by April Oliver I conducted more than a half dozen interviews on the subject of Operation Tailwind with General John Singlaub. The conversation documented by the Media Channel transcript took place in early May, 1998. Jack Smith, my co-producer, was standing in the doorway as the interview took place and can vouch that he asked me to call Singlaub and that he watched me do it. The interview was about an hour long. I have contemporaneous handwritten notes which match the transcript. Even CNN attorney Floyd Abrams confirms that nothing was fabricated. The interview in question was my last contact with General Singlaub before the story aired. In the wake of the controversy that followed the June 7, 1998 broadcast of "Valley of Death," Singlaub's initial public position was that he was never interviewed for the story—that I took his quotes completely out of context from a separate interview that had nothing to do with Tailwind. His later position was that he was interviewed by me, about Tailwind—more than half a dozen times, in fact—and that he cooperated with me in these interviews, despite the fact that he was purportedly outraged by a previous story I had done. He claims that in all of these interviews he consistently denied my version of the Tailwind events, which he maintained was inaccurate and outrageous. Now, in a recent litigation document, he claims that in fact he didn't consistently deny it, but that he, a special forces general, heavily decorated with medals for valor, was "intimidated" by me into providing some measure of support for my version of events, against his will. I had two conversations with Singlaub after the broadcast. The first was approximately two weeks after broadcast, in which he warned me that he would have to go public to condemn the broadcast due to pressure from his associates in Special Operations. I begged him not to, telling him that I would go to jail to protect him as a confidential source. He said he liked me personally and was afraid I was going to get hurt in what he implied would be an effort to kill the story. After I read him portions of the transcript, he backed off and agreed (I thought) not to go public with his condemnation. About three days later, he called me back in an irate state, saying: "If I told you once, I told you a thousand times, it's not true." This was the first time I had heard him express these sentiments in such an outraged fashion. It was particularly perplexing in light of his previous position regarding the story: There had been some dithering and then an ultimate confirmation, but never any denial that the events in question had occurred. The day after the irate call he went public at the Soldier of Fortune press conference, impugning my credibility and saying I had picked up my sources at a bar. Given my pledge of confidentiality, I did not reveal him as a source, despite the defamation. Singlaub was the Pentagon's lead witness claiming the story was false at an international press conference in July, 1998. This was the press conference where the official line was that one drop of sarin will kill you and everyone who comes into contact with it dies—despite the fact that after the Tokyo subway attack by the Aum Shinrikyo cult in 1995, 6,000 people got sick, but only 12 died. No one in the press bothered to open their NATO NBC manuals, paragraphs 204 and 206 of which plainly state that in open fields NBC combat masks—masks which the Tailwind survivors had and wore—are sufficient protection against sarin. The masks provided the decisive edge in what seemed like a hopeless situation. All of this is timely, given the news that the Pentagon gave Gulf War soldiers—500,000 of them—a sarin antidote pill. The claim is that it was just a giant theoretical experiment. The numbers suggest to me that it was not an experiment but part of the operational battle plan. An experiment can be conducted with a small control group of a few hundred. Why on such a scale? I believe that chemical warfare has probably been used more than history will ever record. Consider the Porton Down sarin expose in England: As this is written, British soldiers are stepping forward to claim that the British government tested sarin on willing volunteers in the late '50s and early '60s. Some died; some are suing. If the good guys will use nerve gas on the good guys, why wouldn't the U.S. military use it against the enemy in a life-or-death situation? Why is this so implausible? Not that I'm ideological about Operation Tailwind. I don't have a problem with the use of nerve gas in this situation; technically, it wasn't even illegal, since the U.S. had not ratified the Geneva Protocol yet. Moreover, there's no question that its use saved lives in this instance. I do have a problem with the system of lying and deceit that puts democratic institutions at risk. As well, I have a problem with media that are so complicit in this system that they virtually execute the government's cover-up for them. Most journalists bought CNN's misinformation without question. The few who understood what went down also saw that it was not a fight worth waging. After all, who wants to end up like me? CNN's promise to pursue the story sometime in the future is laughable. They threw money around to buy the silence of people who had originally helped to confirm the story. People who had previously said the story was excellent suddenly claimed to have been defamed. Other sources have informed me that when they contacted CNN to offer confirmation and corroboration of the events recounted in "Valley of Death," they were told that CNN was not interested in talking to them, that the story was simply too political. |
