JAMES TUITE: The Generals don't want to admit that they may have made a mistake that may have cost tens of thousands of soldiers their health and, and many cases their lives.

ALASTAIR HAY: I think this is an enormous experiment. I'm just appalled at the way it was actually done.

NARRATOR (HUGH QUARSHIE): Did allied attempts to shield our troops from Saddam's nightmare weapons backfire? Have we bungled our chemical and biological defence? In 1990 Saddam Hussein threatened the mother of all battles. Over 700,000 allied Troops po

ANGUS PARKER: There was an awful lot of dead bodies burned, scattered round as if they were bits of, bits of dolls that had been dismembered, were arms and legs and things, some of them it was though they were asleep but there was lots of them and the

ANDY BLACK: Thinking oh my God you know is this, is this going to be it. Saddam was known to have used chemical and biological warfare on his own people. I've never been scared in my life as that.

NARRATOR: It was all over in seven weeks. But for many veterans the celebrations were short-lived.

ANGUS PARKER: It's as if your legs are broken and you can't walk on them. You want to, everything is saying you have to do it, but you can't.

STEVE MILLER: I'd start swimming in my head and I can't do anything. I mean you just, you can't walk, you can't brush your teeth, you, you really can't do anything.

ANGUS PARKER: It's like someone's taken the batteries out of a toy. There's just no energy.

ANDY BLACK: You feel that you're going to fall over, basically you're going to collapse, so basically you shuffle round on your bottom, come downstairs on your bottom and if you've got to do that then you've got to sleep downstairs. Psychologically it,

ANGUS PARKER: I went to my doctor when I was feeling ill and one of the things he did was to write to the Ministry of Defence and ask them for my medical records. He wrote and all he got was a photocopy of the cover, so I wrote myself. All I received w

NARRATOR: In the bleak aftermath of war there was no easy way to find out what harmed them. But this was one of the most toxic wars this century. There was no shortage of suspects: toxic fumes from burning oil wells, radiation sickness from exploded ur

NICHOLAS SOAMES: The Government wishes to be entirely open about what happened during the Gulf conflict and I wish to stress Madam Speaker that we have nothing to hide and indeed absolutely no reason to do so. We cannot accept that there any connection

NARRATOR In America, preliminary studies found no evidence for a Gulf War Syndrome, but the number of veterans reporting sickness soared to 70,000.

(ACTUALITY PILOT DIALOGUE)

And fall out from the Gulf War was only just beginning. There appeared to be an unseen target which nobody expected.

STEVE MILLER: When I first saw my son I only got to see him for a short while, I just got a glimpse of his face but he was missing his eye and his ear. We just couldn't cope with it. I mean it was, we tried to cope with it the best we could. We asked q

NARRATOR: Cedric is now 6.

STEVE MILLER: We cried. When it's your child I mean you just don't know what to do. You accept it, you love him. Out of all of this Cedric's gone through so much. He came home from school one day - he wears a glass eye - and he had his eye had come out

What do you think? Alright.

NARRATOR: Initial studies backed the official line that service in the Gulf did not cause birth defects. But pressure from the veterans began to challenge the military's view of a clean war. Accusations began to fly. Most frightening was the veterans c

ANDY BLACK: We were scudded quite regularly which were quite terrifying at first because you thought oh God how am I going to live through this and we used to get quite a lot of black alerts which was chemical or suspected chemical.

STEVE MILLER: Somebody came and woke us up and they said we have incoming scud type things, so many minutes. You put your mask on and you're thinking alright, OK, I'm OK, you know, I've got it on, you know, this is really what's going through your mind

NARRATOR: Alarms fired repeatedly. It was known Saddam Hussein had a vast armoury of nerve agents such as sarin and tarben, so were the troops exposed to a nerve gas attack? Chemical pathologist Alastair Hay has studied the nerve gases.

ALASTAIR HAY: The nerve gases are based on a family of chemicals called organophosphates. The way in which the nerve agents work is basically by blocking an essential enzyme in the nervous system.

ARCHIVE FILM NARRATION: This rabbit is getting a lethal dose of a nerve gas. The effects would be the same in man.

ALASTAIR HAY: So muscles are unable to contract and relax and they stay in the position of almost permanent spasm and this means that individuals are not able to breathe for example.

ARCHIVE FILM NARRATION: There is vomiting, urination and diarrhoea.

ALASTAIR HAY: Everywhere that nerves attach to muscles you will have a permanent effect of spasm.

ARCHIVE FILM NARRATION: Breathing is paralysed and death follows.

ALASTAIR HAY: You're literally talking about a drop of chemical that would be required to kill you.

NARRATOR: Saddam Hussein had used them before. So did he use them in the Gulf?

ALASTAIR HAY: I don't believe that the troops were exposed to chemical warfare agents used as weapons of war. There's no evidence that the soldiers had significant symptoms on the battle-field to indicate that they'd been exposed to nerve gas or mustar

NARRATOR: But there was still the unexplained mystery of what triggered the alarms. The troops say they were told this was due to unburned jet fuel, sonic booms, diesel, even cigarette smoke. But not everyone believes that these were all false alarms.

JAMES TUITE: I was formerly asked to investigate the US's role in arming Iraq. As we were looking and uncovering information about that I was also asked to look at the possible health effects of destroying those weapons during our bombing raids, so I h

NARRATOR: He was concerned the Generals may have exposed their own troops to low levels of nerve gas by bombing Iraqi chemical weapons factories.

JAMES TUITE: When we bombed those facilities immediately thereafter there was widespread reporting and detection of chemical agents throughout the theatre of operations. The detectors of the French, the Czechs, the United States and Great Britain were

NARRATOR: Tuite's own analysis of weather and satellite data, combined with veterans reports, suggested plumes of very dilute nerve gas had drifted over thousands of troops.

JAMES TUITE: The position of the Department of Defence during that period of time was that there was no evidence of any detection, no evidence of any exposure, no evidence of any animals dying in the desert, no classified material indicating any detect

NARRATOR: He wanted the chemical logs, the official record of chemical exposure.

JAMES TUITE: We requested those logs and within 30 days I received a response from the office of the General Council, of the Department of Defence, that the central command could not identify any such thing as a log. We knew these things existed and we

RONALD BLANCK: Well we misplaced a lot of things as it happens after any war. There seems to be no pattern in anything that was misplaced and certainly when we came home we destroyed enormous amounts of, of data and everybody that was with one of the u

INTERVIEWER: Do you seriously expect us to believe that chemical logs could disappear from two secure locations in Florida and Maryland stored in both hard copy and disc?

RONALD: Oh sure.

INTERVIEWER: How do you account for this?

RONALD: I have no idea.

NARRATOR: Only 36 of the estimated 200 pages of logs remain. These do show chemical detections. Now there's a criminal investigation into what happened to the rest of the files and finally, the Pentagon admitted that destroying an arms dump at Khamisya

JAMES TUITE: Since we did our report the Pentagon in July of 1997 released a report that revealed that from a single facility nearly 100,000 soldiers may have been exposed to low levels of the nerve agent sarin.

RONALD BLANCK: It is possible. It's been stated that perhaps up to as many as 100,000 have been exposed to low level chemical agents and that's on the basis of the explosion, the destruction of presumed chemical weapons that took place at Khamisyah and

INTERVIEWER: Why did it take the Pentagon 5 years to admit this?

BLANCK: I think it took the Pentagon 5 years to find it out, not to admit it. As soon as we found it out, as soon as the Pentagon found it out it was instantly admitted to. I think most would now acknowledge and certainly the Presidential Advisory Comm

NARRATOR: The official position on nerve gas had now shifted. The military accepted troops were exposed but argued the levels were too low to cause harm. But in fact tests on low level nerve gas had been carried out at Britain's Chemical and Biological

BILL CLAVEY: Yeah a visit to Porton Down at the time seemed, I think as we used to call it, a good skive.

NARRATOR: The official view was that these experiments caused no long-term harm. The volunteers themselves have a different story.

GERALD BEECH: They told us it was a shilling a day per experiment and a 48 hour pass at the end of it so that sounded very nice you know, so we, I volunteered for it.

BILL CLAVEY: Our section was going to go into a gas chamber, but what we were going into we weren't told.

MAN: The great danger of nerve gas over all previous war gases is its speed of action.

GERALD BEECH: Rabbits were put in these little baskets and wheeled in with us into the gas chamber behind us. They were at the back.

MAN: It kills very quickly.

GERALD BEECH: And a chap came in with us and he stood behind us. Now he wore a gas mask.

MAN: And to an onlooker the appearance of a casualty prior to death can be most unpleasant.

GERALD BEECH: There was, there was about an inch of nerve gas in that needle and he injected that into the atomiser which just sprayed out into the room where you're standing and we were all, we're all standing looking out and they're all sitting looki

BILL CLAVEY: Our lungs were con, constricted and they were very painful and we were quite blinded by the light and you know we laid on this grass bank gasping for breath.

GERALD BEECH: It's worrying because you think well if it's killed the rabbits you know what's it done to me.

BILL CLAVEY: All our eyes were had come, the pupils had come down to pinpricks and we could hardly see. Since I went to Porton Down I've had years of tight chest and pain.

GERALD BEECH: I've had breathless-ness ever since that first time at, at Porton Down. You feel dizzy, sick, your heart's beating like the clappers, you know, and it's really, really bad.

NARRATOR: Hundreds of human volunteers went through the gas chambers before Porton Down switched to testing models. The long-term effects of nerve gas on volunteers have never been studied and they are prevented by law from pursuing a claim against the

PAUL TAYLOR: Times change, science moves on and now looking back and taking into account the events you've just mentioned we will be looking at the long-term effects of low doses of sarin.

INTERVIEWER: So are you accepting that those Porton Down volunteers may indeed have suffered as a result of their exposures here?

PAUL: I've no evidence to show that.

INTERVIEWER: But you haven't studied it?

PAUL: Correct.

MAN: The appearance of a casualty prior to death can be most unpleasant. Nerve gas may be used against us in either...

GERALD BEECH: Oh good grief, justice from, from Porton Down. I am disgusted with the higher-ups if you like. The Gulf War blokes are suffering the same as what we're suffering, so if there's no link, how did it happen?

NARRATOR: So could very low level sarin have affected the troops? Recently a new test was developed which would reveal if veterans had tiny amounts of nerve gas in their blood, but veterans have not been able to obtain their own blood samples.

ANGUS PARKER: When we, we asked for those blood samples the Ministry of Defence said that the blood isn't around anymore. We asked again and they then admitted oh yes we have some in a freezer but we aren't sort of sure what it is.

NARRATOR: Was this the best that could be done after 7 years?

PAUL TAYLOR: The best I can offer them is that we are being as open and as thorough as we possibly can be with all aspects of Gulf veterans illnesses and their, and their cases, and that we are going through every inf, every piece of information we hav

INTERVIEWER: And to veterans who feel then that as a result of what's happened to the blood that there's been a cover-up, what would you say?

PAUL: Obviously there's been no cover-up because if there had been a cover-up I would probably be sitting here denying the existence of blood samples.

NARRATOR So the question of whether the Gulf veterans are suffering from exposure to low-level nerve gas remains unresolved, as for the Porton Down volunteers. But there was another suspect. Nerve agent pre-treatment tablets given in the belief they wo

STEVE MILLER: I first got the pills in Germany. They dispensed them to everybody. I asked a gentleman what they were and he said it was a secret weapon that the Army had to protect us against chemical agents and basically that's all we were told. I rem

MAN: I just felt so ill all of a sudden, you know I had a very, very severe headache, I was having diff, difficulty concentrating and of course I felt you know really, really sick.

NARRATOR: There were decades of research to find antidotes to nerve gas.

ALASTAIR HAY: In the course of some of these experiments the British Government researchers developed an agent called Pyridostigmine bromide.

NARRATOR: Like nerve gas, this blocks a key enzyme in the nervous system, but just temporarily - in theory protecting against the effects of nerve gas to make muscles spasm.

ALASTAIR HAY: And of course this blockade only lasted as long as individuals were taking tablets of Pyridostigmine bromide. Once they stopped taking the tablets the enzyme would return to normal function and it would be available for nerve transmission

NARRATOR: But some question the drug's safety record. Thomas Tiedt was involved in early studies at the University of Maryland.

THOMAS TIEDT: Well PB or pyridostigmine bromide the main ingredient in the NAPs pills, the nerve agent pills, has a tremendous record in, in terms of the toxic record. Study after study was published prior to the Gulf War showing that PB has toxic effe

RONALD BLANCK: Think of the question that would ask had the Iraqis used a nerve agent which we had a pre-treatment to protect again and because of fears that it would cause some other minor problems we didn't use it. I would have lost my job and I shou

NARRATOR: But Army studies suggest PB may not work against sarin, Saddam's chief nerve gas. Worse still the latest research in mice shows that under stressful conditions it can enter the brain potentially causing brain damage.

THOMAS TIEDT: Giving PB in the Gulf War was the largest clinical experiment ever done. Just before the Gulf War began the Department of Defence essentially pressured the Food and Drug Administration to do something that has never been done before or si

RONALD BLANCK: Wasn't an experiment agent, wasn't used experimentally, it was used for very sound scientific reasons to protect soldiers, sailors, airmen and marine lives, to protect their lives. The very, very small risks that were taken with this in

ALASTAIR HAY: I think it's still an open question as to whether the NAPs tablets could have harmed the vets. The NAPs tablets were used in the Gulf and that were used in situations which were quite different to tests on volunteers where the dosages wer

NARRATOR: So it's still unknown whether the NAPs tablets caused harm and new Porton Down studies are underway. In the latest Iraqi crisis the tablets were not given to troops. And a storm was brewing over another revelation. This time the clues emerged

GORAN JAMAL: In the early 90s, three patients were referred to me by my colleagues who had a bizarre and very particular neurological problem. We've investigated them and the only common thing we found between them is that these were farmers using orga

NARRATOR: Many farmers were exposed to these pesticides when sheep dipping became a legal requirement. Their nerve damage was remarkably similar to another group of patients he saw.

GORAN JAMAL: Again we examined them. They had a peculiar combination of neurological problems, in many ways similar to the problems that we actually saw in the farmers and these turned out to be Gulf War veterans.

NARRATOR: Veterans said they were sprayed with organophosphate pesticides, something the Government denied.

ANDY BLACK: They came round and sprayed the tents... It's like a dense smog. The guy comes in with this big box like a compressor and the stuff spew out and you can't see the end of your bed. It's just like being in, in a steam bath.

DAVE ROBERTSON: The problem was there, we were actually soaking the tents, the inside of the accommodation, personnel were actually soaked with it as well. The result of this was we started seeing obviously insects were dying in the drawers but also th

MARK DOYLE: Stocks ran low and the necessary people were sent out to local purchase pesticides for replacement. This was found to be agricultural sheep-dip.

DAVE ROBERTSON: Again with all of the instructions in Arabic none of us knew how to use 'em or prepare them.

GORAN JAMAL: When I press this button...

NARRATOR: Goran Jamal found evidence of serious peripheral nerve damage in the Gulf Veterans. Nerve impulses were slowed.

GORAN JAMAL: Conduction below is 47.6.

NARRATOR: And temperature sensitivity was reduced. All this was no surprise, because the organo phosphate pesticides are close chemical cousins of the organophosphate nerve agents, like sarin.

ALASTAIR HAY: In essence the mechanism of action of the OP pesticides is identical to that of the nerve agents. Where, for example, you might require a drop of sarin to kill somebody, with the likes of malathion, one of the insecticides, you may be tal

NARRATOR: And their toxic effects have been known for decades.

GORAN JAMAL: There were a whole host of other abnormalities that we found. Once you interfere with the neuro transmitters if no impulses pass through to the muscle then the muscle wouldn't get their instruction and this could explain the weakness and t

NARRATOR: But following an enquiry, the last government did a U-turn. Defence Minister Nicholas Soames admitted he misled Parliament. Organo-phosphate pesticides had been sprayed in the Gulf.

NICHOLAS SOAMES: I do not believe there has been a cover-up in any sense. I do believe that there have been very, very, very serious and fundamental failings in one particular division within the Ministry of Defence.

NARRATOR: The Ministry of Defence admit that many of the pesticide records have been destroyed either at the time or subsequently during routine weeding. Scientists have also voiced concerns about the fact that the Committee on Gulf War Illness turned

GORAN JAMAL: We soon found that there were other consultants and professors from different departments all across the UK who had very interesting preliminary results and they were turned down and turned down for no reason, no reason provided at all. Th

NARRATOR: But in the last few weeks the Government has announced a new study on nerve and muscle damage. Whatsmore recently its been found that chemicals used in the Gulf can interact to produce much more toxic effects. A harmless dose of an organo pho

MOHAMED ABOU-DONIA: By applying combination of two chemicals by themselves are harmless, we saw increased nerve damage and when we had 3 chemicals, not only we saw nerve damage and the problems with, with the nervous system, but also as, as many as 60%

NARRATOR: Those exposed to fewer combinations had leg weakness and tremors.

MAN ON FILM: You can see the tremor a lot better if you hold the bird up like this. See how the whole bird shakes.

NARRATOR: Many of those exposed to all 3 chemicals became paralysed.

MAN ON FILM: Look at the claws how they become very stiff.

NARRATOR: When they looked down the microscope they found evidence of brain damage. This is from a healthy brain. Whereas when the animal has been exposed to 3 chemicals the nerve cells have become swollen and some fibres break down altogether. What's

JAMES TUITE: Back in the late 1960's there was an accident that occurred at the Dugway Proving Grounds and thousands of sheep and cattle died.

NARRATOR: Army research showed that very low levels of nerve agents, combined with certain pesticides, could cause this damage.

JAMES TUITE: The military has been well aware of the effects of these exposures. That very low levels, levels that don't cause serious harm when combined with other chemical compounds at levels that don't cause serious harm are added together they can

NARRATOR But a chemical explanation, however convincing, cannot account for all veterans illness. Because some got ill without going to the Gulf and this has raised questions about the vaccination regime against biological weapons.

MALCOLM DANDO: I think biological weapons are by far the most dangerous weapons system that is available today. The first of these is bacillus anthracis the causative agent of anthrax. You can ingest it and get it in your guts, you can have a cut and g

NARRATOR: As protection against this arsenal of bacteria, the allies had developed several vaccines.

ANGUS PARKER: I was given 13 vaccines on one day. At the time I must admit I thought it was a little bit over the top.

ANDY BLACK: There was a group of medics in a horseshoe and you took your shirt off and you went in like this and you walked through and it was jab, jab, jab, jab, jab and polio on the tongue and you know I had 14.

ANGUS PARKER: I had swelled so much that my skin had started to crack, between me fingers, me side of me mouth, round me eyes, it had started to peel and it was all red and very sore.

PAUL TAYLOR: I don't have any knowledge of people being given 12 vaccines at one time. There were three vaccines recommended for use against biological weapons in the, in the Gulf War by the UK and those three were anthrax with pertussis as an (MEDICAL

INTERVIEWER: We've interviewed loads of veterans who, who are very much of the view that they received between 8 and 16 vaccines all in one day. Some were routine travel vaccines, some the biological vaccines. Would you dispute this?

PAUL: Yes I think I would dispute that.

NARRATOR: But the Ministry of Defence now admit that pertussis and plague vaccines were not licensed for adults in Britain. It's also clear that they were warned not to give certain vaccines together by the Department of Health. Data showed when pertus

ALASTAIR HAY: I think the way the vaccines were administered was also something that was bordering on the negligent. There was no long-term preparation, no time for them to build up immunity, no way of assessing whether there were any repercussions of

PAUL TAYLOR: We gave the best available vaccines resulting from the best available vi, advice at the time and that we were in a situation where we were going to war facing mass casualties unless we did these things in the way that we, in the best way t

INTERVIEWER: But interestingly you're not planning to vaccinate the troops this time. Why is that?

PAUL: I can't comment on anything to do with the current crisis in the Gulf.

NARRATOR: So was it in fact a hollow victory? Not only may the allies have to return, but our own defences may have harmed our own troops.

JAMES TUITE: The alarms were defective, the immunisation programme prior to the war was inadequate. They over-used pesticides, they combined compounds, they when, in destroying the Iraqi chemical weapons infrastructure the soldiers were exposed to low

NARRATOR: According to official sources there is still no evidence for a Gulf War Syndrome, or that birth defects are linked to Gulf service. Seven years on, government research is still underway to see if veterans have higher rates of illness than con

STEVE MILLER: I think what's troubling to me about these stories with the birth defects is that we don't know where the government gets these figures from. We know other families who have children like this and none of us have been included in these st

JAMES TUITE: Once they realised that they may have made some mistakes during the War they switched into an adversarial mode and immediately deny everything at every step and at every turn. Say if, if you're making a statement to suggest that this happe

RONALD BLANCK: No, we've not taken an adversarial kind of stance, but we've tried to say what we don't know and not to get drawn into admitting something that we don't know is so.

NARRATOR: But for many this is a smokescreen in an area of research dogged with failings. Failure to monitor long-term human experiments, failure to admit to possible nerve gas exposure, denial of the use of pesticides, lost chemical logs and medical r

THOMAS TIEDT: What I think is really going on here is not only Gulf War Syndrome, it's really a much larger thing that I call the Pentagon Syndrome. We've been experimenting on troops and forgetting or denying the evidence for decades. Back in the 40s

NARRATOR: A recent Congressional Committee recommended that the Department of Defence should no longer have responsibility for research into Gulf War illness. The official efforts have been irreparably flawed, plagued by arrogant incuriosity and a myop

RONALD BLANCK: I think that reports that have criticised us for in retrospect not doing things as rapidly or as well as now appears we should have are correct. I think we were slow, not because we didn't care, not because we were trying to be slow, but

JAMES TUITE: The irony of all of this is that the United States and United States companies had provided Saddam Hussein with many of the technologies that were actually used in his weapons of mass destruction programme. One of the most shocking experie

STEVE MILLER: Did you have fun today? (Yes) Look over here, there's some pink birds.

I don't mind fighting for my country because I'm a soldier and that's what I accept, but for it to affect my family and my son.

What are those?

Cedric is a casualty of war and he has no idea why.

And I love you a whole bunch.

What scares me most about this whole aspect with the Gulf War Syndrome is if you had a valid hypothesis for this with the chemical agent and the fall-out you would think that the government would be concerned foremost to ever prevent this from happenin

ALASTAIR HAY: What this underlines to me is that there really isn't protection against chemical warfare or biological warfare, at least protection sufficient for what we require. The counter-measures that have been used and administered to soldiers in

JAMES TUITE: The soldiers need to understand that this is a serious threat on the battlefield equally or more serious than any bullet, than any tank, than any plane. It is the future of war.