Robert J. Caldwell
CALDWELL is editor of the Insight section.
21-Jun-1998 Sunday
A healthy dose of skepticism is usually prudent in weighing the credibility of sensational tales. Case in point: CNN's recent allegation that U.S. forces used lethal nerve gas and killed American military defectors during a secret, 1970 commando raid in Laos.
If true, the use of deadly nerve gas would have constituted a violation of international law -- specifically, the 1925 Geneva Convention protocol outlawing the first use of chemical weapons that kill. It would also have violated the then-Nixon administration's formal declaration that the United States would not engage in first use of lethal chemical or biological weapons.
As for deliberately killing supposed defectors, that would have made the U.S. military complicit in a policy that, depending on the circumstances, could be construed as the murder of U.S. citizens.
These are profoundly serious accusations. Notwithstanding the many moral ambiguities of the Vietnam conflict, they are among the most damning that could be made against American soldiers and the U.S. military.
But whether CNN's sensational story can hold up under scrutiny is increasingly doubtful. Indeed, the story is falling apart already.
The Cable News Network report, highly promoted by CNN and compiled by correspondent Peter Arnett and producer/researcher April Oliver, appeared jointly on the network June 7 and in Time magazine's June 15 issue. CNN's dramatic account of Operation Tailwind rests most heavily on the word of Robert Van Buskirk, then an Army Special Forces lieutenant, plus purported confirmation of the use of sarin nerve gas by none other than retired Adm. Thomas Moorer, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1970.
Arnett and Oliver say their story was based on some 200 interviews conducted during an eight-month investigation.
Yet, the holes in Arnett's story are glaringly apparent -- no proof that nerve gas was used, no proof that American "defectors" were killed or even present. The more that's learned about what did happen, the less plausible the CNN version becomes.
First, the established facts:
There was a U.S. Special Forces operation mounted against North Vietnamese army troops and those of their Laotian allies, the Communist Pathet Lao, in the vicinity of Chavan, Laos in September 1970. The cross-border raid was conducted by a 16-man Special Forces team of Americans leading about 100 Montagnard mercenaries. Under the command of a top-secret organization euphemistically known as the Studies and Observation Group, the raid was one of many clandestine operations in Laos, Cambodia and North Vietnam staged jointly by the U.S. military and the Central Intelligence Agency.
The Chavan raid's chief mission, according to Defense Department records, the senior officer who planned it, and its commander had nothing to do with killing any imagined defectors. Its primary objective was to draw off North Vietnamese troops threatening CIA-sponsored Laotian forces in the region. A secondary objective was disrupting the flow of North Vietnamese military supplies down the heavily traveled Ho Chi Minh trail nearby.
None of the after-action reports submitted by Van Buskirk and other participants in 1970 mention a word about supposed American defectors. Likewise, the book Van Buskirk wrote in 1983 on Operation Tailwind says nothing of any American defectors or any plan to kill them. Van Buskirk's account of killing two unidentified Caucasians was, he says, a "repressed memory" suddenly recalled during his CNN interview nearly 30 years after the raid.
The many SOG and Special Forces veterans coming forth to dispute Van Buskirk's credibility and the accuracy of CNN's story note that Soviet, East German and Cuban advisers to the North Vietnamese were also present along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. If, indeed, Van Buskirk saw and killed two Caucasians in the North Vietnamese army base camp the SOG force attacked, there is no proof that they were Americans.
Similarly, Van Buskirk's statement that the SOG team's scouts had observed, at night and from a distance of two miles, 20 or more unidentified Caucasians in the North Vietnamese camp remains unverifiable.
The Pentagon counts only two Americans, Bobby Garwood and McKinley Nolan, as actual, confirmed defectors who aided the enemy during the Vietnam War. There may have been a few other defectors from among the hundreds who deserted during a long war. But 20 or so, and all at a single location, seems unlikely, especially given the absence of any tangible evidence, to say nothing of proof.
Now for the nerve gas allegation.
Two U.S. Air Force Skyraiders called in to cover the extraction under fire of the battered SOG team (all 16 Americans and many of the Montagnards were wounded) did drop gas on the closely pursuing North Vietnamese. But was this gas the deadly and banned sarin? Or, far more plausibly, was it the legal, nonlethal but potentially incapacitating CN or CS gases (military versions of police tear gas and riot gas) occasionally employed during the rescue of Americans behind enemy lines in Laos?
Clearly, CS or CN are the far more likely explanations.
The SOG team's gas masks were protection against CS and CN but not sarin, a few drops of which on the skin can easily be fatal. Why would the Air Force risk wiping out the entire SOG team by dropping nerve gas on an enemy in close combat and hot pursuit of the Americans? None of the rescued Americans or Montagnards, or the helicopter air crew members who landed to extract them, later exhibited any nerve gas symptoms, although several suffered from tear gas exposure.
And nowhere in any of the North Vietnamese army's official histories, or statements at the time, is there a single allegation that U.S. forces in the Tailwind operation used nerve gas or any lethal chemical weapon. Vietnamese officials in Hanoi have said in recent days that they know nothing about the alleged use of nerve gas during Tailwind and have no evidence indicating it was ever used against their troops.
Surely the North Vietnamese would have loudly exploited the slightest shred of evidence in 1970 that American forces were using sarin or other internationally banned chemical weapons. Hanoi did not protest.
Add that to the operational implausibility, the accounts of other Tailwind participants, documentary evidence, historical research and the testimony of numerous SOG and Special Forces veterans and it seems overwhelmingly apparent that the nerve gas story is bogus.
CNN's Arnett and Oliver claim the 86-year old Moorer confirmed the use of sarin off camera but wouldn't say so on the record. But Moorer has since said publicly and repeatedly that he could not, and did not, confirm it because he doesn't know if it's true.
John L. Plaster, a retired Army major who spent three years in SOG and participated in numerous forays into Laos and Cambodia from 1968 to 1970, scoffs at the suggestion that U.S. forces used nerve gas. Plaster, who wrote an exhaustively researched SOG history recently published by Simon and Schuster, also made 450 flights as a forward air controller calling in air strikes all over southern Laos, often in support of SOG operations.
"At no point did we ever employ nerve gas; however, on rare occasions we did employ CBU-19 tear gas bomblets," Plaster said last week.
Prof. Richard Shultz, director of the International Security Studies Program at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, is among the foremost authorities on SOG operations in Southeast Asia. Shultz is writing a book on the subject and the Pentagon has given him full access to all SOG documents, including those still classified.
"I find it impossible to believe, based on my research, that nerve gas was used. My research tells me that this story is just not correct," Shultz said in an interview last week. Shultz also said that nothing in the documentary archive on Tailwind, all of which he has reviewed, contains a single word on supposed American defectors or Caucasians in the North Vietnamese camp.
Retired Navy Cmdr. Chip Beck, a CIA/SOG veteran who planned and accompanied missions in Laos and Cambodia during the early 1970s, likewise describes the CNN version of Tailwind and allegations of nerve gas use as wholly implausible.
Eugene McCarley, the Army captain who commanded the Tailwind force, describes Van Buskirk's claims of American defectors and nerve gas as "all lies."
"We never saw a single Caucasian during the operation. There were no defectors there and looking for defectors was not our mission," McCarley said. He also categorically denies Van Buskirk's account of nerve gas use.
CNN's own military consultant, retired Air Force Major Gen. Perry Smith, angrily resigned from the network last week in protest over the Arnett-Oliver report, which he called "inaccurate, terrible." Smith complained that he was never consulted on the story and his subsequent protests about its inaccuracies were ignored.
Perry says he interviewed the pilots who participated in Tailwind and reviewed the relevant Air Force ordnance and logistics records. Armed with that information, he pressed CNN editors and executives for a retraction of the nerve gas allegation in particular. When they refused, Perry quit.
Editors and reporters at Time saw worrisome room for doubt about the accuracy of the CNN report. So Time softened the version reprinted in the magazine, emphasized the Pentagon denials and cast the nerve-gas allegation as more a question than a conclusion.
Against these doubts, eyewitness denials and informed opinions to the contrary, Van Buskirk's credibility is at least questionable. A Special Forces contemporary says Van Buskirk "developed a reputation for deceit and unreliability." After his Vietnam service, Van Buskirk was transferred to Germany where he was later arrested and charged with weapons trafficking. He spent time in a German jail, although the charges were eventually dropped.
Defense Secretary William Cohen reacted to the CNN report by ordering an investigation to determine the Tailwind facts. That's certainly warranted, given the gravity of the allegations. Pentagon officials say nothing in either the unclassified or still-classified documents detailing Operation Tailwind support charges that nerve gas was used or that American defectors were even seen, much less killed.
CNN, Arnett and Oliver were still standing by their collapsing story late last week. What they lacked were facts and credibility.
CALDWELL is editor of the Insight section and can be reached via e-mail atrobert.caldwell@uniontrib.com
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