Dr. Wouter Basson, the Project Officer for the covert South African CBW program, Project Coast, reportedly asked scientists who later worked at Roodeplaat Research Laboratories (RRL), the principal BW research, testing, and production facility, to provide him with a mamba snake and mamba toxin. He then reportedly devised an abortive plan to use the toxin to murder a designated traitor inside the South African Defence Force (SADF) and make it look like an accidental snake bite. Snake venom may also have been used to kill other targeted enemies.

In 1983 Basson allegedly solicited the help of Dr. Daan Goosen, who at that time headed a research team at the University of Pretoria's H. A. Grové Animal Research Centre. Among other things, Goosen's team was working on a snake venom project for the South African Army, which sought to provide a medical kit for every platoon operating in the bush that would include a knife and a suction device to neutralize poisonous snake bites. Basson asked Goosen to supply him with some mamba snake venom as well as a mamba, which Basson told him he planned to use to eliminate an "enemy of the state." Goosen did some toxicity tests to determine effective dosages, then met with Basson at 6 AM and handed over the toxin and a live snake. Basson confided that he could get access to the projected target, inject him with venom, and then leave the dead snake behind to make it look like an accidental death. Basson also began asking Goosen and his colleagues, including Dr. Mike Odendaal and Dr. James Davies, to provide him with other endotoxins that were undetectable or—if that was not possible—untraceable to clandestine application. Although Goosen and his associates were concerned that the targets were legitimate and that the poisons remained untraceable, they willingly cooperated with Basson in the interests of national security. Goosen later became the managing director of RRL, and several other members of his team were also employed there as researchers.

On the basis of converging testimony by SADF operatives, it later became clear that the target of Basson's assassination plot was Roland Hunter, a Directorate of Special Tasks (DST) officer who was in charge of the administration of "Operation Mila," the SADF's covert support program for allied Resistência Nacional Moçambicana (RENAMO: Mozambican National Resistance) guerrillas. The Division of Military Intelligence's counterintelligence section had learned that Hunter was passing along highly sensitive information about secret flight schedules, cargos, and destinations to the African National Congress (ANC), with which he sympathized. Cor van Niekerk, head of the Eastern (RENAMO) section of the DST, consulted with Basson about how best to make Hunter disappear without a trace. Basson then suggested his mamba venom plan. However, it was eventually decided to let the Security Branch (SB) of the South African Police (SAP) arrest Hunter for treason, an action which took place on 8 December 1983. Although Basson later admitted that he kept a mamba snake in his office, he insisted that Dr. Philip Mijburgh, the managing director of the primary CW production facility, Delta G Scientific, had given it to him because he needed its venom for peptide research on animals, which was being conducted in an outbuilding at Special Forces headquarters.

However, it is possible that snake venom was actually used by Basson and his operatives to carry out other assassination operations. On the Project Officer's purported instructions, RRL R&D Director André Immelman secretly transferred mamba toxin and other highly toxic substances to military and police personnel through various channels. Some of these dangerous materials were provided to Dr. R. F. Botha (alternately known as "Koos," "Mr. R," and "Frans Brink") and thence to Vernon Lange (otherwise known as "Mr. T" and "Theo"), both of whom were operatives of the Civil Co-operation Bureau (CCB), a covert assassination unit operating under the aegis of the Special Forces (SF). Others were provided directly to Chris Smit, Gert Otto, and Manie van Staden, three SB officers from the SAP. According to the 1989 "sales list" (TRC document 52), as well as firsthand testimony at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings or Basson's criminal trial, Immelman passed such items on, either to the aforementioned persons in innocuous public places like restaurants, or to Basson himself in the latter's office at South African Medical Services (SAMS) headquarters in Centurion. Another reported recipient of RRL's poisons was Johnny Koortzen, an ex-SADF psychologist who in 1988 assumed control over Systems Research and Development (SRD), a company that bioengineer Jan Lourens had set up in part to manufacture special "applicators," i.e., arcane assassination devices. Some of these toxic materials and devices were subsequently used to assassinate designated "enemies of the state"—guerrillas in neighboring countries, troublesome prisoners, untrustworthy members of the security forces, or activists in the African National Congress (ANC) and other South African opposition groups. Among the items that appear on the "sales list" are two snakes and mamba toxin, which are listed as having been distributed by Immelman to Dr. Botha of the CCB.

Nor was this all. At Basson's trial Philip Morgan ("Mr. Q"), a former Rhodesian Selous Scout who later joined the front companies Elektroniks, Meganies, Landbou en Chemies (EMLC: Electronic, Mechanical, Agricultural and Chemical) and SRD, where he produced specialized weapons for the security forces, testified that he saw a live black mamba snake in Mijburgh's office. On two or three occasions, Mijburgh asked Morgan to drill holes in cans of Game orange soda, into which some substance was injected, and then to close those holes by means of soldering so that they were no longer visible. That substance was certainly some sort of poison, and may well have been mamba toxin. Moreover, National Intelligence Agency counterintelligence chief Mike Kennedy suspected that SADF member Garth Bailey had been murdered in January 1984 with snake venom, so alarm bells went off during his 1994 briefing of Basson, who at that time described the abortive plot to murder Hunter. Finally, Dr. Schalk van Rensburg of RRL recalled being told about the late 1984 murder of a young white conscript who was an ANC supporter, though he may have conflated this with the earlier Bailey incident.

In 1990 President F. W. De Klerk prohibited the carrying out of any further work on lethal CBW agents, and in 1993 Project Coast was officially terminated. The stocks of BW agents produced by South Africa were supposedly destroyed in conformity with international agreements, despite the fact that the actual destruction process was never independently verified and there is evidence that some of the substances were removed and retained by Coast scientists. The current government still has access to the type of technical expertise and the sort of sophisticated R&D facilities that would enable it to initiate a new BW program and misuse snake venom again, but there is little reason to suppose that it has any interest in doing so.

	Updated February 2004