Chemical Arms, Ailing Gulf GIs Not Linked, Aspin Says : Military: Pentagon cites industrial pollutants as possible cause. Officials put the number of cases in the thousands.

Defense Secretary Les Aspin acknowledged Wednesday that low levels of chemical warfare agents were detected during the Persian Gulf War but he strongly denied that evidence exists showing the chemicals are responsible for mysterious illnesses that have befallen a growing number of U.S. veterans.

Instead, Pentagon officials now theorize that the veterans--who are complaining of cancerous tumors, soreness and nausea--actually may have been exposed to small amounts of industrial chemical pollutants, possibly blowing from large tanks used to store fertilizer and ammonia in Saudi Arabia.

In addition, the Defense Department announced that it was sharply increasing its figures for the number of veterans who have come down with the baffling symptoms, raising the number from 250 to as high as “into the low thousands.”

Several members of the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, to whom many ailing veterans have turned for help, said that more still needs to be done to find a cause for the illnesses and a cure and they have scheduled several rounds of hearings for later this month.

“The Pentagon just doesn’t get it,” said Rep. Lane Evans, an Illinois Democrat who chairs the Veterans Affairs oversight and investigations subcommittee. “Thousands of veterans are suffering without knowing what ails them.”

Fifty Persian Gulf War veterans appeared at a special Capitol Hill hearing Tuesday, many of them complaining about chronic fatigue, excessive vomiting and other symptoms.

Some had lost their hair. Some could not walk without canes. And one needed a wheelchair. One woman described how her once-physically fit son had died. A young veteran told how his wife is now ill, too, and said that their daughter was born with deformed feet.

Aspin, in announcing the Pentagon’s “preliminary findings” Wednesday, pledged that it will do everything it can to find the exact cause of the ailments.

“This is a subject that we take very, very seriously,” the secretary said. “The health question is the most important unanswered question of the war. We are determined to get to the bottom of these health problems.”

At the heart of the controversy is a report from the Czechoslovakian government, which sent special chemical agent detection teams to the war area and found low-level amounts of contamination caused by an allied bombing of an Iraqi chemical weapons facility in northern Iraq.

Aspin and John M. Deutch, undersecretary of defense for acquisition and technology, said that the Pentagon, after reviewing the Czech findings, has agreed that low-level amounts of chemical agents were in the air.

But the Pentagon disagreed that the contamination came from a bombed Iraqi chemical weapons facility.

The Pentagon officials also pointed out that the winds the day of the bombing were blowing away from the nearest U.S. troops, who were several hundred miles away.

“The best records that we have available indicate that the wind was not blowing in the direction that could have allowed for the allied bombing of an Iraqi chemical facility to be the explanation here,” Aspin said.

“So what we have here is another mystery,” he said. “Our findings to date establish no linkage between the detections reported by the Czechs and the illness reported by some of the veterans.”

Asked if he is confident that Iraq did not use chemical weapons during the war, Aspin said:

“We’re making no definitive conclusions at this time. Let me say that at this point, we cannot associate these (chemical agent concentrations) with any recorded Iraqi activity at the time.”

Deutch said that troops from other allied countries have not reported similar symptoms.

And after the war, he said: “There was a thorough search of all of this area, and at no place south of Basrah (in southern Iraq) was there any location of any chemicals of any type anywhere in that region.”

He also said there were about 13,000 chemical agent detectors used by U.S. forces during the war and that none showed any harmful concentrations.

“If a cloud was coming down or was anywhere else in the area, we believe that it would have been promptly seen.”

Pentagon officials said they are continuing to search for a definitive answer to the veterans’ problems.

Major Gen. Ronald R. Blanck, commanding general at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, said that 10,000 Gulf War veterans have voluntarily signed a registry so that they can be examined to determine if they have any symptoms.