The drug Tubarine (tubocurarine), a neuromuscular paralysant which is normally used during open heart surgery and can be lethal in small doses, was regularly utilized by Special Forces (SF) personnel to assassinate prisoners, "turned terrorists," and other proclaimed security risks. It was typically mixed into a "cocktail" together with Scoline (succinylcholine), another drug with similar properties and effects. Project Officer Wouter Basson, the de facto manager of South Africa's covert CBW program, apparently supplied both of these drugs to SF operatives, and also supposedly showed them how to administer them via injection.

In 1979, veteran SF operative Johan Theron persuaded Lieutenant-General Fritz Loots, the commander of that elite unit between 1974 and 1982, that "redundant" South West Africa Peoples Organisation (SWAPO) prisoners should be disposed of without a trace. Thus was born "Operation Dual," a systematic program of covert assassinations. Theron further suggested that the best method for disposing of these persons would be to fly them 60-90 nautical miles out over the ocean and dump their bodies out of an aircraft from a height of around 12,000 feet. (Note that this method was already being used extensively by the Argentine military junta, and perhaps also by its Brazilian, Chilean, and Uruguayan counterparts.) After he obtained Loots' approval for this plan, a Piper Seneca airplane was purchased and placed at his disposal. Theron and a handful of trusted associates from the SF's top secret Barnacle unit – the forerunner of the Civil Co-operation Bureau (CCB)—then began the gruesome process of disposing of "hundreds" of selected victims, all of whom were black, including both individuals who had already been killed and those who had simply been sedated with a tranquilizer dart supplied by the SF's Technical Unit (i.e., the Elektroniks, Meganies, Landbou en Chemies [EMLC: Electronic, Mechanical, Agricultural and Chemical] company). Problems soon arose because the sedatives wore off too quickly and some prisoners woke up while being ferried in the aircraft, a disconcerting development that seriously endangered several missions by provoking in-flight ruckuses and forcing Theron to kill the desperately struggling victims with his bare hands.

Theron and his Rhodesian pilot Niel Kriel ("Mr. K") then complained to Loots that the sedation methods being used were inadequate and dangerous. They were then instructed to consult with Basson, at the time a leading member of a specialized medical unit that accompanied SF personnel on their cross-border operations, the Special Operations (SO) section of the South African Medical Services (SAMS). Basson then reportedly supplied Theron and his men with a potent cocktail composed of the drugs Tubarine and Scoline, and demonstrated how best to inject it into the prisoners, who were euphemistically referred to as "packages." According to Ben Steyn, who succeeded Basson as Project Officer of Project Coast in December 1992, these drugs are both curare-like skeletal muscle relaxants that have the effect of paralyzing the patient being operated on while leaving his or her mind fully conscious, which is why they are normally used only when patients are hooked up to a ventilator. Precisely because death by this means was both painful and psychologically traumatic, Basson and his SO associate Dr. Kobus Bothma later began providing Theron and his men with the anesthetic Ketamine or with Vesperax sleeping pills so that the victims could first be put to sleep, a method that was considered more "humane." In any event, once Theron mastered the injection techniques for Tubarine and Scoline, there were no further security problems posed by awakening prisoners.

Basson later denied that he had supplied these particular drugs to Theron or that he had authorized anyone else under his command to do so, and his SO associate Bothma claimed that Tubarine and Scoline were not standard issue items in the medical kits he packed for doctors accompanying SF units in the field. However, these statements directly contradicted the far more detailed testimony of Theron and his fellow "Dual" operatives, who had no reason to lie about the sources of the lethal drugs they admitted to administering. Moreover, Ben Steyn testified that Tubarine, Scoline, and Ketamine were all available in the storerooms at SF headquarters, to which Basson had unrestricted access, and government prosecutors ended up concluding that Basson was personally in charge of issuing medical supplies to all of the covert units within the South African security forces. Given Basson's documented involvement in authorizing the preparation, dissemination, and deployment of so many other toxic chemical and biological agents, there is no reason to doubt that he played a key role in supplying these two dangerous drugs to SF assassins.

	Updated March 2004