Project Coast, like the foreign CBW programs upon which it was said to have been modeled, included both a biological weapons component and a chemical weapons component. In contrast to their counterparts in certain other countries, however, the chemical and biological components were not completely separate in South Africa. Not only did they both have the same official chain of command, the same Project Officer, and integrated secret funding mechanisms, but the actual testing of certain chemical agents was sometimes carried out at the primary BW facility rather than at the facilities responsible for CW. Both the BW and CW programs in South Africa consisted of one principal production facility and a variety of other facilities that, for administrative, security, or technical reasons, carried out specialized research, testing, or production tasks. The BW program was centered at one large research, development, and production facility, Roodeplaat Research Laboratories (RRL), but it also apparently tapped the resources of several commercial firms, university laboratories, and even zoos in order to effectuate supplementary research and testing. After being privatized for a brief period in the early 1990s, the company was sold by its shareholders back to the government and then liquidated. A handful of key RRL personnel profited enormously from this privatization scheme, and several eventually found jobs at other biological or veterinary research facilities.

In theory, the apex of the official chain of command for both the BW and CW components of Project Coast was the President of the Republic himself (P. W. Botha), who under the militarized National Security Management System (NSMS) established in August 1979 exercised his authority primarily through the State Security Council (SSC) rather than the Cabinet. Within this elaborate security-oriented and largely covert power structure, the SADF coordinated the activities of the various armed services (Army, Air Force, Navy, and—later—both the South African Medical Services [SAMS] and the Special Forces [SF]) through a body known as the Defence Command Council. However, although administratively subordinate to this latter body, the entity that officially managed Project Coast was known as the Co-ordinating Management Committee (CMC), which typically met two to four times per year and normally comprised the SADF chief, the Army Surgeon-General (who was also the head of SAMS), the Chief of Staff (COS) Intelligence, the COS Finance, representatives from the state armaments corporation ARMSCOR, personnel from the Auditor-General's office, and the Project Officer, who served as CMC secretary. Directly under the auspices of the CMC, three "work groups" were supposedly formed to deal with specialized matters on a regular basis. The Technical Work Group, which was headed by Basson and included a rotating group of directors and leading scientists from the front companies, did scientific research planning for each company. The Financial Work Group, which included the Surgeon-General and the COS Finance, was responsible for budgetary planning and controlled the movement of money through various front companies so as to hide the SADF's role. The Security Work Group, which consisted of the COS Intelligence and other members of the intelligence community, handled security arrangements in order to assure the secrecy of the project. It may be, however, that these "work groups" were little more than ad hoc collections of people brought together as needed to deal with particular issues that affected their work, since several senior scientists and officials later testified that they were unaware of their very existence.

Operating under the control and direction of these "work groups," at least in theory, was Project Officer Wouter Basson, who in January 1985 also began serving as the commander of 7 Medical Battalion Group, an elite SAMS team that provided medical support for SF units operating in the bush. As Project Officer, his appointed task was to act as an intermediary between the CMC and the directors and scientists at the various CBW facilities. Although Basson modestly claimed that his function was to deal with the practical aspects of the project in accordance with the "strategic guidelines" provided by the CMC and its "work groups," and always insisted that he did not have a "free hand," his nominal superiors all concur that he personally supervised or managed the day-to-day affairs of the project, operated with a very high degree of autonomy and independence, and provided the CMC with the bulk of the crucial scientific and operational information that its members needed to make important managerial decisions, including the authorization of requested project expenditures. In effect, the CMC seems to have become dependent upon Basson for its functioning, rather than the other way around. By the mid-1990s, when it became apparent that some portion of the funds requested by Basson had been used for his own personal gain rather than legitimate project needs, several of Basson's erstwhile supervisors complained that all along he had misled them or kept them in the dark about what he was really doing.

Indeed, Project Coast may well have had some sort of parallel, unofficial command structure that operated alongside the official CMC chain of command. Former Army Surgeon-General Niel Knobel claimed that Basson was often either doing things on his own initiative or, as Basson himself later acknowledged, being given operational instructions directly by other parties, including the Defence Minister, the head of the SADF, the Commanding Officer of the SF, the COS Intelligence, the Director-General of the National Intelligence Service (NIS), the Commissioner of the South African Police (SAP), and possibly also members of the SSC or Cabinet who he treated medically. After receiving at least some of his orders from these powerful figures, above all SADF generals A. J. "Kat" Liebenberg and Magnus Malan, Basson then passed instructions on—always verbally—to Project Coast scientists and select members of covert SADF or SAP units with a "need to know," frequently without informing his nominal superiors on the CMC. Not coincidentally, several of the directors and scientists employed at BW or CW facilities and other SADF front companies were formerly members of 7 Medical Battalion Group or its predecessor (the Special Operations section of SAMS), and the covert operatives with whom Basson collaborated were almost all ex-members of the SF or various other South African and Rhodesian counterinsurgency and special operations units. Perhaps it was just such a parallel command structure, to which Basson clearly belonged, that the NIS referred to as the Binnekring ("Inner Circle") in its December 1992 report on illegal SADF activities.

The SADF provided funding to the Project Coast front companies through various "private" bank accounts that had been set up explicitly for such purposes. The COS Finance was primarily responsible for arranging the details of the transfer of funds after the requested amounts were approved by the CMC. According to government auditors, a total of 418,226 million rand were allocated to the CBW program in the period between 1 April 1983 and 28 February 1992. From 1 March 1987 to 28 February 1993, the period covered by the Basson indictment, the project had access to 340.9 million rand, of which 37 million were allegedly misappropriated by Basson and his collaborators. During this same period the expenditures for the military front company RRL amounted to 98.4 million rand.

RRL was a large, sophisticated BW research, testing, and production facility that cost approximately 40 million rand to build and equip and 10 million rand per annum to operate. It was built specifically for this purpose on a farm 12-15 km north of Pretoria, near the Roodeplaat Dam, beginning in November 1983. By 1985 it consisted of a farmhouse, a small 3- or 4-room lab complex, and some animal cages, but it was thereafter expanded in phases to include a restricted P3-level basement Compression Lab and a security dog-breeding subsidiary (Roodeplaat Breeding Enterprises). Plans were also made to build a P4-level facility further north. Though ostensibly a private company that did commercial contract work for industry, a "cover" which facilitated its recruitment of top scientists and its acquisition of materials overseas, RRL was in fact an SADF front company that worked primarily on "hard" (military) projects and only rarely (on average, about 10% of the time) on "soft" (commercial) or "in-house" (researcher-generated) projects. At its height RRL's staff numbered around 70, including 40 scientists and technicians, and was divided into several scientific departments – Toxicology, Molecular Biology, Organic Chemistry, Physiology, Microbiology, an Animal Unit, etc.—that were supported logistically by administrative, financial, and security departments. Its managing director was Dr. Daan Goosen (who was replaced in 1986 by Wynand Swanepoel), its R&D director was Dr. André Immelman, its Animal Laboratory Services director was Dr. Schalk van Rensburg, and its administrative director was David Sparmer.

Although RRL also did beneficial work on bovine vaccines, its efforts were focused on three types of military projects: 1) a toxin R&D program headed by Immelman, whose purpose was to develop and test lethal BW and CW agents that were untraceable; 2) a fertility program, headed by Dr. Riana Borman, whose purpose may have been—though this is bitterly debated, even by insiders—to limit the growth of the black population; and 3) a BW program linked to new developments in the genetic engineering field, headed by Dr. Mike Odendaal, whose aim was to research and develop antibiotic-resistant strains of pathogens by combining different agents. Although there was no large-scale weaponization of offensive BW agents at RRL, a plethora of toxic substances were acquired, tested, and/or prepared by scientists working for Immelman, whose own instructions came directly from Basson. Among these were BW agents like Bacillus anthracis, botulinum toxin, brucella bacterium, Clostridium perfringens, Escheria coli, Yersinia pestis and/or Y. enterocolitica, salmonella bacterium, Vibrio cholerae, HIV-infected blood, and snake venom, as well as CW agents like mustard, sarin, tabun, VX, and a wide array of other highly toxic chemicals. Some of RRL's products were then tested at the pyrotechnic labs at SF headquarters, the SAP's Forensic Sciences Laboratory, or other facilities at various state companies, semi-state companies, private companies, and universities.

Insider testimony and the RRL "sales list" of 1989 both indicate that operatives from the SF's Civil Co-operation Bureau (CCB) and the SAP's Security Branch (SB) obtained a wide variety of toxic substances directly from Immelman, who kept samples of all the freeze-dried pathogens and chemicals produced at RRL in a refrigerator inside a fireproof and bomb-proof walk-in safe in his office. Later, several of these deadly substances were likely deployed by CCB and the SB "hit squads" in their covert assassination operations against designated "enemies of the state." A number of targeted individuals were apparently murdered in this fashion, and many more were probably sickened. Moreover, cholera and salmonella bacteria were both allegedly disseminated on one occasion in order to contaminate, respectively, water supplies and food.

Some supplemental BW research may also have been carried out at private companies and academic institutions, such as the Onderstepoort Veterinary Institute and the H. A. Grové Research Centre, both of which were affiliated with the University of Pretoria, or the National Institute for Virology, the only South African facility with a P4 laboratory. If so, the scientists at these facilities were probably not all aware that the research they were contracted to do had been initiated and was being subsidized under the auspices of Project Coast.

	Updated February 2004