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July 3, 1998
CNN Retracts Report That Military Used Lethal Nerve Gas in Laos in 1970
Related ArticlesExcerpts From Inquiry's Report on CNN Broadcast Ex-Officer Disputes Parts of CNN Nerve-Gas Story (June 27) Time Orders Investigation on Accuracy of CNN Report (June 22) Pentagon to Investigate Charges It Used Nerve Gas (June 9)
By ROBIN POGREBIN and FELICITY BARRINGER
able News Network executives Thursday retracted the network's report that the U.S. military had used lethal sarin nerve gas in a secret 1970 mission in Laos aimed at killing American defectors.
The retraction, broadcast Thursday afternoon and accompanied by an apology, was based on an independent investigation, performed at CNN's request, that showed the report's conclusions were not supported by the evidence. The original broadcast, which was accompanied by the fanfare of advance publicity common in the growing community of broadcast news magazines, was shown June 7 as the feature presentation on the first installment of the news magazine show "NewsStand: CNN &Time."
The broadcast, a joint venture with Time magazine that was being hailed within the Time-Warner empire as the fruit of productive synergy between the company's disparate news-gathering operations.
The apology amounted to a devastating admission that the report had falsely cast the U.S. government, and in particular its military and intelligence arms, as brazenly using and concealing the use of one of the most forbidden weapons in the modern arsenal, a nerve gas banned by numerous international treaties.
A day after the piece was broadcast, a slightly modified version of the account of a mission that was code-named Operation Tailwind was published in Time, which also made a retraction and an apology Thursday. Journalists at Time and CNN said Thursday that the story was broadcast and published despite reservations raised by journalists within both organizations who received a last-minute chance to examine the report.
A senior executive with the network confirmed Thursday that Peter Arnett, a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist and perhaps the network's most prominent correspondent, had been reprimanded for his work on the story.
April Oliver and her colleague Jack Smith, the producers who had led the eight-month reporting effort, refused to resign and were fired. Pamela Hill, the executive producer, and who made the basic decision to broadcast the report, resigned.
Saying that CNN alone was responsible for the erroneous report, CNN News Group chairman Tom Johnson issued a statement Thursday saying, "We acknowledge serious faults in the use of sources who provided NewsStand with the original reports and therefore retract the Tailwind story.
"We apologize to our viewers and to our colleagues at Time for this mistake."
Time's article appeared under the bylines of Ms. Oliver and Arnett, whose career has taken him from Vietnam in the early 1960s to Bagh- dad in the Persian Gulf war. A Time editor reviewed the article and ac- cepted its basic thrust. The investigation of the broadcast, conducted by the noted constitutional lawyer Floyd Abrams, offered a microscopic examination of how journalism can go awry. "The CNN broadcast was not fair," the report said.
It showed no fabrication or illegality, but a more subtle process of distortion that began when conclusions outstripped the evidence, continued when sources were encouraged to believe that unseen evidence proved their own suspicions to be true and was compounded by interviews laced with hypothetical questions and ambiguous answers. Ultimately, the report concluded, the journalists refused to give more than a glancing nod to a series of eyewitnesses' denials that sarin gas was have been used.
"The CNN journalists involved in this project believed in every word they wrote," according to the Abrams report. "If anything, the serious flaws in the broadcast that we identify in this report may stem from the depths of those beliefs and the degree to which the journalists discounted contrary information they received precisely because they were so firmly persuaded that what they were broadcasting was true."
But even as her work was being repudiated, Ms. Oliver, the producer, refused to back away from her conclusions. "I feel that this report was solid," said Ms. Oliver, 36, "that I made every step any journalist would take to ensure its accuracy and that I had the full backing of management all the way up to the top."
In a conference call with reporters Thursday, Abrams said he had enlisted former intelligence officers from the investigative firm of Jules Kroll to try to independently confirm the account through their own military, intelligence and diplomatic sources.
The account of the Abrams investigation, which was posted on CNN's site on the World Wide Web (www.cnn.com), included numerous instances of overreaching in the broadcast.
One after another, his report examines the five underpinnings of the broadcast -- including interviews with participants, information from nerve gas experts, confidential sources with knowledge of U.S. intelligence operations, a retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- and finds flaws in every one.
The most-cited source, Admiral Thomas Moorer, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from mid-1970 to mid-1974, is 87, lives in an assisted-care retirement home in Maryland, and is no longer relied on by CNN's military correspondents. And many of the answers he gave were to hypothetical questions.
The accounts of those on the scene, where a special forces commando unit had attacked a base camp and then called for support from backup airborne units, are dramatic. Particularly dramatic are accounts that the backup fixed-wing planes dropped gas to help the U.S. unit escape.
But, as one of the pilots of the aircraft said Thursday, when the CNN journalists interviewed him, "I mostly got nerve-gas questions and I gave tear-gas answers."
The pilot, Art Bishop, now a retired satellite engineer, made a brief journal entry the day after the 1970 engagement saying his craft had been armed with cluster bomb units that carried r tear gas and explosives.
In his conference call, Abrams said that a separate document the journalists relied on was "a bad Xerox." It contained a virtually illegible reference to a substance used in cluster bombs coded as "25" (the code for explosives). The journalist read the illegible number as "15," the code for nerve gas.
In another case, the Abrams report pointed out, one member of a reconnaissance unit on the ground near the action, Jay Graves, "was an important on-the-ground source of information for both the use of sarin gas and the presence of American defectors." The broadcast quoted Graves as saying "We saw some round-eyed people. We didn't know if they were prisoners or whatever."
But Graves' qualifying statement -- "I didn't see any of them" -- was not used in the broadcast.
Like Ms. Oliver, the show's senior producer, Smith, said Thursday that he stood by the story.
In an interview with Reuters, Arnett said "Looking at it in retrospect, maybe I could have asked more questions about the story than I did. But I came into it very late, after I had spent several months covering the latest crisis in Baghdad, and by the time I got there the direction of the story was already set."
In the last days before the broadcast, people in Time magazine's New York and Washington bureaus were raising concerns about the piece, according to several Time journalists. In particular, Mark Thompson, the magazine's Pentagon correspondent, said he doubted the truth of the article's allegations. "He thought it was unsupportable," said one correspondent who insisted on anonymity. "The entire bureau was worried about it." Thompson was on vacation Thursday and could not be reached for comment.
According to several people at Time, Thompson and the Washington bureau's deputy bureau chief, J.F.O. McAllister, made their reservations known to editors in New York on June 5, the Friday before the magazine's Monday release.
According to one editor who spoke on condition of anonymity, Time responded to these reservations by toning down the piece somewhat -- putting a question mark in the headline, for example; writing in the subhead: "A CNN investigation charges that...".
Isaacson, Time's managing editor, declined to elaborate on a statement he issued Thursday, which said, "Based on our own investigation and that conducted by CNN, we have concluded that the facts simply do not support the allegations that were made."
The Time article was edited by John F. Stacks, an executive editor, and Johanna McGeary, Time's senior foreign correspondent -- both of whom did not return calls seeking comment. It was also overseen by Joelle Attinger, an executive editor at Time Inc. who serves as Time magazine's liaison with CNN.
"I'm heartbroken," Ms. Attinger said Thursday. "I think we all take responsibility for it -- anybody involved in any aspect of it must."
People at Time say the magazine relied on the 156-page summary that Ms. Oliver had prepared that detailed her sources, a summary that Abrams criticized in his report as selective and slanted.
At no time, several people at Time said, did anyone question Ms. Oliver's material as insufficient or suspect, nor did anyone argue that the article should not run. Moreover, people at Time said there was no overt pressure from CNN to publish the article.
But one correspondent said the timing of CNN's broadcast of the gas story -- which ran that Sunday -- was such that Time felt compelled to publish the article. "Normally, on a Friday, if there are serious questions about a story, you can always hold it," said one Time correspondent who declined to be identified.
Although Time has been working with CNN on polls and on the news magazine program "Impact," the gas story was the magazine's first collaboration in the magazine. Despite its potentially damaging results, Isaacson said in his statement that Time looks forward "to continuing to collaborate" with CNN.
Similarly, Norman Pearlstine, the editor in chief of Time Inc. said the company stood by its alliance with CNN. "It doesn't cause me to rethink the teamwork with TV," he said. "All of us obviously learned some things here and I'm sure as the weeks go on we'll have discussions about what are the appropriate procedures in any kind of joint venture."
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