
DATE: Friday, March 7, 1997                 TAG: 9703070627

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A4   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: FOCUS 
SOURCE: BY ED OFFLEY, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER 

                                            LENGTH:  174 lines

GULF WARNINGS THE PENTAGON FAILED TO DEVELOP A SYSTEM TO DETECT BIOLOGICAL AGENTS BEFORE THEY REACHED LEVELS.

Five months before the United States launched the Persian Gulf War in January 1991 with airstrikes against Iraq, U.S. intelligence learned that Baghdad had deployed near its borders at least 40 launchers capable of spewing out lethal biological warfare agents.

Lacking evidence to the contrary, Pentagon officials assumed the truck-mounted aerosol dispensers were loaded with deadly anthrax, botulinum or some other biological agents that Iraq was known to have developed.

And they assumed Iraq was prepared to use them, threatening the thousands of troops in the U.S.-led coalition then massing in Saudi Arabia, according to declassified U.S. intelligence documents and interviews with current and former government and military officials.

In response to the threat, the Pentagon ordered a secret, crash program to develop a warning system that could detect the presence of biological agents before they reached lethal levels. But the Pentagon effort failed to come up with a workable detection system in time for the war, leaving the allied forces vulnerable to exposure throughout the conflict.

Iraq did not launch a massive chemical or biological attack against the Desert Storm coalition. But the possibility of exposure by troops to low levels of chemical or biological agents through accidental discharge is haunting investigators looking into the causes of what has become known as Gulf War syndrome.

If biological agents were indeed moved from Iraqi storage sites to 40 or more mobile launchers that the U.S. military had tracked to the front lines, it would have increased the chances of the material being released as a result of bomb damage or other battle casualty.

Some Gulf War veterans believe exposure to such agents could be a contributor to Gulf War syndrome, the baffling cluster of medical ailments that have sickened tens of thousands of veterans - and in some cases their families - in the years since the war.

Pentagon officials last June for the first time acknowledged that five years earlier, thousands of Gulf War troops may have been exposed to chemical nerve agents when U.S. combat engineers blew up the vast Khamisiyah weapons bunker complex in southern Iraq several days after the war.

The concession opened the door to a possible link between low-level chemical agent exposure and Gulf War syndrome, although government researchers say no connection has yet been proven.

Pentagon officials say they have no evidence that troops were exposed to biological warfare agents, which pose a more serious threat than chemical agents because long after contact, they can spread germs throughout a widespread population, including soldiers' spouses, children and even family pets.

But in the months before the Gulf War, the military and intelligence agencies had serious concerns about the launchers and exposure to biological agents.

``CIA computer models had indicated to us that if just one of the (biological) sprayers were turned on, . . . we could run a risk of contaminating over 100,000 U.S. troops,'' said Army Col. Gerry Schumacher, who was involved in the crash Pentagon project to build a biological weapons detection device.

His assertion was confirmed by Patrick Eddington, a CIA intelligence analyst during the Persian Gulf War who along with his wife, Robin, resigned from the agency last year over what they said was insufficient CIA interest in examining information about the causes of Gulf War syndrome.

``We (the CIA) had indications clearly that the Iraqis had developed anthrax and botulinum,'' Eddington said. ``Did we have definite indications he (Saddam Hussein) had forward deployed those agents? Definitely yes.''

One of the earliest warnings about the Iraqi biological aerosol sprayers is contained in a message from the Pentagon Joint Staff to more than 100 military commands on Aug. 8, 1990 - six days after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the same day the first U.S. Air Force fighter planes were landing at Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

The then-classified message, from the Armed Forces Medical Intelligence Command at Fort Detrick, Md., warned of Iraq's ``mature'' arsenal of biological weapons that might be unleashed in a war against the coalition. The message specifically noted that Iraq not only had succeeded in ``weaponizing'' a number of biological agents, but also had acquired ``aerosol generators'' that could be mounted on trucks or small boats to launch biological agents.

Robin Byrom, a civilian biological warfare expert at the Army Chemical School at Fort McClellan, Ala., said the threat from a truck-mounted aerosol generator was significant. ``You set that truck on the ground, and with a real good wind direction and wind speed, if he drove from point A to point B spraying out, . . . he would have a long-line spray source'' generating a biological agent cloud capable of contaminating hundreds of square miles of terrain, Byrom said.

Another Defense Intelligence Agency message, on Jan. 18, 1991 - the second day of the Desert Storm air war - recounted the threat from the biological aerosol generators and warned that allied sensors had located five refrigerated trucks or vans at the Salman Pak biological warfare production plant ``capable of transporting BW material from the site to potential distribution points in the (Iraqi army's) forward areas of operation.''

Thirteen days later, a Navy intelligence report stated, ``Unconfirmed Iraqi defector information indicates chemical and biological weapons have been dispersed to forward (military operating) areas.''

Schumacher was serving as a brigade executive officer in the Army Reserve's 91st Division (Training) at Fort Baker, Calif., when he became involved in the Pentagon effort to devise a warning system against biological agents.

His assistant in 1990 was a reserve major, Joseph Leonelli, who in his civilian job as a senior research scientist at SRI International in Menlo Park, Calif., was awarded a classified research contract of $400,000 to design and build a portable sensor capable of detecting and identifying biological agents.

The Army's Chemical Research and Development Engineering Command at Aberdeen, Md., wanted the institute to design ``a real-time detection system for biological agents,'' Schumacher said. From early October through December 1990, institute scientists scrambled to come up with a system and designed a prototype sensor that seemed to fill the requirement, Schumacher said.

By the last week in December 1990, Schumacher was preparing to send several dozen of his troops to Saudi Arabia, where allied air and ground troops were bracing for imminent hostilities against Iraq.

But the deployment never happened.

Army spokesman Maj. Gary Milner said the portable sensor system failed to meet the Pentagon's criteria for detecting biological agents. ``Our assessment was that it would have been useless if deployed since it would respond only to unrealistically high concentrations of BW agents,'' he said.

Milner said the decision to terminate the portable sensor contract occurred Jan. 13, 1991, three days before the start of the allied air war against Iraq.

Instead, the Army ordered the deployment to Saudi Arabia of a 20-year-old device in Army warehouses called the XM-2 air sampler. A small group of Fort Lewis, Wash., soldiers hastily trained in its use were rushed to the region, but their attempts to provide an early warning capability for Desert Storm units were doomed by the outmoded equipment they were issued, participants in the project said. ILLUSTRATION: Saddam Hussein

GRAPHIC

WEAPONS OF WAR

Chemical and biological warfare agents are designed to

incapacitate and in many cases kill. They have some similarities,

but there also are key differences.

CHEMICAL WEAPONS

Types

Nerve agents (sarin, toman, soman, VX).

Blister agents (sulfur mustard).

Characteristic

Toxic chemicals kill or injure only those who come into direct

contact with them.