THE CIA ordered an internal inquiry yesterday into allegations of a cover up of Gulf War chemical weapons exposures and released nearly 400 related documents it had been holding for months.
Even before the moves were announced at an extraordinary press conference at CIA headquarters, a Washington publisher had posted the documents independently on the Internet.
Pressure for their release mounted after two former CIA analysts claimed the agency was covering up evidence of chemical weapons exposures during the 1991 war.
The CIA executive director, Ms Nora Slatkin, denied emphatically the allegations by Patrick and Robin Eddington, a husband and wife team who went public with their allegations on Wednesday in an interview with the New York Times.
"The director of Central Intelligence [Mr John Deutch] has underscored his commitment to the American public to leave no stone unturned by directing the CIA Inspector General to review these allegations," Ms Slatkin said.
She said the CIA put 369 documents back on the Internet on Thursday. more than nine months after they had been removed from a Pentagon site for Gulf War veterans.
Some 88,000 veterans have complained of illnesses that they believe stem from their service in the Gulf. Suspicions run high among veterans groups that the government has hidden information linking the illnesses to exposures to chemical agents.
The Pentagon and CIA insist that Iraq did not use chemical weapons during the war and there is no evidence that Gulf War illnesses resulted from exposure to chemical weapons. The Pentagon announced in June, however, that US troops inadvertently destroyed Iraqi chemical weapons after the war and may have been exposed to low levels of the nerve agent sarin.