ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, November 2, 1996 TAG: 9611040061
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: The Washington Post
The CIA held a rare on-the-record news conference Friday to denounce as untrue two former employees' allegations that the agency covered up Iraqi poison gas attacks and other cases where U.S. troops were exposed to chemical weapons during the Persian Gulf War.
``We have held nothing back,'' Nora Slatkin, the CIA's executive director, told reporters summoned to a small, crowded theater at the agency's Langley, Va., headquarters.
But Slatkin, who manages the agency's day-to-day operations, announced that the CIA's inspector general had been directed to examine the former workers' allegations, including their complaint that they suffered discrimination in their jobs as a result of their charges.
That the agency went to such public efforts to deny the charges by the husband-and-wife team of former analysts Patrick and Robin Eddington of Fairfax illustrates the CIA's sensitivity to the couple's charges, which first were aired Wednesday in The New York Times. In that interview, Patrick Eddington alleged that there were 60 incidents in which nerve gases and other chemical weapons were released near U.S. troops.
Friday, Eddington told an interviewer on the cable MSNBC news network that he believed that in ``eight, 10, 12 incidents'' U.S. forces came directly under chemical attack by Iraqi forces during the brief 1991 war.
As has the CIA, the Pentagon and an independent presidential committee have rejected those allegations, saying they have examined the same data cited by the Eddingtons and found that it falls short of confirming such suspicions.
``On the basis of a comprehensive review of intelligence, we continue to conclude that Iraq did not use chemical or biological weapons during the Gulf War,'' Slatkin said Friday. The CIA official also rejected Patrick Eddington's suggestions that fallout from aerial bombing of Iraqi chemical plants could have reached U.S. troops.
She said that a CIA analyst, Larry Fox, discovered the first evidence that U.S. personnel could have been exposed to some chemical fallout as the ground troops were exploding a cache of Iraqi munitions at a remote desert site after the war. The Pentagon has cited that disclosure as a ``watershed'' event and has ordered 20,000 troops who were in the area to be contacted to determine if their health were affected.
Patrick Eddington's lawyer, Mark Zaid, said Friday that the CIA's news conference was ``just a public relations tool'' and that his client demands a congressional investigation.
Slatkin also said the agency would release most of the 58 documents that the Eddingtons say make their case. Twenty-one have already been published on Gulflink, a Defense Department site on the Internet, 36 are being edited and will be posted on the computer site shortly, and one will not be released because it belongs to a foreign government, she said.
The agency also has decided to return some 369 other documents to Gulflink, Slatkin said. The documents were among about 1,000 posted on the Internet site in the summer of 1995 but removed last February out of concern that they revealed details about the agency's ``sources and methods.''
U.S. soldiers did not report symptoms associated with exposure to such chemicals at the time. But a United Nations research team found rockets containing sarin and cyclosarin in the area, and thousands of American veterans of the conflict have reported health problems they believe are due to their service in the region.
Hearst Newspapers contributed to this story.
LENGTH: Medium: 68 linesby CNB