No Longer So Secret an Agent

Court documents reveal manufacturers knew dioxin's perils

When the flamethrower on the Navy gunboat burned off foliage along the riverbank of the Mekong Delta in Viet Nam in 1967, recalls Robert Sutton, a ship's gunner, "I inhaled the fumes of the foliage that had been killed by Agent Orange." Before long, he says, he began suffering from diarrhea, vomiting and headaches, and in 1969 was given an honorable discharge. Back in West Babylon, N.Y., the veteran's health deteriorated rapidly; today the unemployed steam fitter's ailments include brain lesions and degenerative joint disease.

In court in Uniondale, N.Y., last week, Sutton partook of a bittersweet victory. U.S. District Court Judge George C. Pratt ordered the opening of heretofore sealed documents gathered for a multibillion-dollar lawsuit by some 20,000 Viet Nam veterans and their relatives against Dow Chemical and four other companies that manufactured Agent Orange. One of the substances present in the herbicide, used in the Viet Nam War to defoliate enemy crops and jungle hiding places, is the dangerous chemical dioxin. The documents reveal that Dow officials had knowledge even before the mid-1960s that exposure to dioxin might cause people to become seriously ill. Even so, the company continued to sell herbicides containing dioxin.

In a confidential letter written in 1965, during a time when the Government was purchasing millions of pounds of Agent Orange, Dow's toxicology director wrote to another Dow official that dioxin "is exceptionally toxic; it has tremendous potential for producing chloracne [an ugly skin disease] and systemic injury. . . I trust that you will be very judicious in your use of this information. It could be quite embarrassing if it were misinterpreted or misused." A postscript added, "Under no circumstances may this letter be reproduced, shown or sent to anyone outside of Dow."

Following a 1964 dioxin spill and outbreak of chloracne at Dow's Midland, Mich., plant and complaints from consumers, Dow met with other chemical companies to discuss "problems of health" associated with dioxin. Dow says that the get-together was an attempt to police the industry from within and coordinate methods to keep the level of dioxin in Agent Orange below the danger point. In 1970 Dow recommended to then Defense Secretary Melvin Laird that the Government set a safer maximum level of dioxin content in Agent Orange.

Dow maintains that even before this warning, top U.S. officials already knew the hazards of dioxin in Agent Orange from the Government's own research and that as a Government contractor, the company was simply filling an order. The federal court documents show that in 1967 the Joint Chiefs of Staff reviewed a Rand Corp. warning about the herbicide but discounted it and continued the spraying, believed by the military to be essential to the war effort, for an additional 2 1/2 years. Yet the Pentagon is on record as having ordered Agent Orange from Dow and others specifically on the basis that it would not be harmful to humans. Military leaders said they only learned that the herbicide contained the highly toxic dioxin in 1970, when Dow told them.

Besides Dow, which was the Government's main supplier, the defendants in the Agent Orange case include the Monsanto Co. of St. Louis, the Diamond Shamrock Corp. of Dallas, Uniroyal Inc. of Middlebury, Conn., and T.H. Agriculture and Nutrition Co. Inc. of Kansas City. The case, now in pretrial hearings, is not expected to go before a jury until next year. "It's been all cloak and dagger," says ex-Navyman Sutton, "but I think the truth is finally coming out." No doubt, but some truths may continue to prove elusive: while scientific studies have shown that dioxin is fatal to laboratory animals even in minute quantities, its effects on humans are still a matter of considerable debate among experts. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.