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June 27, 1998
Ex-Officer Disputes Parts of CNN Nerve-Gas Story
Related Article
Pentagon to Investigate Charges It Used Nerve Gas (June 9)
By LAWRIE MIFFLIN
former military officer used prominently by Cable News Network in a report about the use of nerve gas in an attack during the Vietnam War Friday disputed key points of CNN's representation of his account.
In a telephone interview, Robert Van Buskirk, who was a lieutenant in a secret special-forces platoon on a raid into Laos in 1970, said he believes CNN's report of the attack is basically accurate but that he did not confirm, as the network implied, that a gas dropped on the rescue site that day was sarin, a lethal nerve gas whose use is outlawed by international law. He said that he did not know what gas was dropped but had been told later that it was "a lethal gas."
Also, he said he had not told CNN that a soldier he confronted and killed during that raid was an American defector, but had told the producer that his victim was a blond Caucasian, and possibly Russian.
In the CNN report, however, Van Buskirk clearly says: "This is a GI." On Friday, he said that this had been his "gut feeling" but he had no proof.
The CNN report, which was part of a new collaboration between the network and its sister magazines at Time Inc., called "CNN NewsStand," appeared on June 7. The next day, a similar version was published in Time magazine.
Both reports asserted that the U.S. military had dropped sarin on a Laotian village in 1970, as part of a secret mission called Operation Tailwind, and had done so in pursuit of American defectors who had been ordered killed. Both reports cited unnamed military officials with knowledge of the secret mission as sources, and also quoted eight former soldiers by name.
Van Buskirk gave the most vivid account, about encountering the blond man in the Laotian village, offering to rescue him as he fled down a "spider hole," then throwing a grenade into the hole after him. He also told CNN's producer, April Oliver (who co-authored the article in Time, with Peter Arnett), that he had repressed all memory of this encounter until Ms. Oliver began questioning him for her report.
Neither CNN nor Time reported the recovered-memory aspect of Van Buskirk's account. A week later, Newsweek magazine did, in an article that tried to refute most of the CNN-Time report.
"I don't think CNN was wrong," in the gist of their report, Van Buskirk said Friday. "Maybe they edited our words to go along with the line they wanted to take. But they didn't put words in my mouth."
Van Buskirk also disputed the CNN account of his exploits in an interview with Gary Matsumoto of the Fox News Channel (an all-news cable channel and competitor to CNN), seen Thursday evening.
Almost immediately after the "CNN-NewsStand" report appeared, it was denounced by former military officers, some of whom accused CNN's producers of ignoring interviews and evidence that undercut their poison-gas thesis. But CNN defended the report, saying that military officers were usually sworn to secrecy about such operations, and that some officers would feel bound to cover up or lie about secret operations, even 28 years later.
The Pentagon has begun an investigation into the accusations. And both Time and CNN are investigating the report's accuracy, Time using one of its own Washington bureau reporters, and CNN hiring Floyd Abrams, the noted First Amendment lawyer, to work with its general counsel, David Kohler, on an internal investigation.
"It's not surprising that there is some controversy over the facts, given the nature of the story," a CNN spokesman, Howard Polskin, said Friday. He added that CNN executives would not comment further until Abrams and Kohler finish their investigation.
Matsumoto also interviewed Adm. Thomas Moorer, who was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1970, and Lt. Col. Eugene McCarley, who was a captain and the commander of the Tailwind operation on the mission in dispute. Both men denied having told CNN that one objective of their mission was to kill American defectors. Moorer also told Matusmoto that he had never told CNN that sarin nerve gas was used.
"I explained many times to the interviewers that I never saw a document," Moorer said on Fox News. "I never saw battle plans. I never saw a battle report. And, I would not confirm such an event if I didn't have it documented."
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