New Orleans, 21 June 1998

Louisiana Times Picayune

METAIRIE WAR PILOT DISPUTES REPORT

by Stephanie Grace - East Jefferson Bureau

When Arthur Picone got his copy of Time magazine last week, he sat down and started flipping through the pages, as always.

Picone, a retired Marine pilot and Vietnam vet from Metairie, quickly honed in on an explosive story alleging that the U.S. military had used deadly nerve gas in 1970 as part of Operation Tailwind, a secret mission to hunt down and kill American defectors.

Picone couldn't believe what he was reading, because he was part of that mission.

In an interview this week, Picone said he can't prove that the story is false. But he said he never heard a hint of either the use of nerve gas or an order to kill defectors, not at the time and not in the 28 years since, "not one word, not one insinuation, nothing." The whole story, he said, is utterly implausible.

Picone's not the only one raising questions. When the story broke, the allegations, the results of a joint report by Time and CNN, ricocheted through the military establishment and drew adamant criticism. CNN's top military analyst, a retired general, resigned in protest. Secretary of Defense William Cohen promptly ordered an investigation to determine whether the story was true.

This week, the Pentagon called Picone to find out what he remembered and asked if he'd be willing to testify if the investigation leads to congressional hearings. He immediately agreed.

Picone, who rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel before retiring in 1985 and who now owns several check-cashing stores, was a 30-year-old captain when the Americans set off to confront North Vietnamese troops in Laos, sixty miles across the border from Vietnam.

Picone's role was to ferry heavily armed G.I.'s in one of six overloaded 30-odd seat transport helicopters to the remote, mountainous site deep in the jungle. He returned to the area several days later to retrieve the soldiers once the mission was over.

The purpose of the mission, he said, was to disrupt the movement of North Vietnamese troops and equipment along the Ho Chi Minh trail.

The Time account, though, told a different story. The magazine said the soldiers were part of a Special Forces commando unit whose purpose was to seek out Americans who had defected and were believed to be hiding in a nearby village. As part of the operation, Air Force Skyraiders dropped canisters of the nerve gas sarin, which was also used in a deadly terrorist subway attack in Japan three years ago, the magazine said. The story said the nerve gas was used twice, once on a village populated by civilians, and again on attacking enemy soldiers as the Americans were trying to get out of the area.

Among the sources quoted was the Vietnam-era chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.

Still, Picone said the story is full of holes.

For one thing, he said, he never saw a village and he and his fellow pilots were not told there would be civilians anywhere nearby.

"We would have sought to avoid any populated areas," he said. "We would have been subjected to an enemy assault."

Picone also finds the allegations that the military would be out to kill defectors hard to swallow. If they had gone after defectors, he said, the purpose would have been to capture, or "rescue" them.

As for the nerve gas, he said, it would have been far too risky to subject pilots such as himself, who were responsible for as many as 60 other lives, to possible exposure.

But Picone said he does believe tear gas may have been used in the operation, in order to immobilize North Vietnamese troops who had the Americans under heavy fire.

He doesn't know for sure, but he said he saw the canisters hanging from the Air Force planes and was told beforehand that the use of tear gas was part of the plan. All the Americans, both on the ground and in the air, had gas masks, he said.

The Time story said that very few people knew of the mission's true purpose, and Picone said he can't disprove the allegations. But if they are true, he wondered aloud, why didn't the magazine interview sources with more direct knowledge, such as the ground crews that loaded the planes, who could say for sure that the canisters held nerve gas, not tear gas?

"This is the kind of stuff you'd see in a James Bond movie, not in real life," he said.