Search For Gulf War Reports Turns Up Few Pages All Copies Of Battlefield Logs On Chemical Warfare Reported Missing Last Year; Only 36 Of 200 Pages Found Since

The Pentagon said Thursday that all full copies of the chemical warfare logs maintained by the military during the 1991 Persian Gulf War had disappeared, even though copies on paper and on computer disks had been stored after the war in locked safes at two different locations in the United States.

In a new report on the missing logs, the Defense Department said its investigators had conducted an exhaustive search and had been able to track down only 36 pages of the estimated 200 pages of classified logs that were supposed to record any incident in which chemical or biological weapons were detected on the battlefield.

The logs were first reported missing last year and their disappearance has alarmed veterans who believe they may have been made sick by exposure to chemical or biological weapons during the war, and who believe that the Pentagon is hiding evidence of the exposure.

Thursday’s report heightened speculation by veterans groups and members of Congress that there had been either criminal incompetence within the Defense Department - it can be a federal crime to mishandle classified material - or a cover-up.

The report said that the logs, which were recorded on floppy computer disks and on paper printouts, had been shipped after the war from Saudi Arabia to the headquarters of the U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Fla., where they were kept in a safe.

A separate computer disk containing the log information was stored after the war in a safe at the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Aberdeen, Md., and Thursday’s report said that paper printouts of the logs were made daily during the war as a backup and then filed away at the U.S. military command post in Riyadh, the Saudi capital.

But the report said that virtually all of that information has vanished.

The report suggested that there was an honest explanation for many of the gaps in the logs: A computer virus destroyed some of the logs during the war, while some of the computer disks and the printouts may have been misplaced in an office shuffle at the Central Command headquarters after the war. The Central Command was the part of the military that oversaw U.S. troops in the gulf.

Still, members of Congress said the disappearance of nearly 80 percent of the logs was alarming and suspicious.

“Just incomprehensible,” said Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee and is overseeing an probe of Gulf War illnesses. “The Department of Defense is entitled to the benefit of the doubt for a reasonable time, but it’s past its quota.”