Monday 4 August 2014

Ebola


FTR 4 Excerpted from the One Step Beyond show of 8/18/96, this broadcast highlights the possible use of genetically-engineered micro-organisms for the purposes of biological warfare and genocide. Beginning with the research of Doctors Garth and Nancy Nicolson, the program discusses an (apparently) genetically mutated mycoplasma that figures prominently in the mysterious "Gulf War Syndrome". This micro-organism has had a gene from the HIV spliced into its genome, making it much more destructive. Most of the segment focuses on the remarkable recent book Emerging Viruses - AIDS and Ebola: Nature, Accident or Intentional? by Dr. Leonard Horowitz. This vitally important work presents very compelling scientific, medical and historical information suggesting that the AIDS and Ebola viruses were created in a laboratory, possibly deliberately. The viruses may have been intentionally spread in order to effect "population control" in Third World countries and on domestic population groups viewed with disfavor by the far right. 

(Recorded 8/18/96.)




"Without Africa, France will have no history in the 21st century" 
François Mitterrand, then-minister of the Interior of France, 1957

http://spikethenews.blogspot.com/2013/12/francafrique.html





 "FTR 17 This segment sets forth information indicating that the deadly Ebola virus that has emerged in Africa may be a man-made virus that was developed in Western biological warfare programs. Relying on information presented in a German television documentary and accessed in a magazine called The New African, the broadcast notes that the epidemiology of the disease makes little sense and that the institutions dealing with the disease are intimately connected to Western BW institutions. An unnamed military official is quoted as saying that a 1976 outbreak of the disease was "the first time weâve had the bug outside of the lab." 

(Recorded in the spring of 1996.)



FTR #73 Dr. Horowitz's recent book Emerging Viruses: AIDS and Ebola - Nature, Accident or Intentional? (Hardcover edition, Tetrahedron, copyright 1996) makes a compelling case that both AIDS and Ebola are, in all probability, man-made diseases. This interview provides an overview of Dr. Horowitz's thesis. Beginning with Dr. Robert Gallo's genetic engineering of viruses virtually identical to HIV in the late 1960s and 1970s, the discussion illuminates the probable role of a number of corporate and governmental institutions in the development of AIDS. Central among those elements are: the National Cancer Institute's Special Viral Cancer Research Project; Fort Detrick (the Army's top biological warfare research facility, which was turned over to the National Cancer Institute); Litton Bionetics (which administered Fort Detrick for the NCI); Merck, Sharp and Dohme (a German-owned company which has been at the center of the American biological warfare program); Merck's experimental Hepatitis B vaccine trials; the U.S. Agency for International Development; former National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and the Rockefeller industrial and medical empire. Particular attention is paid to some very disturbing research in Africa on the diseases which appear to figure in the development of AIDS and Ebola. This research was followed by a series of vaccination programs which may have been the vector for introducing AIDS into the population there.

https://archive.org/details/For_The_Record_73_Interview_with_Dr_Leonard_Horowitz



 FTR #25 These segments discuss a remarkable German company which leased thousands of square miles in Zaire in the 1970s. This company, an extension of the (then) West German aerospace industry, had complete autonomy and functioned as, in effect, a state-within-a-state. The principal figures involved with OTRAG were veterans of the Nazi rocket development program during World War II, many of whom had gone to work for the United States after the war. Although the stated purpose of their operation was to develop inexpensive rocket delivery vehicles for civilian satellites, the vehicles they were developing had military applicability and, as such, may have been illegal. In addition, there is considerable evidence that the company was functioning as a NATO front organization for a variety of purposes including providing logistical support for U.S. covert operations in central Africa. Perhaps the most ominous aspect of OTRAG's operations concerns the possibility that the company may very well have been involved in joint research with American institutions undertaking the development of genetically-altered, immune system-destroying monkey viruses. This research may have led to the development of AIDS and Ebola.

(Recorded on 1/5/97.)

   

 FTR 16 This landmark broadcast brings together four individuals with expertise bearing on the possibility that AIDS and other diseases may have been created in laboratories, rather than by nature. Dr. Horowitz (author of Emerging Viruses: AIDS and EbolaâNature, Accident or Intentional, hardcover, Tetrahedron, copyright 1996) traces the probable origins of AIDS and Ebola to: a 10 million-dollar Pentagon project aimed at creating diseases to destroy the human immune system; Richard Nixon's "war on cancer;" Litton Bionetics; the National Cancer Institute's Special Virus Cancer Research Program; the Merck, Sharp and Dohme company and the creation, testing and marketing of vaccines. Dr. Cantwell (the author of numerous books including AIDS and The Doctors of Death, Aries Rising Press, copyright 1989) has developed information that dovetails with Dr. Horowitz's research and focuses on cancer research and the testing of the experimental hepatitis B vaccine (produced by Merck, Sharp and Dohme) on gays in New York City. Ed Haslam (author of Mary, Ferrie and the Monkey Virus: The Story of An Underground Medical Laboratory, Wordsworth Press, copyright 1995) analyzes the contamination of the polio vaccine with SV-40, a cancer-causing monkey virus and discusses the possibility that this contamination led to a soft-tissue cancer epidemic currently sweeping the United States.

In addition, Haslam presents the possibility that AIDS may have resulted (accidentally or deliberately) from this contamination and research into possible ways of neutralizing the SV-40.

Haslam connects this research to the milieu involved in President Kennedy's assassination and the murder of Dr. Mary Sherman, a pioneer in American cancer research. The concluding section of the program features Dr. Garth Nicolson, who (along with his wife Dr. Nancy Nicolson) has done research into a genetically-altered micro-organism, which appears to be causing some of the illness known as "Gulf War Syndrome." This organism (called a mycoplasma), features the addition of a gene from HIV, rendering it much more pathogenic.

The broadcast also covers the frightening fact that ongoing U.S. vaccine production and administration is shrouded in secrecy by the Food and Drug Administration. In addition, many vaccines currently being administered are heavily contaminated with viruses and viral particles, which may very well be causing a variety of diseases. Mr. Emory considers this program to be one of the most important he has produced in his almost two decades on the air.

(Recorded on 10/20/96)

 









Recorded less than 48 hours before the 9/11 attacks, this program eerily foreshadows the anthrax attacks that followed 9/11—to date those attacks are unsolved. This broadcast offers some possible clues as to why. Examining more of the political and historical context surrounding the late Dr. Larry Ford, this program provides a vista onto the overlapping worlds of clandestine fascist politics, the intelligence community and biological warfare research.
1. The program begins with review of Dr. Ford’s work for Project Coast—an apartheid-era South African assassination program using chemical and biological weapons. (It is important to remember that Ford had worked with, among other elements, the CIA. This makes his association with ultra-right antigovernment and terrorist groups all the more ominous. The possibility of a “national security coverup” is not one to be too readily discarded. His links to elements of the US intelligence community may be used to obscure some of his other activities from public view. It is also worth noting that other countries appeared to have utilized assets involved in Project Coast in a fashion not unlike the American incorporation of Third Reich scientists and research under Project Paperclip.)
“He [Irvine California police detective Victor Ray] steered the investigation to Ford’s backyard, where men in Andromeda Strain suits would evacuate a neighborhood and haul away an arsenal of toxins, germs, plastic explosives, and guns. In the process they unearthed a trail that stretched all the way from the CIA to apartheid-era South Africa and Dr. Wouter Basson, the man who ran the country’s clandestine bioweapons program.”
2. Ford had links to racist organizations and militia-movement elements, and may have offered them chemical and/or biological weapons. His “microencapsulation” system for a prophylactic vaginal suppository he was developing might have “dual-use” in a biological warfare application.
“The question still plaguing federal, state, and local investigators is a simple but urgent one: what was Ford planning to do with his germs and bioweapons expertise? The discovery of militia-movement and racist literature among Ford’s papers has raised the possibility that he offered biological or chemical weapons to terrorist groups. Concerns have also mounted over a patented feature of his Inner Confidence suppository: the microencapsulation of beneficial bacteria. It turns out this architecture could double as an ideal delivery system for bioweapons, allowing otherwise fragile disease organisms to be seeded virtually anywhere. Ford, in essence, had patented the prescription for a perfect microscopic time bomb.”
(Idem.)
3. Ford had told the family of a business partner that his work on behalf of the US national security establishment had included work on the Ebola and Marburg viruses. As will be seen later in the program, there is some suggestion that Ebola may have been utilized by the apartheid-era regime as part of Project Coast.
“Ford told the Rileys and others his subsequent work for the military and the CIA included research on biological and chemical weapons, consulting on Iraqi capabilities during the Gulf War, and sneaking into epidemic hot zones in Africa to gather samples of such killer organisms as the Ebola and Marburg viruses.”
(Idem.)
4. Reviewing more information from FTR#317, the discussion highlights Ford’s work on AIDS prevention for the apartheid-era government. (South Africa has one of the highest rates of HIV infection in the world and many observers feel that AIDS threatens the very future of the country.) Significantly, research on AIDS by the Broederbond underscored the possibility that the disease could become a vehicle for the restoration of white supremacy in South Africa
“But the AIDS prevention program was for whites in the military, not blacks. A secret rightwing South African organization, the Broeder-bond, [sic] conducted studies around this same time that suggested the AIDS epidemic could make whites the majority in the future.”
(Ibid.; p. 8.)
5. In light of the activities conducted by Ford and his compatriots from Project Coast, the utilization of AIDS as a weapon of extermination is not a possibility to be too readily cast aside.
“Since then, through the new government’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was formed to probe the abuses of apartheid, information has surfaced about a secret South African bioweapons program. Code-named Project Coast, it was run by another Ford friend and financial benefactor, Dr. Wouter Basson; [South African deputy surgeon general Dr. Niel] Knobel had administrative oversight. Basson’s alleged ties to hundreds of poisonings and assassinations in South Africa and in the neighboring countries of Angola and Zimbabwe earned him the nickname ‘Dr. Death’ in the South African press. Documents indicating he had arranged an offshore bank account for Ford were found in Ford’s papers after his death.”
(Idem.)
6. Ford’s involvement with Project Coast may have bordered on the genocidal.
“The commission uncovered evidence that whole villages, including an Angolan settlement of several hundred people suspected of harboring rebels, may have been decimated by Project Coast weapons. This finding parallels information Nilsson’s ex-girlfriend provided: She said Ford more than once boasted of wiping out an entire Angolan village during a civil war.”
(Idem.)
7. Next, the program sets forth more information about the history of Project Coast. Zimbabwe’s Health Minister had some pointed observations about outbreaks of Ebola during that nation’s war of independence and his belief that they resulted from Project Coast.
“ ‘I have my suspicions about Ebola too. It developed along the line of the Zambezi River, and I suspect that this may have been an experiment to see if a new virus could be established to infect people. We looked on the serological evidence on strange cases, including a fifteen-year-old child which occurred in 1980. Nothing really made epidemiological sense. Do I have evidence? Only circumstantial. In fact, the Rhodesian security forces were more expert than the Nazis at covering up evidence.’”
(Plague Wars: The Terrifying Reality of Biological Warfare by Tom Mangold and Jeff Goldberg; Copyright 1999 [HC] by Tom Mangold and Jeff Goldberg; St. Martin’s Press; ISBN 0–312-20353–5; p. 220.)
8. Dr. Stamps’ observations were significant and prescient, because the subsequent inquiry into Project Coast revealed that the project had been active in neighboring countries that had fought against black majority rule at the same time as the apartheid regime.
“Stamps is speaking weeks before the remarkable evidence was presented by South African soldiers and scientists at the 1998 Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s hearings on South Africa’s covert biological warfare program. The Health Minister doesn’t know just how close to the truth he is.” (Idem.)
“Stamps begins to talk gloomily about the revived epidemic of anthrax which now stalks his land. ‘Even the wild animals have been infected—antelopes, elephants . . .’ The voice trails off, then picks up again. ‘We’ve asked the American Centers for Disease Control to come and help us, but they work only on a cost plus basis and my budget is small.’”
(Idem.)
“We talk about the anthrax. ‘If you can destroy a person’s cattle, you can destroy his livelihood,’ he says. ‘If you can kill a few people in the process, then you can subjugate a large number of people. And the stuff lasts forever. That is the evil of biological warfare.’ Who brought it in? Stamps picks up a cake knife and points to the south. ‘Where do you think? South Africa, of course.’”
(Idem.)
9. Nico Palm—a former engineer in the South African Defense Force—provided the authors of Plague Wars with a primary source. “Gert,” as he chose to be called, discussed his use of biological weapons during the border wars of the 1980’s.
“Palm says he has a primary source who used biological warfare against the enemies of South Africa during the covert border struggles of the 1980’s . . . Gert teases with some hints about his personal background, but not enough to make an identification. ‘I was recruited by [Wouter] Basson,’ he says casually. ‘I had the same rank and status, I was a colonel.’”
(Ibid.; pp. 250–251.)
10. “Gert” discussed the methodology of covert infection utilized by Project Coast and some of the infectious agents used.
“The bacteria and viruses, he says, were delivered in containers and used in northern Namibia. Bacteria were placed into a water source ‘wherever you identify one, or wherever you identify one destined for human consumption’.”
(Ibid.; p. 251.)
“ ‘When Hep. [Hepatitis] A was used, we had to make sure that the operators had a gamma globulin injection first. Cholera was pretty widely used also. I used it. I personally was involved in the Eastern Transvaal against FRELIMO in Mozambique. We placed the cholera upstream . . . we looked for areas, and you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to work this out, where they didn’t filter the water or don’t clean it—places where there was no chlorination, so you drop it in and prod it.’”
(Ibid.; pp. 251–252.)
11. According to “Gert,” the actual “homme-de-main” who was selected to do the dirty work, was usually a civilian who was viewed as “dispensable.”
“Who did this? Soldiers? ‘No, no, no, no. Never, never did it happen by ordinary soldiers. You can’t blame any of the normal forces for that. Although sometimes some of our own soldiers did get infected by the cholera that we put in the water.’”
(Ibid.; p. 252.)
“ ‘This is what I’m saying, usually the guy who did it, who placed it, was dispensable—he would have been very well selected, he’s someone you can compromise, he’s either on drugs, or he drinks too much, or he’s got his hand in the cookie jar. That was all done here in Pretoria.’ Who did the selection? Basson himself? ‘He selected the guy with the criminal background . . . It was a criminal operation. The guy would wear civilian clothes.’”
(Idem.)
12. Corroborating some of Dr. Stamps’ suspicions concerning Ebola, “Gert” discussed the use of that virus and the related Marburg virus in Project Coast. “Gert” also implies that US scientists from Ft. Detrick (Dr. Ford?) were involved with a Zairian outbreak.
“ ‘Look, I know what one of the very, very, very secret specialized units had. We had to test it. And that was viral capsules that were specifically related to Congo fever and the hemorrhagic fevers.’ Ebola? ‘Yes.’ So Gert is beginning to corroborate Dr. Stamp’s suspicions in Harare that Ebola and Marburg, although indigenous, were also artificially seeded into Southern Africa. Basson, says Gert, was involved in all this. (when the last terrible Ebola outbreak occurred in Kikwit, Zaire, as late as 1995, Gert claims that Basson was there, unofficially. Twenty years earlier, when the village of Yambuku in northern Zaire witnessed one of the first major Ebola outbreaks, two South African scientists were there, allegedly working hand in glove with US military personnel from Fort Detrick.)”
(Ibid.; p. 253.)
13. As “Gert” made clear, these viruses were for offensive use by South Africa.
“Slowly, patiently, Gert confesses that these terrible viruses were ‘researched’ for offensive use by South Africa. Next, he talks elliptically about ‘taking out’ certain enemy units, even though these actions had no military value. It was done in order to find the one soldier who, according to military intelligence, had contracted an hemorrhagic fever. These sick people would then be evacuated from the border areas to South Africa, ‘to see what the effect was, obviously.’. You wanted to see what the effect because you had sown the disease? ‘For sure . . . I can tell you that I know of this thing because I did it myself. I did the evacuations. It was up in Eastern Angola, we’re talking mid-eighties.’”
(Idem.)
14. Adding sinister depth to the background of the AIDS research that Larry Ford engaged in, “Gert” discusses the deliberate infection of human targets with HIV.
“Gert lifts another veil. ‘There was some HIV tampering,’ he says. Meaning? ‘I mean all you have to do is get one covert guy, he’s HIV positive, he’s of the area. You get him to infiltrate the whole town and screw the whole lot . . . get him out and shoot him.’ Was that really done? ‘If I tell you, it was obviously done. Look, I was a wild guy. At one stage, I worked with the police, I worked with national intelligence, I worked with military intelligence, I worked with Seventh Med, I worked with everybody. I was never identified, because only a very few people knew where I was positioned.’ Was Basson your boss? ‘No, it was higher up, both military and political. [sic]’”
(Idem.)
15. As set forth in FTR#317, Dr. Ford was (according to an Air Force Academy report) part of an underground, extragovernmental network that aimed at continuing the work of Project Coast and the goals of the apartheid regime.
“The Air Force report quotes testimony from a Swiss intelligence agent who laundered money for Basson and who describes a worldwide conspiracy involving unnamed Americans. ‘The death of Dr. Ford and revelations of his South African involvement,’ the report states, ‘[raises] the possibility of a right-wing international network, [still] united by a vision of South Africa once again ruled by whites.’”
(“The Medicine Man;” Los Angeles Magazine; 7/2001; pp. 8–9.)
The possibility that this underground organization might unleash its biological terror on the United States was foreshadowed by some of the statements made by Ford and his associates.
“They say he [South African trade attaché Gideon Bouwer] raved about the ability to keep whites in power through biological warfare, and he hinted at being part of a separate agenda—some sort of extragovernmental conspiracy, like the one described in the Air Force report, that had plans to unleash biological agents worldwide on South Africa’s enemies if the need should ever arise. ‘Just be ready,’ Fitzpatrick remembers Bouwer warning him cryptically, then asking, ‘How fast could get your daughter out of the country if you had to?’ ‘I have to be honest,’ Fitzpatrick says. ‘Gideon could be a great guy. But there was something dangerous about him. And when he started talking about that master plan, about what a great service Ford had done for his country, and about getting out of the country, it gave me chills.”
(Ibid.; p .9.)
16. Ford’s alleged participation in the extragovernmental and apparently fascist underground milieu assumes added significance when evaluated against the post-apartheid “Third Force.” The “Third Force” was a powerful, deadly and (by those familiar with it) respectfully feared underground extension of the apartheid/Broederbond power axis. (As will be seen later on in this program description, Mandela’s fear that Project Coast and the “Third Force” might be connected was not without foundation.)
“In the end it was British representatives who decided to approach President Mandela, with a minimum of fanfare, to advise him that he was inheriting an ugly biological assassination program from the previous administrations. Mandela’s first reaction was: ‘Oh my God!’ He was initially terrified that the South African ‘Third Force’ elements, including such organizations as Eugene Terre’ Blanche’s ultra right-wing and fanatical AWB, might lay their hands on it.”
(Plague Wars; pp. 272–273.)
17. The “Third Force” was not a peripheral organization.
“The most determined of these whites came to be known as ‘The Third Force’. They comprised not the mad neo-Nazi right, but revanchist politicians and hard men in the military, and the military intelligence and civilian intelligence agencies, and the myriad covert action groups involved in fighting clean or dirty, internally or externally, to maintain white supremacy.”
(Ibid.; p. 266.)
18. The aforementioned Nico Palm described this post-apartheid underground organization in more detail, referring to it as “Die Organisasie” and “the Spider Network.” With the links between the Third Reich and the Broederbond and with the vigorous postwar presence of Third Reich émigré elements in the Third Reich, it seems probable that “Die Organisasie” retains connections to the Underground Reich.
“Palm spoke enigmatically of ‘Die Organisasie,’ a pulp fiction nom de guerre (which he calls, even more melodramatically, the ‘Spider Network’). It is a group of white South Africans who wait patiently for he demise of the ANC government and a return to the old days. They are not the mad pseudo-Nazis of the far right, but something far more organized, well financed, and patient. Other people know them as ‘The Third Force.’ We are to hear of them time and again from ex-soldiers like Nico Palm all the way up to South Africa’s deputy defense minister, Ronnie Kasrils. Significantly, files have also been opened by MI5 in potentially significant union of like-minded South African right-wingers. All of them are ex-pats now living in the United Kingdom, who may support the destabilization of any black South African government.”
(Ibid.; p. 250.)
19. Those familiar with “Die Organisasie” regard it with a mixture of fear and respect.
“It is with in this context that Gert now raises the question of Die Organisasie. He is clearly apprehensive of its power, and it is the only moment he appears truly concerned. ‘These are people who take no prisoners,’ mutters Nico [Palm]. Gert grimly nods his head.”
(Ibid.; p. 254.)
20. Dr. Larry Ford’s associate and supervisor in Project Coast—Wouter Basson—was no stranger to “Die Organisasie.”
“We recall there was, in the documents found at his [Basson’s] home, a fax from Britain. It stated that should Basson ever find himself in trouble—real trouble—there was a safe house ready for him not half-an-hour from London. All he had to do was to make his own way to Heathrow. The signature on the fax had been whited out. In fact, the message had been sent by a former Rhodesian/South African citizen who now lives and works in West London, who was once very close to Basson, and worked with him on the biological warfare program. He is ex-Special Forces, and linked to Die Organisasie. Now he is a businessman, married with family, whose permanent residence is in London.”
(Ibid.; p. 281.)
21. The final element of discussion concerns Basson’s apparent connections to “Die Organisasie.” Juergen Jacomet—a former Swiss intelligence operative who had worked with Basson—reflected on the motives for Basson’s involvement in an “Ecstasy” deal.
“So what was Basson up to that night? He says simply that he was framed. Another version has that he did it purely for personal gain; there is a third explanation, that it was a mixture of personal gain and helping to raise funds for the Third Force, of which Basson is considered to be a member.”
(Ibid.; p. 277.)
“Basson’s possible connections with the Third Force were elliptically referred to by Juergen Jacomet, the former Swiss military intelligence agent who worked with Basson on money-laundering aspects of Project Coast in Europe . . .”
(Idem.)
22. The program details Jacomet’s relationship with Basson and the apartheid regime.
“In fact, back in the mid-1980’s, the Swiss agent had first worked with General Lothar Neethling, South Africa’s Police Forensic chief, delivering arms to South Africa, in an extensive sanctions-busting arrangement. Neethling introduced Jacomet to Basson, and the two men became friends. Basson often visited Jacomet at his Berne home. Eventually, Jacomet traveled to South Africa on several occasions to help Basson and Neethling in the dirty wars of the 1980’s.”
(Idem.)
23. Jacomet hypothesizes that Basson would not have engaged in the Ecstasy deal for profit.
“Now, sitting in a quiet West London garden on an early spring day in 1998, Jacomet relaxes with coffee and cigarettes and discusses the arrest of Basson and the Ecstasy allegations. He scoffs at the prospect of his friend being a profiteering drug dealer. ‘It makes absolutely no sense if you know him. It makes no sense tat he would mix with street dealers. If it happened at all, there must be a higher interest.’ Such as? ‘It might be to procure money to support a certain group which represents the interests of South Africa and wants the return of a white-dominated government.’”
(Ibid.; pp. 277–278.)
24. In discussing the Third Force, Jacomet expresses the same fear of the organization that we have already witnessed.
“Jacomet, now nervous, is pressed to expand a little. ‘There is a group of people here in London, he says. ‘One could call them the friends of South Africa. They have it in mind to see a strong white South Africa again. There are American connections too. [Emphasis added.] They need funds, and it is possible that the drug business has helped them. You know, it would really be very foolish of me to talk more about this. They are serious people.’ Jacomet searches for the popular expression, and, remarkably, finds the same aphorism used by Gert about the same people. ‘They don’t take prisoners,’ he says finally.”
(Ibid.; p. 278.)
25. In discussing the Third Force, Jacomet makes a reference to “an American” who worked with Basson. This may very well be a reference to Ford.
“And who are ‘they’? Jacomet mentions some well-known South African names—men previously associated with Third Force activities. He also refers to an American name known to Britain’s MI5 for his alleged involvement with Basson in money laundering, sanctions busting, and biological agents procurement. [Emphasis added.] Once again, Die Organisasie is mentioned in respectful tones, and, once again, the details remain scant and elusive. Jacomet remains silent.”
(Idem.)
26. The discussion concludes with rumination about the possibility that the Underground Reich, utilizing some of the apparent connections evident in the relationships of Dr. Larry Ford, might very well launch a bio-terror strike against the United States. Once again, one should note in that context that this broadcast was recorded on 9/11/2001.





The Medicine Man - Ebola, Project Coast and the Depopulation of Africa


Larry Ford was a regular at those gatherings, and the technology he handed over that day, Bouwer chortled, could prove invaluable: a sampler of virulent, designer strains of cholera, anthrax, botulism, plague, and malaria, as well as a bacteria he claimed had been mutated to be “pigment specific.” “Kaffer-killing germs,” Bouwer confided, using the derogatory Afrikaans term for blacks. “Dr. Ford has done my country a great service.”





The Assassination of Dr. David Kelly of MI6 and Porton Down has deep roots




Dr David Kelly knew too much and died rather mysteriously.

Police have now admitted that the following objects found with his body did not have fingerprints on them:

His mobile phone

A watch

The knife he allegedly used to slash his wrist

The packs of pills he is said to have overdosed on

A water bottle

A secret file of evidence was submitted to the Hutton inquiry by Thames Valley Police.

The contents remain secret.

But 'the cover is publicly available and reveals that the codename for the investigation was Operation Mason.'

This has given rise to 'rumours of a freemasonry angle'.

The start time of Operation Mason is given as 2.30pm on Thursday July 17.

That was at least half an hour BEFORE Dr Kelly set off from his home on his fatal walk.

And, it is nearly ten hours before Dr Kelly's wife rang the police to sound the alert over her missing husband.


The Medicine Man

July, 2001
From Los Angeles Magazine
By Edward Humes

LARRY FORD WAS A BRILLIANT SCIENTIST BENT ON SAVING THE WORLD FROM DISEASE AND MISERY BUT IT WASN’T THE IRVINE DOCTOR’S LAB WORK THAT SPARED THE MOST LIVES. IT WAS HIS SUICIDE.

THE MEETING AT THE BEVERLY HILLS MANSION OF THE SOUTH African trade attache was unusually secretive, but Peter Fitzpatrick still managed to witness it, peering from an adjacent room through a massive shared fireplace. He watched as Niel Knobel, deputy surgeon general of South Africa — the white-ruled, apartheid South Africa of 1986 — met Larry Ford, a noted Los Angeles gynecologist and infectious disease specialist with an unofficial subspecialty: biological and chemical warfare. The two spoke in hushed tones, then Ford, a devout Mormon who volunteered his services to missionaries and Boy Scout troops, passed over a hefty black satchel. The meeting came to a close. Later Fitzpatrick sat down with the boisterous trade attache, Gideon Bouwer, who could not resist explaining in his thick Afrikaans accent what had just happened.

The white minority government of South Africa was in those years locked in a bloody struggle with its black citizens, willing to do anything to stay in power. Bouwer’s role was to thwart the U.S. trade embargo on technology and expertise coveted by the apartheid regime; Fitzpatrick, a young actor, glib and personable, was part of Bouwer’s informal embargo-busting team, making sure the parties at the mansion were well attended by the well-connected.

Larry Ford was a regular at those gatherings, and the technology he handed over that day, Bouwer chortled, could prove invaluable: a sampler of virulent, designer strains of cholera, anthrax, botulism, plague, and malaria, as well as a bacteria he claimed had been mutated to be “pigment specific.” “Kaffer-killing germs,” Bouwer confided, using the derogatory Afrikaans term for blacks. “Dr. Ford has done my country a great service.”

Fitzpatrick clinked glasses with Bouwer and left, then called his handler at the FBI, where he served as one of two informants planted at South Africa’s Los Angeles consulate. He told the FBI everything; yet, he says, nothing was done. According to Fitzpatrick, the deputy surgeon general flew off with his suitcase full of death. “Why didn’t you guys stop him?" he later asked his handler. The agent just stared at him.



FIFTEEN YEARS PASSED. APARTHEID WAS DEAD. THE FBI HAD long since lost interest in its old informant, and Peter Fitzpatrick was sitting on his couch talking with his wife, the television set muted as the evening flashed by. Then something on the screen caught his eye: a grainy photo of a jut-jawed, narrow-eyed, round-shouldered man he hadn’t seen in years — Dr. Larry Ford. He turned up the volume and heard a reporter explain how Ford, co-owner of an up-and-coming biotech firm, had become a prime suspect in the attempted murder of his business partner. That stunned Fitzpatrick, but what had him scrambling to his feet and reaching for the phone were images that followed Ford’s photo: policemen searching the doctor’s Irvine home — unprotected.

“Oh my God, they have no idea what they’re getting into,” Fitzpatrick exclaimed. It all came back to him then: Ford’s talk of bio-weapons and booby traps, his hoard of guns and explosives, not to mention the doctor’s claims of doing dirty work for the CIA — stories Fitzpatrick had once dismissed as a nerd’s Walter Mitty fantasies until he noted the FBI’s official hands-off policy with the suitcase of germs. “I’ve got to warn them,” he told his wife.

So for the first time in many years, Fitzpatrick called the FBI. And once again, no one there seemed interested in what he had to say.

WHEN A MASKED ASSASSIN PUT A BULLET into James Patrick Riley’s head in front of his office on February 28. 2000, the case at first unfolded as a classic story of greed and envy, a corporate power struggle between Riley, the voluble CEO and marketing whiz, and his partner, Dr. Larry Creed Ford, the visionary with big ideas and the scientific skills to carry them out.
Ford was working on a combination contraceptive and microbicide he and Riley named Inner Confidence,” a suppository that promised not only to revolutionize birth control but also to prevent HIV infection, AIDS, and almost every other sexually transmitted disease. Ford liked to say they were going to save the world — and get rich in the process. Their Irvine company, Biofem Inc., could capture annual sales worth some $400 million. Riley told investors. The profits, in turn, would fund Ford’s true passion of the past 12 years, a secret Biofem project to develop a superantibiotic derived from what he called “Unidentified Amniotic Fluid Substance.” He believed it was nature’s way of protecting embryos from disease, the reason HIV-negative babies can be born to HIV-positive mothers. Ford hoped to synthesize the substance, saving countless lives, and earning him a Nobel Prize along the way.

But Ford had come to resent his decade-long partnership with Riley, who had final say in every Biofem decision and who had the physician bound to a contract so sweeping — giving him a 50 percent share of any idea or product Ford might conceive — that one lawyer likened it to indentured servitude. The agreement snuffed out Ford’s attempts to make lucrative outside deals, and so, police and prosecutors have alleged, he decided Riley had to die.

Riley had just emerged from his blue Audi and was walking to Biofem’s offices on a Monday morning when the gunman approached and fired. A chance turn of the businessman’s head sent the bullet through his left cheek instead of his brain. “I have no doubt I would be dead if not for that,” Riley said recently, a faint, nickel-sized scar marking the bullet’s point of entry. After crumpling to the hot asphalt, he staggered back to his feet, blood gushing, pulled out his cell phone, and called the one person he knew could help — his friend and partner, Dr. Larry Ford. The doctor ran outside and applied pressure to the gaping hole in the side of the CEO’s face as they awaited an ambulance.

Within three days, however, Riley’s savior had become a prime suspect. After the first of several searches of his house — which turned up only documents — the 49-year-old gynecologist met for five hours with his lawyer, scribbling notes throughout the discussion. Then he returned home and retreated to his bedroom, where he carefully laid out a selection of firearms from his collection. He put a double-barreled shotgun in his mouth and pulled both triggers. His wife, Diane, heard the blast and the thump of his body on the floor and knew; she called the lawyer and the police without going up to see her husband. The authorities found beside him a rambling, nearly illegible five-page note — what he had been writing in the lawyer’s office — protesting his innocence. He had six different antidepressants in his system.

The Biofem case might have made the back burner then and there had Irvine police detective Victor Ray quit when his department and the FBI warned him to. But Ray, a former sonar technician on navy submarines, a job that requires patience and persistence, would not give up. He steered the investigation to Ford’s backyard, where men in Andromeda Strain suits would evacuate a neighborhood and haul away an arsenal of toxins, germs, plastic explosives, and guns. In the process they unearthed a trail that stretched all the way from the CIA to apartheid-era South Africa and Dr. Wouter Basson, the man who ran the country’s clandestine bioweapons program.

The question still plaguing federal, state, and local investigators is a simple but urgent one: What was Ford planning to do with his germs and bioweapons expertise? The discovery of militia-movement and racist literature among Ford’s papers has raised the possibility that he offered biological or chemical weapons to terrorist groups. Concerns have also mounted over a patented feature of his Inner Confidence suppository: the microencapsulation of beneficial bacteria. It turns out this architecture could double as an ideal delivery system for bioweapons, allowing otherwise fragile disease organisms to be seeded virtually anywhere. Ford, in essence, had patented the prescription for a perfect microscopic time bomb.

“That,” says Ray, “scares the hell out of everyone.”



ONE OF LARRY FORD’S FAVORITE STORIES ABOUT himself dated back to his teenage years, after he won first place in the International Science Fair in 1966 for his studies of radiation exposure. Awards from the Atomic Energy Commission and the defense department followed. Next came an invitation to continue his research in a government laboratory.

So there was young Larry in his buzz cut, canvas low-tops, and high-water pants in a military lab back east, starting a new set of experiments. He was giddy about the turn his life had taken — until he walked in one morning and found that, overnight, he had accidentally killed every lab animal in the facility.

“I thought I was in for it then, that I would be washing dishes the rest of my life,” Ford would say. “But when the general called me in, all he asked was, ‘Can you do it again?’” Ford did it again, and a longstanding affiliation with the government had begun.

The invitation to work in the government laboratory had come from a man Ford identified only as General Wyman. He liked to show people a framed photo of the general and himself (with Ford in an army uniform, though records show he was never in the military). This offer to an 18-year-old about to enter college did not seem all that unusual to Ford or his blue-collar parents. He had, after all, earned lab privileges at Brigham Young University in his hometown of Provo, Utah, at age 12, according to Riley.

Ford told the Rileys and others his subsequent work for the military and the CIA included research on biological and chemical weapons, consulting on Iraqi capabilities during the Gulf War, and sneaking into epidemic hot zones in Africa to gather samples of such killer organisms as the Ebola and Marburg viruses.

Victor Ray, a compact man with thinning hair who has been on the Irvine police force for ten years, initially discounted most of Ford’s claims as the nutty imaginings of an unbalanced genius. It’s not that Ray hadn’t handled unusual cases in the past. He was the detective assigned to the headline-grabbing case in which an “evil twin” allegedly plotted to murder her sister and take over her life.

But the bungled attempt on Riley’s life suggested something far more mundane, and quite a bit less, than the work of a CIA-trained operative. Almost any other time and place for a hit would have been better than the crowded commercial parking lot in front of Biofem’s offices in the Irvine Spectrum, which sits wedged in the busy “golden triangle” where the Santa Ana and San Diego freeways merge. An experienced hit man might have simply pulled up next to Riley’s car in an isolated location and opened fire on a caged target, Ray suggests. This guy, in his black clothes and mask, waited in a public place at ten in the morning for Riley to get out of his car, then shot him with a $70 Russian-made semiautomatic known for jamming, which probably explains why only one round was fired.

The hit man, described by witnesses as a slim and athletic man with blond hair peeking out of his ski mask, sprinted across the office plaza brandishing his gun, running directly in front of the Spectrum Bank branch below Biofem’s second-floor suite. Suspecting a robbery, bank employees locked their doors and watched the man jump through the side door of a silver Aerostar van.

Police traced the plates and the van to an old friend of Ford’s with a violent past, Dino D’Saach, who was arrested that night as the getaway driver and has since been convicted of attempted murder and conspiracy, crimes carrying a mandatory 26-year sentence. His cell phone records showed him talking to Ford immediately before and after the hit from a cell location near Biofem. (Biofem’s receptionist remembers seeing Ford on the phone at his office window just before the shooting, with a perfect view of Riley’s parking space.) Police found private Biofem correspondence fixed from Ford to D’Saach’s South-Central Los Angeles tax preparation business, along with hit-man manuals, photos of Riley’s parking spot, and a crude homemade silencer.

If the crime wasn’t enough to reject the CIA stories, Ray figured, there was Ford himself. Disheveled and disorganized, known for his painful lack of conversational skills ("He could light up a room just by leaving,” Fitzpatrick says), Ford came off as both a brilliant researcher and a childish eccentric. The only shoes he wore were black Converse All-Stars, no matter the occasion, and he was known to skip through hospital hallways, pepper his speech with expressions like yippee and okeydokey, and issue prescriptions with a trademark cliche, “Better living through chemistry!"

None of his friends or family, not even Riley, sitting in a hospital bed with his face a swollen pumpkin, thought Ford capable of murdering anyone. His wife and three college-age children — who declined to be interviewed for this article — saw only a devoted family man whose worst “sin” was a fondness for diet cola, a violation of Mormon prohibitions against imbibing caffeine.
“Everyone who knows him knows who he really was,” Ford’s eldest son, Larry Jr., told the Deseret News in Utah shortly after the suicide. “He was the most loving, giving, loyal person.” Larry Jr. suggested that his father killed himself not out of guilt but “out of love, because he wanted to protect his family from what was eventually coming.”

Ford graduated magna cum laude from BYU, published more than 65 articles, held numerous patents in medicine and biochemistry, had an international ob-gyn award named for him, and bulk a patient list that included doctors and a smattering of celebrities (although one, the late Margaux Hemingway, overdosed on barbiturates Ford provided).

“Look at his background,” says Dr. Hunter Hammill, an associate clinical professor at Baylor College of Medicine and a Biofem consultant, who served his medical residency with Ford at UCLA. “He was the chief resident. He was good. He was so bright, you’d ask him about a compound, he could describe for you the whole formula, how to build it, its structure — he had it memorized. He was the golden boy.”

But during his residency there was at least a hint that all was not quite right in Ford’s life. One night in a campus parking lot in 1978, a gunman opened fire on him. He let off five rounds, though only one struck Ford, square in the chest. He was saved by several cassette tapes he had stuffed into his breast pocket, just enough to deflect the small-caliber bullet, leaving only a bruise over his heart. There had been no robbery attempt. The doctor was evasive when questioned by police, and no one was ever arrested.

* * *

ONLY AFTER FORD’S SUICIDE DID INFORMANTS START coming forward. Ray and his sergeant, Tom Little, began hearing about an entirely different Larry Ford, a man who cheated on his wife, betrayed his partner, and bred super-germs and was willing to use them. This was the Larry Ford who formed a close bond with Dr. Jerry D. Nilsson, a gifted Anaheim general surgeon with extreme views and a penchant for trouble that quickly made him a suspect in the Riley shooting. Nilsson, who boasted of having worked as a special forces physician for the white minority government of Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, appears to have kindled Ford’s interest in supporting apartheid. At the time of Ford’s suicide, Nilsson was in the process of losing his license for sexual misconduct with patients, one of them a 14-year-old who allegedly became his lover for the next 15 years.

Whenever the two doctors were together, it was the charismatic Nilsson who made the most lasting impression. Now 72, the surgeon was a formidable presence even in late middle age. Tom Byron worked with Fitzpatrick as an FBI informant in the South African Consulate in the 1980s and spent time with both doctors. He describes Nilsson as “the monster with miracle hands,” a towering figure with a shaved head — Jesse Ventura as a skilled surgeon. “He was very fit, very muscular, the kind of guy who could knock you out with one punch,” Byron says. “He told me, `I’ve killed people in my lifetime, and I have no qualms about killing again.’ I would never cross that man.” Nilsson was not available for comment.

Nilsson had long worked with Ford to amass biological and chemical weapons, and both doctors stored them openly in their homes, his ex-lover told the FBI. She sued Nilsson and won a confidential settlement after accusing him of performing unnecessary surgeries on her, including cosmetic enhancement, without her permission. She was also treated by Ford and was one of several former patients who told Ray that the gynecologist used them as lab rats, deliberately making them ill in order to test his remedies. “If taking a life advances scientific knowledge,” Ford would tell her, “the sacrifice is well worth it.”

The detective spoke with a Los Angeles gun-shop manager, a longtime friend of Ford’s, who developed a complex of rare diseases, among them a chronic lung and immune system disease, sarcoidosis, that is extremely uncommon in every racial group but one: African Americans. The man is white, and he is convinced Ford had a hand in his ailment. There was a woman with cervical cancer whom Ford treated with an experimental drug that didn’t work; she later required emergency surgery to save her life. Other women, Ray learned, had been given prototypes of Inner Confidence that were never intended for human use. All of them fell ill with a variety of vaginal infections, he says.

“Riley was told there was no product, that it was still being developed, but I have one in a jar sitting in my office that Ford gave to a patient,” Ray says. “He was experimenting.”
More people came forward. A former business associate of Ford’s said that when a mistress broke up with Ford in the early 1980s, the doctor vowed to infect her with an “alpha bug,” promising “she will never be healthy or normal again.” Authorities talked to the woman and learned that she suffered from a mysterious and incurable malady that has caused debilitating vertigo for the past 14 years. She’s undergone two brain surgeries just to ease the symptoms. At least one other woman, who maintains that Ford drugged her against her will during a business lunch, has reported similar problems with chronic vertigo and complained of symptoms that resemble Gulf War Syndrome, except she was nowhere near the war.

State and county health officials, with help from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, interviewed many of these patients, but their investigation was limited to whether there was a public health risk, such as the threat of an epidemic. They found none and closed their inquiry, though the FBI still makes at a point to ask former patients of Ford’s if they were ever unconscious in his presence, something the complaining patients all have in common.

“We started to realize there was a lot more to Dr. Ford than we had first thought,” says Ray. “It began to look like there might be something to the stories he told, and that the attempt on Mr. Riley’s life was just the tip of the iceberg.”

In 1997 Ford’s long association with UCLA, the school where he had been a clinical professor and director of research for the Center for Ovarian Cancer, abruptly ended. He had been caught disposing of blood samples in a trash can in the middle of a chemistry lab instead of taking the biohazard precautions required by the university. Later he was spotted scraping petri dishes into a toilet, another health hazard. The school asked him to vacate the lab and never come back, according to Rick Greenwood, director of UCLA’s Office of Environment, Health, and Safety.

Greenwood, who knew Ford in graduate school, describes him as an arrogant, single-minded know-it-all incapable of admitting mistakes, as when he accidentally killed two rabbits while trying to extract blood from them, then insisted that it was the animals’ fault.

A biochemist who worked with Ford at both UCLA and Biofem says Ford also faked research results — what the science community calls “dry-labbing.” “I could never replicate his results when I would repeat his procedures,” he says. To be associated with Ford now, he explains, would be professional suicide, and he is unwilling to be identified in this article. “The sloppiness was unbelievable. His technique was awful. I ended up deciding I didn’t want anything to do with him.”

One of the most chilling stories Ray heard came from the owner of Chantal Pharmaceuticals of Los Angeles, a company that developed an antiwrinkle cream with Ford’s help. She told the FBI that Ford, angry with one of her partners, went into the man’s office carrying a cardboard box with a rabbit inside. He put the box on the man’s desk, pulled on latex gloves, removed a syringe from his pocket, and squirted two drops of a viscous amber liquid onto the rabbit’s shoulder. It immediately convulsed and died, blood pouring out of its nose and ears. Ford, never uttering a word, turned and left, the box still sitting on the desk.

* * *



RAY GOT CONFIRMATION OF THE DOCTOR’S GOVERNMENT ties three days after the case was opened and a few hours after Ford’s suicide. He had picked up Valerie Kesler, Ford’s research assistant at Biofem, for questioning. She met Ford while an undergrad at UCLA, and the two had been lovers for most of the past 18 years. The night of the shooting, she spent hours deleting Ford’s files from Biofem computers, according to James Riley’s wife, Pam, who is the company’s business manager. (Kesler’s attorney, John Kremer, says that any files that may have been deleted had nothing to do with the shooting.)

Kesler denied knowing anything about the attempt on Riley’s life. Later, however, her lawyer suggested officers exercise caution opening up a gym bag in the trunk of her car, which Ray had impounded. Kremer had been told that it might contain firearms and a knife dipped in ricin, a deadly toxin synthesized from castor beans. A drop in the bloodstream was all it took to kill. Ray and his superiors called in the FBI, whose Weapons of Mass Destruction Response Team is charged with dealing with biological and chemical threats.

According to Ray, the agent in charge of the team mocked the notion that Ford was connected to bioweapons research and the CIA. But with Ray insisting that the information seemed good, that it matched other accounts, the agent agreed to contact the FBI liaison to the intelligence agency. In about ten minutes a call came back: The CIA knew of Ford.

The CIA knows a lot of people, the agent laughed. They probably know my grandmother. But ten minutes later the liaison called again and said there was “high confidence that Ford had biological- and chemical-weapons knowledge and did, in fact, have the capability to coat the knife with a deadly toxin. Shortly after that a third call came in: Ford did work for the CIA, the chastened FBI official told the room full of cops.

There was no more laughing after that. The men in space suits took over. Searchers found an Uzi and another illegal firearm in the gym bag; the knife was plunged into decontaminating fluid before it could be tested, which allowed the authorities to make the calming announcement that they had found no dangerous substances in the car. But a jar of ricin turned up later in Ford’s home.

While this drama unfolded in Irvine, Peter Fitzpatrick was trying to get through to someone, anyone, at the FBI who would listen to his recollections of Ford’s involvement with biowarfare in South Africa. No one was available, so he went to the FBI’s bureau in West L.A., where he was turned away by the receptionist. “Basically,” says Fitzpatrick, “they said they didn’t know who the hell I was and that I should go.” Next he called the Orange County District Attorney’s Office and asked for the prosecutor assigned to the Ford case, but ended up trapped in voice mail. He left an exasperated message, then hung up.

The next day, to Fitzpatrick’s surprise, two FBI agents met at length with him to discuss his information about Ford, bioweapons, and South African surveillance. Then two things happened: First, the weapons team showed up to do another high-risk search and excavation of Ford’s home. They uncovered nearly a hundred firearms, most of them shotguns and rifles, 17 of them illegal automatic or semiautomatic weapons, including four Uzis, an M16, and a gangster-era Thompson submachine gun.

Ford had stowed the illegal weapons in six large plastic cylinders buried in his backyard, along with thousands of rounds of ammunition — something his family apparently did not consider unusual, though they were unaware that one canister contained a large supply of the powerful military explosive C-4. The plastic explosives were packed with blasting caps and secreted dangerously close to electrical wires. Some 52 homes and several hundred people had to be evacuated to the Hyatt Regency for three days (it was, after all, Irvine — no Red Cross sleeping bags in the school gym for this crowd).

At the same time, Detective Ray expressed interest in talking to Fitzpatrick and Byron in order to explore the South African angle, but he and his partner, Sergeant Little, were forbidden to do so by the bureau and forbidden to come near Ford’s house. Their department pulled the reins even tighter. “[They thought] we were crazy, we were imagining things,” Ray says. “They said we had been working too long without enough sleep. It stunk. But we were off the case.”

* * *

NOW A CLERICAL WORKER FOR A Beverly Hills law firm and an aspiring screenwriter, Peter Fitzpatrick was a television and stage actor in the mid 1980s when he struck up a friendship with Gideon Bouwer, the South African trade attache in Los Angeles. He had written Bouwer asking for help financing a hearing aid that Tom Byron, an out-of-work engineer friend, had thought up. The attache, always in the market for any piece of new technology to squeeze past the trade embargo, agreed to meet them.

Early into the meeting, Bouwer, an imposingly large man, began spouting racist rhetoric. Fitzpatrick didn’t blink, sensing this was a test of sorts. He leaned back in his chair, crossed his legs, and smiled at Byron. “You’re among friends,” he told Bouwer, and just like that, they were in.

The pair became regulars at the consulate and at the attache’s home, where senior officials from local defense contractors and pharmaceutical companies, along with minor celebrities, would frequent the parties, barbecues, and dinners Bouwer hosted to forge informal ties to get around the embargo. Each man was recruited independent of the other to feed information to the FBI but eventually learned of their mutual mission. Byron helped plant electronic surveillance devices for the bureau.

Both informants say that Ford, Nilsson, and Ford’s mistress, Kesler, were regular guests at Bouwer’s mansion, and Byron remembers encountering Dino D’Saach, the getaway driver, at several gatherings. Indeed, Ford and Nilsson’s connection to South Africa ran deep. The two doctors went on big-game hunts beginning in the early 1980s — about 20 stuffed trophies lined the walls of Ford’s home — and, as Ford and Nilsson told it, they did charity medical work there.
Later Ford began smuggling into the U.S. distilled human amniotic fluid collected by South African doctors for Ford’s antibiotic research. They would hide the biologically hazardous body fluids in wine and liquor bottles to avoid impoundment. Riley, in testimony in the D’Saach trial, described one trip in which a bottle of amniotic fluid broke inside a suitcase while in flight, creating a noxious odor that permeated the aircraft.

Ford and Nilsson were befriended by South African deputy surgeon general Dr. Niel Knobel. Ford began advising him on protecting troops from biological attack, as well as suggesting AIDS prevention programs in a country that today has the worst AIDS infection rate on earth — benign and praiseworthy endeavors that Knobel maintains had “no political agenda.” But the AIDS prevention program was for whites in the military, not blacks. A secret right-wing South African organization, the Broeder-bond, conducted studies around this same time that suggested the AIDS epidemic could make whites the majority in the future.

Since then, through the new government’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was formed to probe the abuses of apartheid, information has surfaced about a secret South African bioweapons program. Code-named Project Coast, it was run by another Ford friend and financial benefactor, Dr. Wouter Basson; Knobel had administrative oversight. Basson’s alleged ties to hundreds of poisonings and assassinations in South Africa and in the neighboring countries of Angola and Zimbabwe earned him the nickname Dr. Death in the South African press. 

Documents indicating he had arranged an offshore bank account for Ford were found in Ford’s papers after his death.

The commission uncovered evidence that whole villages, including an Angolan settlement of several hundred people suspected of harboring rebels, may have been decimated by Project Coast weapons. This finding parallels information Nilsson’s ex-girlfriend provided: She said Ford more than once boasted of wiping out an entire Angolan village during a civil war. (She claimed Ford had been talking with Nilsson in 1996 about obtaining a missile or bombing system from former Soviet bloc nations that might be used to deliver biological weapons.)

Project Coast scientists called to testify against Basson have said Ford was brought in to brief them on the use of biological weapons in mass attacks and discrete assassination, the latter through the contamination of ordinary items such as Playboy magazines and tea bags. One scientist involved with South African bioweapons development noted that Ford’s ideas — and arrogance — were not well received, and that his work was given little credence in the Project Coast lab. However, Ford continued to work with Basson and Knobel, who had a picture of him hanging in his den at the time of the suicide.

According to a recent U.S. Air Force Academy report on South Africa’s biological warfare program, Ford was part of a global network of scientists that Basson assembled to assist Project Coast. Whether that meant creating — or receiving and storing — toxins produced by the program is a matter of conjecture, the report suggests, as South African officials have been unable to account for all of the dangerous material produced over the years. The air force report quotes testimony from a Swiss intelligence agent who laundered money for Basson and who describes a worldwide conspiracy involving unnamed Americans.

“The death of Dr. Ford and revelations of his South African involvement,” the report states, “[raises] the possibility of a right-wing international network, [still] united by a vision of South Africa once again ruled by whites.”

In the wake of Ford’s suicide Fitzpatrick and Byron reminded a new set of FBI agents about the meeting between Ford and Deputy Surgeon General Knobel, in which the satchel of deadly germs was allegedly passed over to the South African — and about the fact that nothing was done to intercept Knobel as he returned to South Africa. Once again no explanation was offered. Byron suggested reviewing the surveillance recordings from the bugs he and Fitzpatrick helped plant so long ago. “You can get a blockbuster out of those, I’m sure.”

“Not even we can get those tapes,” he remembers the agent responding. “They’re sealed. National security.”

Matthew McLaughlin, spokesman for the FBI in Los Angeles, says the bureau’s policies bar him from confirming or denying Byron’s and Fitzpatrick’s accounts. Nor will he comment on their allegation that the government permitted Ford to illegally develop and traffic in bioweapons. 

McLaughlin does caution, however, that there are often reasons criminal activity is allowed to go on in order to preserve an investigation, and that no informant in any case has the whole picture. “We compartmentalize people we work with, and they are not privy to the breadth and width of a case,” he says. “They see the elephant’s toenail.”

Of course, Byron and Fitzpatrick say trade attache Gideon Bouwer was clear in their conversations 16 years ago about what had happened in the meeting with Ford. They say he raved about the ability to keep whites in power through biological warfare, and he hinted at being part of a separate agenda — some sort of extragovernmental conspiracy, like the one described in the air force report, that had plans to unleash biological agents worldwide on South Africa’s enemies if the need should ever arise.

“Just be ready,” Fitzpatrick remembers Bouwer warning him cryptically, then asking, “How fast could you get your daughter out of the country if you had to?"

“I have to be honest,” Fitzpatrick says. “Gideon could be a great guy. But there was something dangerous about him. And when he started talking about that master plan, about what a great service Ford had done for his country, about getting out of the country, it gave me chills.”

Niel Knobel has admitted meeting with Ford at the attache’s home in the period Fitzpatrick and Byron describe but denies any involvement with biological weapons.

The informants never found out what happened after that meeting between Ford and Knobel. Bouwer fell from favor less than a year later, apparently considered a security risk by his own government. He was recalled, and the visits by Ford and Nilsson to the consulate ended, as did Byron’s and Fitzpatrick’s work there. Bouwer died ten years ago in South Africa.

Looking for answers, Fitzpatrick recently used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain his FBI file. All but the captions were redacted from the small ream of reports detailing his information about Ford and the South Africans. But those captions clearly show one thing: Whatever Fitzpatrick told his handler was immediately forwarded to FBI headquarters in Washington, and then it was dispatched to the CIA.

* * *

VICTOR RAY AND TOM LITTLE WERE BROUGHT BACK on the Ford case after a week, once it became clear that he had not been off-base about a possible CIA connection and that he had developed sources the FBI wanted — sources he wasn’t going to give up unless there was mutual cooperation.

After some initial tug-of-war the Irvine police and the FBI are working well together, Ray says, but there have been disagreements. He could only get to Byron and Fitzpatrick through an L.A. Times reporter whom Fitzpatrick had called, rather than through the FBI, which declared them off-limits. And it is Ray, not the FBI, who has kept pushing to widen the investigation, expanding it to other suspects and states, securing out-of-town search warrants the FBI said couldn’t be obtained, locating a key witness the FBI believed to be dead. It appears that Irvine’s small police department is the main reason an international investigation is now under way, one that started with an Orange County grand jury probe and that now appears headed for a federal grand jury.
So far the only public charges have revolved around Riley’s shooting. Besides D’Saach’s attempted-murder conviction, Kesler has been charged with weapons violations for the guns found in her car. She remains a suspect in the shooting, as does Nilsson, whose home was searched but who has not been charged. The gunman remains unidentified.

Biofem, meanwhile, is still trying to recover from the loss of Ford. The Unidentified Amniotic Fluid Substance project, which Riley only reluctantly admitted existed when called to testify against D’Saach, may well die without Ford. Inner Confidence is moving forward, but FDA clinical trials, which were supposed to have begun by now, have been postponed. Investors can’t be happy about the revelations concerning Ford, and Riley fears the delay has opened a window to rival products, since interest in microbicides as a means of battling HIV has grown intense in the last year or two.

The search of Ford’s house unearthed more than 260 containers of biological material, most of it in a refrigerator in Ford’s garage, along with the jar of ricin, the substance Kesler said the knife had been dipped in. Authorities found it in his family room. Botulism, which produces one of the deadliest toxins known, was recovered from a refrigerator at Biofem, stored by Ford next to a bottle of ranch dressing.

These discoveries were followed by reassuring statements to the public that the doctor’s illegal brew of germs was aged and posed little danger. But internal FBI reports state there was a genuine public health hazard, and Dr. Mark Horton, head of public health services for Orange County, concedes that, had the materials been handled without great care, they could have imperiled the community.

It turns out that the assurances were based on the testing of only 16 of the samples — there has been no official accounting of what was in the rest. The public statements did not even mention the botulism.

Ray has no doubt that the danger was severe. He notes that many of the biological samples in Ford’s home were stored next to a jar of what was suspected to be old and chemically unstable ether. “If that ether had been exposed to a higher temperature, it would have exploded,” he says, “and Larry Ford’s chemistry set would be blown all over Irvine.”

His disgust over the case almost led him to leave it for good last summer. He was away all the time, his wife was complaining; the stress was enormous. “It really made me think ... what in the hell was going on and how could the government have stood by while Ford ... did these things? I really wondered if there was anything that I could or should do.”

He took two trips to Washington, D.C., that summer, the first to wander alone among the monuments, the Arlington cemetery, the Vietnam and police officers’ memorials, looking for inspiration. During their second trip, Ray and his wife decided he should continue the case. “It’s hard to stand among so much history of personal sacrifice and say, ‘I’m more important,’” he says.

But reality was not far behind. While at the capital, he tried to make contact with officials at the South African embassy, to pass on his information about Ford and Dr. Death’s financial dealings and offshore accounts. Prosecutors in South Africa had been desperately trying to hold their case together, Ray knew, and the records he had found could have helped. But no one, he sighs, was the least bit interested.