"Valley of Death" started out to be a big scoop for CNN's April Oliver and Peter Arnett, but their journalistic glory--such as it was--did not last long. In less than a month, their sensational story had been exposed as untrue.

The way producer Oliver and reporter Arnett told it, a US Special Forces commando unit pushed deep into Laos in 1970 on a mission to kill American GIs who had defected to the enemy. In the course of the mission, Operation Tailwind, CNN said, US Special Forces troopers not only killed 15 or 20 defectors but also wiped out everyone else in a village of 100 people, including the women and children. The "hatchet force" commandos were supported by Air Force A-1 Skyraider aircraft, which dropped deadly sarin nerve gas on the village and on North Vietnamese and Laotian forces.

These accusations were broadcast June 7 in a segment titled "Valley of Death" on the premiere of "NewsStand: CNN & Time," a new TV magazine show brought forth jointly by the network and the magazine. The telecast featured Oliver and Arnett, who also shared a byline in the print version of the story, "Did the US Drop Nerve Gas?" in the June 15 issue of Time.

The wild story soon began to fall apart.

There really was an Operation Tailwind, but its purpose was to aid anti-communist guerrillas. The "village" was a North Vietnamese military base camp. Pressed by a large North Vietnamese force, the US troops were pulled out by helicopters. The withdrawal was supported by Air Force A-1s dropping tear gas, not nerve gas. Art Bishop, one of the A-1 pilots, had shown Oliver his journal written in 1970 at the end of the mission, recording that it was tear gas that had been used.

The officer who planned the mission said that if the US troops themselves had been as exposed to nerve gas as CNN and Time reported, "They would have been dead or in the hospital." An Army medic who was on the mission--and who had experienced exposure to tear gas before--confirmed that the substance used was tear gas.

Eugene McCarley, who led the raid as an Army captain, and others who took part in Operation Tailwind said that when Oliver interviewed them, she demonstrated little interest in what had actually happened.

Maj. Gen. Perry Smith, USAF (Ret.), CNN's military analyst, resigned in protest on June 14 when CNN refused to retract the story.

The star witness for "Valley of Death" was Lt. Robert Van Buskirk, a platoon leader who supposedly had killed two GI defectors himself and called in the nerve gas strike. However, Van Buskirk subsequently told Newsweek that he had "repressed" his memory of the operation during a vision he had on Easter morning in 1974. At the time, he was in a German jail on charges (later dropped) of gun-running. Twenty-four years later, he suddenly "recovered" that memory during a five-hour interview with Oliver.

Van Buskirk, now a prison minister in North Carolina, then drifted further from the story CNN said he had told. Interviewed by the Washington Times, he said he never confirmed CNN's claims that US forces used sarin nerve gas and targeted a camp holding American defectors. Also, he said, "I didn't see any civilians."

Jay Graves, said by CNN and Time to be the "recon-team leader" who supposedly checked out the village before the strike and saw American "roundeyes" through a special field telescope, made a public statement declaring that he had no part in Operation Tailwind and that his comments had been "twisted" by CNN and Time.

With the story coming unstuck at all seams, CNN hired Floyd Abrams, a New York lawyer who specializes in news media matters, to investigate. He soon reported that "CNN's conclusion that United States troops used nerve gas during the Vietnamese conflict on a mission in Laos designed to kill American defectors is insupportable," and that those responsible for the program had "ignored or minimized" information that did not agree with conclusions they had already reached.

The Abrams report went to some length in acknowledging the misrepresentation of comment by Adm. Thomas Moorer, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. CNN misconstrued his remarks to indicate he had validated the nerve gas story. A friend of Moorer's told The Weekly Standard that "the admiral got mixed up. He's 87 years old; he's in a nursing home; they interrogated him for hours."

On July 2, CNN news group chairman Tom Johnson retracted the story and apologized to viewers, to his colleagues at Time, and to the US military personnel involved in Operation Tailwind.

Concurrently, CNN fired Oliver and another producer but gave Arnett only a reprimand, explaining that "it was mainly a case of him being flown in to read a script." Arnett professed shock to hear that his job might be in question, declaring that he had "contributed not one comma" to the story and that his byline had been tacked on to Oliver's in Time for "marketing reasons."

However, Oliver-who continued to claim the story was true and said CNN's retraction of it was prompted by "an organized attack full of untruths and brutal slander"-said Arnett did more than read a script. She said Arnett had conducted a number of the interviews, including sessions with Van Buskirk and Graves, among others.

This was not the first time Arnett has been wrong in reports about the armed forces. In 1965, when he was working for the Associated Press, Arnett picked up and repeated a false allegation by Radio Hanoi that the US Army was using poison gas in Vietnam. Reporting from Baghdad for CNN in 1991, he broadcast and later defended Saddam Hussein's claim that the United States had bombed a "baby milk plant," which turned out to be a biological weapons factory.

Veterans groups and others have bombarded CNN, calling for Arnett's dismissal, but the network decided on July 9 that the reprimand was punishment enough and that Arnett could stay.

Arnett lamented that he had been "trashed on a daily basis in the right wing media" and that his reputation had "taken a major hit around the world."

He said he accepted CNN's retraction of the story but that he was still not certain the allegations in "Valley of Death" were untrue.

CNN has created a watchdog position to track the accuracy of its reporting.