CIA Executive Director Statement
News Conference on
Persian Gulf Veterans Illnesses

1 November 1996

 

The reason that I am here today is to tell you what this Agency has done to try to shed light on the issues associated with Persian Gulf Veterans illnesses. We want to use this occasion to set the record straight, to tell you what our involvement has been, and what we are doing. We also want to use this occasion to emphasize that we know how important this issue is to Gulf War Veterans, and that our intelligence may help. We are therefore committed to making as much of it public as possible. In our efforts to do this, the CIA has sought information from every intelligence source, cooperated extensively with the Department of Defense, kept the Congress informed and made every finding available to the independent Presidential Advisory Committee. Specifically:

Let me tell you how the CIA has been involved, what we have done, what we know, and what we plan to do.

Historical Context

First, let me define CIA's role. CIA's main concern about Iraq before the war was uncovering, assessing, and characterizing Iraq's chemical and biological warfare capabilities to prepare our troops to deal with this potential threat. We concluded that Iraq had a significant chemical warfare capability, including chemically armed Scuds, and had used chemical weapons on numerous occasions against Iran and its own citizens. In December 1990, after the invasion of Kuwait, the Intelligence Community concluded that Iraq had probably forward-deployed chemical weapons into the Kuwaiti theater of operations and would use them in a variety of circumstances.

At the start of the air war, and continuing to the end of Desert Storm, we established a 24-hour chemical warfare watch. These analysts screened incoming intelligence for evidence of chemical weapons use, and followed every Scud launch. Although there were many reports of chemical weapons use, when subjected to all-source analysis, none stood up. We published assessments concluding that Iraq had readied its forces to use chemical weapons, decided to move them out of the theater prior to the war, and then never used them.

For the first few years after the war, CIA's principal mission, driven by intelligence requirements, was to identify the residual Iraqi chemical warfare capabilities and stockpiles. During the 1993-1994 timeframe, we began to focus on the Gulf War illnesses issue by helping DoD determine the possible causes of chemical warfare agent detection in Saudi Arabia by Czech soldiers. We believe the Czech detection was credible but we can not ascertain the source.

Initiation of the CIA Study

In 1994, there was growing concern in the Veterans community about this issue. Secretary of Defense Les Aspin directed that all information relating to this issue be made available to the public. The President directed that we would leave no stone unturned and called for thorough study. CIA undertook a comprehensive review of all of our holdings.

We then instituted a broad search and declassification effort.

We also undertook an analytic effort to reassess our conclusion that no chemical agents had been released as the result of Iraqi attacks, and to consider the effects of coalition activities. In the course of this work, we uncovered evidence that chemical munitions were destroyed in March 1991 at the bunker in Khamisiyah and that this created the possibility that some US troops may have been exposed to chemicals.

Three Specific Issues--Documents, Activities, and Modeling

Let me now turn to three specific issues that I know interest you--the disposition of our documents, the scope of our actions, and the status of our modeling efforts.

Documents

In 1995, the DOD established a web site on the Internet, called GULFLINK, that was designed to make information on Gulf War Illnesses available to the public. One element of GULFLINK was devoted to the results of DoD declassification efforts, that included 1400 documents that people could access.

The original DoD postings raised some security concerns, and they were temporarily withdrawn in February. We convened a Community group to conduct a detailed assessment of the contents. All but 369 were restored by the end of April. Yesterday, all remaining documents were reposted on Gulflink.

Now, lets turn to the 58 documents that two former Agency employees, the Eddingtons, have discussed. The Eddingtons claim that there is evidence in these documents that show that chemical weapons were used during the Gulf War. All of these documents have been provided to the Presidential Advisory Committee in late 1995. Today, we have begun the process of making these public. Twenty-one of these have already been released on Gulflink; 36 documents are being redacted now. One document will not be released because it belongs to another government. We are doing this because we want to show that we are being as forthcoming as possible.

Actions

Our efforts have not been limited to document search and release. We have briefed at public meetings sponsored by the Presidential Advisory Committee. We have worked closely with the DOD Persian Gulf Investigative Team. And, we have briefed the findings of our study effort to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the Senate Veterans Committee, the House National Security Committee, the House Subcommittee on Human Resources and Intergovernmental Relations.

Modeling

In the course of our work with the Presidential Advisory Committee we were asked in spring 1996 to examine the potential dispersion of nerve agent in Iraq.

Specifically, we modeled four releases. We have published the results of our modeling of Al Muthanna (AL-MOOSE-ANNA), Mohammadiyat (MOE-HAMM-ADEE-AT), and Bunker 73 at Khamisiyah (KAHM-AH-SEE-YA). These are available on the Internet. The DoD used the results of our modeling of Bunker 73 to identify troops that may have been exposed.

We are still working on the modeling of the chemical release at the Khamisiyah pit area. There are some significant limits in this analysis that have kept us from completing this work so far.

We only learned of the destruction of the chemical munitions at the Pit in May 1996, over five years after coalition forces destroyed them.

We do not know the precise weather conditions.

We do not know how many munitions were destroyed, and we do not know the exact date of the explosions.

In addition, we are dealing with two different chemical agents which have different persistencies, degrade at different rates, and react differently to winds and sunlight--conditions that are very difficult to reconstruct five years later.

Nevertheless, we continue to work to resolve how we deal with these uncertainties. Because of these uncertainties, the DOD is undertaking an expert review to look at all of the modeling efforts to date.

Conclusion

The CIA is absolutely committed to help determine what our troops may have been exposed to during the Gulf War. Every document we have has been made available to the Presidential Advisory Committee. We have held nothing back.

One last point. There have been allegations from two former employees of CIA conspiracy and cover-up on the issue of Gulf War Veterans illnesses and allegations that we have retaliated against them for their views. We have already emphatically denied those allegations. We stand by that statement today. I know the people in this Agency. There is not one individual who would willfully withhold information that if released, would be of benefit to those brave men and women who deployed into the desert. Nevertheless, these are serious allegations. Therefore, the Director of Central Intelligence has underscored his commitment to the American public to leave no stone unturned by directing the CIA Inspector General to review these allegations.