U.S. to Expand Probe of GIs’ Chemical Exposure

The Pentagon announced plans Tuesday to look into “dozens” of reported incidents involving possible exposure of U.S. troops to chemical weapons during the Persian Gulf War and to increase its investigative team from a dozen to 110.

Deputy Defense Secretary John P. White said the department will boost outlays for such activities to $12 million, up from $2 million, and will recruit experts ranging from intelligence officers to military operations specialists to serve as investigators.

At the same time, Pentagon officials said an initial survey of health records of several hundred U.S. soldiers who took part in the destruction of an Iraqi chemical weapons bunker at Khamisiyah in March 1991 showed no signs of illness resulting from any exposure that might have occurred.

The Defense Department is surveying 20,000 soldiers and veterans whose units may have been within a 31-mile radius of the explosion to see whether they suffered ill effects. Officials conceded that the initial finding, while encouraging, is not conclusive.

The announcement came on the eve of a meeting of a special White House panel that has criticized the Pentagon’s handling of the Gulf War illness issue and is preparing to call for an independent review of the dozens of incidents in question.

The group, known as the President’s Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses, is scheduled to take up a draft recommendation today concluding that the Pentagon’s credibility has been shattered and that the investigation should be handled by an independent body.

The Pentagon reshuffling, which had been in the works for several weeks, includes creating a high-profile investigative team inside the Defense Department charged with looking into military operations during the 1991 war and interviewing veterans on the issue.

The group, headed by Bernard Rostker, an assistant secretary of the Navy, is expected to broaden the department’s contact with veterans in an effort to learn more about the possible causes of the illnesses from which some Gulf War soldiers have suffered.

The incidents that the Pentagon will investigate include reports of dozens of alarms sounded by chemical weapons-detection devices during the war--including several by Czech army poison-gas experts--as well as reports of chemical fallout from Scud rocket attacks.

The Defense Department has insisted that it already had investigated such incidents and was unable to confirm them. But officials since have conceded they did not check them out adequately with either the unit commanders or the soldiers on the ground.

That, in turn, has led some veterans to suggest that the Pentagon--and, later, the Central Intelligence Agency--have been covering up the facts in the case, presumably to save billions of dollars in medical costs needed to treat any victims of chemical attacks.

While the department has not changed its previous assertions that Iraq did not fire chemical weapons at U.S. troops during the war, it has admitted that some American soldiers who destroyed Iraqi rockets at Khamisiyah may have been exposed to sarin, a nerve gas.

White conceded at a news conference that the Pentagon may have been deficient earlier in not having interviewed enough veterans about what happened. But he insisted that none of the other incidents appears to be of the potential magnitude of the blowup at Khamisiyah.

“We do not know of any other incident of the caliber or the character of Khamisiyah--none at all,” he told reporters. At the same time, he promised that officials would be open-minded. “As long as there are . . . other incidents, we will look at them,” he said.

Although most Gulf War veterans have not suffered any debilitating symptoms, some have reported illnesses ranging from aching joints and short-term memory loss to digestive problems and respiratory difficulties. Physicians have said that there is no single cure that works.

U.S. officials said that a pair of new studies by Navy and Department of Veterans Affairs physicians shows that the hospitalization rates and death rates of Gulf War veterans have been no higher than those of active-duty military personnel who did not take part in that war.

The studies are expected to be made public Thursday by the New England Journal of Medicine.

Besides expanding its investigating team, the Defense Department is more than doubling its budget for financing government-sponsored medical research relating to Gulf War illness.

The Pentagon announced earlier this month that it would spend an extra $5 million on researching the possible effects of low-level exposure to chemical weapons and $10 million more on studies of chemical hazards. The department already spends $12 million for general research.

The addition of Rostker’s group is a new element in the department’s program for dealing with Gulf War-linked illnesses, enabling it to investigate reports of possible exposure and to obtain more feedback from former commanders and soldiers.

Dr. Stephen Joseph, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, will continue to head the department’s medical investigation of Gulf War-related illnesses. The Pentagon already has conducted clinical studies of 20,000 veterans but so far has found no cause.