2 Fired CNN Producers Assail Repudiation of Their Nerve Gas Story

The two television producers who were fired over their story alleging the use of nerve gas by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War attacked CNN’s internal investigation of the report Wednesday, saying it was biased against them and that CNN management had succumbed to pressure from the military in retracting their story.

“This [internal report] suggests that it is designed to absolve CNN management . . . of any reponsibility,” producers April Oliver and Jack Smith charged in a 78-page rebuttal to the report released during a seminar at the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center here. “It virtually ignores much of the most important information and attempts to discredit the many important sources that we had for our story.”

Earlier this month, CNN and Time magazine retracted the nerve gas story--which aired in June on the CNN newsmagazine “NewsStand” and then was published in Time--after an investigation by noted 1st Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams criticized the reporting and said that the evidence cited was not sufficient to support the allegations.

The comments from Oliver and Smith came a day after the Pentagon issued the results of its own investigation of the story. Citing declassified documents and interviews with special forces soldiers, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen said there was “absolutely no evidence” that, as the TV story alleged, U.S. special forces used deadly nerve gas to kill American defectors on a mission in Laos in 1970.

Despite the Pentagon report and denials by key interview subjects in their TV report, Smith said, “we stand by our story.”

“This was a ‘black’ [secret] operation,” Oliver said, “and people who talked to us . . . have been under very strong pressure from the military community.”

Smith and Oliver also said that CNN News Group President Tom Johnson and CNN/USA President Rick Kaplan were concerned about complaints about the story from former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger and retired Gen. Colin L. Powell.

“Rick said, ‘This is not a journalism problem--it’s a PR [public relations] problem,” Oliver said, referring to the specter of a congressional hearing on CNN’s story.

Attorney Abrams and a CNN spokesman rejected the producers’ claims.

“I have personal knowledge that CNN retracted the story not because of any pressure from the outside but because of my report,” Abrams said in an interview. “To suggest that my report was designed to somehow absolve CNN is preposterous.”

CNN spokesman Steve Haworth said that the cable network stood by the Abrams report and its decision to retract the story.

“I won’t deny that Rick Kaplan made a statement somewhat like” what Oliver reported, Haworth said. “But it was early on [in the controversy], in the context of saying, ‘I can’t go to Congress with 200 interviews, most of them anonymous--we need to have more.’ ”

Haworth would neither confirm nor deny that an offer had been made to former Capt. Eugune McCarley, who led the Operation Tailwind mission cited in the CNN story, but he said that CNN did reach a monetary settlement with retired Adm. Thomas Moorer, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff whom Oliver said had confirmed the usage of nerve gas.