By Evan Thomas and Gregory L. Vistica
It is a shocking tale--if true. In September 1970, as the Vietnam War rages on, a team of 16 commandos is sent deep into Laos on a secret mission. They are ordered to find and kill U.S. defectors, fellow soldiers who have gone over to the communists. In a jungle village, scouts spot a dozen or so "round eyes"--Westerners--who are believed to be turncoats. U.S. warplanes drop bombs containing lethal sarin gas, a nerve gas, killing some of the defectors, along with scores of civilians. The Air Force drops more poison gas the next day to help the commandos escape by helicopter.
But is the story true? The account, which appeared on CNN and in Time magazine last week, caused a stir in the Pentagon, which announced a full investigation. Sarin, the lethal gas used in the 1995 terrorist attack on a Tokyo subway that killed a dozen people, is banned by international law. The United States has threatened to go to war against Iraq to prevent the production of nerve gas and biochemical weapons. Use of sarin gas against civilians or soldiers would be a clear-cut war crime.
Reporting by NEWSWEEK, however, raises serious doubts about the most sensational allegations. The Army captain who led the raid, Eugene McCarley, told NEWSWEEK, "It's all lies." Several other officers and enlisted men involved in the mission, code-named Operation Tailwind, strongly disputed that they were ordered to kill defectors or that they ever saw any. (NEWSWEEK was able to reach seven of the eight soldiers who spoke on the record to CNN/Time as well as 26 others involved in or knowledgeable about the raid.) Gas was dropped to help the commandos escape a large North Vietnamese force, these men said, but it was nonlethal tear gas, not poisonous nerve gas. According to the CNN/Time story, Adm. Thomas Moorer, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, confirmed the use of sarin gas in the mission. But Moorer denied this to NEWSWEEK. Moorer, who is 86 and now lives in a "care-assisted" retirement home, said that he recalled hearing something about a mission in which gas was used, but he could not recall if it was sarin gas or tear gas.
Officers involved in Operation Tailwind scoffed at the suggestion that commandos would be ordered to kill defectors. "We'd try to bring them home, if we ever found any. We never did," said Lt. Pete Landon, one of the three platoon leaders on the mission. The real purpose of Tailwind, according to Captain McCarley and several other officers briefed on the mission, as well as a declassified special-forces history obtained by NEWSWEEK, was to blow up a bridge and disrupt traffic on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The CIA needed the commandos to create a diversion to draw away North Vietnamese regulars who were threatening to overwhelm CIA-backed Hmong tribesmen in the Laotian highlands.
From the beginning of Operation Tailwind, the 16 special-forces commandos, along with some 140 Montagnard tribesmen hired to fight the communists, encountered stiff resistance. All the commandos were wounded, though none died. The CNN/Time story reported that 60 Montagnards were killed; official records put the death toll at three. On the fourth day, the American force came across a rear-guard base for a North Vietnamese unit. Lt. Robert Van Buskirk, a platoon leader, gave CNN/Time a dramatic account of what happened next. Entering the enemy base, Van Buskirk says he spotted two Caucasians. One was sliding down a "spider hole" into an underground tunnel. The other was running toward it. The lieutenant gave chase, but just missed the blond man as he slipped down the tunnel. Van Buskirk said he offered to take the man home. "F--you," came the reply. "No, it's f--you," answered Van Buskirk, as he dropped a grenade down the hole.
Van Buskirk repeated this story to NEWSWEEK. But, he said, he had forgotten it entirely for 24 years--until he suddenly recalled the events during a five-hour interview with CNN producer April Oliver earlier this year. Van Buskirk told NEWSWEEK that he had repressed the memory on Easter Sunday 1974. At the time, Van Buskirk said, he was in a German prison on charges that he had sold weapons to a terrorist gang (the charges were later dropped). Van Buskirk, now a prison minister in North Carolina, said that until he had a vision of Christ on that Easter morning, he had been drinking heavily and was haunted by nightmares.
Two special-forces scouts, viewing the base from a distance of about two miles, told CNN they had seen "round eyes." One enlisted man, Sgt. Mike Hagen, says he saw a "blond guy from a distance." He thought the man might be a Russian adviser. But Van Buskirk did not mention killing defectors when he was debriefed after the mission. He says he was warned not to by a senior officer who is now dead. Other knowledgeable officers and officials dispute Van Buskirk's account. "I never heard anything about defectors, and I would have," said Hugh Tovar, the CIA station chief in Laos at the time.
Under attack, the men of Operation Tailwind had to be rescued by helicopter. U.S. planes dropped canisters of gas on the enemy. Van Buskirk and Hagen later suspected that the gas was lethal. Hagen says he is today numb below the knees and is seeking full disability payments. But other men told NEWSWEEK the gas was ordinary riot-control gas sometimes used on helicopter rescue missions to befog enemy gunners. Art Bishop, one of the two American pilots who bombed the enemy, wrote in his journal the next day that his payload was "CBU-30"--tear gas. The allegation of sarin gas, he told NEWSWEEK, is a "lot of nonsense."
It is possible that the special forces used an "incapacitating agent" stronger than tear gas in Vietnam. Two commandos told NEWSWEEK they had been trained to operate in a kind of gas that was not lethal like sarin but powerful enough to cause vomiting and diarrhea. April Oliver, the CNN producer, has for the past eight months been investigating the alleged use of poison gas by special forces in Vietnam. CNN vice president Pam Hill told NEWSWEEK that Oliver has "multiple confidential sources" to back up the story about the use of sarin gas. Oliver, together with correspondent Peter Arnett, wrote the piece that appeared in Time as part of a new TV magazine show called "NewsStand: CNN & Time." (The two news organizations are corporate partners.) When informed of the substance of this NEWSWEEK article, Arnett said, "It's a pretty factual account of one side of what's going on. It seems fair." Time staffers had minimal involvement in reporting the story. Says Time Managing Editor Walter Isaacson: "We welcome further debate and inquiry." A Pentagon spokesman says no evidence has been found to confirm the story, but the investigation continues.