker 1: Billy Wayne Davis is my Instagram. So well, you can
Speaker 1: find me on Twitter too, and I'm not going to
Speaker 1: tell you where, but you can. I'm there, seek me
Speaker 1: out and if you're meant to find me, you will.
Speaker 1: You can also find this podcast on Twitter, at Instagram
Speaker 1: and at Bastard's pot. You can find our sources at
Speaker 1: behind the Bastards dot com. Uh and you can hopefully
Speaker 1: not attempt to commit genocide. That's all I ask of
Speaker 1: my Audi. Don't do it. Don't don't even try, not
Speaker 1: even once. Don't you get an attempt to make excess.
Speaker 1: H Yeah, as much as you want. Really, I'm fine
Speaker 1: with that. This is a very pro amateur chemistry podcast.
Speaker 1: Unless it's genocide chemistry. Don't let me June. Try to
Speaker 1: help your parents marriage, and don't be racist about who
Speaker 1: you give your ecstasy. To give it to everybody otherwise
Speaker 1: it's a problem that is funning. I did. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: one puzzled me. There's some science puzzles here in this
Speaker 1: one that I was Yeah, it's a thinker, It's it's
Speaker 1: a real thinker. It's a motherfucker, is what that is.
Speaker 1: Where you're just like, oh, you figured out that we're
Speaker 1: all the same, so you can't Okay, I'm gonna hear yep.
Speaker 1: All right, everybody have fun with this one. Enjoy your holidays.
Speaker 1: If this comes out before the holidays. Bye. B