Ex-CIA analysts assert cover-up on chemical risk to troops

By Philip Shenon
c.1996 N.Y. Times News Service

WASHINGTON -- Two intelligence analysts who resigned earlier this year from the CIA say the agency possesses dozens of classified documents showing that tens of thousands of Americans may have been exposed to Iraqi chemical weapons during the Persian Gulf war in 1991.

The husband-and-wife intelligence analysts, Patrick and Robin Eddington, say that while investigating the issue at the CIA, they turned up evidence of as many as 60 incidents in which nerve gas and other chemical weapons were released in the vicinity of American troops.

The Eddingtons assert that the CIA and the Pentagon repeatedly tried to hinder their unauthorized investigation. And they say that when they insisted on pursuing the inquiry over the protests of senior officials, their promising careers were effectively destroyed. Their inquiry attracted concern at the highest levels of the agencies, including John M. Deutch, a former Pentagon official who is now the director of central intelligence.

"The evidence of chemical exposures among our troops is overwhelming, but the government won't deal with it," said Eddington, who resigned this month after more than eight years at the agency, most of it spent as an analyst of satellite and aerial photographs from the Persian Gulf.

The CIA and the Defense Department have rejected the Eddingtons' accusations. Yet despite the public appearance of unanimity among Government officials -- namely, that there was no evidence until recently that large numbers of American troops were exposed to the Iraqi poisons in the war --the Eddingtons' account suggests that there was evidence earlier of many possible exposures, and that there was a heated internal debate within the government over the meaning of the intelligence reports.

Eddington, who is 33 and is preparing to publish a book outlining his allegations against the CIA, said government officials who had overseen investigations of gulf war illnesses "have lied, are continuing to lie, are continuing to withhold information."

He became so enraged over the government's conduct that in 1994, he wrote a letter to the editor of the The Washington Times, without noting his ties to the intelligence agency. The letter, which was published, alleged a government "cover-up."

Scientists have been unable to find an explanation for the variety of ailments reported by gulf war veterans. But increasingly, the medical debate has become separate from the issue of whether the government has told the truth about the intelligence reports about chemical weapons that it received during and after the war.

After the war, Eddington said, he collected 59 classified intelligence reports from agency files and computer banks that provided "very, very specific" information about the presence of chemical weapons in southern Iraq and Kuwait during the war.

Mrs. Eddington, who is 32 and now works for a military contractor, said she had seen at least one classified document suggesting that even trace exposure to chemical weapons over an extended period could cause illness, an assertion at odds with the Pentagon's official position.

The Eddingtons said they were unable to provide details of the documents that they have seen because they are still classified.

CIA officials said the Eddingtons were trying to portray an honest disagreement among intelligence analysts as something sinister.

"This conspiratorial theory is just not fair or logical," said Dennis Boxx, the agency's chief spokesman. Eddington, Boxx said, has "essentially vilified everybody who doesn't agree with him."

The Pentagon said in a statement that "the idea that the Defense Department has engaged in any conspiracy to cover up any information regarding Persian Gulf illnesses is simply not true."

Although CIA officials acknowledged that intelligence reports suggesting the release of Iraqi chemical weapons were still classified, they said the documents had been made available to a White House panel that is investigating gulf war illnesses. The CIA said the documents could not be made public because they contained information about its intelligence-gathering methods.

At the same time, the agency acknowledged that the Eddingtons had been highly valued employees, and said that their honesty, competence and emotional stability had not been questioned.

"I think Pat had a lot to offer this organization," a senior agency official said of Eddington. Boxx said of Eddington: "Do we have any reason to believe that he's not an honest or truthful person? The answer is no, we don't."

The Pentagon has acknowledged only one incident in which a large number of soldiers may have been exposed to chemical weapons. In that incident, in March 1991, the month after the gulf war ended, American combat engineers blew up an Iraqi ammunition depot that contained nerve gas.

The Eddingtons said the CIA and Pentagon were hiding evidence of scores of other potential chemical exposures. Mrs. Eddington said the intelligence agency's attitude in studying the possibility of chemical exposures was one of "cowardice and conformity."

"There is a complete lack of enthusiasm for trying to find answers," she said.

The Eddingtons said their investigation raised concern at the highest levels of the Pentagon and the CIA. Eddington said he was told twice by a supervisor last year that Deutch, who was then deputy secretary of defense and the official responsible for the investigation of gulf war illnesses, called to express his alarm over the couple's inquiry.

Boxx, the CIA spokesman, confirmed that Deutch had been aware of the Eddingtons' analysis and had expressed concern over it -- but only because their findings had been described to him incorrectly as a new, official analysis by the agency.

Deutch, he said, had never tried to block the Eddingtons' investigation. When Deutch "learned that this was not a CIA study, that it was an individual analyst's assessment," he raised no further concerns about the inquiry, Boxx said.

The CIA said the intelligence reports identified by Eddington had already been turned over to the White House panel, the President's Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses -- proof, officials said, that the information was not being hidden.

But Eddington said that some of his superiors had wanted to withhold the documents and that they were turned over to the panel only because "it was my absolute insistence that they be turned over." Veterans may never find out what is in the gulf war documents, he said, since the White House panel is barred from releasing classified material in its final report.

The Beginning: A Honeymoon On the Eve of War

Patrick Eddington and Robin Katzman joined the CIA within a week of each other in February 1988. Miss Katzman had just graduated from Brandeis University. A veteran of the Army Reserves, Eddington had graduated from Southwest Missouri State University in 1985 and had worked in a variety of jobs before joining the intelligence agency.

The couple met when they were both studying at the agency's photo-analysis school. They were married in October 1990, three months before the gulf war began. "We spent our honeymoon watching CNN," Mrs. Eddington said.

During the war, Eddington was responsible for the analysis of satellite photographs from southern Iraq. It was clear before the war began, he said, that the Iraqis had moved chemical weapons onto the battlefield. "It was very clear that the Iraqis intended to use them," he said.

Eddington said his office received reports from various intelligence sources that the Iraqis had begun to use chemical weapons against the United States.

"In several specific circumstances," he said, "there was a statement that a particular chemical attack was taking place at a particular time. You'd ask management: `Hey, what's the story? Is this for real?' And I remember being told at the time: `No, Centcom says it didn't happen, false alarm.' "

Centcom refers to the U.S. Central Command, which directed the American-led alliance in the gulf war. Eddington said, he was in no position at the time to question the reports from the Central Command.

The Evidence: Rising Careers, Rising Suspicions

Immediately after the war, the Eddingtons prospered in their careers. In 1993, Mrs. Eddington was placed in a fellowship program that singles out fast-rising women employees and offers experience in other agencies of the government.

She found work on Capitol Hill in the offices of the Senate Banking Committee, which was then led by Senator Donald W. Riegle Jr., a Michigan Democrat who was interested in the question of why so many gulf war veterans were falling ill.

Although the panel would normally not deal with military issues, he asked the committee staff to investigate the possibility that troops had been exposed to chemical weapons in the war, and the inquiry was directed by James J. Tuite 3rd, a retired Secret Service agent who is now widely credited with having conducted the first extensive investigation into gulf war illnesses.

"I had never heard of this issue before I went to work for Jim," Mrs. Eddington said.

She was assigned to interview the gulf war veterans who were calling the committee.

"Almost immediately, I started talking to the veterans," she said. "And their stories were absolutely consistent -- the symptoms, the stories about alarms going off."

She took home one of Tuite's early reports. She handed it to her husband, with the announcement, "Hey, we got gassed." Eddington read the report -- "it was powerful," he recalled -- and decided to start his own unauthorized investigation on the issue, gathering information from within the CIA.

Eddington said he had prevailed upon friends working in other parts of the agency to search through computers banks.

"We just plugged in key words dealing with chemical and munitions storage," he said, "and we just began to pull up all this cable traffic."

The cables, he said, confirmed that the Iraqis had indeed moved chemical weapons into southern Iraq just before the war and that American military commanders had received warnings during the war that chemical weapons had been released near their troops.

Eddington said that in July 1994 he took his evidence to his superior.

"I told him that I strongly suggested that the agency needed to go back and re-examine its conclusions," he said.

Instead of reviewing the evidence, he said, agency officials set out to disprove it. Mrs. Eddington said that by accident she had met another agency analyst who told her that he had been given a copy of the Banking Committee report by his superiors and that he was trying to "debunk" it.

"We were both extremely angry about that," Eddington said, "and I really began to feel, at least tentatively, that we were not going to be taken seriously. I decided to do something about it."

The Fallout: Poor Reception For Accusations

In his letter to The Washington Times, a conservative newspaper widely read at the CIA, Eddington suggested that the government had orchestrated a "cover-up" of evidence of chemical exposures in the gulf war. The letter was published on Dec. 7, 1994.

Pentagon officials, he wrote, may have been "criminally negligent and obstructionist where the issue of ongoing medical problems of gulf war veterans is concerned." Eddington did not identify himself in the letter as a CIA employee. It was signed simply: "Patrick G. Eddington. Fairfax, Va."

The letter had the intended effect. Eddington said he and his wife were quickly asked to brief several agency officials about their evidence.

But Eddington said the meetings were often hostile, leading him to conclude that the CIA had no intention of reviewing the evidence honestly -- that agency officials planned to "stonewall" and insist that there had been no widespread chemical exposures during the gulf war.

The Eddingtons say that by this point, their careers within the agency were largely over.

Eddington said that in reviewing his personnel file earlier this year, he discovered that he had been the target of a criminal investigation last year to determine whether he had leaked classified information. (An agency official said that the investigation had been a "routine" response to the letter to The Washington Times and was not meant as retaliation.)

Mrs. Eddington said that over a few months last year, she was turned down four times for a promotion that should have been routine.

"People were looking at us like we're some kind of conspiracy nuts," she said. "The agency promotes people who don't rock the boat, and that's why you have this pervasive mediocrity ingrained in most levels of management."

In his final months at the agency, Eddington said, he completed his book, "Gassed in the Gulf," which is to be published largely at his own expense by a small, independent publishing house. He said he had never considered submitting the manuscript to large publishing houses.

"I didn't want anybody to be able to say that I was acting for profit," he said. "The reason for writing this book is to let the vets know that they are not alone."

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