A Rain of Terror in Asia

The U.S. documents its charges of Soviet chemical warfare

Midmorning on Oct. 10, 1980, a plane flew low over the foothills of the Khao Khouy Mountains in southern Laos. As it passed above the village of Long Sa, the craft began trailing plumes of reddish-yellow gas. Villagers enveloped in the falling mist felt dustlike particles landing on their skin. The air smelled of burning peppers. Ma Hear, who saw the mist fall on the village from a protected lean-to on a nearby hill, recalled that within minutes many of Long Sa’s 1,000 residents fell ill. Itchy rashes, followed by tiny blisters, appeared on their skin. Their vision blurred, and the villagers felt dizzy and began gasping for breath. Farmers caught in open fields vomited blood. Although most of Long Sa’s villagers recovered from the attack, Ma Hear told doctors in a Thailand refugee camp that 40 people died, including his wife and daughter.

The “yellow rain” that fell on Long Sa is the focus of a bitter dispute between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Since last fall, Administration officials have accused the Soviet Union and its allies of violating the Geneva Protocol of 1925 and the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention—both treaties have been signed by Moscow—by engaging in chemical warfare. “With every passing day,” charged Secretary of State Alexander Haig in February, “we get more incontrovertible evidence of the use of mycotoxins [fungal poisons] in Afghanistan, Laos and Kampuchea [Cambodia] . . . There is no question in our minds that such weapons have been and are continuing to be used.”

Responding to numerous requests from Congress for documentation of these charges, the Administration last week released a 32-page summary of its evidence, prepared by the State Department and based in part on secret Pentagon and CIA reports. The document charged that since 1975, the Soviets and their allies have launched at least 432 chemical attacks in Indochina and Afghanistan, killing more than 10,000 people. The chemicals involved include nerve gas, mustard gas, lewisite and mycotoxins.

At a press briefing, Deputy Secretary of State Walter Stoessel said that the summary was based on examinations of physical evidence, including environmental samples, as well as the testimony of eyewitnesses to yellow-rain attacks, journalists and doctors treating refugees. Said Stoessel of the use of these chemicals in Indochina: “Thousands have been killed or severely injured. Thousands have also been driven from their homeland by the use of these agents.” As for Afghanistan, he added, Soviet forces have used a variety of lethal and nonlethal chemical weapons against rebel forces since the invasion in December 1979.

The Soviet Union has consistently denied its involvement in chemical warfare. The Soviet news agency TASS denounced the State Department report as “dirty lies,” and pointedly noted that the U.S. had used poisonous herbicides (including the controversial Agent Orange) during the Viet Nam War. The Soviets have also accused the U.S. of supplying Afghan rebels with chemical weapons and of preparing to use them against Cuba and the rebels in El Salvador.

The most mysterious and dreaded of the chemicals that the U.S. accuses the Soviets and their allies of using are the mycotoxins, specifically a class known as trichothecenes. These poisons carry such names as nivalenol, deoxynivalenol and T2. Little is known about trichothecenes, but they apparently cause the deterioration and death of cells in bone marrow, lymph nodes, intestines and other organs, and the rupture of blood vessels. They also interfere with the blood’s ability to clot. When sprayed in a mist that is usually yellow but can be red or white, they are said to kill plants, animals and people with frightening speed. According to May Xiong, 29, a Hmong refugee in Thailand who witnessed a score of gas attacks: “Nothing survives yellow rain.”

The first reports on the use of the toxins in Indochina began circulating in 1976, when members of the Hmong tribes, which had fought with U.S. forces in the Indochina conflict, fled their Laotian highland villages for Thailand. At first, their bizarre stories were not taken seriously. But at least one listener was struck by the consistency of these tales: Dr. Amos Townsend, 51, a retired Air Force colonel who served at Fort Detrick, Md., when it was the U.S. Army’s biological-warfare research center. “I knew the Hmong were not lying to me,” says Townsend, who is now with an International Rescue Committee team helping refugees in Thailand. “There were so many stories, each slightly different, but all describing similar incidents.” Later, refugees fleeing Cambodia began telling almost identical stories. In 1979, a U.S. medical team was sent to a Hmong refugee camp in Thailand to investigate the charges. It concluded that two or three chemicals, including a mysterious lethal gas, were being used against the tribe.

Last September the U.S. announced that a leaf and twig dusted with yellow powder, which had been retrieved by Thai forces from a Cambodian village shortly after a gas attack, contained high levels of three trichothecenes. Townsend collected another telling set of samples in October during a four-day trip to a Cambodian hospital that was tending victims of a reported yellow-rain attack. He drew blood from nine survivors of the assault, which had occurred four weeks earlier, as well as from four people who had never been exposed to yellow rain. Traces of a metabolite of T2 were found in the blood of two of the victims. Townsend last month made three more trips to the Thai-Cambodian border to collect blood samples from survivors of chemical assaults that occurred in February and March.

The State Department report contends that only the Soviet Union—and certainly not its Indochinese allies—has the capacity to mass-produce the toxins. The U.S.S.R. has a long familiarity with mycotoxins. During World War II, thousands of Soviet citizens died, apparently after eating food made from improperly harvested grain. The presumed reason: fungus growing on the grain had produced trichothecenes. Soviet technical literature contains extensive studies of the toxins, including how to produce them on a large scale, and the Soviets are said to use the chemicals as insecticides and antifungus agents. Says a State Department official: “To produce them by the hundreds of pounds for spraying out of airplanes requires a major pharmaceutical facility.”

But why would the Soviets use these deadly weapons? According to Richard Burt, director of the State Department’s Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs, “chemicals were the most effective way” of removing enemies from contested territory. Argues Burt: “The Soviets teach in their chemical-warfare school that lethal chemical weapons are acceptable and effective in putting down resistance in a local war, particularly when it looks like you’ve got them on the run.”

The U.S. formally asked the United Nations to investigate its yellow-rain charges; last November the U.N. sent an eight-member team to interview refugees in Thailand. The team was denied visas to Laos and Viet Nam and for complex diplomatic reasons did not try to make on-site inspections in Cambodia. Not surprisingly, the hamstrung investigation found no evidence to “prove or disprove the allegations.” Even so, the U.N. team reported that refugee accounts “could suggest a possible use of some sort of chemical-warfare agents” and recommended that the inquiry continue. The team visited Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan in February, and will issue a new report in the fall.

Some congressional critics are more than satisfied by the State Department report. Says Congressman Jim Leach, Republican from Iowa: “The previous statements on the subject were sufficient to indict but not to convict. On the basis of the new report, I think any jury would convict.”

World reaction to the U.S. charges has been curiously muted, in part because of the Administration’s frequent overstatements. Says Gregory A. Flynn, of the Paris-based Atlantic Institute for International Affairs: “What happened with that [purported Nicaraguan guerrilla in El Salvador] brought up to Washington is bound to affect the world’s interpretation of this latest report.” Concedes Leach: “The U.S. is not too credible any more in the eyes of some [foreign] governments. They think we suffer from an anti-Soviet paranoia.”

Some U.S. scientists, too, argue that the case is not yet conclusive. Employing a peculiarly exact figure that recalled the illusory body counts of the Viet Nam War, the State Department study alleged that at least 6,504 had been killed by chemical attacks in Laos. Asked how that precise number could be confirmed with out autopsies, a spokesman for the department answered that the figure was meant merely to show the number of deaths that it had corroborated by outside evidence.

Scientists also take issue with the report’s argument that only large-scale industry, on the Soviet model, can mass-produce the toxins. Argues Biochemist James Bamburg of Colorado State University: “You can do it in your basement or a converted dog kennel.” What most concerns scientific skeptics is that the physical samples, the crux of the Government’s case, are few in number and have been gathered in haphazard fashion. Notes Ecologist Arthur Westing of Hampshire College, who chaired a panel on chemical weapons at a January meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science: “You don’t know if they have been doctored or if they were brought over sloppily and fungus simply developed on them naturally.”

Whether or not that is true, there is ample and indisputable evidence that the Soviet Union does have a massive investment in chemical warfare. According to the Pentagon, the Soviets have 100,000 personnel in the program and 14 active chemical factories. By contrast, the U.S. military has only 5,000 people assigned to chemical warfare and no active production facility. Manufacture of chemical weapons ceased in 1969. The U.S. has a stockpile of 700,000 rounds of nerve gas, but most of these weapons, says Deputy Under Secretary of Defense James P. Wade Jr., are “unserviceable and unreliable.”

President Reagan wants to resume production of chemical weapons, which he has called “essential to the national interest.” His new defense budget calls for $123 million to be spent on rebuilding and maintaining the U.S. chemical arsenal. The Pentagon plans to produce so-called binary weapons, in which the ingredients of deadly nerve gas are kept in separate compartments of bombs or shells. They combine to form a lethal mixture only after being fired, thus making handling safer.

Some military experts on Capitol Hill are dubious about allotting money for chemical warfare. Democratic Senator Gary Hart of Colorado has introduced legislation to ban money for the new weapons, arguing that they “would constitute a mindless escalation of the arms race.” The Administration believes, however, that replenishing its chemical-weapons stock could force the Soviets into serious negotiations on a chemical-arms ban. If a mutually acceptable verification system could be worked out, said U.S. Disarmament Negotiator Louis Fields Jr. at talks in Geneva last week, the U.S. would “terminate our binary program promptly and eagerly.”

—ByAnastasia Toufexls. Reported by Victoria Butler/Bangkok and Bruce W. Nelan/Washlngton, with other bureaus