'CNN's Retraction Was Based on Fear'

Last week CNN and Time retracted a story that I produced. In her July 7 editorial page article, Dorothy Rabinowitz has deemed the story "a journalistic felony in a class by itself." But on what basis? A flawed report written jointly by super-lawyer Floyd Abrams and CNN general counsel David Kohler, whose intent and design was to kill off the story, so that CNN could put the controversy behind them.

This story is now caricatured as being "rich in absurdities." But to the men on the mission, who broke secrecy oaths to step forward and speak, it is hardly absurd. It was, for many, a defining moment of their lives. It took courage for them to speak out, and it took courage for CNN to broadcast it. Far from being embarrassed by this report, I remain proud. It is tough cracking a black operation, the very design of which is to deceive and cover up the truth.

The armchair critics are now belly-gazing about the problems of journalism represented by the "Valley of Death" report. They point to the fact that a confirming source was an aged gentleman, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Thomas Moorer. They insinuate that he, at his age, cannot be relied upon. And they undercut his confirmation by pointing out that in an early interview, preceding his final confirmation, Adm. Moorer suggested he knew nothing about the sarin gas usage on this mission. Adm. Moorer later reversed himself on that matter, however. Not only did he confirm that sarin was proven an effective weapon on the Tailwind mission, he also told CNN that the sarin cluster bomb unit was "by and large" available for search and rescue missions throughout Laos and North Vietnam during the Vietnam War. Finally, Adm. Moorer read the script a week before air and gave it his explicit approval.

The felony here is not in the reporting. It is in the lack of guts by CNN management to back a controversial story that they nurtured and approved. The retraction was not based on inaccuracy, but on fear. Fear of controversy, fear of congressional hearings with retired Gen. Colin Powell opposing CNN, and fear of retribution by the military establishment when the next Bosnia or Iraq crisis strikes, and CNN needs access. Even the superficial and flawed Abrams/Kohler report concedes that the research on the sarin gas story was exhaustive and that the story should be pursued further. But CNN made a corporate calculation: whatever happened 28 years ago in Laos was far less important than what will happen in CNN's future relationships with the military.

But now CNN, in order to buttress its retraction and protect its relationships with the military, has decided to kill off the story entirely. According to one CNN executive, "We're going to try and kill this thing, drive a stake through its heart, and bury it...so it's gone." This is the speech of a corporate warrior, whose mission is to kill off fact-finding that might endanger the mother company. It is not the speech of a journalist.

CNN now seems more committed to public relations than to fact- finding. But in the aftermath of the "Valley of Death" broadcast, CNN was flooded with new leads on the sarin gas story. We even shot another interview with a Vietnam veteran who claimed to have gone into Cambodia to kill defectors, and was pulled out of a dangerous situation with the use of nerve gas dropped by airplanes. All those who came into contact with the veteran found him to be credible, and his paperwork checked out. What now happens to this tape? Does CNN burn it on the altar of its zealotry to kill the story? Is CNN afraid that -- if the story is advanced -- they will have to retract a retraction?

I and my co-producer, Jack Smith, were muzzled for three weeks by CNN, unable to defend the story. Now that we have been fired, we can finally speak out. Our story was grounded in multiple sources and carefully put together. We both stand by it, and believe that in this democracy, the truth, in its entirety, will eventually be told.

April Oliver
Washington

People forget, but by any measure, the Vietnam War was a criminal war, as any war planned and orga nized by dishonorable and duplicitous politicians and Pentagon bureaucrats must be. So when CNN and Time reported in their June 7th program, "NewsStand: CNN & Time - The Valley of Death," that the U.S. had used nerve gas in 1970 in the Laotian theater - a place in which American troops were "officially" and by international law not supposed to be - few familiar with the war's history were surprised.

What was surprising was the swiftness with which a coterie of unscrupulous former officials could put together a coalition with contemporary Pentagon bureaucrats and Special Forces veterans to elicit a pusillanimous retraction from the effete media giants.

Both CNN and Time Magazine issued a retraction. CNN fired the program's producers, April Oliver and Jack Smith. According to a printed version of the story authored by Oliver and CNN correspondent, Peter Arnett, and published in the June 15th edition of Time Magazine, the CIA named the operation "Tailwind." Its target was "a large group of American G.I.s who had defected to the enemy. The Special Forces unit's job was to kill them." Sarin, a nerve gas, was used in the operation.

Admiral Thomas Moorer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, confirmed the story in several interviews with Oliver and Smith. "The story was based on statements by soldiers, airmen, and military officials," say a fired-up Oliver and Smith, who are angered by the story's retraction. "We stand by our reporting."

The mobilization of pressure against CNN and Time to retract their nerve-gas/defector story was essentially a cover-your-ass action. As Major Albert J. Paxton (USA, Ret.) noted in a strong critique of the CNN/Time story, "THERE IS NO STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS ON MURDER OR WAR CRIMES! (sic)"

Using nerve gas in combat constitutes a war crime. The extra-legal execution of an American soldier, even on the battlefield, could lead to a murder charge. Since Tailwind was a CIA operation with the chain of command stretching into the White House, it's no secret whose ass was on the line: the National Security advisor at the time, Henry Kissinger's. And Kissinger, who refused to be interviewed for the story, was one of the first on the line to the CNN executives. The subsequent critique of the CNN program has been focus on questioning the honor and heroism of the troops on the ground instead of the cunning duplicity of the men who planned the war.

The public theater since the airing of "Valley of Death" - critiques, firings, reports, threats, retractions, press conferences, rebuttals, and the inscrutable silence of those responsible - has been a grand exercise in "plausible deniability," though Melvin Laird admitted that sarin gas had been shipped to Indochina, before the Pentagon could deny it.

Let's recall that the mobilization for the Vietnam War was based on a lie to the American people.

The phony Gulf of Tonkin incident that led to the military build up in August, 1964, was as devious as Hitler dressing up prisoners as Polish soldiers to fake a bogus attack on a German outpost on September 1, 1939.

We can't forget the Vietnamese non-combatants were the most numerous victims of the war. The terminology of the war attests to this: body-count, free-fire zone, search-and-destroy. Unforgettable images are still haunting: a naked girl running from a naplam attack, peasants huddling as their village is destroyed, aerial bombardment with napalm and Agent Orange, helicopter gunships firing indiscriminately into treelines.

The Vietnamese have reported that as many as 4 million civilians died in the war, in addition to the 1.1 million military combatants killed in action.

We also have to remember that anti-civilian barbarism was institutionalized in the CIA Phoenix program. Through Phoenix, the CIA sponsored torture and assassinations - i.e., "neutralizations" in Vietnam that later exported to Latin America in the 1980s. The result was vastly to increase the numbers of innocent persons rounded up and imprisoned, brutally tortured, and indiscriminately murdered. The State Department officially admitted that the CIA-run Phoenix program murdered or abducted as many as 35,708 Vietnamese civilians, though the true number may be twice or three times as high.

So when a well-prepared report about nerve gas emerges almost thirty years after the fact, who doubts its credibility?

According to the June 7th report, when the U.S. Special Forces team encountered a superior force preventing their successful extraction, the "worst of the worst," CBU-15, also known as GB sarin gas, was called in. Who would doubt that any commander would use any weapon available to save the men under his command?

Many are not committed to finding out the truth. They've redefined the issue as an emotional one regarding support for American vets, who got no parade when they came home. And few vets know the truth. Many concluded the "Valley of Death" story is an attack on them. But, as with any revealing truth, it is actually a rebuke of the American officials who sent them to Vietnam.

CNN retracted the story on July 2, after an internal investigation conducted by attorney Floyd Abrams and CNN Senior Vice President and General Counsel David Kohler concluded that the use of nerve gas during the Vietnam conflict "is insupportable."
The same report also concludes, "We are persuaded beyond doubt that the (NewsStand) report was rooted in extensive research done over an eight-month period and reflects the honestly held conclusions of CNN's journalists ... We do not believe it can reasonably be suggested that any of the information on which the broadcast was based was fabricated or nonexistent."

The Abrams-Kohler Report did not question Oliver's or Smith's integrity.

The Pentagon also commissioned an internal review and issued a report on July 21. In presenting the report, Defense Secretary William Cohen said, "The 16 men who conducted this mission were heros, but they have been hurt by this report ... Some may not be receiving the benefits that they deserve, and I've asked Under Secretary Rudy de Leon to make sure that all the participants are receiving the recognition and the benefits they deserve."

A little wampum never hurts in a lip-tightening exercise. But how credible is the story?

There is no doubt the Tailwind Operation occurred. (A short history of the engagement can be found on the internet at http://www.seas.gwu.edu/nsarchive/tailwind.) The U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, Studies and Observation Group (MACSOG) was actually directed by the CIA.

Admiral Moorer, who was interviewed four times for the "Valley of Death" program, states during a segment of the taped interview included in the Abrams-Kohler Report, "Well SOG after all was conceived by agents of the CIA. The CIA briefed the President [Nixon] daily. The CIA and the White House would know about this before the JCS ... A strong effort was made to keep the CIA operations quiet and secret. But the CIA couldn't conduct an operation of this size and magnitude with it going thru the White House (sic)."

In short, the Operation Tailwind took place outside the main military command structure. The buck stopped at the White House, not the JCS.

The Pentagon denied on July 21st that it had the means to use sarin in the operation. Cohen stated, "Sarin was stored in Okinawa at the time and remained there until 1971." In short, according to Cohen, sarin was never deployed during the Vietnam war.

However, a June 9th Time story reported that the Secretary of Defense at the time, Melvin Laird, "claims the U.S. shipped a 'small amount' of sarin to Saigon in 1967."

April Oliver found that as much as 30 million pounds of sarin were available by 1970. Oliver says, "an A1 squadron commander [told] us in an interview that GB [sarin] was stored at the secret airbase, NKP [Nakkon Phanom Air Base], in Thailand. General John Singlaub told me last summer that he believed SOG's incapacitating agents were stored at NKP, that some affected the human nervous system, required an antidote, and were sometimes lethal." Singlaub ran the SOG program between 1966 and 1968.

The "Valley of Death" program is not the first time reports of nerve-gas use in Vietnam emerged. According to a 1972 article that appeared in Earth magazine, the Pentagon wanted "to observe how real nerve gas in real combat conditions made real 'enemy' real dead."

A Laotian operation provided the perfect opportunity to use the gas. U.S. troops were not supposed to be in that country, nor were the North Vietnamese. The operation was secret and deniable. In addition, as the CNN program noted, the SOG commandos were outfitted with "special gas masks to protect against lethal gas" and "atropine, a nerve gas antidote."

Meanwhile, the MACSOG history notes that the commandos "came under attack from 140-150 enemy" as they were trying to secure a landing zone (LZ) for CH-53 helicopters. In the next paragraph, the history records, "When the enemy action decreased," the team "moved to secure an LZ at a different location." What accounts for the "decrease" in enemy action and the need to move to another location?

The commander of the SOG group had a strong motive for calling in "the worst of the worst." As any good combat leader, his first concern is for the safety and survival of the men under his command. When threatened with a superior force, any commander would use any weapon available to protect his men.

What is available is decided by his superiors and the officials responsible for the war and its logistics.

In the Abrams-Kohler Report, Admiral Moorer says, "Treaties will never stop people from using this weapon ... I would have used any weapon, any tactic, and any move to defend the security of the United States." According to one of Oliver's sources mentioned in her rebuttal to the Abrams-Kohler Report, "People don't understand how callous we were in SOG. There were simply no rules."

Would the White House have authorized sending men on secret missions to Laos if they could not predict the probability of their successful extraction? In 1970, before the Big Fall? Before Woodward and Bernstein? Henry the K knows, but won't tell.

The attack on the "Valley of Death" story and its producers has been unrelenting since June 7th. Web sites are popping up. The Special Forces Association is calling for a boycott of CNN, Time, and the corporate sponsors of "NewsStand: CNN & Time," which include AT&T, IBM, Ford, Chrysler, Sony, and Ricoh. The military is closing ranks with calls to anyone who may know anything.

Meanwhile, Admiral Moorer was under severe pressure to recant the story after the CNN broadcast, even though he read and approved the "Valley of Death" script before it aired. The Pentagon actually "faxed Admiral Moorer a statement" for him to issue the day after the program, say Oliver and Smith in their rebuttal to the Abrams-Kohler Report.

The Pentagon statement has Moorer saying, "I did not confirm the use of Sarin gas by U.S. military forces during Operation Tailwind." According to Oliver and Smith, Moorer changed this to read, "I did not authorize the use of Sarin gas ..." Since Admiral Moorer's original motive in agreeing to appear in the CNN program was to set the historical record straight, presumably the denial that he authorized the use of nerve gas is consistent with this motive. It had to have been authorized by the White House.

While the messengers are being shot down, the critics of CNN, Time, and their writers/producers have forgot that it not the soldiers at the front who bear the ultimate responsibility for what may have occurred on the mission. Those responsible are the men who sent them there. There has been no accounting for Vietnam, no "Truth Commission" to investigate the immoral and incompetent mediocrity that sent 57,000 Americans to their premature deaths. The old-boy network that integrates the military-industrial- government establishment is strong enough to prevent it. So we can only expect any news about the Vietnam War and its interpretation to continue to divide the American people, much as it did between 1964 and 1973.

• April Oliver has filed a lawsuit in District of Columbia Superior Court charging that CNN fired her "primarily on business and public relations concerns."
• Oliver claims that senior management at CNN and Time knew the Tailwind report was "inherently volitile and would be particularly controversial and sensitive in the military community."
• While Oliver is seeking unspecified damages, she said money was not her motive. "This is a useful opportunity for me to put facts on the table that have been buried -- which CNN intentionally tried to bury...there are issues of honor at play here and there are issues of fact-seeking and truth-finding. I want the public record restored on this so I'm not buried under a sea of character assassination.
• Oliver also filed a counter-lawsuit against retired Army Gen. John Singlaub, naming him as her source for the Tailwind report. Singlaub was among a group of veterans who sued CNN and Time magazine, claiming the reports defamed them. "This is an act of defense," Oliver said. "He sued me for a story he confirmed. He was offered the script to read although he declined...I think that people should understand that he confirmed the central ideas of the Tailwind broadcast." Attorneys for Singlaub could not be reached for comment.

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Updated May 8, 1999

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