DATE: Thursday, April 10, 1997              TAG: 9704100462

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A14  EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWS SERVICE 

DATELINE: WASHINGTON                        LENGTH:   41 lines

CIA REPORTS SHOW INFORMATION WAS BOTCHED ON IRAQI DEPOT

The CIA released a cache of documents Wednesday that show the nation's intelligence community fumbled much of the information it got about the controversial Iraqi chemical-weapons depot at Khamisiyah.

In an extraordinary admission, the CIA acknowledged it had done a poor job of handling information about Khamisiyah before, during and after the Persian Gulf War, and apologized for its performance.

Some agency analysts were confused about the name of the place. Others misread what was going on there. And one, after noting ``my puny brain,'' wrote incorrectly: ``Maybe we've finally found a . . . storage location!''

``There were things that we simply should have done better,'' Robert Walpole, a CIA special assistant on Gulf War illnesses, said at a news conference. ``And we didn't.''

The depot has become important because the government now believes it contained nerve gas and other chemical weapons when it was blown up by U.S. Army engineers a few days after the war ended. The engineers have said they were told the depot was ``clean'' of chemical weapons.

The Pentagon now believes 20,000 soldiers may have been exposed to low levels of chemical agents when the depot was destroyed in early March of 1991.

And while most scientists so far disagree, other sick veterans believe destroyed chemical weapons may be a factor at the root of the collection of veterans' maladies called Gulf War Syndrome.

The Pentagon already has come under intense fire for its handling of the investigation into Khamisiyah and Gulf War Syndrome. And Wednesday's scores of documents indicate that the intelligence community's performance left much to be desired.

The documents show that intelligence officials knew about the depot when it was under construction in 1976.

They show that there was evidence, in the form of a decontamination vehicle, of chemical-weapons activity as early as 1984 - although this report was not discovered in government files until three weeks ago. KEYWORDS: GULF WAR GULF WAR ILLNESS GULF WAR SICKNESS

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