This week online (see Fact), William Finnegan reports on the acquittal of Dr. Wouter Basson, the head of the South African apartheid regime's top-secret chemical- and biological-warfare program, which was used during the South African Army's long, dirty war in defense of apartheid. Last January, Finnegan wrote this report on the trial, which was then at its midpoint.

South Africans call him Dr. Death. He is regularly compared by the local press, never very persuasively, to Josef Mengele. His name is Dr. Wouter Basson. He's a decorated former Army brigadier and, in civilian life, an eminent cardiologist, and he was the founder and leader of Project Coast, a top-secret chemical- and biological-warfare program that Archbishop Desmond Tutu has called "the most diabolical aspect of apartheid." This theological metaphor gets closer to the truth about Wouter Basson, who, in his smooth impenitence and incorrigibility, seems at times like an Afrikaner Mephistopheles.

South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which Tutu chairs, and which has been giving victims and perpetrators of violence under apartheid an opportunity to speak publicly—seeking acknowledgment and forgiveness, respectively—held a special round of hearings on Project Coast in 1998. Some of the project's top scientists testified. Some applied for amnesty from prosecution in exchange for describing their activities. Tutu later wrote that he found their stories "devastating" and "shattering." There were revelations of research into a race-specific bacterial weapon; a project to find ways to sterilize the country's black population; discussion of deliberate spreading of cholera through the water supply; large-scale production of dangerous drugs; the fatal poisoning of anti-apartheid leaders, captured guerrillas, and suspected security risks; even a plot to slip thallium, a toxic heavy metal that can permanently impair brain function, into Nelson Mandela's medication before his release from prison in 1990.

Wouter Basson appeared before the commission, but he rejected with contempt its offers of amnesty. And so, in October, 1999, Basson went on trial in Pretoria High Court, charged with sixty-seven counts of murder, conspiracy to murder, drug offenses, and fraud. A Johannesburg newspaper recently called the Basson trial "the most sensational showcase of apartheid-era atrocities in South African legal history." The trial is expected to last two years. Since Mandela's election and the end of white-minority rule, in 1994, there have been a few successful prosecutions of members of the state-backed death squads that savaged the democracy movement during the last decade of apartheid—men whose crimes were too horrendous to be amnestied. But these were all policemen. The South African military, which was involved in countless extrajudicial killings both in the country's dirty war and in massive campaigns to destabilize its neighbors, has proved a far more difficult target for the new government's prosecutors. The Army has successfully maintained its version of omertà. The one serious effort, in 1996, to hold high-ranking Army officers responsible for their role in a specific massacre of black South African civilians ended in acquittals on all charges.

And so Project Coast, because it employed civilian scientists who do not feel bound by the military's code of silence, is now the post-apartheid state's best hope of exposing some of the South African Army's war against its own people. Basson relied on a global network of spies, ex-soldiers, sanctions busters, smugglers, and biowarriors to obtain the chemicals, toxins, viral cultures, specialized equipment, and expertise necessary to develop his program—and then, according to witnesses, on a string of assassins to deliver the goods—and some of the main figures in that network have also proved willing (or have been compelled) to testify against him.

At the trial, Basson sits alone at the end of a long table. Dapper in a black jacket and gray slacks, he looks alert, relaxed, his back to the public gallery, taking notes, and passing messages to his advocates, who read them carefully. He is fifty, slightly built,witherect posture, a neatly trimmed beard, an upturned nose, and a wreath of mousy hair around a big, smooth dome. It takes imagination to reconcile this distinguished-looking physician with the bloodthirsty, subhuman beast ("the evil Einstein") that snarls its way through the South African press.

Basson came to public notice in 1997, when he was arrested for allegedly selling a thousand capsules of Ecstasy to a police informant. Until then, he seemed to be enjoying a brilliant medical and military career. Raised in Cape Town in an upwardly mobile family—his father was a police colonel and Rugby official, his mother an office secretary and opera singer—he had been drafted into the Army as a medical student. A fast-rising major at thirty, a cardiologist, and a paratrooper, Basson, in 1981, founded and commanded the Seventh Medical Battalion, a pioneering unit that gave medical and military support to special forces fighting behind enemy lines in the clandestine wars that South Africa waged in Angola, Mozambique, and Namibia. He ingratiated himself with some of the country's most powerful men, and was awarded the Order of the Southern Cross. But his exploits as a biowarrior, spy, and alleged war criminal remained largely unknown—before and after the transition to democracy—until that unlikely Ecstasy bust in a public park across from his house in Pretoria.

It was strange enough that a cardiologist of his stature should be dealing street drugs—assuming, that is, that he was not framed by the authorities, as some people believe. Stranger by far was what the police found at his house: two padlocked steel trunks (they later found a third) containing the history in documents of Project Coast. Basson had been ordered to destroy these records—after overseeing their transfer onto CD-ROMS that went into a safe to which the President of South Africa had one of only two keys. Basson had obviously double-crossed his bosses. Several investigative bodies pored over the thousands of pages of documents in the trunks. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission's special hearings on Project Coast were a direct result of this discovery, as were most of the criminal charges eventually brought against Basson.

South Africans are following the Basson trial closely, and so are international agencies and nonprofit groups working to halt the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Many foreign governments are also nervously watching, for the trial threatens to expose not only the frightening permeability of the world of doomsday science and outlawed weaponry but a maze of deeply embarrassing connections between the apartheid regime's chemical- and biological-warfare program and the intelligence services of the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Israel, Switzerland, Croatia, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Taiwan, China, Pakistan, and an unknown number of other countries. Some multinational chemical and pharmaceuticals companies are also said to be sleeping poorly.

Curiously for this quintessentially New South Africa trial, the scene in the courtroom is pure Old South Africa. Anyone with any standing or authority is white. Virtually everyone, for that matter, is Afrikaans—the judge, the prosecutors, the defense team, the defendant, the court reporter, the minor court officials, even Basson's state-supplied bodyguard. Nearly all the proceedings are conducted in Afrikaans—a language inseparable, in the minds of most South Africans, from the apartheid state. There is no jury, and yet the judge, who will decide the case alone, seems to be nothing if not a peer of Basson's. His name is Willie Hartzenberg, and he, too, was a faithful pillar of the former regime. Red-robed and white-haired, he runs his court with gruff good humor, adjourning, as he always has, at noon on Thursdays in favor of his golf game. Although the "negotiated revolution" that brought democracy to South Africa in 1994 precluded a purge of the apartheid state, Judge Hartzenberg's courtroom seems, at least to a visitor, starkly out of place today.

The anachronistic trappings and personnel are only the beginning of the trial's ambient paradoxes. Basson's ace legal team is being paid by the government that is prosecuting him. Basson was quietly forced into early retirement from the military in 1993, after President F. W. de Klerk, who was trying to clean house before the transition to democracy, ordered an internal investigation. It found, among other things, that Basson was violating South Africa's commitments under international treaties on chemical and biological weapons. Nevertheless, he was rehired, in 1995, by, of all people, President Nelson Mandela. Basson became the chief cardiologist and head of the heart-transplant program at the main military hospital in Pretoria—a post he still holds. When he is not required in court, Basson continues to practice medicine. One of the patients he recently saw was the military's former surgeon general, Dr. Niel Knobel, who was Basson's nominal supervisor on Project Coast. In a twist that typifies the incestuous opacity of the Basson trial, Knobel took the stand as a witness against his former comrade (and onetime anatomy student) only weeks after undergoing triple-bypass heart surgery partially under Basson's care.

Many of the trial's witnesses are similarly caught between their roles in the old regime, where they often worked closely with Basson, and their new situations—though some have not changed jobs. Mike Kennedy, a deputy director of the National Intelligence Agency, for instance, whose career, spent mainly in counter-intelligence, spanned thirty-four years, testified for the prosecution and then, in the corridor outside the courtroom, warmly shook Basson's hand, and wished him luck. Their longtime mutual enemy, the African National Congress, is now, of course, running the country, and was effectively employing them both. (Kennedy, who has since retired, was also in charge of protecting Basson during the trial. His biggest concern, he said, was a kidnapping or assassination attempt by one of the foreign-intelligence agencies that would like to see Basson silenced.)

This looking-glass awkwardness extends to the state's legal team. Torie Pretorius and Anton Ackerman, the lead prosecutors, had the same jobs under apartheid. They spent much of their early careers, in other words, putting away, as enemies of the state—or "enemies of the then state," as they now say—any A.N.C. supporters the police managed to capture. It is only at a higher level of the Justice Ministry that the A.N.C. has one of its own people in place, directing that the trial of Wouter Basson go forward. The actual work of prosecution has been left to lawyers whom even a sympathetic Afrikaans journalist, Freek Swart, describes as "legal henchmen of the old regime, legal henchmen of the new regime."

The defense team does not bother to hide its disdain for the prosecutors, and displays in court a markedly sharper wit, which does nothing to discredit the idea, very popular in South Africa today, that public service is for the slow. Jaap Cilliers, Basson's chief advocate, is sarcastic and pugnacious, thick-bodied in black barrister's robes, his blond locks in need of a trim. Cilliers worked on the defense team that won across-the-board acquittals for the group of Army generals charged in connection with a massacre of black civilians. He is also representing, according to the newspapers, three white farmers—small-town ultra-rightists accused of torturing and blinding a black farmworker. Cilliers's specialty, it seems, is the defense of racist monsters. But then, a few days after I start attending the Basson trial, Cilliers announces that he must be absent briefly. He has another case, reaching a crucial stage in faraway Cape Town, where his client is the Reverend Allan Boesak, a charismatic A.N.C. leader, who has been caught mishandling funds.

During breaks in his trial, Basson strolls out to the courthouse lobby, leans against a pillar, and chats with a group of admiring, muscled young white men—plainclothes security of some sort. Though he is careful to keep any remarks to reporters off the record, he makes it clear that he thinks his trial is absurd, that it is all pure politics, that he regrets nothing.

Still, an astonishing story has been emerging from the long march of the state's case. (After fifteen months, the defense has yet to call its witnesses.) This story illuminates some of the outermost reaches of apartheid madness, as well as the narrow gap that separates certain areas of scientific research from mass-murder schemes. It features an abundance of small-scale homicide, but suggests that more ambitious biowarfare plans went blessedly unrealized. It contains a tale of ordinary corruption—as pursued, particularly, through the era's signature boondoggle, privatization. It is, finally, a story about the limits of democratic transformation in South Africa, and the revisionism that Western governments prefer when it comes to the recent history of South Africa—during which we were all, of course, fiercely anti-apartheid.

Dr. Schalk van Rensburg is a large, thoughtful, soft-spoken man. He was working on nutritional diseases at the South African Medical Research Council when, in the early nineteen-eighties, Wouter Basson began showing up there. Basson told him that the Russians were preparing to use chemical weapons on South African soldiers in Angola. "Yellow rain," van Rensburg told me recently. "They had used it with devastating consequences in Afghanistan. It would burn the skin right off those guys. I had done some work on it as a food contaminant—alimentary toxic aleucia—so I knew how dangerous it was. If you get more than a few drops on you, you're dead."

Van Rensburg paid attention to what Basson said. "He's a very impressive, persuasive guy, if you don't know him," van Rensburg said. "He cruises around, acts very important and sincere, looks you in the eye as if to say, 'I am doing something very important, and I may need you.' And we were listening closely then, because a lot of us had sons on the border." "On the border" was the euphemism of choice among white South Africans for the fierce, undeclared bush war that South Africa was fighting in neighboring countries—not, in fact, on its borders.

Van Rensburg answered Basson's call to arms and in 1984 joined a military front company for Project Coast called Roodeplaat Research Laboratories as director of laboratory services. He helped build Roodeplaat into a thriving operation, with departments of toxicology, microbiology, biochemistry, molecular biology, and an animal unit. It had a staff of seventy, all working in a plush, high-security facility, much of it built into a hillside, north of Pretoria. Van Rensburg never heard anything more, however, about yellow rain. "Within two weeks of joining them, I realized this is not defensive work, this is offensive work," he told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. "The most frequent instruction we obtained from Doctor Basson . . . was to develop something with which you could kill an individual which would make his death resemble a natural death, and that something was not to be detectable in a normal forensic laboratory." When van Rensburg asked about the defensive work that he and his colleagues were supposed to be doing to protect their soldiers from the Russians, he was told that such work was being done elsewhere. He thought about leaving but was told, "If you let the side down, you're dead."

Not all of Roodeplaat's work was on what were called "hard" projects—military work, usually toxins intended to harm and kill—and the single largest project under van Rensburg's supervision was a vaccine to block human fertility. It was a valuable project, in his view, with real commercial potential, although, he explained to his military superiors, if the vaccine worked it would work on all races, and it could not be administered involuntarily. The Army, taking these points, is said to have entertained a plan to tell people that the vaccine was against some disease, perhaps yellow fever, and to administer it widely and exclusively to black South Africans. Van Rensburg recalls being under pressure to hand over a finished product, and that when he protested that it would take many years to develop a safe, effective vaccine he was met with growing exasperation.

Most of the scientists, including some who have since applied for amnesty, apparently felt few qualms about their work's manifest violations of medical ethics. "It was the times," Dr. Daan Goosen, the first managing director of Roodeplaat, told me. "It was the nineteen-eighties, total onslaught." "Total onslaught" was a rallying cry popularized by President P. W. Botha to describe the political and military threat to white-minority rule in South Africa.

"We were all hyped up against the Cubans, against the Communists, all very patriotic," Dr. Mike Odendaal, who was a microbiologist at Roodeplaat, told me. "The politics was completely different at that time. The Afrikaner was in the saddle, and if the horse didn't want to go he would beat it. He was strongly in the saddle. I felt strongly in the saddle."

Van Rensburg concedes today that he stayed at Roodeplaat not only because of the suggestion that he might be harmed if he left but because the job was well paid and came with a car, a pension, and "a tremendous housing subsidy." He was in his late fifties, with a family to support, and pessimistic, in any case, about trying to start over somewhere else. He likes to think that his own lack of enthusiasm for the hard projects he oversaw at least slowed them down.

Secrecy was crucial, and, while Project Coast's generous budget and grandiose ambitions later helped give rise to the idea that it had employed South Africa's "top scientists," the truth is that Basson's recruiting was largely confined to the academic redoubts of Afrikaner nationalism, such as Pretoria University and Rand Afrikaans University, which were not the country's most rigorous or internationally respected institutions.

Project Coast operated on a strict need-to-know basis, with only one man, Basson, in a position to know much at all. Instructions were often oral, and sometimes deliberately obscure. Paperwork on hard projects was kept to a minimum, and records were destroyed when the possibility of investigation loomed. The scientists, working on their assignments, had, in many cases, never heard of "Project Coast," and among Basson's superiors only the state President and a handful of generals knew even vaguely what he was doing. Many of Project Coast's principals, moreover, are still not talking, or have developed selective amnesia under questioning.

We nonetheless know that, at Roodeplaat, Basson's scientists were working with anthrax, cholera, salmonella, botulinum, thallium, E. coli, ricin, organophosphates, necrotizing fasciitis, hepatitis A, and H.I.V., as well as nerve gases (Sarin, VX) and the Ebola, Marburg, and Rift Valley hemorrhagic-fever viruses. They were producing crude toxins (and some strange delivery systems) for use by the military and police, and they were genetically engineering extremely dangerous new organisms—creating, that is, biological weapons. Chemical weapons were produced elsewhere, primarily at a laboratory south of Pretoria known as Delta G Scientific, where a potent new form of tear gas was developed, and where large quantities of illegal drugs, including Ecstasy and an addictive sedative known as Mandrax (a quaalude), were manufactured for Project Coast, ostensibly as incapacitants for riot control and disorienting enemy troops.

Fragmentary records contain such items as a list, introduced as evidence at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, of biological and toxic weapons drawn from the Roodeplaat stocks in one seven-month period in 1989. It includes twenty-two bottles of cholera; fourteen doses of chocolate spiked with anthrax or botulinum; cigarettes spiked with anthrax; beer bottles spiked with thallium and botulinum; salmonella hidden in bleach, whiskey, and sugar; deodorant infected with paratyphoid; anthrax spores sprinkled on the gum of envelope flaps; and so on. We know almost nothing about who received these lethal gifts, or whether their deaths or illnesses were even seen as suspicious. We do know that state-sponsored death squads and assassins were active throughout the life of Project Coast—it lasted twelve years—both inside and outside South Africa.

Schalk van Rensburg notes that the scientists at Roodeplaat heard complaints about killings that went wrong, such as a series of bungled attempts to poison the Reverend Frank Chikane, an important anti-apartheid leader, by saturating his underclothes with organophosphates, which are the deadly ingredients in pesticides. (Chikane was hospitalized four times, and he survived the most harrowing episode only because he happened to be visiting the United States when he was stricken—his poisoners, who had tampered with his luggage, thought he was leaving for Namibia—and American doctors correctly diagnosed his symptoms.) The scientists never heard a thing about successful operations, van Rensburg says—although he does remember merriment among the operational types at Roodeplaat when a poisoned T-shirt meant for a black soldier they disliked was borrowed by a friend of the target, and the friend died instead.

It is only because a few former Project Coast scientists have decided to speak that we have heard anything about some of Basson's wilder schemes. Daan Goosen says that Basson ordered him to research the possibility of developing a race-specific bacterial weapon after the South African Embassy in London received a letter offering the formula for such a thing. The letter, it was decided, might be a trap, but Goosen completed his assignment—and concluded that it was theoretically possible to build a germ weapon that would target only blacks. He does not know what became of his report.

Van Rensburg heard references around Roodeplaat to a plan to poison Nelson Mandela with thallium in his cell. (Scientists have also testified that Basson suggested that "we" had poisoned Steve Biko with thallium before his death in police custody, in 1977.) Then, after Mandela's release, van Rensburg says that he was told by Dr. André Immelman, Project Coast's chief toxicologist, that the thallium would soon begin to show signs of working and that Mandela would be "impaired progressively." Immelman now says he was just testing van Rensburg's discretion, seeing if his remarks surfaced anywhere. In any event, according to van Rensburg, prison doctors balked at poisoning Mandela.

Goosen and van Rensburg came to be seen as security risks. Both were ultimately forced out of Project Coast, and became marked men. Some of Goosen's colleagues believe he was poisoned in 1989 at a scientific conference, where he suddenly began having hallucinations and suffered a psychotic breakdown. This episode left him temporarily incapacitated, and he did not work again as a scientist for nine years. "But I'm not cross with Wouter anymore," he told me earnestly, in his home near Pretoria. "He ruined my scientific career, but I think I understand him—even his attempt to kill me. I'm only worried that this judge will be fooled by him."

I went to interview van Rensburg at a small farm in the Free State, hundreds of kilometres from Pretoria. He and his wife had originally moved there, he said, because it was safer. The farm was on a hilltop at the end of many miles of unpaved road. Van Rensburg and his wife had been city people, lovers of the opera and the symphony. But there had been too many unsettling episodes after van Rensburg left Roodeplaat—mail tampering, intimidating surveillance—for them to stay in town, his wife said. In Pretoria, they had been afraid even to have their grandchildren visit.

Out here, the grandkids could come for whole weeks during school holidays. After a simple lunch, the van Rensburgs and I fell silent, watching an afternoon thunderstorm gather in the west. I found myself wondering why the government, which was going to such lengths to protect Basson, was not doing more for the van Rensburgs. Dr. van Rensburg had testified at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, had applied for amnesty for his role in Project Coast, and would be a major state witness at Basson's trial. Many state witnesses, including former death-squad operatives and active intelligence agents, were being allowed to testify anonymously, and the prosecutors themselves had told me that the dangers to state witnesses were real, especially if their testimony concerned death-squad activities. The Civil Coöperation Bureau, as the dirty-tricks unit within the Special Forces was officially known, had been disbanded after its exposure, in 1990. "But taking on the C.C.B., even now, is no laughing, playing matter," one of the prosecutors had said. "It may not formally exist, like the Memorable Order of Tin Hats"—a South African equivalent to our Veterans of Foreign Wars—"but the Memorable Order of the Special Forces, as it were, still meets, and they still tell each other when one needs to go to Sierra Leone to hide, or when something needs to be done."

Wouter Basson, so often described as a "brilliant scientist" or "apartheid's mad scientist," actually had little to do with the scientific work performed for Project Coast. He issued orders, but he rarely visited the labs. He was the project's liaison to its funders and overseers in the Army leadership, and to the Special Forces and police operatives who used its products. Most of his time, though, was spent elsewhere—cultivating an international network of allies and suppliers.

According to Basson, Project Coast was modelled on the American chemical-weapons program, which he first managed to penetrate in the early nineteen-eighties. He also had great success, by his own (and his military superiors') account, penetrating the programs of Britain and the former Soviet Union. He attended international conferences of forensic toxicologists in Western Europe and aerospace medical officers in the United States; befriended key scientists and military men and program administrators, particularly those who seemed interested in his battlefield tales of fighting Communism (Russians, Cubans, their local proxies) on the front line in southern Africa; claims to have gained entrance to world-renowned facilities such as Fort Detrick, in Maryland, or Porton Down, in England; and energetically expanded his network as he went. The Cold War was good to Basson. He learned to play East off West—offering intelligence, however dubious, about the Soviet bloc's biowarfare capacities to Western agents in return for information or equipment he wanted, some of which he could then turn around and trade to a growing list of contacts in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Soviet Union.

Basson found that some nato officials and former officials were as willing to sell their countries' military secrets as their Communist counterparts were. Some ex-intelligence agents also proved happy to come out of retirement to help defend, for a fee, the last beachhead of white-supremacism in Africa. Basson was a frequent visitor to what were known, until recently, as the rogue states: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, North Korea—countries that, like South Africa, were trying to develop nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons in the face of international sanctions. Taiwan, Israel, Croatia, China, and Pakistan were also useful to Project Coast.

Basson rarely presented himself as a military man. At times, he was a medical researcher—that worked well enough, in 1984, to persuade the Centers for Disease Control, in Atlanta, to send eight shipments of Ebola, Marburg, and Rift Valley viruses to South Africa (and, thus, to Roodeplaat), according to "Plague Wars," a recent book by Tom Mangold. At other times, Basson told people he was a draft dodger. This apparently went down well with human-rights groups working against (but knowledgeable about) the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and with other scientists ill-disposed toward apartheid. Mostly, though, he posed as a wealthy businessman, dealing in restricted chemicals, high-tech equipment, expensive property (safe houses), private jets, protective clothing for hazardous lab work, and the like. Dr. Jan Lourens, a senior administrator at Project Coast, remembers Basson playing each role to the hilt: "Once, he was in London, and he was supposed to be a banker, so he dressed up in everything he thought a banker should wear—a striped Savile Row suit, even a bowler hat."

Partly to get around the military and economic sanctions against South Africa, partly to launder the money pouring into Project Coast from the Army, Basson created, with the tacit approval of his superiors, dozens of front companies, which were registered in Luxembourg, Belgium, Britain, France, Switzerland, South Africa, Florida, and the Cayman Islands, and were quickly encumbered with impossibly complex interrelationships and interlocking boards of directors. An accounting company created to monitor the flow of funds among these many units was called, with a naughty-boy flourish that is echt Basson, Infladel (for "in flagrante delicto").

He travelled on various passports, using various names, while enjoying the assistance of South Africa's embassies. (Many of these had quiet but close relationships, some of them military-to-military, with the more avidly anti-Communist elements in their host governments. Dirty tricks, including assassinations, could often therefore be carried out with a reasonable assurance that local authorities would not question, say, the stock explanation—"internal struggle"—for the violent deaths of A.N.C. officials on their soil.) At one point, hoping to expedite his movements around Western Europe, Basson married the sister of a Belgian businessman who had interests in South Africa and specialized in sanctions busting. The fact that Basson already had a wife seems not to have given anyone pause. As Jan Lourens recalls, "The environment in which we lived allowed everybody to live out their fantasies."

Basson's extreme freedom to spend and improvise derived from the support he enjoyed at the highest levels of the South African government. His patrons and admirers included General Magnus Malan, then the Minister of Defense, and President Botha (Basson is sometimes described as "Botha's personal physician," though both men say that was never the case), as well as his nominal superior, Knobel, the surgeon general, who continues to describe him as "cool, calm, and collected, and a gentleman."

Flying on the Concorde was not Basson's only indulgence. "Wouter had an issue about strip joints, pornography, and so on," Lourens says. "Whenever you travelled with him, you ended up in such places. He was not comfortable with women, but he was a great seducer." (Among the women Basson allegedly seduced was Lourens's wife, also a Project Coast employee.)

Basson's sexual aggressiveness still betrays him on occasion. In his appearance before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the commissioners asked whether he was tempted to sell for profit some of the vast quantities of Ecstasy and Mandrax he produced. He incongruously responded, "For the last three days, I was tempted by the girl behind me"—referring to a woman who had been sitting in the courtroom. "We're all subjected to temptations," he went on. "The fact that the temptation was there does not mean that I succumbed to that." When the flabbergasted commissioners pointed out that he had caused the woman to blush crimson, Basson replied, "I was hoping to achieve more than that." Rebuked for this line of "sexist" banter, Basson, perhaps carried away by his own drollery, added, "I was actually interested in her cooking ability."

Basson had turned up for his T.R.C. appearance wearing a bright African-style smock known as a Madiba shirt. (The shirt was popularized by Nelson Mandela, who is affectionately known by his Xhosa clan name, Madiba.) He was even coy—charmlessly so—about revealing his age. The brazenness of an Army brigadier (and alleged war criminal) making such a fey self-presentation on such a solemn occasion reportedly had an effect at least as unsettling as Basson could have hoped. And that evening he went further. At a Cape Town coffeehouse often patronized by the A.N.C. leadership, Basson, who was roaring drunk, took a felt pen and wrote on the wall "Truth Above All," and signed it "Dr. Death."

Basson's politics are a mystery. In recruiting scientists to Project Coast, he made emotional appeals to their patriotism. Some people thought him sincere—a true Afrikaans nationalist, devoted to volk en vaderland. Others considered him a cynical opportunist, with no real respect for his military superiors, whom he privately called "chicken heads," or for the ruling National Party, the party of apartheid. Daan Goosen recalled him saying, "I've got one daughter . . . and one day when the black people will take over the country, and my daughter asks me, 'Daddy, what did you do to prevent this?' my conscience will be clean." Other men who worked with Basson say that sounds just like him. "He is a racist," Jan Lourens said. "I remember how he talked to black people. O.K., it was the fashion at the time. But it was quite marked nonetheless."

And yet Basson himself now says that if his life had taken a slightly different turn—if his father had not been transferred from Cape Town to Pretoria, say, when Wouter was in high school, meaning that Wouter would not have gone to the University of Pretoria, as he did, but to the University of Cape Town, which had a far more left-wing political atmosphere—then he might have taken a different path and might, indeed, be the A.N.C.'s Minister of Health today.

He has never publicly expressed any regret for his betrayal of the Hippocratic oath. (Privately, he has scorned Project Coast colleagues who have apologized and applied for amnesty.) On the matter of conscience, Jan Lourens (one of those who have applied for amnesty) recalls a conversation with Basson during a train ride from London to Ascot, where Project Coast had a safe house. "It was the first time I asked him if our work was morally justifiable," Lourens told me. "He said, 'I've made my peace with my Maker.' He used the Afrikaans word Grootbaas—the Big Boss. 'What you do is your own business.' He was quite comfortable with what he was doing." Hearing this reminded me of another remark widely ascribed to Basson: "Medicine's my profession, but war's my hobby."

Remarkably, Project Coast was not, even in its heyday, Basson's sole occupation. He remained commander of the Seventh Medical Battalion, which meant that he was in charge of a major hearts-and-minds program that operated in nearly every corner of Africa. Seventh Med, as it was called, supplied medical support to dozens of African countries (or to their Presidential guards, anyway). This was mainly to establish listening posts from which the Army could monitor its enemies in their rear bases—not just the A.N.C. but the South West African People's Organization (swapo, the black-liberation movement in what is today independent Namibia) and the government forces of Angola and Mozambique, two countries in which South Africa was bankrolling major insurgencies. Pretoria kept the allegiance of the rebel armies in Angola and Mozambique not only by supplying arms and food and training but by funding clinics and providing medicines, and Basson was a leader in this effort, doing the hard negotiating with warlords in the bush, and overseeing operations behind enemy lines.

The scientists at Roodeplaat and Delta G, meanwhile, knew little about Basson's globe-trotting for the cause. They were, however, increasingly aware of the luxurious style in which the Project Coast brass travelled locally, particularly after Basson replaced the scientists who had been managing the laboratories, including Daan Goosen, with buddies from Special Forces. Basson took to entertaining his associates from the sanctions-busting world with Rugby weekends in England and golf holidays at a seaside condominium owned by a Project Coast front company, ferrying these parties around in private jets. Some of the scientists, when they heard about these junkets, began to wonder exactly what sort of enterprise they were involved in.

There was allegedly an attempt by the Civil Coöperation Bureau to spread cholera and yellow fever, provided by Roodeplaat, through the drinking water of a refugee camp in Namibia, and Schalk van Rensburg heard Basson say that rioters in the Eastern Cape district of South Africa could be "sorted out" with a cholera epidemic. But there was little indication that such ambitious malevolence was achieving results. Van Rensburg also heard Basson repeatedly boast that he was now in a position "to rewrite the world's toxicology textbooks," suggesting that he had been observing the effects on human beings of controlled doses of deadly poisons, effects that were not always as predicted. Just as appalling to van Rensburg was his discovery that Basson and a new lab manager had associated with—even gone out on rampages with—one of the country's most notorious police units. Known then as the East Rand Murder and Robbery Squad, the unit's core members went on to form some of the most violent hit teams of the Civil Coöperation Bureau. These were racist terrorists, ultra-violent sociopaths. Several of them later testified that it was common knowledge that, if poisons were needed for a job, "Doc Wouter" was the man to see.

According to state witnesses, the poisons that Basson came to rely upon most were surgical muscle relaxants called Tubarine and Scoline, injected in fatal doses. Dr. Kobus Bothma, a former member of Seventh Med, and Johan Theron, a former intelligence officer, have described in court taking three prisoners—black South African soldiers whose loyalty had been questioned—to a rural area of Natal Province, chaining them to trees, smearing their bodies with an experimental gel that was considered promising as an untraceable toxin, then leaving them overnight. In the morning, the men not only were still alive but had struggled so vigorously that one had nearly sawed through the tree trunk. The gel had failed. The men were murdered with Tubarine and Scoline.

According to the prosecution, Basson perfected the art of murder by muscle relaxant "on the border." The South African Army had captured so many swapo fighters that its prisoner-of-war camps were overcrowded; many of the prisoners were also deemed impossible to process through ordinary P.O.W. channels, because they might have exposed the clandestine programs that had captured them. With the military leadership's customary disregard of the Geneva Conventions, it was decided to reduce the crowding and security problems by killing prisoners. Theron, testifying at Basson's trial, said that at first they had tried to strangle the prisoners. This proved difficult and, for the executioners, more traumatic than expected, and so lethal injection was settled upon as the most "humane" method. Brigadier Wouter Basson supplied him thereafter, Theron said, with vast quantities of Scoline, Tubarine, and syringes. Theron estimates that between 1979 and 1987 he murdered "hundreds" of swapo prisoners by these means. The victims' bodies were loaded, three at a time, into a small plane at a remote airstrip on the Skeleton Coast of Namibia, flown a hundred miles out to sea, and dumped into the Atlantic from an altitude of twelve thousand feet. Theron recalled only one occasion when Basson came to supervise the execution of a group of prisoners. But he and Basson were a disciplined, efficient team, and their prisoner-disposal operation was successfully kept secret from all but a handful of collaborators. Then, around 1996, Theron experienced what he called a spiritual rebirth, and decided to testify against Basson, he said, because "the truth will set me free."

At the beginning of Basson's trial, his lawyer Jaap Cilliers asked that six charges of conspiracy to murder be dismissed. These charges involved two hundred swapo prisoners killed with muscle relaxants. Cilliers's argument was that the murders had taken place in Namibia, and therefore could not be prosecuted in South Africa. There were some problems with this argument. One was that Namibia had been under South African administration during the period of the killings. Another was that a former police death-squad commander had recently been convicted in Pretoria High Court of conspiracy to murder for killings that had taken place outside South Africa. Judge Hartzenberg nonetheless delayed the start of the trial while he took the motion under consideration. A week later, he dismissed the six charges.

Most of the murders in which the prosecution claimed it could prove Basson's involvement were thus stricken from the indictment before the trial itself began. Hartzenberg's decision relied on an indemnity for wartime abuses in Namibia, issued by the South African administrator of the territory in 1989, shortly before Namibia won its independence. That South Africa's occupation of Namibia had long been viewed by the world as illegal went unremarked, as did the fact that last-minute declarations of amnesty, issued by outgoing rulers, for abuses committed by their own forces had been repudiated in South Africa. F. W. de Klerk had tried to obtain amnesty for himself and his underlings, but they had instead been compelled to face the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Hartzenberg's dismissal of the six charges shocked the Basson prosecution and provoked public outrage. Politicians fumed. Still, the trial began, and the defense continued to make a fool of the state on a regular basis. At the first court session I attended, a few weeks into the proceedings, Dr. Knobel, the military's former surgeon general, was cross-examined by Cilliers. Although Knobel was a prosecution witness, he testified that the Army's bizarre stockpiling of illegal recreational and addictive drugs had been President de Klerk's decision, not Basson's. Cilliers and Knobel then discussed Project Coast's research into brain function, including its use of a machine called a peptide synthesizer. Cilliers announced that this research had "terrified the world," because it was possible, through the manipulation of peptides, to alter brain function, perhaps permanently, either rendering previously normal people passive or turning them into "uncontrollable monsters." Knobel let these assertions pass uncontested, apparently preferring to have the program he oversaw noted for its fearsome scientific prowess. The claims were absurd—a peptide synthesizer is ordinary lab equipment, with no doomsday use. But what was significant—or at least seemed so to me—was the way Judge Hartzenberg listened raptly to Cilliers's tale of a world trembling in fear before the brilliance of South Africa's scientists.

There seemed to be a fundamental problem with the state's case. The government was trying to persuade the Judge that Basson and Project Coast had been up to serious and terrible things—experts from Britain and the United States were, according to a prosecution witness, "amazed" by South Africa's chemical- and biological-warfare program, which had been second in sophistication only to that of the Soviet Union—but this impression did not really appear to weigh against Basson. Daan Goosen, the managing director of Roodeplaat, framed the problem bluntly when he told me, "There are many people who think Basson was a war hero—because he killed the blacks big time." Goosen believed the prosecution was making a mistake when it charged Basson with murder and conspiracy. Simply charging him with drug peddling and with stealing from the state would do far more to discredit him, Goosen argued. He meant, of course, that such charges would do more to discredit him with those diehard whites (not really, one hopes, "many people") who thought killing swapo prisoners was all well and good. He was not suggesting that Judge Hartzenberg himself might see it that way. And yet the question of how Hartzenberg sees Basson is central to the trial. Is Basson, in the Judge's eyes, too, a "war hero"—a hardworking soldier being persecuted now for his refusal to eat humble pie?

Hartzenberg allows some extraordinary testimony—including assertions that it seems could not possibly be made in the New South Africa. One day, for instance, a Special Forces hit man testified that he had been ordered to kill a black man believed to have participated in the assassination of a Mozambican rebel leader. Basson and two other doctors from Seventh Med had been interrogating the prisoner at a military hospital. When the hit man fetched him from the hospital in order to kill him, the prisoner was unconscious. The hit man testified that Basson told him that the man's condition was the result of an overdose during "chemical interrogation." On cross-examination, Cilliers announced that the prisoner had in fact been "catatonic," and that the witness was "clearly not aware that catatonia is particularly prevalent among black people, far more so than [among] whites. Under severe stress, black people enter a trancelike state, and this is what happened to this person." Such hokum passes, in Judge Hartzenberg's court, for legal argument.

During the third and fourth months of the trial, when the prosecution's case turned to the fraud charges against Basson, and to the great tangle of front companies and international shuttling of funds that, according to the state, allowed Basson to pocket millions of dollars, Judge Hartzenberg grew increasingly exasperated. He pronounced himself "bored to death" by all the evidence from auditors, and made it apparent that he, for one, remembered how, during the period of sanctions against South Africa, it had been essential to play fast and free in business dealings to circumvent foreign restrictions, especially when it came to military procurement. The prosecutors became so alarmed by the Judge's comments, which seemed to verge on dismissing much of the state's case before it had even been presented, that in February of last year they formally asked that the trial be halted and Judge Hartzenberg replaced. In their application, they revealed that Hartzenberg had actually "burst out laughing" in his chambers while ordering the state (in yet another victory for the defense) to return the title to Basson's house and other assets, which it had seized before the trial.

The state was taking a big risk by asking that Hartzenberg be replaced. The entire trial, which involved two hundred and fifty witnesses and vast public expense, would have to start over if Hartzenberg stepped aside. And it was not clear when another judge would be available. Basson could argue that his right to a speedy trial had been violated, and could possibly walk free. As it happened, however, Hartzenberg briskly dismissed the recusal application as "unfounded in its totality," its points being "frivolous" and "absurd."

How is it that a judge like Willie Hartzenberg is hearing the Basson case? The agreement that brought peace and democracy to South Africa, ending decades of undeclared civil war, included a pledge that there would be no purge of the apartheid state—no blacklisting or prosecutions for collaboration (as in postwar France), no "lustration laws" (as in post-Communist Czechoslovakia), no de-Nazification or mass dismissals or Nuremberg-style victors' justice. The upshot is that the military, the police, the judiciary, the bar, and the civil service are still almost exclusively white and male, especially in their middle and upper ranks.

South Africa's old legal system was an instrument of the racist state, and firmly subjugated to the executive branch. The country's new, nonracial constitution is, by contrast, a glistening blueprint for a liberal democracy that enshrines civil liberties and human rights. Today, South African judges enjoy a high degree of independence from executive interference. The rights of defendants are not trampled in favor of prosecutors. A world-class Constitutional Court is the final arbiter of legal dispute, and the rule of law is scrupulously respected. (The catastrophic decline of Zimbabwe can be traced, in substantial part, to its government's habit of flouting the orders of its courts.) Judge Hartzenberg, then, not only still has his job; like his fellow-judges, he also has far more real power and freedom than he did under the apartheid system that trained and shaped him. The Basson trial thus showcases both the successful separation of powers in the New South Africa and the blocking by an Old Guard of serious institutional change.

There is still widespread nostalgia in white South Africa for the old order, as Daan Goosen suggests. Basson's trial naturally brings some of that to the surface. The trial has been stopped several times because of bomb threats. Less cataclysmic disruptions also occur. A police officer who participated in the drug sting against Basson was testifying for the prosecution when he suddenly announced that he was in fact sympathetic to the accused, for they had served together in the Army in Namibia. A group of retired Army generals, several of whom were among those acquitted in the previous trial of apartheid military officers, have been following the Basson case closely and carefully, and are said to be receiving trial transcripts even before the prosecution does. Former military chiefs make appearances in the gallery, showing solidarity with Basson.

The Afrikaans-language press has been broadly sympathetic to Basson, calling him in its headlines not "Dr. Death" but "Dr. Basson," or even simply "Wouter." When Basson does something noble or heroic, which, with his knack for drama, he manages to do even while sitting in the dock—calling a press conference to gently demand that the bomb threats cease, or leaping to render medical assistance to someone felled by a stroke in the courthouse—he can count on great play in the Afrikaans press.

"All in the line of duty, I suppose," said the landlady at the Pretoria bed-and-breakfast where I was staying. She had deduced that I was in town to cover the Basson trial. Basson had once been a regular customer at the Italian restaurant she ran downstairs. "He used to come in with his wife," she went on. "He was a lovely man."

Plenty of white South Africans see the case differently, of course. A woman in the same neighborhood told me that just having Basson around unsettled her. "It's so strange," she said. "My husband sees him at the gym. It's like seeing Hitler at the gym."

The antipathy toward Basson among black South Africans who follow the case is nearly universal. Most of his alleged victims were members of the black-liberation movement. And, as Archbishop Tutu notes, there is something particularly horrifying about crimes that have "been well thought out by white-coated men in clinically spick-and-span laboratories, subverting science for such nefarious ends."

Laboratory germ warfare got its start during the Second World War, when projects were launched in Germany, Britain, Canada, the United States, and, most gruesomely, Japan. The Japanese worked to weaponize anthrax, cholera, plague, and typhoid, among other diseases, and did extensive experiments on human beings, in some cases tying people to stakes and measuring the effects of different types of bombs and poisons, and on several occasions aerial-bombing cities and towns in China with plague-infected fleas and then monitoring the outbreaks of bubonic plague that followed.

The United States developed a large-scale secret biological-warfare program, which eventually made eager use of the captured Japanese research on human subjects. By 1969, the Army had weaponized anthrax, tularemia, and botulinum, which is the most deadly biotoxin known, and had stockpiled more than two million biological bombs, bomblets, spray tanks, and other munitions. Then, without warning, President Richard Nixon terminated the project, ordering its arsenals destroyed. In 1972, seventy-nine nations, including the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and South Africa, signed a treaty outlawing biological weapons.

Some of those nations, however, notably the Soviet Union, continued clandestinely to pursue the development of offensive biological weapons. The Soviet program soon dwarfed even the American program at its peak. Its deputy chief defected in 1992, and his heavily documented report was chilling. The Soviet program employed sixty thousand people, at more than fifty facilities. It, too, weaponized Marburg, anthrax, tularemia, and, most worryingly, smallpox. (Because smallpox had finally been defeated worldwide, people were no longer being vaccinated against it, and vaccine stocks were disappearing.) Finally, the Russians pioneered genetic engineering, manipulating pathogens such as those that cause tularemia and bubonic plague to produce a super-virulence not found in nature. Disturbing signs that Russia has not entirely halted its program still surface occasionally.

Project Coast's most noteworthy contribution to this dismal field—apart from its achievements on the chemical side, which included a high-tech gas mask that was in great demand among the Allied forces during the Gulf War—was a genetically engineered E. coli bacterium that produces botulinum toxin. Since the Roodeplaat labs produced, according to the microbiologist Mike Odendaal, between three and five grams of purified botulinum, and since five grams is enough to kill, at least in theory, a million people, this was not a happy achievement. There is no evidence that botulinum was ever weaponized at Roodeplaat. (Weapons of mass destruction need delivery systems, an industrial-scale engineering task seemingly not undertaken by Project Coast.) But it is unclear whether the biological weapons that were developed—or, for that matter, the chemical weapons at Delta G Scientific—were destroyed when the program was dismantled, in 1993. There was no refereed destruction of the estimated six hundred cultures produced and preserved at Roodeplaat. Many of them were presumably valuable, and would certainly be of great interest to Saddam Hussein or Colonel Qaddafi.

Talking to a microbiologist like Odendaal about his work in a weapons lab is an adventure in cognitive dissonance. Odendaal did ghastly things at Roodeplaat, including putting anthrax spores in cigarettes, chocolates, and lipstick. He grimaced when he told me about these tasks—we were sitting in his wood-panelled suburban living room, drinking velvety local wine, his young daughters giggling nearby. "That's not science, that's boring stuff," he declared. Odendaal's personal interest was in developing a vaccine for sheep, which he thought would have commercial potential. He was willing to do secret-weapons work, but he also wanted to publish in scientific journals, and to feel he was advancing professionally.

I steered the conversation back toward weapons. "Angola would have been the ideal situation in which to test these weapons," Odendaal said. "But Basson wanted to use them against our domestic opponents as well—to impress the generals. But one of the major tenets of chemical warfare is that you don't use these things on your own soil."

I asked about the charge, often heard, that the drinking water in the Eastern Cape district, a center of political resistance, had been deliberately infected with cholera in the late nineteen-eighties. Odendaal nodded. "If that happened, the cholera in the Eastern Cape probably came from my lab, and it probably did kill old people and kids," he said evenly. "I only read about it in the papers, and then was confronted about it at the T.R.C. No details have come out yet, but it was probably put in the water. But that, again, is something you produce to use in enemy territory, not on your own people. And it doesn't make any sense, if you want to make a dent in the black population, to poison a couple of hundred people, putting a strain on your own health services. You need to kill ten million to make a difference."

Then, returning to the subject of Wouter Basson, Odendaal exclaimed, "I just can't believe that he would stoop so low as to sell drugs!"

Basson denies everything. He doesn't hide, or at least not often, behind excuses that he was following orders or that he did not know what others were doing. He was in charge of Project Coast, "the guy who had fingers in the whole pie," as he told a TV interviewer, and he often made decisions on his own. But he never killed anyone, or conspired to kill anyone, or sold drugs, or sought to enrich himself. He never distributed poisons, or plotted to poison Nelson Mandela, or authorized research into sterilizing blacks or a race-specific bacterial weapon. Whenever testimony is heard that Basson did such things, Jaap Cilliers is careful to register his client's denial of all accusations.

Basson's explanations can be baroque. At the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, while scoffing at or obfuscating most of the commission's questions, he seized upon others. All those cigarettes spiked with anthrax spores and chocolates laced with cyanide produced at Roodeplaat? They were training devices, Basson explained. Operatives who might be in foreign hotels needed to learn not to eat the chocolates put on their pillows at bedtime. An astonished commissioner asked, "Are you really expecting this panel to believe that you manufactured these chocolates with cyanide for . . . purposes of educating your troops what not to do in a hotel room?" Basson coolly replied that he did indeed expect the panel to believe it.

In response to a discussion about the offensive and defensive purposes of Project Coast, he launched into an extraordinary tale about a plot by the A.N.C. to kill its own leader in his cell—something about ambitious Young Turks who believed Mandela was not sufficiently radical. "I then went into a classical military method," Basson testified. His task: to protect Mandela's life at all costs. Toward that end, Basson devised an elaborate exercise involving two groups of scientists, the "blue force" and the "red force." One came up with ingenious ways to kill Mandela, the other with ways to stop them. The upshot of the exercise: Mandela's life was saved, "in order to insure the future of this country." When the commissioners pressed Basson for details or documentation of this account—the names of scientists who had taken part, copies of the red and blue forces' plans, anything—he couldn't help them.

Basson's true strength when it comes to his legal defense is his readiness to drop hints that he knows much more than he is saying—and the implied threat is to embarrass or destroy powerful people if things should start going against him in a meaningful way. In the first weeks of his trial, Cilliers served notice in this area by repeatedly mentioning Basson's purported links to the A.N.C., particularly to Nelson Mandela. He even asserted, without challenge, that Basson collected funds in Libya to help pay for Winnie Mandela's defense during her 1991 trial for her role in the death of a young activist, and that Basson had personally delivered the money to the Mandelas' home in Johannesburg. Mike Kennedy, then the deputy director of national intelligence, confirmed in his testimony that Basson had "close contacts" with Libyan intelligence, and that Libyan agents had in fact stayed in Basson's home for some months.

Basson had already put the fear into American intelligence during his T.R.C. appearance, where he handed over fourteen pages of notes from a visit to the United States in 1981. American Air Force officers had been eager to develop joint "medical projects" with South Africa, he wrote. Of Major General William S. Augerson, then the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Resources and Programs, Basson wrote, "He feels that chemical warfare is an ideal strategic weapon because infrastructure is preserved together with facilities, and only living people are killed. The warm climate of Africa is, according to him, ideal for this type of weapon because the diffusion of the poison is better and the absorption is increased by perspiration and increased blood flow in the persons who are targets." (General Augerson was actually lecturing publicly on methods of protection against chemical attack, an area in which he is an expert. Basson, perhaps hoping to impress his superiors with his access to high American officials, managed to get Augerson's views on chemical weapons exactly backward.) Basson says that in 1995 his life was threatened on the street by a C.I.A. agent. The American Embassy in Pretoria admits privately that the United States government is "terribly concerned" that Basson may start talking about his sources of information and technology. The Embassy hopes that an impression of "unwitting coöperation" is all that emerges in the way of an American connection.

Other countries have also shown signs of panic. The Swiss government launched a formal investigation of General Peter Regli, the former head of Swiss intelligence, who allegedly dealt with (and was double-dealt by) Basson in a quest to obtain South African nuclear secrets. (Regli was cleared in December, 1999.) Then there are the pharmaceuticals manufacturers—"household names," according to Project Coast scientists—that apparently had agreements with the South African Army under which expired drug stocks were not destroyed but were given to the Army for distribution to the rebel forces sponsored by Pretoria in Angola and Mozambique. Some multinational drug firms were in the habit of contracting out animal research to companies in South Africa, where animal-welfare laws were relatively lax, and some of those contracts ended up at Roodeplaat.

Basson's most potent leverage, however, is over the A.N.C. and the government it leads. He is happy to suggest that his dealings with the A.N.C. during the years when he was masquerading as a wealthy, sanctions-busting businessman were extensive. The liberation movement needed connections, especially for arms and intelligence, and Basson had them. The drugs he is alleged to have trafficked in? Those were placebos, palmed off on the A.N.C., which had no qualms about selling illegal drugs. When it was revealed that Nelson Mandela had rehired Basson, speculation about exactly what type of information he had on the A.N.C. intensified, and, when the state insisted that the bail hearing after his 1997 arrest be held in camera, a belief that the government had something to hide became virtually universal in the South African press.

One persistent suspicion is that Basson knows the identities of A.N.C. leaders who were double agents working for Pretoria. Another is that the chemical- and biological-warfare program never ended—that the new government doesn't care to observe the international treaties it has signed any more than the old one did. (The military leadership is largely the same, after all.) Yet another is that the government has been passing along (selling) the chemical- and biological-warfare expertise developed by Project Coast to its post-apartheid set of allies—nations such as Syria, Cuba, and Libya.

The state argued that parts of Basson's bail hearing should remain secret because allowing them to become public would violate South Africa's treaty commitments to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, doing so would also "jeopardize relations between South Africa and other countries." Basson himself argued that in his bail-hearing testimony, not realizing his remarks might become public, he had named various companies and individuals who had helped him build Project Coast, including foreign agents who had sold him state secrets and who would undoubtedly be jailed, or worse, if their roles were revealed. Judge Hartzenberg found this argument persuasive. He had parts of the hearing transcripts excised before their release. "I'm not going to execute people," he declared, meaning Basson's old friends in the sanctions-busting world.

Why did Nelson Mandela rehire Wouter Basson two years after F. W. de Klerk fired him? The short answer is that British and American intelligence agents talked (and frightened) him into it. MI6 and the C.I.A. had been watching Basson closely since his dismissal, and had become alarmed by his frequent trips to Libya. Everyone knew that for years Colonel Qaddafi had been trying to develop a biological-warfare capacity. Basson, now working as a "consultant," could obviously be of great and dangerous service to Qaddafi. The Americans and the British gave de Klerk a joint démarche, demanding that he tell them everything about Project Coast; end the program and destroy its records; inform Nelson Mandela, who would soon become President; and make a public declaration about the matter. De Klerk resisted at first, but eventually complied with most of these demands; the démarche led also to South Africa's nuclear disarmament. Unwilling to hand over the country's nuclear arsenal to Mandela, de Klerk allowed the United States to come in and remove it.

Basson, made available by Mandela, was interrogated by American and British experts, who were apparently impressed with his knowledge of chemical and biological warfare, especially his familiarity with international procurement channels. They were also impressed with his deviousness. When he was later observed taking yet another trip to Libya, officials in London and Washington decided that he simply could not be allowed to sell his services on the open market. British and American representatives met with President Mandela, told him in forceful terms about the dangers as they saw them, and recommended returning Basson to government service, where his movements could be monitored. Mandela bought the argument, rehiring Basson "in the national interest."

Project Coast's reputation for scientific prowess has been taking a beating lately, with evidence of technical and financial incompetence accumulating steadily at Basson's trial. Judge Hartzenberg may yet be in awe of the project's terrifying sophistication, but it is hard to see how such admiration could survive, say, the slapstick tale of Jan Lourens, the Project Coast administrator, demonstrating to a would-be hit man in England the use of a spring-loaded device that could be attached to an umbrella. The device was armed with a poison dart and, according to the would-be hit man, was intended to assassinate Ronnie Kasrils, an A.N.C. leader (later a Deputy Minister of Defense). Somehow Lourens got the poison on his hands, and from there into his mouth. Then he started drinking disinfectant and fearing for his life. Certainly, even the most advanced work at Roodeplaat seems to have yielded only dangerous science, rather than actual weapons of mass destruction. As Daan Goosen, the former managing director of Roodeplaat, says, his laboratory really specialized in "crude toxins, Macbeth level."

Testimony at the Basson trial from some of the C.C.B. hit men who got supplies from Project Coast has not exactly burnished the project's mystique, either. Slang van Zyl, an ex-policeman, described various botched assassinations and a bizarre operation against Archbishop Tutu. In 1989, van Zyl and three accomplices, following orders, crept into the garden of Tutu's official residence in Cape Town, carrying a baboon fetus in a jam jar. The fetus had come from Roodeplaat. According to van Zyl, Ferdi Barnard, an infamous C.C.B. killer (now in jail), took eight nails that had been treated by a witch doctor, and pounded them into trees along the driveway. The men hung the fetus in a tree near the front door. Van Zyl did not seem to know precisely what sort of black magic or intimidation it was hoped that this feat would achieve.

As the end of white rule neared, Basson and his partners in Project Coast, seeing the great political change ahead, came up with privatization schemes for the front companies that had realizable assets, such as Roodeplaat Research Laboratories and Delta G Scientific. Their financial maneuvering became increasingly complex and frantic, and, with privatization, some of them got rich.

Basson's name was on a long list of bank accounts in a long list of countries, and he was the nominal owner of jets, condos, cottages, Swiss drug companies, travel agencies, farms, and so on. At his trial, a critical question has become whether he was the real owner of these assets, a real beneficiary of their sales, or whether they were still actually state property—at a time when the state was about to change hands. Had the man who donned the disguise of the wealthy businessman for Project Coast morphed into an actual wealthy businessman? The state has had little success in showing that Basson was actually salting away any proceeds in personal accounts. But even Judge Hartzenberg has been given pause, it seems, by revelations of trust funds and other financial arrangements that name Basson's wife and daughter as beneficiaries.

Then there is the question of Basson's alleged drug dealing. Delta G Scientific produced hundreds of thousands of Mandrax tablets, and received at least another two hundred thousand from the police, who had seized them in raids. Black politicians have accused the police and Project Coast of manufacturing Mandrax and distributing it to blacks in order to promote drug addiction and crime, thus counteracting political mobilization. Vast quantities of Ecstasy were also produced at Delta G—a million capsules' worth, by some accounts—and the Army's explanation, since the exposure of the program, has consistently been that both drugs showed promise as incapacitants. The notion seems to have been that Ecstasy or Mandrax, placed in aerosols and sprayed over an angry crowd, would "neutralize the offensive spirit," as the former chief of the armed forces told parliament. This idea strikes most people as far-fetched at best, and neither drug was ever weaponized. Officially, Delta G's immense stocks of Ecstasy and Mandrax were destroyed—packed into barrels and dumped at sea—when Project Coast was terminated. But there were rumors that the drugs ended up in the hands of Basson and his cronies.

Basson's arrest in January, 1997, while he was allegedly in the act of selling Ecstasy, seemed to confirm those rumors. Basson claims he was framed, and the police unit that pulled the sting on him and the informant who was used have been said to rig evidence. But even Basson's supporters, those people who believe his trial is a witch-hunt (and these include the former chief of the armed forces, now a respected parliamentarian, who takes responsibility for the Army's production of Ecstasy and Mandrax), must find themselves wondering if the drug-dealing charges are true—and, if so, what Basson's motives for getting involved in such activities could possibly be.

"Wouter believed—and still believes—he is untouchable," Jan Lourens told me. "He has gotten away with everything before. Why not?" There was an obvious financial motive as well, Lourens said. "His hospital salary did not allow the life style he was accustomed to."

Other ex-Special Forces operators, used to living outside the law, have apparently gone into the drug (and diamond) trade. "Many of them came here in 1980 from Rhodesia," a white South African prosecutor told me. "These were the big killers. Now there is nowhere for them to go. Funds become an issue. Pensions. That's how they see it."

But Basson was not an old mercenary forced into retirement. He knew he was already being investigated for fraud. He had every reason to stay clear of any illegal scheme. He had, as Lourens says, got away with so much already. Why would he risk everything?

You could ask him. You could make your way to Pretoria Academic Hospital, a big, low-rise, scruffy brick complex where Basson pulls regular shifts as a cardiologist. He has been suspended (at full pay) from his other post, at One Military Hospital, pending the outcome of his trial, but the objections of politicians, ethicists, and officials of the health workers' union to his continuing to practice at this humble public hospital, where his patients are working-class blacks and whites, have not persuaded the Health Professions Council, the statutory body in charge of such matters, to act against him. (He also maintains a private practice.) You could wander the wide, dim corridors, asking directions, and eventually find his unit.

And Basson might appear, in hospital scrubs—a striped pink mobcap, purple drawstring pants, a blue Zima T-shirt—and, finding himself between patients, he might sit down with you in a small, cluttered conference room, polite but with little time to waste. He might answer your questions with surprising candor, delivering a steady flow of fresh, plausible (if sometimes counterintuitive) explanations and stories concerning his case and many of its main characters. His affability, his wit, his sharp eye for the hypocrisies of the Great Powers, his philosophical attitude toward his enemies might all serve to disarm you. And he might take your measure and provide an overview of his story that suits your own predilections, a version that emphasizes a range of agendas, personal and professional, corporate and ideological—involving political groups from the far right to the far left—all converging on his trial, everyone bringing his own fears and projections and ambitions to the case, almost no one acting in good faith, almost no one particularly interested in the facts. In short, an exorcism, with a sacrificial figure in the form of a defendant—an "apartheid scientist," as the newspapers call him. In this ritual, though, the defendant has not only the facts on his side but an abundance of aces up his sleeve. He has the goods on almost everybody.

And by the time you've heard this whole story—several hours seem to have passed between patients, somehow—you might feel as if your brain molecules had been rearranged by that legendary peptide synthesizer. You might feel unable to remember what you thought before you stopped by Pretoria Academic Hospital.

But all this would have been off the record, of course. This conversation would never have happened. If you were to tell anyone about it, Basson would have to kill you. Ha-ha-ha.

The trial staggers on. In August, the prosecution ran out of money. Anton Ackerman, one of the lead prosecutors, had to pay from his own pocket for a witness, a businessman from Belgium, to fly to South Africa to testify, and the state failed to repay him, and so, Ackerman announced, he was reluctantly resigning from the case. Judge Hartzenberg said that, in seventeen years on the bench, he had never heard such nonsense. It turned out that prosecutors' offices all over the province had run out of money for even basic supplies like fax paper. Their budget was exhausted. It was yet another embarrassment for the state. Eventually, the money to repay Ackerman was found, and the prosecution of Wouter Basson resumed.

The prosecution, at last report, is in despair. No verdict is expected before mid-2001, and it is generally accepted that this will be the last of the big apartheid trials. Among other considerations, the strapped new democratic state can't afford another one.