Prologue

"I couldn't hurt any more if I were bleeding . . . . It's been the most horrible nightmare I've ever lived through . . . . If committing suicide would help, I've even given that some consideration."

So moaned Ted Turner, founder of CNN, now vice-chairman of Time Warner, just after the roof fell in on CNN's Operation Tailwind report. It was far and away the greatest calamity to afflict the all-news network in its eighteen-year history. The program tarnished CNN's credibility and that of Time magazine, which was a party to presenting the story of a secret military mission inside Laos during the Vietnam war. The Pentagon persuasively denied the story's major conclusions. An independent study commissioned by CNN found fatal flaws in the producers' research.

Questions lingered: Was the CNN/ Time story correct in its essentials, despite wholesale challenges to its body of evidence? Was the U.S. government covering up an embarrassing episode in its military history? Whatever the truth, CNN and Time, in varying degrees, were guilty of mistakes, misjudgments, miscalculations, and miscues. We'll catalogue them here. But first:

How it All Began

June 7, 1998: CNN airs the now-infamous eighteen-minute investigative report "Valley of Death." In it, correspondent Peter Arnett claims that U.S. forces from Vietnam -- in a sortie called Operation Tailwind -- dropped sarin, a lethal nerve gas, on an enemy village base camp in Laos in 1970 while evacuating an exhausted and besieged U.S. Special Forces commando unit. If true, it was a war crime under international law. The Americans and Montagnard mercenaries, said CNN, had killed about 100 people, including (what some of them believed were) American G.I.s who had defected to the enemy.

Time, CNN's sibling within the Time Warner empire, simultaneously publishes a 2,000-word article headlined "Did the U.S. Drop Nerve Gas?" Bearing the bylines of CNN producer April Oliver and Arnett, the story asserts that retired Admiral Thomas Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs in 1970, "and other top military officials have confirmed the use of sarin in the Laotian operation and in other missions to rescue downed U.S. airmen during the Vietnam War."

CNN's report and Time's article were the opening salvos in a collaboration -- a prime-time television news magazine called NewsStand: CNN and Time. The two organizations had proudly announced the series at a press breakfast on May 27 at Time's Rockefeller Center headquarters, attended by top executives of both entities: Time Inc. editor in chief Norman Pearlstine, Time's managing editor Walter Isaacson, and executive editors Joelle Attinger and John Stacks; CNN president Tom Johnson, and Richard Kaplan, the twenty-eight-year veteran of ABC News and CBS News, who had taken over as boss of CNN/USA just nine months earlier. Also present and speaking: Jeff Greenfield and Bernard Shaw, two high-profile anchors for NewsStand.

Building audience for CNN was a major goal of the joint effort. The network's audience had slumped from 35 percent of Americans who watched CNN "regularly" in 1993 to 23 percent in 1998. Competition was mounting from MSNBC and Fox News Channel. Kaplan decided that shaping a prime time schedule of so-called "appointment viewing" -- TV newsmagazines yoking CNN to Time Warner properties Time, Fortune, and Entertainment Weekly -- was just the ticket to create a popular 10 p.m. series.

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