Air University Review, May-June 1982

Death From Above . . . Russian Style

In the mid-1970s Sterling Seagrave became intrigued with the reports he heard concerning poison gas being used against the hill people of Laos. This interest led to the investigation that produced Yellow Rain, which is partly about the American "bugs and gas" establishment and the fraud Seagrave claims it has committed on the American people.* However, as the title indicates, most of his effort is directed at the evidence of Soviet use of chemical and new biotoxin weapons in clandestine assassinations as well as during recent wars in Yemen, Afghanistan, and Indochina.

*Sterling Seagrave, Yellow Rain: A Journey through the Terror of Chemical Warfare (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1981, $11.95), 316 pages.

Seagrave has had considerable experience in Indochina, which proved valuable to him in researching allegations of Soviet chemical warfare in Laos. He is the son of the famous Burma surgeon, Dr. Gordon S. Seagrave, and he spent much of his early life in Southeast Asia. After working for the Washington Post, Sterling Seagrave served as a foreign correspondent in the Far East for nearly ten years.

In forming an opinion about the credibility of a work, one of the first things I do is to find a section I know something about to see how well the author has handled that subject. If the author has done a credible job on matters about which I am knowledgeable, then I may be able to trust his work on those subjects with which I am not so familiar. Unfortunately, Seagrave failed this test. His sections on the American use of herbicides in Southeast Asia, a subject I have studied for several years, are filled with exaggerations, unsupported charges, and plain inaccuracies.

A few examples will illustrate this. Seagrave says that almost as much herbicide was used in Cambodia as in South Vietnam. (p. 104) The only allegations of herbicide spraying by the United States in Cambodia of which I am aware consisted of a few cases of suspected herbicide drift from nearby targets in South Vietnam and perhaps a wayward planeload or two in areas where the border was difficult to discern. He also claims that cacodylic acid, formulated as Agent Blue and sprayed on crops, was recognized from the outset as being highly toxic. (p. 99) He further claims that 500,000 acres of cropland were "eliminated." (p. 104) In fact, cacodylic acid has little or no toxicity through the skin, and one must drink one ounce or more to produce lethal effects. Agent Blue rapidly lost its potency as a herbicide on contact with the soil, and cropland sprayed with it could be replanted in a matter of days. In his discussion of possible environmental and health damage from Agent Orange, Sea-grave accepts the most extreme charges and speculations as fact while ignoring the preponderance of medical and scientific research which contradicts his positions. In general, Seagrave’s treatment or the U.S. experience with chemical weapons and herbicides, while bringing out some relevant and valid points, consists of far too many inflammatory statements and unsupported (and unsupportable) charges. These liberties will cause the careful reader to suspect that whet he has to say about the Soviet Union’s use of chemical weapons and biotoxins may also be exaggerated.

However, Seagrave is not alone in concluding that the U.S.S.R., either directly or through proxies, has in recent years not only been developing and stockpiling but also emp1oying lethal chemicals and biotoxins in warfare in violation of treaties prohibiting the use of such weapons. The State Department in November charged that samples of foliage froth Cambodia and yellow powder dropped from aircraft in Laos contained abnormally high levels of poisonous mycotoxins and constituted proof that lethal toxin weapons had been used in those two countries. Mycotoxins are produced by molds which are not indigenous to Southeast Asia but quite common on grain in the Soviet Union. Several outbreaks of poisoning from contaminated grain have occurred in the U.S.S.R., and Soviet scientists have published a good deal of research on these molds, including how the molds can best be grown artificially. An ABC news documentary in December reported on the independent analysis of another sample of yellow powder allegedly dropped from an airplane on the Hmong people in the mountains of Laos. This sample contained four different mycotoxins along with a man-made compound, polyethylene glycol, which could not have occurred naturally. The polyethylene glycol would help the mycotoxins to spread and penetrate body tissues, and this suggests strongly that someone had used these deadly poisons as a weapon against the Hmong.

Considering the level of Vietnamese and Laotian sophistication in chemical weaponry and the fact that the Soviet Union is the main supplier of these two countries’ armed forces, along with additional evidence reported by Seagrave and others, one is drawn to the conclusion that the U.S.S.R. is behind the use of chemical weapons in Southeast Asia. There are similar indications from Afghanistan and the fighting in Yemen in the 1960s.

What should the United States, and its military leaders in particular, make of all of this? Perhaps the Soviet "bugs and gas" establishment is using the remote mountains of Afghanistan and Southeast Asia to test operationally some of its newer weapons and determine their actual effects in warfare. Would the U.S.S.R. show more reluctance to use such weapons against, say, NATO forces in Europe? The chemicals found in Southeast Asia and suspected by Seagrave and others of having been employed in Yemen and Afghanistan are third-generation superpoisons, a step beyond the nerve agents against which most American defensive equipment is designed to work. Would current protective devices and decontamination procedures handle mycotoxins? Furthermore, might some strategists in the Soviet Union consider biotoxins and other chemical and biological weapons as a potential weapon of mass destruction that might be used for strategic purposes? Have we examined what form a chemical or biological attack against the United States might take and what defensive measures might be appropriate? Have we considered the possibility of an attacker’s using chemical and biological weapons in conjunction with nuclear weapons that would disrupt the health care infrastructure? Another disturbing possibility is the proliferation of chemical or biological weapons to other countries or even terrorists. Producing them, while not easy, probably would be much less difficult than acquiring nuclear weapons.

Perhaps a more disturbing question that Seagrave’s book should raise concerns the amount of trust the United States can safely place in the Soviet Union as a partner in negotiations and international agreements. One can speculate that American reluctance to pursue and publicize charges of Soviet use of chemical weapons and biotoxins, especially during the previous Carter administration, may have been motivated by precisely this consideration. If the U.S.S.R. will violate as long-standing an international treaty as the one outlawing the use of chemical weapons, how can one have any confidence that the Soviets will live up to the terms of the SALT treaties, the Helsinki accords, or any other of the multitude of agreements negotiated since the beginning of the era of détente in the late l960s? Does the current Soviet leadership, like Lenin, believe that treaties are only made to bind the other side and that they may be broken whenever there is a unilateral advantage to be pained?

In spite of some reservations, I recommend Yellow Rain to anyone interested in learning more about chemical warfare and especially recent Soviet activities in this area. The book has several good sections on the history of this subject, going back to World War I, and parts of Seagrave’s discussion of the strange poisons used in Afghanistan, Southeast Asia, and possibly Yemen, read like a good detective story. The controversy is one that will probably not fade away, and Yellow Rain will provide a good introduction for the reader who desires a deeper familiarity with these issues.

Major William A. Buckingham, Jr. (USAFA; M.A., Ph.D., Ohio State University), is Associate Professor of Political Science at the USAF Academy. He was previously a historian in the Office of Air Force History. Major Buckingham is author of Operation Ranch Hand: The Air Force and Herbicides in Southeast Asia, 1961-1971.

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

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