Missed Story Syndrome   

Why did the national media largely ignore the medical problems of Persian Gulf War veterans until an embarrassing Pentagon about-face forced them into action?

I T WAS A WARM, SLEEPY FRIDAY in June, just the kind of afternoon to sneak out of the newsroom early and get a jump on the weekend. When word came that there would be a late-afternoon Pentagon press conference, the timing seemed suspicious to David Martin, who has covered the beat for CBS since 1983. "That," Martin says, "seems to be when bad news gets delivered in Washington."

And so it was on this Friday, June 21, 1996. After five years of steady and at times indignant denials from every corner of the Pentagon, Department of Defense officials came before the press to announce a dramatic reversal of their position on U.S. troop exposures during the Persian Gulf War. The government's repeated statements to Congress and Desert Storm veterans had been wrong: Chemical weapons had in fact been present on the Iraqi battlefield. Hundreds of troops--possibly more--may have been exposed during the 1991 demolition of the huge enemy ammunition depot called Khamisiyah, where nerve and mustard agents were stored. Other possible incidents of exposure also were under investigation.

Patrick J. Sloyan, Newsday's senior Washington correspondent, was stunned. And a little angry. "It was, 'WHAT???!!' " he says. "Remember, the Pentagon had been denying this the whole time. And I don't mean denying it cautiously. They denied it sweepingly: 'It did not happen.' "

Until that point, Sloyan hadn't written a word about the baffling illnesses that have plagued many veterans of the Persian Gulf War or about the possibility that some veterans had been exposed to chemical agents. Nor had many reporters in that Pentagon briefing room. The health problems of gulf war veterans--tens of thousands of whom had been reporting symptoms ranging from muscle fatigue to rashes to neurological problems--had not emerged as a major national issue. That was about to change in a hurry.

Why the abrupt Pentagon reversal? There were a number of reasons, among them the resurfacing of a 1991 United Nations report, seemingly filed by U.S. officials and forgotten years before, describing the presence of chemical weapons at Khamisiyah. At the briefing, top Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon and Assistant Defense Secretary Stephen Joseph cited "new information" as the reason for the turnabout.

Reporters raced for the phones. Suddenly, the gulf war was a hot story again.

For more than five years after the conflict, the Pentagon maintained that U.S. troops had not been exposed to chemical weapons. Even as hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of gulf war soldiers reported health problems, the Defense Department did not budge. DOD officials had commissioned a special Defense Science Board task force to study the matter. It concluded that there was no evidence of the presence of chemical weapons on the gulf war battlefield--and certainly no evidence that troops had been exposed.

Since the veterans had not been exposed to them, chemical weapons could not be making soldiers sick. So what was? Defense officials said all of the vaccines the vets had received, including nerve-agent pretreatment pills, were safe. They largely ruled out many of the pollutants the vets had encountered from oil well fires and the like.

The long-standing answer? Veterans must simply be suffering from stress-related ailments; it was "all in their heads."

The Pentagon retreat, says New York Times reporter Philip Shenon, "changed everything. First, they said there may have been chemical exposure, and secondly, they left open the possibility that there could be health consequences as a result."

No one has established a definitive link between chemical weapons and the ailments that have plagued the veterans. But the fact that the deadly agents had been present in the desert war zone, and that the Pentagon denials had been completely off base, transformed the problems of the veterans into a major news story.

Why hadn't anyone been listening?

A FTER THE GULF WAR, THE PRESS coverage was harshly criticized. There was a feeling that many reporters simply had written what they had been spoon-fed, that the media's vaunted skepticism had been overwhelmed by patriotic fervor.

And now, it seemed, the same thing had happened in coverage of gulf war illness. Why did it take so long for the mainstream media to see this as a major story? Why had much of the press simply accepted the Pentagon line? Why did an issue resulting from our last major global conflict remain the near-exclusive domain of a handful of local and regional reporters for five years?

Certainly, there's little controversy about most of the chemical exposure the 700,000 U.S. soldiers encountered during the war: billowing benzene from oil well fires, diesel-soaked drinking and shower water, pesticide-coated uniforms and careless use of insecticides to ward off disease-carrying sandflies. Depleted uranium lay exposed across the battlefields. Troops spit up black oily substances and sneezed what looked like axle grease. But the DOD and CIA vehemently ruled out the possibility of exposure to chemical weapons during Operation Desert Storm.

Yet in six months, the Pentagon went from stridently insisting that no soldiers had been exposed to chemical weapons in the gulf war to admitting that 300 or 400 may have been exposed, later upping that figure to over 20,000. It's now clear that military intelligence had known of the presence of chemical weapons (although not, officials say, that U.S. troops had been exposed to them) since 1991, and that years of Pentagon statements smacked of, at best, misinformation, at worst, lies. What's more, key wartime records are missing, their loss attributed to a computer virus that seemed to only infect records from the week of weapons destruction at Khamisiyah.

If you talk to journalists who have watched this story develop, you'll find widespread agreement on one matter: The media should have pushed the Pentagon harder before the June 21 announcement. But there's little consensus about how the press has played catch-up since then. In particular, the New York Times and Washington Post have taken dramatically differing approaches to the question of what might have made the veterans sick.

G ULF WAR VETERANS GROUPS have long maintained that the Pentagon knew more than it was saying. Since 1992, it's been their rallying cry--heard over the years by only a few members of the press, notably by reporters at the Birmingham News, the Dallas Morning News, the Hartford Courant and Gannett News Service. Their stories played big regionally, but couldn't crack the Pentagon's facade--or muster much national attention.

In Birmingham, Dave Parks started reporting in 1992 on local veterans who were sick with health problems that seemed "mysterious"--except that their symptoms began soon after the start of Operation Desert Storm on January 16, 1991 (see "Tracking Gulf War Illness," page 31). The veterans described in detail an apparent chemical weapons attack near their camp at the Port of Jubayl in Saudi Arabia and said that their commanders had ordered them not to discuss it. Immediately after the attack, the Seabees said, they experienced a variety of symptoms: Some felt a burning sensation on their skin, some felt their lips go numb, some had their breathing passages clog up. Later, the veterans said, they were variously plagued by respiratory problems, dizziness, blackouts, rashes, muscle aches, fatigue.

Parks, joined by the paper's Washington correspondent, Michael Brumas, talked to veterans, doctors and government officials, trying to find out why these veterans were sick. Parks' stories explored a variety of possible causes. Brumas was told about the presence of chemical weapons in the gulf theater during interviews in Paris and Prague.

Ed Timms and Steve McGonigle of the Dallas Morning News interviewed sick local veterans, including one who returned from the gulf with a life-threatening sensitivity to chemicals. (Today, he's under a doctor's care, living in a sterilized glass chamber.) Thomas D. "Dennie" Williams of the Hartford Courant reported on defective Army equipment, including chemical masks and suits, and interviewed sick veterans whose lives had depended on them.

Brian Cabell of CNN, which gave gulf illnesses more air time than the three major networks, quickly followed up on Parks' interviews with the Seabees and also reported on a New Orleans doctor who had had some success treating gulf vets.

But most news outlets covered the issue sporadically, running spot news stories after a hearing or the release of a report.

"There was never any follow-up," says James J. Tuite III, a former congressional staffer and now director of the Gulf War Research Foundation. "You'd get the initial flash in the mainstream press, but unless you continue to do something spectacular, you're not on the radar screens anymore."

And those short attention spans had an effect, as cyclical news coverage raised and lowered public expectations for answers about gulf war illness. Everyone seemed to be searching for the magic bullet. First, it was oil well fires. But a study would show that that didn't explain everybody's problems. Next it was leishmaniasis, a disease carried by desert sandflies. But fewer than 40 veterans were found to actually have leishmaniasis. Then it was depleted uranium; again, not every sick soldier had been exposed.

"Each time we went through this, it seemed harder to get Congress or the general public or the media to focus on it," says Phil Budahn, media relations manager of the American Legion. "And that's where the Dave Parks and the Dennie Williams of the world did an amazing service, because they were able to keep the issue alive by telling the stories of veterans in their areas and tracking their cases. They were also devoting the resources that, frankly, the New York Times and Washington Post weren't."

The few who took the time to investigate found there was plenty lurking beneath the surface. When the DOD reported that its medical exams of 10,000 gulf war veterans showed the soldiers were no sicker than the general population, the Courant's Williams posed a follow-up question: Exactly whom were the sick soldiers being compared to? It took nearly three months of pushing before the Pentagon admitted that the "general population" used as a comparative group for the gulf war fighting force, mostly men in their 30s, was a group of mostly women over 60.

But generally, the press simply printed what the DOD said. "Reporters would just see the DOD study come out and they'd write their little stories: Here's what the DOD program is, some quotes; here's what the veterans have to say about it: They say it's crap," Williams says.

In the absence of national media interest, a few energetic veterans became investigative journalists themselves. They hit the phones, solicited expert testimony and held their own hearings. More important, they filed Freedom of Information Act requests and fed key documents--wartime military logs showing reports of mustard and nerve gas at the front--to the press and Congress. Their persistence prompted several congressional investigations of gulf war illness.

The Senate Banking Committee's hearings were the first public forums to raise the question of low-level chemical exposure as a possible cause of gulf war illness. The committee also looked into whether a chemical weapons attack in the Port of Jubayl could have made some veterans sick, as the Birmingham News had suggested. The senators probed whether nerve-agent pretreatment pills--actually nerve agents themselves--taken by veterans as protection against possible chemical exposure may have caused neurological damage. And they heard the anguished appeals of veterans' family members: wives who said they were also showing symptoms of "gulf war syndrome" or wondered if their children's birth defects were connected to their husbands' sickness.

But by the end of 1994 the investigations had ended inconclusively. Once again it fell to the veterans to try to encourage the media to take their health woes seriously. But at the national level, this was an uphill struggle.

L IKE MANY MAJOR NEWSPAPERS, the New York Times published few stories on gulf war illness--less than a dozen from 1993 until the Pentagon announcement last June. It generally ran Associated Press stories on DOD or National Institutes of Health reports ("Health Panel Finds No Single Cause for Gulf War Veterans' Ills") or the occasional staff-written piece on spot news. But it did little serious enterprise reporting on the subject.

The Los Angeles Times largely relied on spot news stories on Senate investigations and Pentagon reports, although it also did some enterprise pieces. The paper reported on an unreleased Senate survey that found a high number of spouses also exhibited symptoms of "gulf war syndrome." In another story it examined miscarriages and birth defects among gulf war families. But there was little follow-up.

The Washington Post followed the story more consistently than most of the national media. The paper also devoted a lot of space to a thoughtful three-part series in 1994 by science writer David Brown. Brown's series gave an overview of possible gulf war exposures, including exposure to environmental toxins and stressful situations. He also tended to debunk what the veterans were saying and reflect the Pentagon view that there was no evidence to show gulf war veterans were suffering from anything but stress.

"Years after the fact, these exposures can't be reproduced experimentally," says Brown, who has a medical degree. "So you have to look at, what do the statistics show? What are the biological possibilities? What can be gleaned from general knowledge in medicine about toxicity of certain substances?"

The complexity of such questions--and the time and investment it would take to sort through them--no doubt discouraged many reporters and editors. After all, scientists had never before studied what happens when 700,000 people are exposed to a multitude of chemicals, including pesticides, multiple vaccines and possibly nerve or mustard agents.

"I don't think newsrooms ever said, 'Ah, let's take a pass on that story. We don't believe these guys,' " says Drex Heikes, a Los Angeles Times assignment editor in Washington. "But Congress was getting into it, they had subpoena power, they were bringing in witnesses, they were truly going after this. So you kind of see that one's getting done, that's not where we need to be spending our resources. In hindsight, not a great decision--because there was something more there."

There is no reason to think that more aggressive coverage would have solved the mystery. We may not know for years precisely which, if any, battlefield poisons made the veterans sick. But more media attention probably would have forced the government to take the situation more seriously.

"It would have been nice to have had more coverage early," says Norm Brewer, who began covering gulf war illness for Gannett News Service in late 1993, "because it seems like, since the briefing on Khamisiyah, the weight of all the new coverage resulted in the Pentagon and the Veterans Administration taking a much more serious look at what could be happening here."

Not that the issue was entirely ignored. The occasional magazine article and infrequent network news spot would examine the plight of the veterans. The AP and Reuters filed bread-and-butter stories on congressional hearings and government studies. Those hearings and Pentagon announcements might occasionally crop up on the network news shows, and maybe rate a segment on a morning news program.

CNN was the only network providing regular coverage of the issue. The veterans and their illnesses became grist for the likes of Leeza Gibbons and Montel Williams.

But pieces like those by "Nightline" and People magazine on gulf war families whose postwar children were born with birth defects did have impact. They attracted the attention of Hillary Rodham Clinton in 1995, and her concern led to the formation of the Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses, which began looking into what could be making soldiers sick.

The veterans' plight also caught the interest of "60 Minutes" anchor Ed Bradley. "This issue was something that was worth saying, 'Let's look into this and see if there's anything to it.' " Bradley says. "Instead, all we got really was obfuscation from the Pentagon." A "60 Minutes" segment featuring interviews with veterans aired in March 1995.

Intrigued by this multifaceted subject--with its battlefield drama, postwar dilemmas and the pathos of sick veterans desperately searching for answers--Bradley wondered why the press wasn't jumping all over the story. "I don't want to be critical of my colleagues, and there have been a few reporters who have been persistent in going after it," Bradley says. "But, generally, it hasn't been a hot-button issue...and for the life of me, I don't know why."
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