This blog has reported here and here on the export of the Bladerunner 51, a high-speed boat that holds the speed record for circumnavigating Great Britain, from South Africa to Iran. A recent story in South Africa’s Mail & Guardian reports that the Iranian Republican Guard has reverse-engineered the boat and is now manufacturing clones capable of launching missiles and torpedoes. The story also provides some interesting details with respect to a South African company co-owned by Willem Ehlers, a former official of the apartheid-era government of P.W. Botha, that was involved in the export of the boat to Iran.

As this blog noted earlier, the boat was in the possession of South African firm Icarus Marine. The Bureau of Industry and Security (“BIS”) first issued a Temporary Denial Order in January 2009 against Icarus in an effort to persuade the South African government to prevent the export. BIS argued that the boat was subject to U.S. jurisdiction because it was equipped with U.S.-made engines. Because the TDO was faxed to the South African government on a weekend, no one in South Africa took action and the boat was loaded onto an Iranian vessel and shipped to Iran.

Nothing else was done with respect to the shipment until June 28 of this year when Icarus, its owners, and a company called Scavenger Manufacturing (Pty) Ltd were placed on the BIS Entity List by the inter-agency End User Review Committee on the grounds that the individuals and entities had acted contrary to the national security and foreign policy interest of the United States. The M&G article now supplies the missing detail as to why Scavenger was added to the Entity List as a result of this transaction:

The M&G independently verified Scavenger’s central role in the transaction: shipping sources confirmed that it was the “shipper” of the speedboat — the formal term for the party responsible for the cargo — as it transited South Africa.

Scavenger tried to rebuff inquiries from the M&G by claiming that the boat was a “recreational craft” and that its export violated no South African laws or U.N. sanctions.

One of the owners of Scavenger, Willem Ehlers, was a navy commodore who was assigned by the South African Defense Department to P.W. Botha as his private secretary. When Botha was deposed in 1989, Ehlers became involved in arms-brokering, including brokering 80 tons of rifles, grenades and ammunition to the Hutus in Rwanda during the period of Hutu-led genocide in that country. Ehlers argues that he believed the shipment was destined for Zaire and not to the Hutus. Ehlers was also implicated in 1996 shipment of fuel to Angola during the period it was under U.N. sanctions, although he claims not to have been involved in that shipment other than requesting permission for the flights themselves.

Finally, the G&M article indicates that the South African government is now investigating whether the shipment of the boat to Iran violated South African export laws.

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