DATE: Tuesday, February 25, 1997            TAG: 9702250356

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A12  EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: THE NEW YORK TIMES 

DATELINE: WASHINGTON                        LENGTH:   52 lines

REPORTS SHOW ARMY KNEW OF IRAQ CHEMICAL WEAPONS DANGERS IN '91

An internal Pentagon investigation has determined that the CIA provided the Army with detailed warnings more than five years ago that American troops might have been exposed to nerve gas in the demolition of an Iraqi ammunition depot shortly after the Persian Gulf war.

But because of errors by the Army, the information was not confirmed at the time. It was only last year that the Pentagon acknowledged publicly that U.S. soldiers had blown up the depot in March 1991, and that more than 20,000 troops may have been exposed to a cloud of nerve gas and other chemical weapons as a result.

Two newly declassified CIA reports undermine the Pentagon's repeated assertion that the possibility of chemical exposure of American troops at the depot was brought to the military's attention only last year, and that there had been no follow-up delay.

The documents show the agency told the Army in November 1991 that U.N. investigators had visited the ruins of the Kamisiyah ammunition depot in Iraq the month before and found damaged rockets filled with sarin, a nerve gas.

According to one of the November 1991 reports, the Army was warned of ``the risk of chemical contamination'' of American troops as a result of the demolition. But the Army failed to conduct a thorough investigation, and the information was put aside for more than four years.

The sudden appearance of the documents, which were made public this month on a Defense Department site on the Internet, has alarmed members of the White House committee on gulf war illnesses, who say that the documents were not shared with them before they issued their final report to President Clinton last month.

The documents reported on the findings of U.N. weapons inspectors who visited the sprawling depot, which was also known as Tall al Lahm, in October 1991.

The report, dated Nov. 12, 1991, said that the CIA had passed the information onto the Army Central Command, known as Arcent, and that the central command determined that troops assigned to the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division had been in the area of the demolition.

The reports suggested that when the 24th Infantry reported that it had not destroyed the depot, the Army let the matter rest.

Had the Army pursued the issue, however, it would have discovered that soldiers from another division, the 82nd Airborne, had also been in the vicinity of the blast, and that combat engineers assigned to the 82nd had carried out the demolition. Many of those combat engineers, members of the 37th Engineer Battalion, have since reported serious health problems. KEYWORDS: PERSIAN GULF WAR GULF WAR SYNDROME CHEMICAL

WEAPONS

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