The South African Biological Weapons Program - Deadly Cultures: Biological Weapons Since 1945 - page 207

con, a few miles from the RRL facility. Biocon took over all RRL's com-
mercial contracts and some of its equipment. 81 Two of the RRL scientists
left the company to farm, 82 and the remainder returned to positions at
the Onderstepoort Vaccine Institute (a division of the Agricultural Re-
search Council) or found work in the private sector. There was no at-
tempt by the state to ensure the reemployment of the scientists who left
the organization before 1994, and there is no publicly available docu-
mentation to suggest that the matter of the employment of the scien-
tists was ever discussed with the African National Congress government
thereafter.
During the closing-down phase of the BW program, scientists were
asked to hand over their research proposals and reports to the managers
of the company. Some of the technical reports were allegedly scanned
and recorded on optical disk in 1991. 83 According to Odendaal, shortly
before the organization was closed down a “roomful of documents” was
destroyed. 84
There is a great deal of uncertainty about the fate of the RRL culture
collection during this process of closure. As head of the Department of
Microbiology at RRL, Odendaal was responsible for the collection. He
maintains that before he left the organization in 1993 the collection was
given to Immelman, who, he believed, had plans to destroy it. 85 Goosen
makes a different claim, saying that scientists at RRL had retained sam-
ples of the cultures and later gave them to him. 86 According to Goosen,
there was little managerial oversight at RRL when it was being closed
down, and scientists simply helped themselves to cultures that they
might want to use in future research. 87
The South African government authorities appear to have given little
thought to the fate of the collection. Indeed, the South African Coun-
cil for the Non-Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction (NPC) ap-
peared to show interest only in 2002, when Goosen was discovered at-
tempting to sell the collection and other products from Project Coast to
former members of the CIA. In a discussion with Gould, Goosen claimed
that since the culture collection was not very different from those main-
tained by bona fide research and industrial institutions around the world,
with most of the cultures freely available, the NPC had concluded that
there was no need to ensure that the collection had been destroyed. 88
Goosen's attempt to sell the collection was a cloak-and-dagger deal in-