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sors; and the pilot was examined medically after each mission and re-
ceived extra pay. This testimony was obtained by interviewers from the
US embassy who were not themselves pilots, and they requested that
Washington send a pilot to conduct further interviews. This was done,
and the US Air Force pilot who conducted the interviews concluded, on
the basis of technical information about arming the rockets, targeting
practices, and the like, that “it seems very unlikely that the rockets fired
contained toxic [illegible word] CW agents.”
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Reports of Trichothecene Detection
The centerpiece of the US allegations was the claim to have detected
trichothecene mycotoxins
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in environmental samples taken from areas
of alleged attack, and in biomedical samples from alleged victims. How-
ever, this evidence, too, is badly compromised by procedural flaws. Prov-
enance and handling of the samples was undocumented, as they were
collected by refugees or guerrillas, and only much later handed over to
US personnel.
More seriously, the presence of trichothecenes could not be replicated.
Most of the positive reports for environmental samples (four, with tri-
chothecene concentrations ranging from a few parts per billion, to 150
parts per million) were obtained by a University of Minnesota laboratory
commissioned to do the tests, as the Army's Chemical Systems Labora-
tory lacked the capability until October 1982.
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When the Army's analyt-
ical capability was developed, several of the environmental samples that
had tested positive were retested, with negative results. Using gas chro-
matography and high-resolution mass spectrometry, (state of the art for
detecting trichothecenes), coupled with scrupulous controls against con-
tamination, the Chemical Systems Laboratory tested over 250 samples
from alleged attack sites in Southeast Asia without finding toxin in any of
them.
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Similar failures were later reported by British, Swedish, Austra-
lian, and French laboratories. No positive test for trichothecenes from
Southeast Asia has been independently validated, and several have been
negated. Almost certainly the early results were false positives, disclosed
prematurely before confirmation.
Not only were the positive results unable to be replicated, but the
US never published the results of control samples and blanks, although
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