GULF WAR CHEMICAL COUNT HIGHER : REPORT SHOWS AGENTS DETECTED 7 TIMES IN FIRST WEEK OF CONFLICT.

Byline: Philip Shenon The New York Times

The Pentagon has acknowledged in a new report that chemical weapons were detected as many as seven times in the first week of the 1991 Persian Gulf War near staging areas in northern Saudi Arabia, where tens of thousands of American troops were housed.

While insisting that it still had no conclusive evidence that American soldiers were ever exposed to Iraqi chemical weapons, the Defense Department said in the report that it was ``further exploring the plausibility'' that small amounts of chemical agents passed over American troops after American bombers destroyed Iraqi arms depots and factories north of staging areas near the Saudi city of Hafr al-Batin.

In the past the Pentagon had said it knew of only two ``credible'' detections of chemical weapons in the Gulf War, both made with Czech military equipment. The new report, which was dated Aug. 5, recounted those two detections and said five others reported in the first week of the war ``cannot be discounted.''

The report, which pulls together information from intelligence reports and other government studies, some of them made public earlier by the Defense Department, probably will be seen by ailing veterans of the Gulf War as additional evidence that they were made ill by chemical agents released in the war.

And the report also is likely to draw new attacks on the credibility of the Pentagon, which until recently had insisted that it had no evidence that American troops were exposed to chemical weapons. It was not clear why Defense Department officials had not compiled the information before in a public report, given the intense interest of thousands of sickly Gulf War veterans and the fact that the information has existed in Pentagon records for years.

Scientists and health officials in the Defense Department acknowledge that little is known about the long-term health effects of exposure to trace amounts of chemical weapons, like those that were detected. More than 60,000 Gulf War veterans have asked for special government health screenings to determine whether they suffer from ailments related to the war.

In June the Defense Department acknowledged for the first time that there was evidence that a significant number of American soldiers may have been exposed to chemical weapons, and that the exposure may have been the result of an error by American military commanders.

In the incident disclosed in June, about 150 American combat engineers blew up an Iraqi arsenal in a bunker near the southern Iraqi village of Kamisiyah. The bunker was later determined to have contained chemical weapons, including mustard gas and the nerve gas sarin.

Many of the soldiers who participated in the mission on March 4, 1991, a few days after the end of the war, have reported in recent interviews that they have chronic gastrointestinal ailments and mysterious rashes and other growths.

The Kamisiyah incident was not referred to in the new report, which focused instead on chemical detections in the first week of the Gulf War. The new report, prepared by the Pentagon's Persian Gulf Veterans' Illness Investigation Team, was posted this month on a Defense Department site on the Internet intended for Gulf War veterans.

The report said detection equipment manned by Czech and French soldiers found evidence of mustard gas or nerve gas - usually in ``low levels'' or ``infinitesimal'' amounts - as many as seven times from Jan. 19, 1991, the third day of the air war against Iraq, to Jan. 25, 1991.

All of the reported detections were made within a 35-mile radius near Hafr al-Batin and the King Khalid Military City, a sprawling Saudi military base that was used to house thousands of American and other coalition soldiers.

``What this report tells me is that they were getting fallout from the plants being bombed in Iraq,'' said James Tuite III, a former congressional investigator and founder of the Gulf War Research Foundation, a group that has accused the Pentagon of a cover-up.