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witnessed attacks, with no attempt at cross-checking, and no reinter-
viewing to check consistency of accounts, with the interest of the inter-
viewers in chemical attacks known in advance to the interviewees, who
were refugees strongly motivated to please their interviewers. Many ac-
counts were of events months or years past, and their dating was unreli-
able.
Later, from November 1983 to October 1985, a joint State and Defense
Departments team, with medical and CW expertise, was sent to Thai-
land. It conducted more-systematic attempts to confirm some witness
accounts. When reinterviewed, refugees who had previously reported
chemical attacks denied having witnessed any or admitted that they had
only heard such accounts secondhand. Only 5 of the 217 people inter-
viewed claimed to have suffered the constellation of symptoms that the
CIA claimed to be indicative of trichothecene poisoning. On-site investi-
gation of alleged attack sites on the Thai-Kampuchean border, complete
with yellow spots, failed to confirm them as chemical attacks. Propheti-
cally, the team wrote of one of these allegations: “the incident appears to
have been caused by insects or some other natural phenomena.” 103 Medi-
cal examination of alleged victims did not confirm exposure to chemical
or toxin agents.
PARTICIPANT ACCOUNTS Some defectors from the Soviet, Vietnam-
ese, and Lao armed forces claimed to have participated in chemical at-
tacks, or to have been involved in logistical operations with special muni-
tions thought to contain chemicals or toxins. However, these accounts
suffer from many of the same methodological deficiencies as the victim
accounts, and some of them have their credibility reduced by obvious er-
rors. For instance, a former Soviet soldier reported that chemical attacks
took place in two stages—in the first, a container was dropped, and then
in a second pass a bomb was dropped at the same spot to cause two chem-
icals to mix, forming a lethal chemical agent. 104
The star testimony came from a Lao pilot who claimed to have flown
multiple missions against the Hmong, carrying standard high-explosive
rockets and “smoke” rockets. The CIA concluded from circumstantial evi-
dence that the latter were chemical munitions: the pilot was instructed to
fly higher than usual, to keep the missions secret, not to fire “smoke”
rockets near Lao forces; flights were accompanied by Vietnamese advi-
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