In April 2002, Basson, a heart specialist once the personal physician of the former South African leader, P. W. Botha, had been cleared by a court in Pretoria on forty-six charges. They included fraud, drug-trafficking, and eight counts of murder committed when he had been in charge of Project Coast, the country’s secret apartheid-era germ warfare program. After the verdict, Dr. Basson had been smuggled out of the court by South African intelligence agents. The judge had earlier ruled that cases involving alleged assassinations of apartheid opponents outside South Africa were beyond his jurisdiction. During the trial, Wouter Basson had revealed that the South African government had given him “unlimited power and money to devise defenses against chemical or germ attacks on the country.”
Now, in July 2006, MI5 had begun to investigate whether those defenses had included using the expertise of Dr. Kelly and two other sinister figures in the secret world of biological warfare. One was a Mormon gynecologist, Dr. Larry Ford. Attached to the University of California campus in Los Angeles, Ford had a secret life none of his patients suspected. He had built up a close relationship with Wouter Basson and, through him, established contacts with the biowarfare scientists of North Korea—and Dr. Kelly. The two men had met in a safe house Basson had rented for such meetings. It was at number one, Fair-cloth Farm Cottage, Watersplash, near Ascot, Berkshire. There, MI5 now believed, Dr. Kelly and Dr. Ford regularly met until the gynecologist committed suicide in 2000 at his home in Irvine, California. When police dealing with the case opened Dr. Ford’s refrigerator, they found bottles containing cultures of cholera, botulism, and typhoid fever. All three toxins were among those Dr. Kelly had been working with during his time as head of the microbiology department at Porton Down, the chemical warfare research establishment in England. Had he provided them to Dr. Ford? If so, why? Did Ford or Basson intend to pass them on to North Korea? These were some of the questions for which MI5 wanted answers.
Since October 1989, Dr. Kelly had also established contact with another sinister figure in the world of germ warfare. He was Dr. Vladimir Pasechnik, the former top scientist in the Soviet Union’s biowarfare program, Biopreparat. In one of those classic spy novel moments, the fifty-three-year-old Russian microbiologist had strolled out of a drug industry fair in Paris. Telling his colleagues he was going to buy souvenirs for his wife and children back home in St. Petersburg, Pasechnik had instead hailed a taxi to the British Embassy in the city. He had been brought by MI6 agents on the next EuroStar train to London. Dr. Kelly was appointed “to open the Pandora’s Box of biological secrets the Soviet Union had kept concealed from the world,” he later admitted to the author. Assisting Dr. Kelly was Dr. Christopher Davis, a member of the Ministry of Defense Intelligence staff. Over weeks of questioning Dr. Pasechnik revealed, among much else, how the Soviet Union had planned to spread the plague—the medieval Black Death—across Europe.
Later, Dr. Kelly, now a close friend of the Russian scientist, helped him to start Regma Biotechnologies Company and became a regular visitor to the company’s offices in Wiltshire, England. It was in Porton Down, Britain’s secret biodefense establishment. He also arranged for Pasechnik to have his own office and laboratory in the same building where Dr. Kelly worked at Porton Down. On November 21, 2001, Dr. Pasechnik left his office at Regma Biotechnologies. Staff later remembered he seemed happy and in good health. At home he cooked dinner, washed up, and went to sleep. He was found dead in bed the next day. Initially police said the death was “inexplicable.” The coroner, however, accepted the pathologist’s report that Pasechnik had died from a stroke. No details of the autopsy were made public. No reporter covered the coroner’s inquest. The funeral, which normally would have attracted media attention given who Pasechnik was, went unreported. A full month later the briefest announcement of his death was released by Dr. Christopher Davis, by then retired from the Ministry of Defense and living outside Washington, DC.
