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Q: Did Secretary Cohen talk to Melvin Laird about the use of nerve gas while he was Secretary of Defense in the Nixon Administration? Two, do you have any comment on Admiral Moorer's thoughts today? And three, are you going to provide us with the TAILWIND freedom of information release?
A: Let me address all those questions, maybe not in the order that you asked them.
First of all, Secretary Cohen has sent a memorandum to the Secretary of the Army and the Secretary of the Air Force asking them to report back to him in 30 days on their assessment of the truth of the allegations that have been made about the use of nerve gas in Laos in September of 1970. You can get a copy of those memos as you leave if you want them.
To the best of my knowledge, Secretary Cohen has spoken to nobody about this because he feels that what's appropriate is for him to turn this over to experts and let them do what they need to do to get to the bottom of these accounts. That will involve not only looking at documents but interviewing people who either participated in the operation or participated in the decisionmaking at the time. So it will be up to the Secretaries of the Army and the Air Force and also the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who was included on the memo, to design an approach to figure out what happened, and to do that within 30 days.
I understand right now that another agency in town is reviewing the documents that have been requested under the Freedom of Information Act and they assure us that they will try to complete their review as quickly as possible. Many of the documents are still classified and have to be declassified. It's something that requires more than just the Department of Defense. I hope that those documents will be available quickly. Since this is not... I would not make a promise about the ability of this Department to produce documents quickly, although we try very hard to produce them quickly. I certainly can't make a promise about another department when classified documents are involved.
Q: Secretary Cohen and his investigation is sort of the Administration investigation of these allegations, but it doesn't sound like in his memo he's asked the CIA or Tennet for help. Traditionally the CIA ran these Laotian operations, out of country operations during the war. Traditionally they ran the special forces black operations. Is the CIA involved in this investigation one way or another?
A: I think the Service Secretaries will have to decide whether they need to go to other agencies to get questions answered and that hasn't happened yet. They just got the memo this morning.
My assumption is that if they feel they need information from other agencies that they will seek that through the proper interagency process.
Our goal here is to get to the bottom of this quickly, and our goal is to make the facts known to everybody, whatever the facts are. This is something that happened 28 years ago. It's something, obviously, the public deserves to understand. And they certainly deserve to know whether or not nerve gas was used in Laos in September of 1970. So we will try to produce that information as quickly as we can.
Q: What about Admiral Moorer's comments today?
A: I think that Admiral Moorer will have to explain his own dealings in this. I talked with Admiral Moorer yesterday and he told me that he did not authorize, when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in 1970, he did not authorize the use of sarin gas. That he had, at the time, no personal knowledge that it had been used; that he had no documentary evidence either in the terms of operational orders or after action reports or other documents suggesting it had been used. And that was his, that he heard rumors afterwards that gas had been used, but he had no first hand knowledge that it had been used.
Q: He heard rumors?
A: He told me that later on he heard rumors that gas had been used...
Q: After the war, or...
A: He wasn't specific about when.
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Q: Can you tell me what the purpose of your call to Admiral Moorer was yesterday, and have you received personally any other feedback on this TAILWIND situation, realizing that it's only been about 24 hours since it's cropped up?
A: I spoke to Admiral Moorer because there were differences between what he was quoted in saying on the program and in Time Magazine, and what I saw him quoted as saying in a Reuter report. I just wanted to talk to him and get a sense of what was correct.
I think there is no doubt that Admiral Moorer will be interviewed by the service investigations in the course of their study of what happened. But Admiral Moorer is clearly capable of speaking for himself. I know he spoke again with CNN yesterday.
In terms of information, a lot of people are sending around e-mails and giving their accounts of what happened in Laos in September of 1970 as part of Operation TAILWIND. Most people who seem to be sending around e-mails from the Special Forces Association and coming forward don't believe that sarin was used. And it's interesting that one of the primary participants in the program, a guy named Robert Van Buskirk, wrote a book about this in 1983 in which he did not mention the use of nerve gas at all. Nor did he mention that this Operation TAILWIND was designed to track down and kill defectors. He called it a diversionary operation. He mentioned that about half the soldiers in his group did not have gas masks, and he also mentioned that his gas mask had a big leak in it because of a shrapnel hole through the rubber, and specifically mentions that his eyes were burning, which is generally associated with tear gas.
To the best of my knowledge, from what I can tell so far, it looks as if two gases were used -- non-lethal gases: tear gas CS, and possibly a vomiting gas called CN. But the facts, I hope, will become clear after 30 days when the Secretary of the Army and the Secretary of the Air Force complete their reviews of exactly what happened there.
Q: Did you say there was some evidence that CS/CN was used?
A: I have spoken personally with a pilot who flew A-1s during this mission and he said that he delivered CS. There's some other evidence that CN may have been used, but that's one of the things we have to find out.
Q: Which pilot was that?
A: It's a pilot in Philadelphia named Stumpf.
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