Behind the Bastards - The MDMA Cook Who Tried To Commit Genocide

Episode Date: January 2, 2020

Robert is joined by Billy Wayne Davis to discuss Woulter Basson, a chemical weapons engineer with a hard on for racial extermination.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's podcast in time. Podcast Dorinos. Damn it. I am Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards, trying to find a new strategy for introducing the show because I got tired of the old ways. And that was not a success. It was a miserable failure. And today, though, my guest is not a miserable failure. It's Mr. Billy Wayne Davis at Airhorn.

How are you doing, Billy? Good. Was that too loud? I liked it. No, that was fine. I think a lot of people who have their car stereos up high in the early part of the show are maybe frustrated with you. You might have caused a car wreck or two. It was aggressive. I apologize. I was just excited. Yeah, it's okay. Billy, I'm trying to find a new way to introduce my show. And I'm clearly terrible at it. Notes, you know, you're a professional introducer. I know. I mean, it's basically, I liked the way you were doing it before because it was like... But what's X in my Ys? Yeah. Yeah, it's catchy. And I mean, it's exhausting to come up with a new one every time. But it is.

I do like when I feel it, my favorite part is when you can feel you making it up as you go. Yeah. Yeah, that's definitely the case every time. I'm debating as to whether or not to stick to a format, though. I wrote one. He won't use the one I wrote. He has a format. You wrote one? Yeah. What did you write? I said, what's salty my ex-boyfriends? It's great, right? No? Nobody? All right, continue with your show. I'm just going to go ahead. What's assaulting your ex-boyfriends? Okay. No, what's salty like salt as opposed to what's cracking my peppers? It already takes you in a direction you do not want to go off the bat. We're like, wait, what is that? Is she okay?

Because I don't know what's salting your ex-boyfriends. I do know what's cracking my peppers. It's the pepper cracker that I have. You like it to pepper. Also, buy that shirt on T-Public. It's cute. Okay. Yeah. So, we have some old business before we get into the episode today, Billy. One of those pieces of old business is that a couple of our fans found you at a comedy show and gave you a wonderful gift for me. Yes. And an odd gift. They did contact me and us before on Twitter, which was nice.

And very thoughtful because it is nice to know to expect this gift. Yeah, it's not a kind of gift you'd want to receive at random. No, God. And especially at this show, it's like in a house basement in Louisville. Oof. So, like, the show's in this guy's, these people's basement, and then I was selling T-shirts and just meeting people afterwards in their living room, basically. And then, yeah, these people stood in line very patiently and they're like, hey, we like to buy a T-shirt. And I was like, cool. And then they're like, also, here you go. And I was like, ah, it's real.

And what was this gift, Billy? It was, it's a brown shirt, a Nazi dagger. And it's legit. And they reached out to us on Twitter beforehand and explained that it was like a family heirloom they didn't want to have anymore. And he was a brother and sister. They were so happy to give it to me. And I don't really know what to do with such a thing. It is a piece of history and an interesting one at that.

Definitely not the kind of thing you want to have out just in your living room because people will make the wrong conclusions about it. No, and my wife and mother-in-law were at my house when I opened it because I shipped it because I didn't want to fly with it. Yeah. Also, I have blonde hair and blue eyes. And my just family with it, they're like, yeah, this checks out. Yeah. Well, in it, the fact that it's a family heirloom of theirs reminds me of one of my weird family moments. My dad's dad did something spooky for the US government.

He was always over in Vietnam during the war. And nobody seems to know precisely what he was up to. There's the thing that he said he was doing, but everybody in the family is like, yeah, but it was anyway. Yeah, but he was never dirty. Do you know what I mean? So that was what he did in the 60s, but he was in Germany right after the war and years after he died, we found a little box that was just full to the brim with Hitler youth armbands and penance and stuff like that, like a whole lot of them. And it was always like, what's the story here?

I'm certain it was just like he was in Germany after the war. They found a bunch of Nazi. He was like, oh, we should put this in a box, but it's weird. It's a weird thing to like find, right? Like to find a bunch of them. Yeah. Like finding one, you're like, I could see, but I'm gonna take that. That's pretty weird.

Yeah. But to find a bunch, I'm like, did you do something with a bunch of them? And I don't think so, but it's a strange thing to come across. And I'm gonna guess it was something like that for our fans where that somebody's grandpa was over in Germany. Yes. And shoot some guy or is in some house or like, oh, okay, I guess this is what I'm taking back. It was used. Yeah.

It was, I mean, yeah, it's haunted for sure. Well, Billy, speaking of Nazis and speaking of racists, today's episode is about the racist chemical weapons engineer who probably cooked up the MDMA that you'd used if you've done MDMA. Oh, man. Yeah. I told you it was gonna be uplifting. I mean, it's a fun one. He's a doctor, so it's on brand for us.

But I mean, yeah, I'm sure he is a doctor. But I mean, I always assume when you're doing certain types of drugs, they're just bad people have touched this. Like cocaine for sure. Yes. Like MDMA is made in a lot of different places. I've known some people who were like, what made cooked MDMA in their college lab while they were getting their PhD. And I feel fine about that.

Yes. Yeah. That seems ethical to me. I just mean on the black market, period. Yeah. There's always, when you go to the black market, you're like, there's just, you have to accept there's a percentage of bad is involved in this. Yeah. And bad people, you know, it's how like most good people accidentally do bad stuff.

It sounds like this bad guy accidentally did some good stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, so the extent to which this guy was selling MDMA is such that if you did ecstasy in the 1990s during the height of the rave scene or probably in the early 2000s, there's a very good chance you did this guy's ecstasy. Cool. Like if you were raving in like 1998 and you came across a batch of fucking awesome E, like the odds are really good that it was cooked by this dude, Walter Basson. So that's the guy we're talking about today.

And we're not talking about his, mostly about his career making ecstasy. We're talking about his career as a chemical weapons engineer trying to exterminate the black race. Oh, see, there's always. Oh boy. He had me. I was like, I don't know. He sounds pretty fun. He just makes a lot of great.

Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. He's a genocide. Oh, damn it. Attempted genocide. Yeah. So it's the story of Walter Basson is a really fucked up and interesting one.

But to actually like tell it, there's a lot of background that I think people need about the history of chemical weapons. So we're going to talk about that a little bit first. Are you a chemical weapons fan, Billy? No. No. I mean, I understand them and I've looked at, you know, I like all military stuff on some level. So I've read into it, but some of it gets real horrific so quick. Yeah.

Like in the torture kind of way. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. So it's like, I can enjoy, like I can both understand like the horror of trench warfare in World War One and how much artillery played into that. Yes. And appreciate like looking at a piece of artillery and how it functions and the way the mechanics work. And part of that's because like you can see like in good old war reenactment, you can see cannons being used and they're not hurting anybody. There's none of that with chemical weapons.

Like there's no like displaying them. There's no appreciating the mechanics of it. Like it's purely designed to not just kill people, but to do it horribly. Horrible. Um, horribly. Yes. Like with firearms, they do horrible things too, but we also get like fireworks out of that genealogy. Like there's fun things associated with them.

Yes. Yeah. Not with chemical weapons. We're like, this makes your insides be on your outside and you're like, just blow somebody up, man. Come on. Yeah. What happened to you? An honest God fearing howitzer.

Yes. There's something to say that like just instant death. Yeah. Yeah. Instant death and like death in a way that, you know, we've been doing for a long, like people have always blown each other up in war. You kind of know what you're getting. Different ways of doing it. Yeah.

But this chemical weapons are like pretty new. Um, and this is actually something like we talk about in the Fritz Haber episodes. And whenever I talk about like the birth of chemical weapons, like a whole bunch of people are going to hit me up on Twitter and be like, no, the first use was this and the first use was that. And I'll tell stories about like Mongols catapulting plague victims over walls or like something like that. And I get what they're saying. I don't think that stuff really counts because like sickness has always been a part of war and like cunning commanders have always found ways to spread illness among their enemies because it makes sense. Yes. Chemical weapons in the modern sense are something really different, I think.

Just one immune Mongol just running with the plague. There's a chemical warfare over there. Yeah. There's a difference between that and like gassing a town with Saren in my view. Yes. I agree. Yes. Yeah.

Because yeah, that's just more of like, hey, this is whoosh works, but being like someone in their army being like, we're going to gas them. You're like, wait, what? No. What? Yeah. It's, I mean, and this is like a personal line for everybody. So people may disagree with me, but I can, it's like, it's complicated when you try to talk about like where it all started. Like the first formal treaty that forbade something that you could call chemical warfare was probably the Franco-German Treaty of 1675.

But that just banned the use of poison in war. So it wasn't really like chemical weapons. It was more like you can't rub shit on your bullets and then shoot people. That's bad, you know? It's like that sort of thing. Yeah. Yeah. In 1874, a bunch of, I mean, you can, and shit's going to get in your bullet wounds anyway, because there's poop everywhere in war.

That's one of the eternal truths of war is all the poop. And a festival. It's the same. And the what? And a festival, like a music festival. Yes. Yeah. Music festivals and warfare have a lot in common.

I'm actually more okay with the use of chemical warfare on music festivals, but I'm not a big fan of Bonnaroo. No, it's Lavnation Bonnaroo. So in 1874, about a dozen European states signed the Brussels Declaration, which banned poison gas and other poisons as weapons of war. So it was the first time like a modern chemical weapon was banned as 1874. And the Brussels Declaration was never ratified, but in 1899, the Hague Convention on the Laws of War was signed by every major European power, and they agreed universally to avoid the use of poison. The convention included a declaration on asphyxiating gases and explicitly forbade the use of projectiles designed solely for gas warfare. Now, the first modern chemical weapons attack on a huge scale occurred at Ypres in Belgium on April 22nd, 1914. We talked about this on the Fritz Haber episode, German soldiers emptied cans of chlorine gas and trusted the wind to carry them into the foe.

And there were similar experiments. What could go wrong? What could go wrong? On that day, it was great. Yeah, but afterwards, it didn't work out so well for anybody. Jesus. So yeah, that was like the first kind of like modern chemical weapon attack. And by the end of World War I, there'd been a grand total of 3,000 different chemical agents tested as potential weapons.

So every side was guilty of this, even though they'd signed a thing saying they wouldn't do it. Something like 124,000 metric tons of chemical weapons were delivered via 66 million artillery shells over the course of the war, causing around a million casualties. And as you might notice, this clearly violates the letter in spirit of the Hague Convention. The way all the powers got around this was by arguing that their poison gas shells didn't violate the letter of the Hague Convention. Because the explosive shells they delivered them in didn't just kill people with gas. Since they exploded, they still killed people through explosions too. So their argument was like, well, the Hague Convention just banned shells that only disperse chemical weapons since our shells exploded too. Well, technically, technically, we also.

Yeah. I hate you guys so much. I hate you. It's so fucking shitty. Yeah. It reminds me, as a kid, I was a war gamer. I played a lot of those little games with models. And the rules lawyering that you encounter in that hobby, it's just weird to realize, oh, the same thing happens in real war. There were a bunch of overweight shitty assholes standing around a table being like, no, it doesn't break the rules because of this.

It's amazing. Just a bunch of bearded dudes who've never been near a battlefield yelling about what doesn't break the letter of the law while actual soldiers get gassed. It's amazing. I was thinking, while you were saying that, every war, it sounds like there comes to a point where like, okay, okay, you can't do that anymore. Goddamn, stop doing that. Every war, there's something like, wait, humans just figure out like, okay, okay, what about this? And then it comes to the point where everybody's like, all right, it's just we gotta stop. We can't do that.

Oh, God. What is that? Stop that. Every time. Yeah, it's fun. So, yeah, it World War One was shit. Chemical weapons made it worse. And in 1925, the Great Powers signed the Geneva Protocol on asphyxiating poisonous and other gases, which would have banned all chemical weapons in warfare, like without any sort of exceptions in it.

The only two major powers who did not ratify the proposal were the United States and Japan, which is interesting. The US has a long history of advocating for rules and warfare, but then forbidding or refusing to sign on to them because it will limit what we can do. Yeah, we should sign that. Yeah, it's probably a good thing to sign. Yeah, I should sign that. I should say, though, that like the Geneva Convention was kind of bullshit in some ways just because like, there was an exemption in it that if you were attacked with chemical weapons by a state, you could use chemical weapons in defense of your country. And there was another provision that allowed chemical weapons to be used on any states or groups that had not signed the Geneva Protocol, which meant that colonial powers could continue to deploy mustard gas against their tribal enemies. So it was like, we can't use chemical weapons on other white people.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's basically the law that they agree on after World War One. We're not barbarians. But we're going to keep doing this to the people we call barbarians. We do need to keep some order because. Yeah. The Geneva Protocols also made it legal to stockpile chemical weapons.

So it's like, you can't use them, but you can build up an arsenal of them and you can use it if you're attacked or if you need to suppress people who don't have a country. So that's cool. That's like they're just giving people poker chips and you can't spend them unless you really need it. Unless you really want to. Yeah. That's kind of always how rules about warfare are. I guess in part because it's usually not people who have faced those weapons who are signing onto the conventions about them. It's a bunch of politicians being like, yeah, in generals, all sort of debate.

Okay, but what if we need to? Well, then we'll have this exception and so that we can still use them if we need to. Yeah. Yeah. But it is that, I mean, that is their job is to think like that too. So it's like that weird. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, they're all a bunch of fucking lawyers.

Now, the first nation to break with the protocols was Fascist Italy and their colonial war with Ethiopia, which was a state at that point in time. Mussolini's troops dropped mustard gas bombs and mass on Ethiopian villagers in 1935 and 36, killing and wounding more than 15,000 people. Mussolini's actions were a clear violation of the protocol, but the League of Nations refused to do anything. This would prove to be the last time an international organization failed to take action against a Fascist gas and civilians. So that's good. Nice. Never happened again. Never, not, not, not once.

I can't recall any of the time. No, that's what's great about international governance is that it's a thing that really happens. Oh, yeah. It's just, it's not, it's not theater. Yeah. It's not at all, not at all theater. Totally a real thing. So World War II wasn't a great time for anybody, but one of its few bright spots is that in the European theater, at least chemical weapons were not deployed.

This did not stop both the Axis and the Allies from manufacturing huge quantities of them, and the failure of either side to use chemical weapons was not due to high-minded ideals on anyone's part, but more due to a balance of terror that kept bare minimums of human decency in place in this one specific field of war. I'd like to quote from a Carnegie Council paper on the rise and fall of chemical weapons about this. While the Allies refined older model gases like false gene and mustard, the Germans invented a new, far deadlier category of chemical weapons, nerve agents. In one of the greatest intelligence coups of the war, the Nazis successfully kept this development secret from the Allies until their surrender. If they had chosen to use these weapons on Allied troops, they might have altered the course of history. Once again, Germany had its superior chemical industry to thank. A chemist from IG Farben, then one of the world's largest corporations, stumbled on compounds of extraordinary potency while trying to develop potential insecticides for commercial use.

What became sarin, taboon, and somen, all nerve gases, which caused the cascading failure of body functions, including the body forgetting to breathe and then rapid death, were developed by German scientists working with their Wehrmacht counterparts. IG Farben, by the way, is bare today. So that's cool. That's cool. Yeah, your aspirin's made by the people who invented sarin. I mean, they know what they're doing. They do.

You know, I would argue that sarin works better at its intended application than aspirin. Yes. Yeah. I could attest to that from what I've seen and experienced. But... Aspirin doesn't do shit. What do you... Like, when you're working, like, as you develop that, you just go home and your wife's like,

well, how was today? You're like, it was intense. Yeah. I imagine a lot of scientists, like, sitting out with a beer, watching the sunset, like, staring at their kids playing in the yard and just, like, shaking their heads. It's like, ah, I should... I don't think we should have done that. I do not...

This might go bad places. It feels like you're just gonna bite us in the ass. It does. I feel like there's all the best scientists wind up feeling like that at some point. Like, we had a whole generation of them on the Manhattan Project who must have just gone home. You get this reading them where they're just sitting around being like, oh, boy, maybe I shouldn't have done that. Probably shouldn't be doing this job.

Yeah. They just know just enough of the, like, I don't think we should do this. You got... Okay. All right. I'm just not... Okay. Yeah, it's like...

Everybody spreads that Oppenheimer, like, that anecdote about him reciting that line from the Bhagavad Gita, I'm Become Death the Destroyer of Worlds, and I feel like when you're talking about when you need to change your career, if you feel the need to quote that unironically about what you're doing, maybe you need a new job. Yeah, you're like, this is... Yeah, maybe you're not in the right field. I feel like I'm in over my head. I'm in over my head now.

I'm gonna... I just like science. That's all I want. I just like science. I bet his resume was fun, just like 1943 to 1945, I became Death the Destroyer of Worlds, 1941 to 42, like... You may have heard about me. You may have heard about me.

You know the guy who will ultimately be responsible for the end of human civilization? That was my day job. I figured it out. Yeah. It was a math problem, and I got it first. I got it right. Ah, damn it. That is...

I mean, most scientists I know, their whole thing is like, we don't know, so we're just constantly trying to figure out everything. It's like, oh, we don't really know. And that's what happens is like, you guys keep asking questions, man. It's like doing too many drugs sometimes. Like, don't go down that hallway, man. Yeah, you're gonna go too far, and you're not gonna be able to come back. But at least when people do that on acid, it just leads to them following fish around

for seven years. Yeah, and the military doesn't weaponize it. Yeah, not yet. They've tried, that's for sure. They have tried. It's just hard to. So, after World War II, the US and the Soviet Union embarked on a dark and secret arms race to build more varied stockpiles of chemical weapons.

In 1957, the US stockpile of sarin was so vast that we started developing a new series of nerve gases, the V for venomous agents. VX nerve gas is probably the most famous of these. It's three times as toxic as sarin when inhaled, and a thousand times as toxic when absorbed through the skin. Because we had too much of the other, we got to make it worse. Yeah. That was, I just make sure, and this isn't, I forget this isn't TV, I just threw my hands up and I was like, Jesus.

Like, we have too much, let's just make some more. Yeah. Well, if you follow the line of thinking there, it's remarkable because like in 1945, like we see that the Nazis have like operated the most brutal regime in history, have gassed 11 million people to death and like the fastest massacre in the history of human murder. And we were like, oh, and these same people developed the deadliest poison anyone's ever developed. I guess let's take it and make more. Yeah.

Oh, we are so shitty. Like everyone is, but even specifically the US post-World War II. Yeah. Oh, we won. We're going to take everything. Yeah, that is. We won the worst people ever designed the worst poison ever. Let's make it, oh, we've made so much of it that there's no point in us having more.

Let's make a deadlier version of it. Yeah. Just in case somebody finds all ours. Yeah. We get some worse. Now, Billy, you know what isn't a thousand times deadlier than Seren Gas? No. The products and services that support this podcast.

We don't know that. I do. I do. I can guarantee you that if you, if you deploy the products and services that support this podcast against say, a recalcitrant rebel village, it won't suffocate them. I hope you're right. I hope you're right. I suspect I am in this case.

Anyway, here is our non-weaponizable products. Services. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And on the good and bad ass way. And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match. And when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. Okay. So, Billy, we've been talking about poison gas a little bit this morning, and that's been fun. And I should probably talk a little bit here about what these chemicals we're talking about do. So, serine nerve gas basically turns off the off switch for your muscles and nerves, which leads to constant muscle contractions, seizures, uncontrollable conversion,

an exhaustion that can cause respiratory paralysis, which is when your lungs forget to work, and of course, death. But it doesn't turn off your nerves, so you get to feel... No, it's... you're in horrible pain. Oh, yeah, that's a fun one. That's fun. Yeah, it's good. Motherfucker. VX nerve gas works the same way, but at lower doses and it's much faster.

One liter of VX nerve gas contains enough individual doses to kill a million human beings. Whoa. That's... Yeah, that's cool. That's helpful. Just... Yeah. You don't need a lot.

We made it good, so you don't need much. You can give a million people with this much. Thanks, guys. And again, the dudes who did that went home and watched fireworks with their families. Uh-huh. It's amazing. We're going to leave early. We're going to leave early.

Yeah. Well, guys, we made a leader of this shit. Time to go home for the day. This will kill a million people. Yes, it will. So, by the late 1950s, the Soviet Union had also learned how to produce VX nerve gas, and they started making it too. Now, the USSR was, in general, a major distributor of horrific poisons throughout the Cold War.

They sent a shitload of chemical weapons to Egypt, a nation who today still refuses to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention. In 1963, Egypt deployed phosphine and mustard gas against Yemeni forces. In 1967, they again used nerve gas in Yemen. Many of these weapons were likely supplied directly by the Soviet Union. In the mid-1980s, Saddam Hussein's Iraq began producing its own VX nerve gas. Here we come. Yeah.

It was deployed extensively throughout the Iran-Iraq war. Now, the U.S. did not approve of any of this directly, nor did we directly hand the Iraqi regime VX nerve gas, but we did use our intelligence apparatus to inform Iraq of the position of Iranian military units knowing full well that Iraq would deploy chemical weapons against them. No way. And then we later used this as a justification for invading them.

I'm going to quote from a great article in Foreign Policy. Quote, U.S. officials have long denied acquiescing to Iraqi chemical attacks, insisting that Hussein's government never announced he was going to use the weapons. But retired Air Force Colonel Rick Francona, who was a military attaché in Baghdad during the 1988 strikes, paints a different picture. The Iraqis never told us that they intended to use nerve gas. They didn't have to.

We already knew. So that's cool. Yeah. So everybody's fine in the Cold War with using chemical weapons. Because it's cold. Chemicals warm people up. It's a cold war. That is true, Billy.

We're not having a real war. We're just having it like, hey. Come on. It's chilly. Warm up with this VX. It'll make your muscles contract. That'll warm you up. It makes you sweat.

You know what they say. People having fatal seizures are never chilly. They sweat a lot. They sweat a lot. So I brought all of this up as background because the stuff we're about to talk about today, Walter Bassin in South Africa is horrific. But it's important to understand the context of the global chemical warfare industry

and its use in the 1970s and 80s. When we start talking about chemical weapons and the nations that use them, it's not a story that has any good guys. But there's definitely bad guys. And Walter Bassin is one of the worst. Mr. Bassin was born on July 6th, 1950, seven years before the birth of the V series of nerve gases. And we don't know much about his early life.

He grew up around Cape Town and became a cardiologist, and he seems to have excelled in his career. He practiced medicine in the suburbs of that city and the employee of the South African Defense Forces. He eventually rose to the rank of Brigadier and became a trusted part of the military medical establishment. So have you ever heard of Rhodesia, Billy Wayne? Maybe.

Is it a place or is it a herb? It's a place. It was a place. Rhodesia was essentially a call. It's like modern days in Bobway. But back when white people were in charge of it, it was called Rhodesia. Now, in the 1960s and 70s,

the European powers started to increasingly pull out of their African colonies. And this posed a problem for the parts of Africa that had sizable white populations who had grown up basically controlling large chunks of land and ruling over large numbers of black people. Rhodesia was named after the arch-colonialist Cecil Rhodes, who will certainly have an episode of his own one of these days. And so for years, there was this big conflict over Rhodesia.

And basically, a lot of our modern military tactics that the U.S. military uses in Afghanistan and Iraq, like counterinsurgency tactics, were invented by the white Rhodesian military to suppress the black population. So we're just, you know, taking from the good and keep doing the good. Yeah, exactly.

Have you ever heard of Soldier of Fortune magazine? I have. I used to read it when I was little. I didn't know what it was. Well, during the 70s, they would put in ads for the Rhodesian military, because Rhodesia would solicit white people from America and Europe to come and fight and become like colonial warriors, suppressing like the black population. It's super fucked up.

The story of Rhodesia is incredibly fucked up. I know where we grew up, people were like, y'all, you can go over. You can go over there and get to shoot people. You can kill them, and they pay you. Not racist there. It's fine. I saw it in an ad.

It was in Soldier of Fortune magazine. Well, in the back of a magazine, you can go over and kill people, and it's okay. All the best militaries advertise in the back of a magazine. Jesus. So the Rhodesian struggle for, I don't know, colonial domination ended in the early 1970s in defeat and with the establishment of the nation of Zimbabwe.

We ran out of racist Americans. We did, we ran out of racists. Hell yeah, I'll win, I guess. You have your country back. So that left just one power in Africa fighting for white supremacy. Obviously, South Africa. Now, the badly outnumbered white population of South Africa managed to maintain power via a brutal police state

and oppressive laws that made Jim Crow look still pretty bad, but less bad. That's not the best way to frame it. It was even worse than Jim Crow is what I'm saying about the apartheid state in South Africa. You don't want to have that argument either way. We're like, hey, we're not bad. You take the most racist people in America

and you make them more racist, and that was the government of South Africa in the mid-1970s. Or maybe not more racist, but with more power to be racist is probably a better way to frame it, because I suspect a lot of racists in America in this period and South African government did, but they just weren't allowed to. They didn't have the internet to motivate them.

They're like, oh, they're getting it done down there. We could be more racist? I know we wasn't doing enough. So in the mid-1970s, South Africa got involved in a civil war in Angola fighting on the side of anti-communist rebels. And this was a very complicated conflict, but the gist of the story is that South Africa believed

that this supremacy was best served by supporting the United States and its allies in the Cold War, so they backed the anti-communist side in the civil war in Angola. Yeah, you can make of that what you will. So Cuba came out on the side of the pro-communist Angolan government, and in short order, South African soldiers

found themselves wildly outnumbered and outmaneuvered by the Cuban army and their forces in the Angolan army. They were forced to withdraw from the country, but before that happened, they took control of Cuban military vehicles. Inside them, they found a variety of gas antidotes and gas masks.

This convinced the South African defense forces that Cuban soldiers were preparing to use chemical weapons against them. Now, it's possible that this never happened. Everything I'm telling you now is based on war crimes trials conducted in the mid-1990s, but the South African military establishment claims that fears of Cuban chemical weapons

is what drove them to start developing their own chemical weapons program. Now, one thing I should note in terms of like determining whether or not this is true and whether or not they thought there was a real military threat that inspired them to make chemical weapons is that right around the same time

their war with Angola went to shit, the powers that be in South Africa also felt control of the domestic situation in their country slipping through their hands. See, at this point in South Africa, white South Africans basically held all political power in the country despite making up only a small percentage

under Prime Minister B.J. Worster throughout the mid-1970s, economic growth plummeted, urban crowd and grew worse, and it became increasingly clear to everyone that the black majority of the country was increasingly less willing to take this kind of shit. In 1976, after the last South African troops left Angola,

students in the Soweto township of Johannesburg protested against the mandatory teaching of Afrikaans in school. Now, Afrikaans is like a white, kind of like, I think it's a descendant of like, German and Dutch and stuff. Like, it's the language that the white people in South Africa speak.

And black people in South Africa were not happy at being forced to learn a foreign occupier language. Why not? As you might imagine. It's truly mystifying, Billy. Normally, people love being forced to learn the language that the people

who regularly shoot them speak. Why are you guys being rude about this? Just learn our language. Why don't you want to learn... Is it the shooting you? Is that why you don't want to learn our language? It's because this is your country and we came here.

You gotta let that go, dude. You gotta let that... So, the Soweto uprisings were put down by white police with live rounds. They killed a number of school children and it sparked an international incident. So, obviously,

the late 1970s was not a great time for racial awareness in the West. But things had progressed enough that black school children being mowed down by white cops did not play well. And since South Africa's political position was precarious at best,

they really needed the support of western nations. The head of their defense force, General Konstan Viljan, later testified that the diplomatic backlash convinced the government that such bloodshed had to be prevented. They had to develop alternative crowd control agents. So, this is what starts them

on the road to developing chemical weapons. They're like, boy, it looks bad when we just shoot people. We need an alternative crowd control. We need an alternative to shooting people. No, it can't be democracy. Alternative crowd control. We can't shoot them anymore.

So, gases seem like a good call because you can't see those so well on a camera. What if we just put invisible stuff that gets in their bodies and kills them that way? Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's basically the thinking. So, after Soweto,

the South African defense establishment becomes convinced that a total strategy is necessary in order to defend the country from the unrest that was increasingly sweeping the nation. I feel like it might be our fault to start with, but we're gonna have to do something awful about it. Now there's all this unrest.

We gotta do something about it. Let's try to do the worst thing imaginable about it. Yeah, that's basically where this goes. So, in 1981, the South African government orders Brigadier, Walter Basson, a young military cardiologist

to travel abroad and learn about the chemical and biological weapons programs of the western world. Why a cardiologist? Yeah, I guess because he was just the best evil doctor they had. Like, they looked at all the doctors in the military and were like,

you're the evilest? That's my guess. This motherfucker is hollow inside. There is nothing behind this man's eyes. He's good at stuff, but I don't like it. Yeah.

So, his name is, I think, W-O-T-E-R. So, I'm not Wooter. It seems more like Walter, which is why I think I've called him that a couple of times. We'll call him Wooter. Wooter was 30 years old

at this point, and he took to his task with all the enthusiasm you'd expect of a young Wunderkind given the chance to embark on an unprecedented project. Project Coast, as it was named, grew into one of the most ambitious and sinister weapons projects in human history. Its goals, if not its ends, may have even eclipsed

the Manhattan Project in a horrifying scale. So, we don't fully know where Basson traveled in order to learn the tools of his new deadly trade. The evidence we have shows he visited a dizzying variety of different destinations. A congress on chemical and biological weapons in San Antonio in May of 1981.

A visit to Taiwan to see their chemical weapons factories that same year. He made trips to Denmark, Switzerland, and he spent more than four weeks in the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. We know he spent time working with British intelligence, and it's impossible for us to say exactly

how much help or what precise sort of help these different nations provided, but it's fair to say that both sides of the chemical weapons industry, Soviet and Western, contributed knowledge to Woder's, like, later development. So that's cool, right?

Everybody came together. Yeah, it's like how, I don't know if you've ever been to a gun show, like a fairground. Oh, all the time. I know you have. This is more for the people, but what always makes me laugh is like, it's people that hate each other.

It's like base. A gun show is like base, where they go get their weapons and then they go fight each other outside. Yeah, it's pretty fun, actually. It is great, yeah. It's the same thing going to gun rages and seeing the different political patches

on people's bags and stuff and being like, oh, you all, a couple of bad years, and you'll be using those on each other. Yeah, but you can't do it here yet. Not yet, not yet. I'm not sure when you put those targets up. So throughout the late 1980s

and early 1990s, Bassen developed a shocking array of conventional chemical and biological weapons for South Africa. He designed rifle grenades, mortar bombs, and artillery shells with biological weapons capacity. Now, this was all pretty conventional within the dark standards of the arms industry

at the time, but Bassen quickly went beyond preparing South Africa's conventional forces for a shooting war that just involved chemical weapons. See, around the same time Project Coast started, the South African Special Forces launched Operation Barnacle. This was an action spearheaded by

white former Rhodesian security operators to assassinate enemies of the apartheid government. Wuder Bassen wound up at the heart of this enterprise, too. His goal in it was to clamp down on the Southwest African People's Organization in Namibia, a group the South African government considered terrorists,

but most people would probably call freedom fighters. Here's how the Guardian described what Wuder Bassen helped his government do to the SWAPO is the acronym, the Southwest African People's Organization. I think SWAPO is fun. Quote,

particular favorites of his were muscle relaxants, which, when given to victims in large doses, caused their lungs to collapse and induced suffocation. The charge sheet alleges that around 1980, Bassen provided the toxins to kill 200 Namibian SWAPO guerrillas fighting for independence from South Africa. An aircraft was purchased for the purpose

of disposing bodies in the sea. Aw. Yeah, it's fun stuff. Like, he's just like, oh, you think, like, he watches people be like, okay, man, that's terrible. He's like, just wait. He gets, he's getting good. They're like, no, no, no, we're good.

And he's like, no, no, I just crack my knuckles. We're just now. Then we get an airplane and we dump their bodies in the ocean. Right? You guys got to throw it up. Okay. Billy, you know who won't poison freedom fighters to death

and dump their bodies in the ocean? Doritos. Probably, well, actually, they're owned by, I think, Frito-Lay, and I suspect Frito-Lay absolutely would do that. Yeah. Or Conagra Foods. Yeah, you're right. I'm with you on that. Yeah. But you know who won't

are the products and services that support this show? Yes. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right.

I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season, we'll take you inside an undercover investigation.

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What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic

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It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC.

What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one

that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth,

his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days

that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! So, Billy, when we left off, we talked

about how Basson provided toxins that shut down the lungs of Swapo-Gorellis and then they would throw them into the sea from helicopters. And I'm going to continue quoting from that Guardian article. It's just sort of what things Wotubasson

got involved with as part of this operation to clamp down on an independence movement. Basson supplied quantities of Tuberene and Scolene, muscle relaxants, which in overdose would cause suffocation. So that's great. God. Yeah, so what you get from that, this is obviously, there were trials about this later,

which we'll talk about, but this is a guy who, number one, he's charged with helping South African Special Forces clamp down on this black liberation movement, basically. And it's not enough for him to just help them kill people. He's a scientist.

He's always experimenting. So he's testing out new drugs on these people to see what works well. And there's like a kind of a perverse like that, I guess I can understand is sort of like a sociopathic, like he's a scientist, he's going to experiment with shit. The writing along

to watch the corpses get thrown into the sea, that is like, okay, this is beyond just like a soulless monster. Like this guy gets some sort of enjoyment. There is a pleasure out of, yeah. Well, to me, what made it seem pleasurable is

the lungs collapsing. Yeah. He's really focused on that. That is a thing where it's like, oh, you're going to live and know you're going to know you're dying. It's like you're drowning in the, like

you're just drowning outside the water, which is awful. And it's like, there's also clearly like you think about it from a tactical standpoint, and the only reason to use chemical weapons for this is to freak people out

is like the fear, is to like scare them away from rebelling, because like you could, if you just are trying to kill insurgents, you can shoot them. Yeah. Like you can execute people. That works very well, and it's less horrible.

So, like, there's an element of sadism present in like the whole South African military establishment, where it's like where these black people are not happy being ruled by us, and we have to make, we have to scare the shit out of them while we kill them.

Yeah. It's fun stuff. Fun story. Thanks for sitting here and talking with me about it today. It's just good to be here. It's always nice talking about it. Always a pleasure. But it is important that we talk about stuff like this, because it's like Jesus. Yeah.

Stop doing that to each other. Yeah. And where this story goes is pretty wild. So, under Bassen's direction, South African operators use poison to kill several hundred people all over the world. Not all of his victims were insurgents

in Africa. Some of them were murdered in the UK, and MI5 later investigated at least six people who died of suspicious strokes and heart attacks, possibly as a result of project barnacle. So they're not just murdering like people who have taken up arms against them. They're killing like activists around the world.

People who are like a danger to the apartheid regime. So that's cool. Well, they've learned from other regimes that turn into empires. Yeah. They all do it. Yeah, we all do it.

Now, Bassen traveled over the world throughout the late 1980s and early 90s, seemingly irrespective of the sanctions leveled against his nation. He attended conferences and spoke to chemical weapons experts in the US, Israel and all across Western Europe, often while his agents were using his weapons to kill

people in those countries. So that's really neat. Nobody stopped this guy from traveling around to learn how to make better chemical weapons, even though like multiple nations that he traveled to had sanctions against South Africa for its racism. Well, they wanted to learn from the best.

You think it might have been a two-way street. Yeah. Yeah. I think it was like oh, without a doubt, they're like, alright. We'll tell you some shit, but you've been practicing a lot and we want to learn some things from you. How'd you do that? Yeah. You get that

feeling. Yeah. And again, like there's no way for there to be any evidence of that for me. Like, I can't say that happened, but like fuck you, look into this guy's story. And I am certain there were some sketchy motherfuckers and like the CIA and the Mossad and MI5 probably even who are like, yeah, we'll let

him into the country. We're going to hear what he's got to say. Yeah. Is he like vegan? What's he like? Yeah. What does he want for lunch? Yeah. Yeah. No, I assume that's how all that works. Where at some point everything gets so confusing,

you're just like, yeah, I mean, we're just learning how to do stuff. Yeah. I don't know who's friend and who's not. Yeah. There's a great musician named Tom Lehrer who was like the weird Al Yankovic of like the 50s and 60s. I think he's a math professor at Harvard now, but

he was like an early musical funnyman and he wrote a song about Werner von Braun who designed V2 rockets for the Nazis and then was instrumental in the US space program. And there's a line in it that I think really sums up all of these people very well.

When the rockets go up, who knows where they come down. That's not my department says Werner von Braun. It's just like, I think a lot of these people are like that is like, yeah, he's killing people in our country too, but like that's not my problem. My problem is developing better chemical weapons.

Yeah. And he's good at it. So he's really good at this shit. Yeah. So under Bassen's direction, the apartheid government of South Africa developed a dizzying array of biological weapons. Ebola, E. coli, necrotizing fasciitis, anthrax

and botulinum. That last one deserves a bit of special discussion. See, botulinum, which is like if you have like a can that starts puffing up, like you got to get rid of that thing very carefully because it has botulin in it. And botulinum is like one of the deadliest

things by weight in this planet. It's what we use in Botox treatments in very diluted measures. But in slightly less diluted form, it can kill people by the thousands. Bassen's team is alleged to have synthesized roughly five grams of botulinum

which is enough to murder five million people. Cool. So that's cool. You can see like the scale of deadliness, though. You develop this like VX nerve gas which a leader can kill a million people and Bassen develops this botulinum toxin that like

five grams can kill five million people. Yeah. Cool how science works like that. Well, and it's competitive. Yeah. Yeah, everyone's trying to beat each other. It's like oh, they got a million people with a leader. We can kill more people with less than that.

And meaner. And it's the same thing like with your phones where it's like we were all marveled at how quickly phones got smaller and faster but like the same thing happens with murder poison. Yeah. So

Bassen helped to direct the assassin. But not cancer cures. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. It is wild that we're way slower on that shit. So Bassen helped to direct assassination attempts against a number of African national congress activists in London

which is like a group advocating for like more racial justice and reform of the apartheid system in South Africa. He was behind the assault of at least two members of the ANC in London. He developed a special poison that was launched via a syringe described as a screwdriver. The only reason that the plot

to kill these guys failed is that the scientist who tried to do the deed fucked up and almost stabbed himself instead. Then he panicked and threw the screwdriver into the Tims. So that one didn't work. Yeah. Bassen was involved in at least one attempt on the life of Nelson Mandela while he was a prisoner.

Wutu developed a way to slip thallium, a toxic heavy metal that basically melts your brain in the Mandela's medication. These attempts failed but for his gallantry Wutu Bassen was awarded the order of the Southern Cross which even sounds like a racist man. That was gonna say

that sounds like the most racist award of all time. It's the Southern Cross. You're like, uh, go. I don't like it. Yeah, it's like, we gotta come up with an award for racists. But we wanna make it sound even more racist than the

Iron Cross. Anybody got suggestions? I got one. What if we just call it Southern? What if we call it the Southern Iron Cross of Alabama? Now, Nelson Mandela was released in 1990.

In 1992, the ANC was unbanned in the face of massive unrest. Suddenly the cause of black people having basic rights was legally legitimate in South Africa. Got hip all the sudden. Yeah, yeah. So basically the ANC had been like a terrorist group

prior to this and like ANC members had definitely done some terrorism in South Africa although it's terrorism in a pretty fundamentally electrifiable cause, I would argue. But yeah, and after 1992 the ANC is like a legal political party and the cause of black people having

basic rights was like legally legitimate to fight for in South Africa. Now, as you might imagine, Wuder Basin was not happy with this. And he responded by spearheading a plan to distribute poisoned beer to black people at bus stops. So that's good. Stop, stop them from

voting if you poison their beer. What the fuck? This is shit. Yeah, now as I relate these stories, I don't want to discount the role of the South African government or military establishment in any of this just because we're focusing on Wuder.

His work enjoyed a broad base of support among the powers that be in his unspeakably shitty government. His work was directed and approved at high levels and supported by a variety of less technically sophisticated methods of repression. Some as simple as just guys with truncheons beating protesters. But Wuder Basin

was a unique man within the South African military and medical establishments. He did eventually go to trial for his many, many crimes. And because of that trial we have some knowledge of the extent of those crimes. Johann Theron, one of the operators who worked for Basin admitted personally to the murder of several

hundred Swapo prisoners, along with South African defense soldiers, identified as security risks. So they even killed soldiers in their own military. Multiple different government agencies managed Basin's chemical weapons project over the decade or so that he was active. In the late 1980s, as resistance to the apartheid

regime picked up, Basin's work increasingly focused on poisoning members of the African National Congress, the South African Communist Party, and the South African Council for Churches. Anyone who voiced displeasure with apartheid was subject to poisoning. The testing process for these poisons was as horrific as you'd

imagine. The Rude Platt Research Laboratory where most of this work was done, conducted numerous experiments on dogs and horses. In one study they poisoned baboons to death over the course of several days. So that's cool. Yeah. But of course, the killing of individuals could only go so far, and Wuder Basin

knew that. By the late 1980s the situation was dire enough for the government that they knew some sort of mass solution to the problem of black people wanting rights was necessary. Now it was accepted that there were too many black people in South Africa to kill. This was not a moral question. Many people in the government

likely would have supported mass murder, but they simply did not have the technical capacity to do so. Logistically it'll be a nightmare you guys. We just can't. We just, we don't have enough bullets. We just can't make it work. So let's let them live.

Good lord. That's a conversation they had in a room like we're sitting at. We have to let most of them live. But, Billy, they didn't have to let most of them continue to have babies. And this is where Wuder Basin

came in. Oh, cool, cool. Yeah. So under Basin the South African military establishment embarked on a different scheme. An anti-fertility vaccine. Oh, god. Yeah. Yay. I mean, can't you just

see some of the dingbats in the United States being like, oh, you want abortions? Is that what you want? We'll give you an abortion. We'll give you one for life. And you're like, that's just what? No. Yeah. Yeah. So fully 18% of the projects

Basin masterminded during his time in the military were focused on what were referred to as fertility and fertility control studies. Scientists under Basin later testified that they understood they were developing a vaccine which would be administered to black women without their knowledge or consent in order to render them

infertile. Damn it. Yes. Now, the initial goal of Basin and his fellow scientists was to develop a vaccine that would only work on black women. This obviously proved to be impossible because black women are genetically the same as any other kind of women and it just doesn't, things don't work

that way. It's impossible to target people by skin color in that way. So it's interesting to me, Billy, that like these incredibly racist scientists start out by wanting to make a vaccine that will render black women infertile and they realize that because black women are the same as every other kind of woman, they

can't do it. And this doesn't lead them to like realize like, oh, maybe this racism is based on nothing. Oh, science says we're stupid. Science says what we're doing is idiotic, but no, they never at any point. That can't be. That science is wrong about that.

We're smart. Yeah. So they were rational enough to accept that their plan of a vaccine to render black women infertile would not do anything, but they refused to give up on their plan of stopping black people from having sex, well, at least from having babies. And so things evolved. So

one of like the scientists who worked under Bass and later testified, as I've alluded to a few times, and one of them, a dude named Van Rinsburg, claimed the effort started back in 1985. And he said he was told that the project initially existed at the request of Jonas Savimbi, the Angolan anti-communist

rebel leader and Paul Manafort client who was allied with South Africa. There we go. The story goes that Savimbi was concerned that his female fighters would get pregnant and wanted an anti-fertility vaccine. This is widely believed to be complete horseshit designed to provide plausible deniability to the scientists.

So basically, scientists were like, it seems maybe like fucked up that we're trying to render all black people infertile. And if there's ever a war crimes trial, we're getting trouble. And so their leadership was like, no, it's not to it's for this guy's female soldiers. He just doesn't want them getting pregnant in battle.

He needs them to, because when they get pregnant they can't do murder as good. Exactly. That's a better excuse. Yeah. And it's like most of the scientists that we're like talked to were like, yeah, we knew that was horseshit. Like it was, you give people a little bit of plausible deniability and

that's all it was. So the non-proliferation organization has a good write-up of the ensuing court case that includes an interview with one of Basson's men and I'm going to quote from it now. Of course, the scientists did not believe the cover story. Van Rinsberg testified that he could not think that an intelligent man could think we would spend

a couple million on a project like this to control pregnancy in a few of Savimbi's female soldiers. Nonetheless, the project got underway and became central to work at the research laboratories. After the fall of the apartheid government, a truth and reconciliation commission was convened to investigate the unspeakable crimes the white government had committed against

its black citizens. And this is where, like all of our interviews from this come from. One of Basson's employees, a guy named Goosen, gave fascinating detail into the plan. The interviewer was a fellow named Jerome Chaskleton. So Chaskleton said it was decided that a front company would be formed and he was asked,

can you tell us what brief that you were given for what this front company was? And Goosen said, our final brief or the other brief was a very important one, was to develop a project to curtail the birth rate of the black population in the country. So Goosen was asked to give more detail on this and he said, the person who instructed us

or asked us to do this was Dr. Basson. There was a lot of talk on the ethics of this and Basson spent some time quoting to us the census figures of 1982 or 81 or whenever the census was. I can't remember exactly that the census office stopped counting the black people when they reached 45 million and the government decided that it was not feasible

to make it known to the public that there were 45 million blacks. It was just too many and this was mainly one of our big threats and I think the figure of 28 million was made known. Now, if those were true facts, I wouldn't know. Up till today, I don't know, but that was presented to us by Dr. Basson. So basically, Basson's

scientists are like, we feel a little bit questionable about this and one of the things they're told is that you're working to sterilize these gorillas and they're also told that like there's twice as many black people in the country as the government's willing to admit on the official census forms. So like if we don't solve

this problem of black people breeding soon we're going to be outnumbered and overwhelmed or like completely overwhelmed. So like this is like the scientists being told this are both simultaneously being told you're not trying to sterilize all the black people and also given evidence that like

we have to sterilize all the black people right away or we're fucked. So it's yeah, wild. I like the arbitrary numbers to like 45 stop counting. That's too high. Stop it. Stop. Yeah. Don't count anymore. We can't tell anybody. Tell him it's 28.

28 is fine. Yeah. And Goosen later testified based on conversations he had with different South African generals that he thought the anti-fertility project was considered by the government to be the most important project for the country. So like

as a general rule like the anti-fertility project when you like read stories about Bassen and his work is portrayed as like one horrible project among others and generally like less awful than the nerve gases and assassination drugs he made and I don't think that's fair

because the reality once you like dig into the documents is that Bassen and his colleagues like what they were trying to do with these drugs was attempted genocide. Like their goal here was to wipe out the black population of South Africa. They just wanted to do it more peacefully than

with gunfire. It's like it's pretty staggering. And do it silently. Yeah. Silently and like in a way that people don't realize it's happening because you're secretly dosing people with this anti-fertility drug. Like that's the plan that's being made here.

Goosen later testified by the government. By the government. Yeah. To sterilize 45 million people or so. Yeah. One thing I can remember which we spoke about was the effectivity then of the product which needed to be developed

whether it is 100% permanent sterilization or whether it's temporary or whether it's 80% effective. You know how these things work. In fact we discussed involving with statitions from the university and we discussed getting them secret clearance that they can work on the project for us to work out models. What will be the influence on population

rate if the project was 50% effective for one year 60 70 whatever. So we realized that you cannot really you might not achieve 100% effective sterilization and it was not thought to be necessary. So they're saying like maybe we only stop 70% of them from breeding is what he's

saying. Like they it's but like those are the numbers they're looking at. Like this is a real effort to stop two thirds or more as many people as possible from breeding as many black people as possible from breeding. And I think that that rises to the level of an attempted

genocide. Yeah. Like 70 80% sterilization like you know the the holocaust wiped out like roughly half of the world's Jewish population. So you're talking about the goal was something that would have led to an even sharper decline in the population of South African black people.

Like that was the end goal of this. It was a much slower project but like that's what they're shooting for 70 80%. It's pretty wild. Yeah it's like they're they're they had a discussion with that. Well I mean the Nazis were just like too loud and efficient

about it. Yeah exactly. So you can't kill them as fast as they did. That'll get you in trouble. Yeah people get like real malvy when you do it like that. So you got to just do it. We'll get invaded. But if we can stop 80% of them from having babies well then

yeah, it's pretty wild. Yeah. So thankfully the anti fertility vaccine was never distributed in mass and we have very little data on how it was tested but we do know that the program was wound down in the early 1990s when President F. W. DeClerk was elected and the death

null of apartheid was obvious enough for even people like Basson to hear. The new president ordered project coast to be gradually killed off but he was not willing to give up on the dream of pacifying South Africa's black masses for domination by the white minority. Instead of sterilization or mass poisoning though

President DeClerk started funding a kinder and gentler method of social control. He wanted Basson to test the use of quailudes and MDMA to pacify the restless population. So that's nice. Okay. It is better. I mean

Yeah. Yeah, everyone's going to get along be a little looser. If it was for everyone in the country I would say that's a great plan. The racism is what ruins it. Oh, I see. Okay, I missed that part.

No, they were just giving them to black people to stop them from wanting their rights. No, no, you thought they were just giving ludes to everybody. Yeah, unfortunately, no. Yeah, if it was just like the army helicoptering quailudes and MDMA to everybody, like I'm fine with that

project. That's a good use of the military. But no, this was racist. Very racist. There's always a catch. Yeah. So a scientist named Hennie Jordan at a company that act as a front for project coast is generally credited as the

person who came up with the formula for what may have been the very best MDMA ever synthesized. Most sources suggest that it was over 95% purity, which is pretty exceptional. Now, I can't say for certain whether or not I or you ever took this particular strain of ecstasy.

But like, it's one of those things I started going through like my memories of the best ecstasy experiences I had in the early 2000s and like wondering like, yeah, that was a really good batch. Was that the genocide ecstasy? Because this stuff was

initially cooked up as a crowd control drug. They wanted to dose. This got really sad, really fast. Yeah, it's real bad. This was initially cooked up. They wanted to basically dose millions of black people with MDMA to like stop them from revolting

and stuff. But how were what was their delivery device? Well, I don't think they ever got that far because like they start, they cook up a huge amount of MDMA, but I don't think they ever really figure out like how to distribute it to people. And then the government shuts down the project

before they can dose anyone with it. So there's this big old tank of MDMA. Yeah, yeah. So they have millions of doses of MDMA and no longer a government who's willing to like let them use it for anything. And they kind of

asin and his colleagues all kind of decide that they should use it to fund their retirements. It's not the worst thing they've ever done. Yeah, it's definitely not like I prefer them selling ecstasy to people to have for fun

than murdering people. Yeah. And genocide. Doing a quiet genocide is not as... Yeah. Yeah. So the data we have suggests that like at some point the priority, like

before the program got shut down entirely, but when they knew that Project Coast was going to get shut down completely, Bassin and his colleagues stopped producing drugs for like crowd control purposes and started producing drugs to sell on the black market. And what we know is that

the bulk of the millions of doses of MDMA that Bassin's labs cooked up wound up sold in Europe, India and the United States. Wow. So they just are like, we only got a year or two left before the government shuts this lab down completely. Let's manufacture and sell as much ecstasy as we possibly can

so that we can retire. Which is cool. What were they supposed to be doing in that lab? I don't... I think it was, you know, it's a government project. So I think that like it became clear that they weren't going to do anything with the research before the project actually got shut down.

So no one was watching. They were just like, we're just here for like seven more months. Yeah. How much E can we make? Yeah. Usually when government workers are like, all right, vacation starts now, we can finally get to work

and make some money here. We can get paid now. We didn't succeed in genocide, but we can sell a lot of ecstasy. But we can get people pretty fucked up. Yeah. So yeah, obviously like

this is not the kind of thing you would ever have expected to have much detail about and I do wish we had more, but like we have a lot of information about like all the different things this project was trying to do, which is weird, right? It's a special, like a secret special forces plan for genocide.

You wouldn't expect the South African government to have kept any files on this shit. And in fact, they didn't. So are you wondering how all this information got out? Yeah. It's because Dr. Basin was a dumb shit. Yeah.

So the government, when the apartheid regime fell, the government ordered all of the drugs cooked up as a result of these schemes and all the evidence of what they'd done in Project Coast destroyed, but Dr. Basin didn't do this. So obviously they continued like manufacturing narcotics

for profit, but he also kept all of his files on this project, probably as like an insurance scheme, because he was afraid that the government was going to betray him and he wanted to have evidence that other people had been involved. I don't trust you guys because of that time

you made me try to kill all the black people. You guys are genociders. I don't like that. I feel like he killed me pretty easy. So Basin keeps all of the private files for this genocide scheme in his house. And

while he's keeping this shit in his house, he's personally like hand-to-hand selling millions of doses of ecstasy to drug dealers. Jesus, he's doing all that. He's doing a lot of the sales. He's a hands-on fella.

So one of the guys buying drugs from Basin in this period is Grant Wintzel, who's a commodities broker from Johannesburg who also sold ecstasy on the side and he's one of the guys that Basin is selling to. And in 1997, Wintzel is busted by the cops

and he agrees to roll over on his source and they set him up with a wire and run him through a couple of deals to test his connections. And then they realize, as they're studying this guy, they realize that one of his connections is a kind of inexplicably wealthy cardiologist

who lives in the city and who seems to be the source of his drugs. And, of course, it turns out that this cardiologist is Wouter Basin. Is he still practicing cardiology, too? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You gotta have a cover, man.

I guess so. Fascinating. Maybe he likes it. Yeah, that is what he got into, originally. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Go back to Basics. It's one of those things. Your career falls apart. For most of us, it's because

you're changed or something like that rather than a genocide plan failing, but you go back to Basics, you know, and you also start selling E. I feel like that's identifiable. Yeah, that's pretty smart, actually.

Yeah, yeah. Vice has a fun article on the bust that caught Basin and I'm going to quote from that now. A white Nissan Sentra pulls up to Wintzel's car. Its occupant gets out and pops the trunk, pulling out a trash bag. Three other officers, these are South African police officers, recognize him immediately.

Dr. Wouter Basin, the man the media would later dub Dr. Death for his alleged crimes in apartheid era South Africa. Basin gives the bag to Wintzel, who hands him an envelope containing 60,000, about 55,000 US dollars. Basin's cut of the deal had gone down five days earlier

when Wintzel had been arrested. So, at this point, Ellers makes his move, Basin tries to flee by ducking cops through the pond, a tactic that ends up slowing him down enough for the cops to catch up and make an arrest. The trash bag contained red and black capsules filled with MDMA. MDMA that research chemist Tim McKibben

would testify at Basin's trial was created by a unique synthesis and was more than 95% pure. So, he's not a good drug dealer. He just has a sack of this shit in his trunk that he delivers by hand to a source. Yeah. In a sack.

In a sack. In a trash bag. Yeah. Cause he's like, here's that shit y'all going crazy about. Yeah. It's like Walter Widdish. Yeah, it is, but like, dumber. Like, White at least gets his, like, tries to remove himself

from the hand-to-hand dealing pretty quick. Yeah, he at least read, yeah, he read some books about the business of drugs. Yeah. Homeboy was just like, no, here it is. Look, give me that money. Yeah, why would I care? Yeah. So, he gets arrested.

He gets arrested in this bus. And of course, the cops search his home, which is what the cops are going to do when they catch you trying to sell a full trash bag of ecstasy. And the police find more drugs in his house. But they also find his insurance policy against the old government.

The boxes of folders containing the details of his plan to commit genocide and all of his murders. I knew that would come in handy. Didn't think it was for this. So, Billy, I guess we both had friends arrested for, like, simple marijuana possession.

Some of whom have done time. You would probably expect that when Wouter Basin gets caught with a trash bag of ecstasy and files in his house, like, going into detail about his complicity in hundreds of poison murders and an attempt at genocide,

you would guess that would come with sizable jail time, right? Ah, no. Yeah, yeah, you've done enough of these shows. So, in 1998-99, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Committee

held a public hearing into the chemical and biological warfare program that Basin had spearheaded. This was the first trial of its kind in history, and it brought out all the information we've discussed in this episode. It was heavily based on the files they'd taken from Basin's house.

But it failed to actually punish him for any of his crimes. His official trial started in October of 1999, where he was charged with 67 counts ranging from drug possession and embezzlement to murdering 229 people. Basin called as the only witness in his defense himself.

He claimed he had learned the secrets of chemical warfare from Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq, which was, at that point, backed up by the US defense establishment, back in like the 80s when he was working there. He admitted basically everything we'd talked about today, saved the attempt to genocide and was found not guilty on the ground

that nothing he'd done had been illegal at the time. So that's cool. I mean, he's not, yeah. He's not wrong, but also like, fuck that? Yeah.

So, now a free man, Basin became a popular speaker on the international circuit. He was paid to deliver such headline events as Dr. Wouter Basin, a motivational talk from groups like the Kelvin Grove Club, an organization in South Africa that bans

Jewish membership. He's a hero to some people. Oh, I bet he is, yes. There have been numerous hearings in the years since as the some members of the government in South Africa have attempted to punish Wouter Basin for his numerous crimes.

And he was eventually found guilty of professional misconduct. But none of these trials have resulted in long-term charges. In March of 2019, a high court in South Africa found that even those charges were had been made by a biased court

and the results were set aside. Dr. Wouter Basin remains a free and unpunished man to this day. Okay. That's cool. Yeah, it's super cool that he's just out there because you know he's just chilling. You know he's not doing anything bad.

Nope. Here's my question as someone that's read history and keeps up with how laws and politics and all that works. What files are they not talking about that he probably had

that keeps getting him out of stuff? Like they were willing to admit the attempted genocide on South Africa's black population. What did they keep under wraps? Yes. You were saying that

there's stuff in there that they're not because we did try to kill all the black people. Yes. We tried to stop them all from breeding because we couldn't kill them all. This guy was trying to help us do that, but

just nothing else. Nothing else. There's nothing that's unspeakably and almost unimaginably evil waiting buried in a bunker somewhere in South Africa that Wotur Bassen invented. Trust us.

Ask him anything else. It is. You kind of do think like I'm not obviously familiar with the intricacies of South African law. So maybe it is just an understandable technicality and a necessary part of the reconciliation effort that he wasn't margable.

That's not what my heart says. This guy has other insurance policies waiting and if he does time, something unspeakable will be revealed. He's smarter than us. He's very smart. Not a dumb man.

Damn it. If you did great ecstasy, unbelievably good ecstasy in the late 90s, early 2000s, maybe. He made enough that it circulated for a while after he got busted. I mean, he is

like a metaphor for every drug dealer. Do you know what I mean? They're like, yeah, I mean, we know. We know what he does, but have you tried his shit? It's crazy.

I know. I know. And don't bring your sister around it, but because he does that thing. But he's the only guy in three counties that can, yeah. Yeah. It is one of those things on a personal scale. You'll accept the fact that

your drug dealer is creepy and says some weird things every now and then. You wouldn't want to be alone with him or let other friends be alone with him. You travel in a group to pick up your shit from his place. Do not meet him there. Do not meet him.

No. But on a larger scale, you probably do accept genocide. I mean, none of the people buying that ecstasy knew it was genocide ecstasy. No. I think probably there's some traffickers or distributors that had a clue.

Yeah. Someone being like, where's this shit coming from? I don't know. South Africa. Oh, God. That's probably not a good story. Yeah. It's kind of like every time I've done cocaine, it's been like, I wonder if someone was

on heroin. Yes. And not even like maybe where you think. It's like, I talk about that with heroin, listen, it's awful, but it's also responsible for most of the most amazing music we've ever had

and people are like, no, I'm not saying that the singer of your favorite song but someone that was working on that album, yes, was on heroin. Someone. It helps with music. It's not good,

but it does help. So if you're a musician, Billy's official advice is to pick up some heroin. Sophie, are we sponsored by heroin? No, not just a musician, an incredibly talented musician that has not broken through yet,

but don't get addicted. No, and no. Should we edit that last part? I'll do it on live shows sometimes. But it's a live show. So they can't. You know what, though, we can say about heroin?

It was not manufactured by Wouter Bassen. That we know about? I don't know. That we know about. I mean, I guess it's easier. I think Bassen, you don't need a doctor to make your heroin, right?

No, you just need that. I think people cook it in their living rooms pretty regularly. From what I've seen on that GEO channel, that's where it comes from. Yeah. So yeah, he's 69 years old. He's probably...

It's Billy. I just think that's... I like to imagine that's how he's just living. Just a 69-year-old. Just raven day and night. I think he has like a pet gerbil and also does that dance all day.

But definitely has a pet gerbil. I think he goes to Abiza a couple of times a year. With his pet gerbil. I don't know why I pick it as a gerbil. You feel good? That's because of me. If you've danced with a racist South African cardiologist at Abiza,

it was Wouter Bassen. I mean, I wonder if he ever did ecstasy. I don't like... I think he was delivering it and the bag is hilarious to me. Robert, should I show what he looks like?

Oh, yeah. Because he looks like the lobotomy doctor, actually. This is why I said I think he has a pet gerbil based on his face. Oh. Yeah, you kind of see it, right? Yeah.

He's got a pet gerbil. He looked way cooler in my head. No, he's not that cool. He doesn't look that cool. You know what? He looks like he makes serum gas and shit. Yeah. He does, right?

Yeah, he does. He looks like he makes MDMA out of spite. I don't like his face. I'm just gonna put it out there. If that makes sense. He's not trying to get laid. Maybe by his gerbil. Yeah, that's true.

Yeah, I think... Yeah, and he looks like someone that... Young photo of him looking... Yeah, he rides in the plane to watch the bodies get dumped out. Yeah, he's that guy. Yeah, he does look... I don't... I don't enjoy his face.

I like that my mind goes to like a softer person, but that's not who he is. I know. Just trying to give him a bit of a doubt. I do like that I would love to see the footage of him getting busted though with that sack of pills. Yeah, that would be fun.

I want to see him like running from the cops because you know it was hilarious and he was really bad at it. Yeah, there's not in him. It's amazing for how smart this guy is that he would be like, well, but I'm gonna keep all of my genocide files unprotected in my home

along with piles of illegal drugs. This seems like a good idea. Well, he does seem very unfamiliar with drug culture. And with crime. Yeah, I think it's because he was doing all these horrible things for years and he was being supported by the government

so he never worried about it at all. Yeah, it's all very structured and there's like an email and memos involved. It's not like, hey, meet me in a park and we're gonna make a rocket. Yeah, there's a real learning curve to crime and while he was good

at committing the kind of crimes that aren't crimes because a government tells you to do them, he was bad at committing crimes that are crimes because the government tells you not to do it. Yeah, he is, yeah. Yeah, amazing. It is amazing.

So, you can go find him in South Africa, say hi, see if he's gotten the E hanging around. I bet he's friendly, you guys. I bet he's very nice if you have a certain complexion. Yeah. I'm gonna guess he's not nice to everybody. Yeah, he's suspicious of the people.

No, he's not. There was like a weird story that like one of the people who was part of the prosecution against him, he gave heart surgery to like before the trial and it was fine but it's like, it's pretty weird. That is so weird.

What people's... Like what their boundaries are are very strange. Yeah, the compartmental is... I guess it's kind of like like Ben Carson obviously hasn't committed crimes on this scale but he's not someone I like

or think is a particularly good person but if I needed brain surgery I'm sure he's like everything I hear is he's great at it, so what do you do? Well, Billy, this has been a fun story about a guy who tried to commit genocide and who did make a lot of people drown in their own lung fluid.

You know what? And then sold ecstasy and got off scot-free. I would rather, if we're doing silver linings, someone try and fail at genocide and end up making ecstasy for everyone

than someone trying to make fun drugs and end up committing genocide on accident. I guess you could say that Wooter Basson is actually the best case scenario for someone who attempts to commit genocide. Failing to commit...

That did not make Anderson happy. No, Anderson did not. No. It's a good dog. It's a good dog. But yeah, like... Well, but I mean, like, normally when people try to commit genocide they kill a lot of people

and he failed to kill a lot of... Well, he killed a lot of people. But then he made ecstasy, so I guess it's better than killing a lot of people and I don't really know where I'm going with this. It's been after life and it's like what your grandma thinks at St. Peter's up there. He's like, you made a lot of people

really fucked up and happy, but you did some killing. I mean, a lot of killing. He did a lot. I think attempted genocide outweighs the ecstasy, but... Yeah. Maybe there's not anything to learn

from the story of Wooter Basson. Other than that, apartheid was garbage and the South African nation under apartheid was one of the worst countries that ever existed. And I hope Wooter Basson gets hit by a car soon. Yeah. With a bag of pills in his hand.

With a bag of pills in his hand trying to sell a trash bag of drugs. And they just go everywhere and everyone gets them for free. Yeah. That's kind of the best-case scenario. Well, Billy. You got any pluggables to plug? Not. I mean...

Yeah, I'll be on tour coming up soon. We're booking all that right now. But just at Billy Wayne Davis is my Twitter. And I'm on the new season of Squidbillies. So check that out. And at Billy Wayne Davis is my Instagram. So...

Well, you can find me on Twitter, too. And I'm not going to tell you where, but you can. I'm there. Seek me out. And if you're meant to find me, you will. You can also find this podcast on Twitter at Instagram and at Bastard's Pod. Bastard's.com

And you can... Hopefully not attempt to commit genocide? That's all I ask of my audience. Don't do it, you guys. Don't even try. Not even once. Don't. You can attempt to make ecstasy. All right.

As much as you want, really. I'm fine with that. This is a very pro amateur chemistry podcast. Unless it's genocide chemistry. Yeah, don't. Don't be doing it. Try to help your parents' marriage. And don't be racist about who you give your ecstasy to. Give it to everybody, otherwise it's a problem.

Yeah. That is fun. I... Yeah. This one puzzled me. There's some science puzzles here in this one that I... Yeah, it's a thinker. It's a real thinker.

It's a motherfucker is what that is. Oh, you figured out that we're all the same, so you can't... Okay. I'm going to go. Yep. All right, everybody. Have fun with this one. Enjoy your holidays. If this comes out before the holidays. Bye.

Bye. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse are like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained

astronaut? That he went through training in a facility outside Moscow hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know. Because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my

crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? And the wrongly convicted

pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.