Special Hearings — Chemical And Biological Warfare Hearings — 1998-06-18

DANIEL PETER KNOBEL: Well Mr Vally in the case of this project is was reasonably clearly conveyed to me by my predecessor and it is also contained in some of the documents that have been made available including the briefing that I gave to the TRC initially. I think I did testify the previous round of testimony that the problem that you have with such a project it is a very complexed project. It has lots of technical aspects. It has complexed financial arrangements. It has very complexed security arrangements. And this necessitated in this case that the project was managed by a committee with all due respect a committee is not always the best structure to control any project. However in this case it meant that the chairman of the co-ordinating management committee who was the Chief of the Defence Force like the vice-chairman who was a certain General who was also the responsible functionary because the project officer came out of the medical service. And because the medical service as an independent arm was chosen to deal with the scientists and deal with the subject matter, namely chemical and biological defence.
 Both those functionaries, the chairman and vice-chairman was totally dependent on the sub-committees that existed within the co-ordinating management committee. Which meant a division of responsibilities and the position of the project manager was to try and co-ordinate those functions and bring them together. 
 But I stress again on the financial side the complexity of the front companies and how you structure their financial arrangements and how do you structure the payment of accounts overseas in such a way that it cannot be traced back to the client which is the Defence Force was to a very large extent planned and approved and suggested and controlled by Chief of Staff Finance. And in particular the name came out this morning on that document Brigadier Koertzen who is very familiar with the arrangement of such financial arrangements where you have to transfer money overseas and then allow it to flow to different accounts so that it cannot be traced back and so on.
 On the security side the same situation arose where the Chief of Staff Intelligence through his sub-structures would look after the security arrangements in such a way likewise that neither the project officer nor the project nor the Defence Force is compromised or in any way revealed in transactions that take place. Which is after all as came out clearly this morning transactions which are geared to overcome the situation of isolation and sanctions and all that sort of thing.
 I think the third sub-committee I think has become clear to you all which is really the technical committee. The research development at grassroots level. The handling of the scientists, the co-ordination of their activities and also keeping it apart, keeping it separate, that was the direct responsibility of the Project Officer.
 In the co-ordination role of the Project Manger, it was to ensure and to represent to the Chief of the Defence Force that all three these functions were brought together in budgetary allocations in presentations of the kind that I've been making to all the various Ministers and all the various parliamentary groups, etc., etc., and to do so with total reliance on those three sub-structures.  
 You are correct if you say that the details contained within those presentations or briefings that refer to the scientific or the technical aspects, that had to be provided by the Project Officer.  The privatisation, commercialisation phase, all of that was planned by the Project Officer in conjunction with the Chief of Finance at that time, considering the various company regulations that existed and that is why, you will have noticed, that is why all the documents of financial transactions have had to be kept and they were kept, none were destroyed as far as I'm aware of.  Those are the 14 trunks that I've referred to before.  
 The Company Act provides that you cannot destroy that, whereas other documents in terms of regulations within the Defence Force and in terms of directions that we got either from the Chief of the Defence Force or from the Minister were in fact destroyed or so, that's my information.  It certainly is a bit frustrating that  you don't have that type of information available today.
 Certainly, when I took over and when I became aware of the financial problems I started keeping every single document that was under my control because I realised the important of, for example the support of the OSEO investigation.  
 At the same time I have to admit to you, the issue of privatisation and commercialisation and whether it was in the best interest of the country and whether it was a reasonable way of doing it, if you look at it today you might think that it was not a very good way of structuring that whole process but the fact of the matter was, at the time with the security constraints, with the guidelines that we had from our own Minister at the time and the fact that the Auditor General was closely involved in the whole negotiating process about how that process should be structured, the State Attorneys were involved in that and ultimately the Minister of Finance approved it along with the Minister of Defence.  
 Quite frankly it was so complex that I was not capable of dealing with that on my own and I had to rely totally on Chief of Staff Finance.  To what extent the Project Officer had understanding and influence and control over that, I can really not tell you.  I think it was really the Chief of Staff Finances structure, how it should take place.
 It was so complex that even today at the request of the Parliamentary Committee on Public Accounts, the Joint Standing Committee, that have asked questions about that process, the answer to that as far as I know has not yet been provided for the Standing Committee.  It was given to the Auditor General to investigate and to take statements from everybody that was involved right from the beginning of the project.  In other words, they go back to Admiral Becker who was the First Chief of Staff Finance involved in the project, followed by Admiral Murray, followed by General Raubenheimer etc., etc.
 One of the difficulties is if you look at the, my notes, I can provide them if you want me to, if you look at the changeover in the positions of the members of the Co-ordinating Management Committee, we are now talking of about 25 individuals.  The Co-ordinating Management Committee consisted as I've said many times now, of the Chief of the Defence Force, the Surgeon General, Chief of Staff Finance, Chief of Staff Intelligence, Chief of the Army, later on the Commanding General Special Forces and later on the Chief of Staff Planning and so on.
 If you take the incumbents of those posts, from 1981 onwards we're talking about 25 different people and to preserve continuity within that as Project Manager, first of all my predecessor for the first eight years of the project and then myself for what turned out to be the next five years of the project, is extremely difficult and also to change a system which is working and which is producing results and giving what we're aiming to try and achieve through the objectives is virtually impossible.  You inherit a system that is working, that everybody is satisfied with it, with its shortcomings and to come in as a newcomer and now say that: "I'm not satisfied with this process, I want to reverse the whole process or change it or I want to re-evaluate it and so on", that I think is not possible.
 And I must say that this is one of the issues which to me became very difficult to handle and that is what I tried to explain this morning in my statement when I said that I found I could not really achieve the results and the answers that I wanted to achieve within the Defence Force alone.  I thought I had to get the permission to move outside.  I had already had the permission to work as closely as possible with the OSEO investigation and I did.  I have spent five years now giving documents and giving inputs at the OSEO investigation.  I'm the State witness for their entire case at this stage against Doctor Basson.
 I believe there are going to be more charges at a later stage and I will still take part in that entire process.  But at the same time the second component which I described this morning as being the second channel of command and control or what was described by National Intelligence as the unofficial programme, that as it emerged in the end of '92 if you like, and in as far as I am concerned the end of '93 with the demarche, that has resulted in an investigation mainly by National Intelligence but certainly by the Attorney General's office, in which I'm very closely involved and which in exactly the same way all these sort of documents that you are showing to me and other documents that have been found in the trunks and other documents that are official documents still today in the Defence Force, even the documents that are in the archives, are brought up and we look at them and we decide together where we can give comment on it.
 Likewise, there I'm very limited.  The fact that I'm limited is the fact that I wasn't involved in it to begin with until the realisation occurred in '93 and since then Mr Kennedy and I have been working absolutely together in every possible way in every respect and this is why my suggestion to the Commission was that it would be extremely important for the Commission to listen to the evidence of Mr Kennedy.