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 CW program was centered at one large biochemical research and production facility, Delta G Scientific (Delta G), but it also relied upon the services of several other research facilities and laboratories in order to conduct additional testing or carry out the actual weaponization of various chemical substances. In the midst of a privatization phase in the early 1990s, the company was briefly sold by its shareholders back to the government armaments company ARMSCOR before being acquired by the chemical conglomerates Sentrachem Ltd and thence Dow Chemical. A handful of key Delta G personnel, in particular managing director Philip Mijburgh, seem to have profited considerably from this privatization scheme.

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 Project Officer Wouter Basson, 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 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 418.2 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 period the total expenditures for the military front company Delta G cannot be determined with certainty. The same is true for some of the other CW facilities which carried out supplemental research and testing or the full-scale weaponization of chemical agents.

Delta G was a large, highly sophisticated CW research and production facility that cost approximately 30 million rand to build and equip. Originally, some of its functions had been performed at smaller technical laboratories located at SF headquarters, in particular those operated by an entity known as Elektroniks, Meganies, Landbou en Chemies (EMLC: Electronics, Mechanical, Agricultural and Chemical), which was allegedly designed to provide the SF with a defensive CBW capability and other specialized equipment. In April 1982, Delta G was established to take over EMLC's CW tasks. It was originally located in the Pretoria suburb of Weldegraan, but in 1985 or 1986 the company moved to new facilities on the corner of George and Old Pretoria roads in Midrand, north of Johannesburg. Eventually, it consisted of two manufacturing plants, a pilot or pre-production plant, a large laboratory complex, workshops, and administrative offices. 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, Delta G was in fact an SADF front company that worked primarily on "hard" (military) projects rather than "soft" (commercial) or "in-house" (researcher-generated) projects. At its height Delta-G's staff numbered around 120, most of whom either worked in production or in the Research Unit headed by Dr. Gert Lourens, which was itself divided into several scientific divisions—including the Biochemical Division under Dr. Hennie Jordaan. These essential units were supported logistically by administrative, financial, and security departments. The company's managing director was Dr. Willie Basson (no relation to Wouter; he was replaced in 1985 by Dr. Mijburgh), its technical director was Dr. Gerrie Rall, its marketing director was Barry Pithy, and its administrative director was Dr. André Redelinghuys.

Although Delta G had the ability to make virtually any synthetic chemical, its efforts were focused on various military projects geared toward the preservation of public order: 1) the large-scale production of chemical irritants used for crowd control, such as the CS and CR Riot Control Agents; 2) the relatively small-scale production of various illegal mind-altering narcotics in an effort to develop and test their potential viability as "calmatives"; 3) a peptide synthesis program, officially headed by Dr. Lucia Steenkamp, one of whose goals was apparently to enhance the physiological effects of bioregulators; and 4) a CW research and analysis program, which manufactured small quantities of toxic substances on demand for various purposes. Although there was no actual weaponization of CW crowd control agents at Delta G itself—this was handled by other companies to which Delta G's materials were provided, such as Swartklip Products—various dangerous chemicals were acquired, researched, and/or prepared by scientists working for Gert Lourens, whose own instructions came directly from Basson or Mijburgh. Among these were classical CW agents like the psychoincapacitant BZ and mustard, and a wide array of other toxic chemicals. Some of Delta G's riot control products were then tested at the pyrotechnical labs at SF headquarters, the SAP's Forensic Sciences Laboratory, or other facilities at various state companies, semi-state companies, private companies, and universities. These facilities included the defensive CBW company Systems Research and Development (which was later renamed Protechnik) and the weapons manufacturer Swartklip, an ARMSCOR subsidiary.

Insider testimony and the notorious 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 chemicals and freeze-dried pathogens 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 actually 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.

	Updated March 2004