Gulf War Chemicals Found, Congress Told

Two military chemical-weapons specialists told Congress on Tuesday that their units made confirmed detections of nerve agents in the vicinity of U.S. troops in Kuwait during the 1991 Persian Gulf War but that their superiors never followed up on their reports.

Testifying before a House subcommittee, Army Maj. Michael F. Johnson and Marine Corps Gunnery Sgt. George J. Grass said that in both cases they took pains to verify the detections and to make sure they were reported up the chain of command.

Both men said, however, that the detections were ignored at the time and that no one from the Pentagon hierarchy ever questioned them about what they had discovered, even though they disclosed the incidents publicly before a presidential advisory panel last year.

Their stories appeared likely to add to doubts about the Pentagon’s insistence that all such detections by U.S. chemical teams either could not be confirmed or were later proven inaccurate.

Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.), the subcommittee chairman, said that the incidents bolstered suspicion by lawmakers that top military officials--and the Pentagon’s civilian leaders--simply were not aggressive enough in pursuing the mystery of Persian Gulf War illness.

“You are all voices in the wilderness that nobody is listening to,” he said.

The controversy arose because many of the Gulf War veterans who have been suffering from illnesses that they believe they acquired during the 1991 war have contended that their illnesses stemmed from exposure to toxic chemicals in Iraq, Saudi Arabia or Kuwait.

Although the Pentagon has begun investigating those allegations more fully, top Defense Department officials have insisted for years that they knew of no such exposures. They have said that virtually all such detections by chemical warfare teams have proved to be false.

On Tuesday, however, Johnson and Grass insisted that they had taken steps to verify the detections they reported and told lawmakers that they heard of dozens of other instances in which U.S. chemical specialists found firm evidence that toxic agents were present.

Johnson headed a special chemical weapons team that joined forces with a British unit in investigating a tankful of mustard agent at a girls’ school in Kuwait City in August 1991 while Grass said that his unit found a nerve agent in a freshly cleared minefield in the area.

Both headed teams that were operating “Fox” vehicles--specially equipped trucks designed to sample the soil in any given area and run it through a spectrometer to detect possible chemical contamination. Their crews were carefully trained for the job.

They said that the incidents involved both traces of toxic agents--not large enough to pose a serious threat to large numbers of U.S. troops--as well as “lethal” concentrations. In each case, they said, they took pains to report their findings to their superiors.

Their testimony came as the British Defense Ministry, under pressure from critics, appointed an independent medical panel Tuesday to study similar claims by British veterans of the Persian Gulf War.

Like those in the United States, the British veterans have been suffering from a broad array of ailments, from muscle aches to memory loss. As in the United States, however, the British have yet to find a firm link to anything their troops encountered in the Persian Gulf region.

Many sick veterans believe that the military’s pest-control program--which used organophosphates to, among other things, delouse prisoners of war--may be responsible for their conditions.

The Defense Ministry also formally apologized to the House of Commons for providing “flawed” information over the past few years in response to inquiries about the extent to which British troops were exposed to potentially hazardous pesticides during the Gulf War, the Associated Press reported from London.

Johnson and Grass, who said that they also have experienced some symptoms of the disease, were joined in their testimony by Marine Corps Maj. Randy Hebert, who has contracted amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

In a dramatic, emotional appearance in which his slurred speech had to be translated by his wife, Hebert told the panel that he believes the nerve disorder he had discussed is “due to low-level chemical exposure over an extended period.”

All three men still are on active duty and appeared with the permission of military authorities.

The Pentagon disclosed last June that it had discovered a group of U.S. soldiers assigned to destroy an Iraqi weapons bunker near the village of Khamisiyah in 1991 unwittingly blew up rockets laden with sarin nerve agent, possibly exposing as many as 20,000 troops.

The Defense Department has been trying to put together a computer model that may provide a clue as to how many U.S. troops actually were affected. Although sarin is considered deadly, no U.S. soldiers died as a result of the incident.

The Pentagon announced Tuesday that it had begun seeking medical researchers to conduct a new batch of studies on the effects of low-level exposure to chemical agents--part of its latest response to the Persian Gulf illness controversy.

The contracts are part of a $15-million research program that the department plans to launch over the next several months. In addition, the Pentagon has revamped its entire process for dealing with Gulf War illness and is retracing earlier inquiries that it has made.