Pentagon’s Late Chemical Arms Finding Assailed

The Defense Department’s top health official, facing withering criticism from Congress, sought to explain Wednesday why it took five years for the Pentagon to admit that thousands of U.S. troops may have been exposed to chemical weapons in the Persian Gulf War.

In a tense hearing on Capitol Hill, members of the Senate Intelligence and Veterans Affairs committees chided Dr. Stephen C. Joseph, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, about the turnaround--with one senator calling for a “shake-up” of Joseph’s office.

In a broadside typical of the prevailing sentiment on both panels, Sen. John D. “Jay” Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), who called for the reshuffling, told Joseph that for five years “the official response [to complaining veterans] has been, ‘It’s all in your head--no problem.’ ”

Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), a member of the Intelligence panel, called the Defense Department’s earlier rejection of the possibility that some veterans were suffering from chemical weapons-related illnesses “a shameful campaign of obstruction and delay.”

The department had insisted for years that U.S. troops had not been exposed to toxic weapons during the Gulf War but last week it disclosed that at least 5,000 American soldiers may have been subjected to low-level exposure while blowing up an Iraqi weapons cache in 1991.

Joseph and Dr. Kenneth W. Kizer, undersecretary for health at the Department of Veterans Affairs, said that the administration now is convinced that there is a probability U.S. troops were exposed and would reassess the way it handles complaints about Gulf War disease.

Joseph said that, under accepted medical procedures, there previously was no way to link the veterans’ complaints to toxic agents unless it could first be determined that they actually had been exposed to chemical weapons and, second, that they developed symptoms immediately afterward.

He said the discovery this summer that Army units had participated in the destruction of two Iraqi chemical weapons sites would prompt the department to alter fundamentally the way it approaches the whole issue. “It’s a major watershed change,” he said.

The department announced Wednesday that it would reassess the studies it has done on the veterans’ complaints, broaden its clinical investigation to include the troops exposed to chemical weapons and increase its spending for research on low-level exposure by $5 million.

Officials said the increase will boost total federal outlays on such research to $15 million. The defense authorization bill for fiscal 1997 that President Clinton signed into law earlier this week requires the Pentagon to spend at least $10 million on such studies.

The administration went to considerable lengths Wednesday to explain why it did not discover until this year that U.S. troops may have been exposed to Iraqi chemical weapons in the Gulf War, even though a United Nations commission first raised the possibility in 1991.

Joseph told the panel that, incredible as it may seem to outsiders, the U.N. report--which was vaguely worded--initially was overlooked because intelligence officers had been primed to hunt for remaining Iraqi weapons bunkers rather than for ammunition that had been destroyed.

“It was submerged in the avalanche of information,” he said.

John E. McLaughlin, vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, which assesses analyses compiled by U.S. intelligence agencies, reminded the panel that the question of whether there might be a so-called Gulf War illness did not emerge until mid-1993.

As a result, officials said Wednesday, top administration officials did not really become aware of the possible exposure of U.S. troops until this summer, after the U.N. commission reinspected the area in Iraq and confirmed its earlier findings.

The CIA “was not brought into this issue until March of 1995,” McLaughlin said.

Besides broadening its investigation into the possibility that there may be a Gulf War disease, the Pentagon has asked the CIA to compile a computer model showing how far from the Iraqi bunkers the fallout from the explosions would have traveled.

McLaughlin said that the model, expected to be completed early in October, would help officials determine just how many U.S. troops might have been exposed to toxic agents in the incident.

The Pentagon said last June that as many as 400 U.S. troops may have been involved but its later discovery that there had been a second explosion--this time at an ammunition pit several miles from the bunker--prompted officials to raise the estimate to 5,000 or more.

Defense Department officials said that they expect that number to grow, although they are not sure yet whether it will be substantially more than current estimates. The figure refers to those who may have been exposed, not to the number who actually came into contact with toxic agents.

The Pentagon had insisted for some time that it was unable to find any specific military units that had any contact with toxic chemicals during the war, despite assertions by some service members that they suspected they had been exposed.

Officials have conceded that tests conducted by some Czech and French experts indicated that toxic agents might have been present in areas where U.S. troops were deployed but they have said that U.S. experts were unable to confirm the results.

Along with the extra money for research, the Pentagon announced Wednesday that it would launch special investigations into the events surrounding the destruction of the two Iraqi arms caches and into why U.S. officials did not act on the first U.N. report.