Ex-CIA Analyst From Annandale: 'Government Ignored Warnings of Kuwait Invasion'

Twenty years after the start of the ground war in Operation Desert Storm, former CIA analyst Patrick Eddington remains haunted by what the CIA warned President George H. W. Bush and his senior advisors of leading up to the war.

The Annandale resident details his charges that the White House ignored warnings of Saddam Hussein’s intent to invade Kuwait in his second book, Long Strange Journey: An Intelligence Memoir. Timed to coincide with the anniversary, Eddington believes Gulf War veterans are “on the verge of becoming the next generation of forgotten soldiers.” This book continues Eddington’s campaign detailed in his first book of how administration deliberately attempted to suppress evidence of chemical weapons exposure among Gulf War veterans.

In 1987, 24-year old former National Guardsman and Army Reservist Eddington was excited to fulfill his dream of a career in intelligence when he joined the CIA. During Desert Storm, Eddington said there was numerous reports of chemical exposure, but “General Schwarzkopf’s staff told us these were false alarms."

Early in 1994, his wife, also with the CIA, was offered a short-term position with the Senate Banking Committee as part of CIA training. Through this work, Robin Eddington became privy to reports from Gulf War veterans of health issues related to chemical exposure during the war. When she shared that with her husband, light bulbs went off and Eddington began to reexamine basic conclusions that had been made by the CIA. “We found that the alarms were, in fact, legitimate and were verified by reports from other country’s troops,” said Eddington.

He built a case for CIA management who promised to look into the allegations. Eddington later found out they did nothing spurring him to write an anonymous editorial for The Washington Times. Soon after, Eddington reported that the CIA “reluctantly got the ball rolling,” but the eventual response was to “try to discredit us, initiating a bogus counterintelligence investigation of me, and refusing to take the necessary steps to have a truly independent review of the Agency's previous conclusions that no U.S. troops had been exposed to Iraqi chemical agents,” he said in a blog entry.

He and Robin decided to leave the Agency and go public in an effort to help veterans with their medical care. Eddington carefully followed protocol and gave his book, Gassed in the Gulf, to the CIA for review. After much legal back and forth, the book was published in 1997, and Eddington took on a series of jobs with veteran’s rights organizations including The Gulf War Resource Center and the Vietnam Veterans of America. He currently serves as an aide to Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) who Eddington says is the only member of Congress to hire a national security whistleblower.

While his journey was difficult, Eddington admits it was nothing like the “toxic environment” for whistleblowers today. “We were engaged in all of this prior to 9-11 and never exposed classified information,” said Eddington, differentiating himself and Robin from Julian Assange and Bradley Manning of the WikiLeaks exposures. That said, Eddington said he is disturbed by the treatment of Assange and Manning in that the public focus became on their respective actions, rather than the government cover-ups and misdeeds they were exposing.

“There is no Federal protection for whistleblowers,” he said. “In the absence of a genuine descent channel, it is difficult for anyone to bring forth information that needs to be acted on.” Eddington maintains that his purpose was not an academic exercise. “Thousands of Gulf War veterans were exposed to nerve agents and other chemical weapons. This equates to real harm and the information needs to be in the public domain so treatment protocols can be developed.

During the course of his work on Gulf War Syndrome, Eddington found that the CIA had identified more than 1.5 million documents that may be relevant to his allegations but which the CIA would not review or declassify. Feeling this was unconscionable, Eddington worked through Rep. Holt who secured a provision for review of the documents that was signed into law in 2010 and is underway currently.

Eddington is “tickled” that two icons of the former Church Committee, a Senate committee tasked with investigating the CIA and FBI after Watergate, have given him their endorsement for the book along with others who work to protect individual liberty. He hopes to see the review of the 1.5 million documents conducted expeditiously but, above all, thoroughly, for the sake of Gulf War veterans.

For more on the facts supporting the book and to see what others are saying, visit http://www.longstrangejourney.com/.