Introduction

In this essay we will look at the arguments pro and con in regard to US biological warfare during the Korean War as they have been made in the subject literature. After the first decade of post-Korean War secrecy, including McCarthyism, prosecution, direct censorship, and programmed forgetting, an initial trickle of academic curiosity has increased into a steady flow of articles and new titles. The allegations that the US used germs and insects as combat weapons during the Korean War have grown into an historical controversy with its own library— a small but recognizable sub-genre of Cold War history, stimulated by the heated and ongoing charges.

BW literature is still a specialized interest, for the vast majority of Americans remain ignorant about the Korean War allegations. Few veterans of this war still live who remember what most of us have long been programmed to not know—in 1952, in a brutally stalemated trench war engagement, the US Army opted to secretly drop insect vectors carrying disease pathogens by airplane upon identified sites in North Korea and China in hopes of changing the battlefield outcome.¹ This BW experiment began in early 1952 and lasted through all of that year.

The English-language academic community² divides itself on the subject of Korean War BW into three entrenched camps—the accusers, the deniers, and the avoiders. The avoiders are not neutral. They just “don’t want to go there,” or they claim the evidence to be inconclusive. Following the advice of colleagues, funders, and publishers, their modus is to stay clear of controversy. Their silence supports the power structure. My own convictions lie firmly with the prosecution. I’m not neutral, but I believe that all arguments in this controversy should be aired in order for me to support them or refute them. Not all the BW library can be examined in this short space, but the story that emerges is both sinuous and instructive.

We will begin our discussion of the literature with Murray Sanders,³ a Ft. Detrick investigator sent to Tokyo in 1945. Sanders’ role is seminal for he conducted the first post-war investigation of Japanese military BW and wrote a report.⁴ Sanders admits that he personally petitioned General MacArthur to guarantee the amnesty deal for Shiro Ishii and his Unit 731 staff, in exchange for their research and cooperation. Later in life, Sanders also granted interviews to BW historians.⁵ Two subsequent Ft. Detrick investigators, Arvo Thompson⁶ and Norbert Fell, filed additional reports on the Unit 731 Water Purification Plant at the Ping Fan train station near Harbin, China. Other written documentation from the early post-war occupation reveals that Alva Carpenter,⁷ an attorney attached to the Adjutant General’s office in Tokyo, was the legal fixer of the unwritten amnesty for collaboration deal for Unit 731 staff.

The receipt of the Japanese research at Ft. Detrick prompted the 1947 publication of a 90-page detailed article by Theodore Rosebury, Director of the Ft. Detrick Research and Development Division, in collaboration with his colleague, Alvin Kabat. In “Bacterial Warfare”⁸ the two authors discussed the glowing prospects of germ warfare and rated insect vectors as highly reliable pathogen delivery systems. In 1949, Rosebury wrote his own book on BW, Peace or Pestilence.⁹ In the opening chapter, titled “Today’s Question,” Rosebury laid out his plea for sanity in the headlong race with the Soviet Union toward ever more monstrous means of mass annihilation. Like J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, Rosebury reveals a deep remorse for the blindness of scientific curiosity delivering terrible weapons into the hands of politicians and generals. Rosebury’s book is the beginning of a modern BW literature.

Reporting the War

The next group of BW investigators were the journalists who covered the Korean War from the front, notably Wilfred Burchett, Alan Winnington, and Tibor Mèrey. Mèrey’s writings I’ve discussed at length in a previous essay.¹⁰ Burchett and Winnington were embedded with China’s People’s Volunteer Army (PVA)¹¹ where they had access to the latest battlefield reports and backstage dramas of the stalled peace talks in Panmunjom. No Western journalists enjoyed anywhere near the information sources from the tight-lipped UN/US side. Burchett and Winnington also covered the prisoner massacres of 1951 and 1952 on Koje Island which was the site of several US-run POW camps housing many thousands of Chinese and North Korean prisoners.

According to American official communiqués and western news agency reports alone, some three thousand prisoners of war were killed or wounded by their American captors up to the end of 1952. Machine guns, rifles and other small arms, hand grenades, bayonets, and even flame throwers and tanks were used against unarmed men.¹²

Burchett also interview captured American pilots.¹³ He eye-witnessed an American germ attack on June 6, 1952, and wrote an account published in L’Humanité.¹⁴ Burchett, an Australian citizen, wrote of his Korean War experiences in a book titled, This Monstrous War. Five hundred copies of the book were seized by US Customs agents and dumped at sea.¹⁵ Burchett was hounded relentlessly by Australian authorities, and his passport was revoked.

An American journalist based in Shanghai, John W. Powell (father of this author), railed against the US Army’s brutal bombing campaigns with names like “Operation Killer” and “Operation Strangle” in editorials in China Weekly Review. CWR had been founded in 1917 by Powell’s father, J.B. Powell. The younger Powell had been a journalist in China since 1939 and had heard of deadly Unit 731 BW attacks on cities in Manchuria.¹⁶ When reports came in from reliable sources at the Korean front of US BW attacks, Powell found them credible and printed them. He also reprinted roll lists published in Chinese newspapers of American soldiers interned in communist POW camps. This was a blessing for desperate families back home in the States who often had no word for months from the army on missing soldiers, but this editorial decision also earned him much rancor with army brass, and contributed to his later sedition indictment.¹⁷

Canadian peace activist James Endicott was invited by the Chinese Committee for World Peace in 1952 to investigate the Korean War BW charges. Endicott, born to missionary parents in China, spoke several dialects of Chinese, and had spent 22 years in missionary service in China on behalf of the Canadian Church of Christ. He had been a relief worker in Chungking during the Japanese bombing raids of 1939-1940. Endicott toured BW-attacked sites and interviewed witnesses. At a press conference on April 10, 1952 at Mukden, China, he denounced the US BW campaign, stating his personal investigation had revealed undeniable evidence of large-scale continuing American germ warfare on the Chinese mainland.¹⁸ He was immediately attacked in both the US and Canadian press and threatened with treason and sedition prosecution. His passport was seized upon return to Canada. The Canadian Peace Congress quickly arranged a mass support rally for Endicott at Toronto’s hockey stadium, where Endicott presented his evidence before 10,000 attendees who gave him a standing ovation. As the Korean War was not popular in Canada, the government backed off its threats but continued surveillance and harassment.

The most notorious volume (from this time and still today) on Korean War BW was the 1952 Report of the International Scientific Commission (ISC).¹⁹ The commission of scientists led by Joseph Needham spent ten weeks traveling in China and North Korea collecting evidence and interviewing witnesses. Needham, fluent in Mandarin, had also spent most of the war years in China as a British education envoy at Chongqing (Chungking), and had traveled extensively around China, including Japanese occupied areas. He too was aware of Unit 731 BW activities in Manchuria. The US BW attacks with insect vectors looked agonizingly familiar.

The ISC stipulated a rigorous, multi-step investigative methodology in advance of its inquiry which required physical evidence, pathology reports, autopsies and eye-witness testimony.²⁰ The report’s 60 page summary finding bolstered by another 600 pages of evidentiary appendices was unequivocal. The US was found culpable on five occasions of delivering deadly pathogens and infected vectors by airplane to identified sites on specific dates at specific times. There was abundant additional evidence of many aircraft incursions which correlated with anomalous insect appearances, outbreaks of illness, and pathology reports, but these five cases met the criteria stipulated by the methodology, and scientifically confirmed the allegations. The committee deemed them to be conclusive evidence of US BW attacks.²¹

The ISC report also included handwritten statements of four captured American airmen—one navigator and three pilots. The committee interviewed the POW airmen who reiterated their confessions of dropping BW bombs over enemy targets while also expressing deep remorse.²² The prisoners’ confessions, the treatment of POWs on both sides of the battlefield, forced repatriations, forced tattooing, psychological warfare, and brainwashing claims are complex issues which will be addressed together in a future article.

The report was ferociously attacked by Western journalists and American officialdom. As the committee did not conduct its own autopsies and lab studies, but instead relied upon the findings of the Chinese medical experts, committee members were disparaged in Congress as naïve dupes, while Needham was additionally denounced as a communist sympathizer. The Chinese scientists who performed the lab cultures and victim autopsies were ridiculed as incompetent, while the airmen were claimed to have been “brainwashed” by a sinister new technique of planting false memories. Celebrities, generals and politicians of authority were trotted before the cameras to categorically deny the charges.

The attack on the ISC report inside the US was withering and decisive which was all that really mattered to American war planners. At the UN, which was officially at war with North Korea, nations in the Western bloc fell in line with the American denial regardless of what their leaders privately thought. But the report had a positive effect. Germ war attacks subsided, and six months later a grudging truce in Korea was finally reached.²³

The McCarthy Period and its Aftermath

Criticism of the ISC report continued for some time. Most criticism was non-specific, dismissive, and often racist in tone. One of the few authors who bothered to address the actual findings in the report was John Clews, first in a 1952 article, and again at length in a 1964 book, Communist Propaganda Techniques.²⁴ Clews acknowledges that the Chinese science was good, “the evidence was found as stated.” This was a major concession from the denier camp to admit the accuracy of the Chinese lab and pathology reports. Clews recognized the fact that the Chinese medics had been trained in Western science and most had attended universities in Europe, the US, or Japan. It was the first major concession in what has since become a continuing series of rollbacks of denier claims.

Clews’ primary objection focuses on what he considers to be discontinuities in the evidence chain. Since most bombing runs associated with BW allegations were made at night, visual eye witnessing of insect bomb disbursements did not occur, he postulates. Instead, infected insects were found clumped in snow banks the following morning; thus, Clews contends, the attribution of the diseased insect hoard to the US plane flyover the previous night was only by inference, regardless of its abnormal seasonal appearance. Clews’s logic may be sound in regard to a single incident,²⁵ but inference diminishes with multiple occurrences. After many such correlated incidents of insects and airplanes, the statistical likelihood of Clews’ inference claim dwindles to zero.

The most openly repressive action of the US government was the show trial of John W. Powell. Powell was subpoenaed to testify before the Jenner Committee of the US Senate where Alva Carpenter, the secret fixer of the Unit 731 amnesty deal, had ensconced himself as legal counsel. Powell was indicted on multiple charges of sedition in 1955, along with my mother, Sylvia Campbell Powell, and the CWR associate editor, Julian Schuman. Judge Goodman, siding with defense arguments that the prosecution cannot dictate the scope of defense, ordered the US State Dept. to provide defense attorney A.L. Wirin with an unrestricted passport to travel to China and North Korea to collect depositions and evidence. ²⁶ The trial began in January 1959, but ended three days later in a mistrial being called by the outraged Judge Goodman. The Oakland Tribune had run a banner headline declaring, “Judge Says Powells, Aide Guilty of Treason.”²⁷ The case hung in limbo until 1961 when new Attorney General Robert Kennedy, recognizing the government’s case was weak and history had moved on, quietly dropped the charges.

Three books published in 1968 made the next significant contribution to BW literature. The Silent Weapons: The Realities of Chemical and Biological Warfare,²⁸ by British science writer Robin Clarke, gave equal space to CW and BW in the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) arsenal, but it is really Clarke’s discussion of the moral argument in favor of CW which is most intriguing.

Indeed it was argued that one of the most valuable chemical weapons which could be produced would be a totally reversible one— one that left the victim entirely normal after a period of a few hours or perhaps even days. Ultimately it was this idea of a “humane” chemical warfare that led to the unbuttoning of what was previously classified information.²⁹

Through the guise of a humane warfare, psychoactive drugs like LSD were studied as potential umbrella incapacitants under which a quick-strike task force could penetrate an enemy nation’s defenses and take over. Such strategic warfare would greatly reduce loss of life and property destruction. This potentially humane preservation of life, property, industrial capacity, and infrastructure also bolstered arguments in favor of BW. Clarke labeled such war planning calculations “the mathematics of suffering.”

Clarke’s investigation of the Korean War BW allegations is brief. He discusses the ISC findings in a general way, then focuses on the American criticisms. Clarke repeats a claim by an unidentified British BW scientist who informs him, “If the US wanted to wage BW on Korea the results would have been much more effective.”³⁰ This is called “argument from sanctimony.” It demands exoneration on the basis of results, and was frequently invoked by the US military which bristled that the apparent lack of effectiveness of the alleged BW campaign would be an aspersion against its competency.

Clark attended the 1968 London Conference on CBW. The conference papers were compiled and edited by Steven Rose in the volume, CBW: Chemical and Biological Warfare.³¹ The event took place at the height of US bio-chemical warfare in Viet Nam, and in the midst of global anti-war protest and student uprisings. Many complex moral issues of colonialism and war swirled about the conference. A cautionary note was sounded by the event organizer, Lord Ritchie-Calder.

One knows of distinguished scientists who can be forthright as the rest of us in denouncing nuclear weapons but will avoid the subject of chemical and biological warfare. It is quite irrational. . . . It is a psychological inhibition. They simply do not want to believe that their fundamental work can be perverted.³²

Questions of civil and moral responsibly were raised in the paper of Elinor Langer. Langer informs us:

Because chemical and biological weapons development is by its nature less costly, comparative expenditures reveal nothing of the scope of the program, the intent of its sponsors, or their degree of commitment to it.³³

She continues:

For a variety of reasons the [US] military has found it necessary and desirable to contract out a substantial portion (perhaps as much as half, or more) of its CBW research and development to universities, research corporations and private industry.³⁴

Langer attributes this fact to the Army Chemical Corps’s public relations problem, “even within the Pentagon.” Private corporate suppliers she indentifies are, “Dow, Diamond Alkali, Uniroyal, Thompson Chemical, Hercules, Monsanto, Ansul, and Thomas Hardy, and about another dozen companies all sell chemicals, including various tear gases to the Government.” Langer relates a utility company response from downwind protesters in Utah:

We are an electric utility company and our contract with the federal government covers the supplying of electrical services for the Dugway Proving Ground. . . . what the power is used for is beyond our knowledge.³⁵

She notes similar responses had been made at this time by the Johns Hopkins Institute and the Dow Chemical Company, both disavowing any responsibility for the application the US government made of their products.³⁶ Langer personally claims she doesn’t share collegial beliefs such as “CBW is less moral than other means of war,” or that “it is a less unpleasant way to die,” or that “man is capable of ‘civilized warfare’,” but her conclusion is a bit stark for humankind, “CBW is only a battle, it is not the war.”

In spite of voices of reason the mood of the London Conference on CBW seems to have been carried by its proponents. The paper by I. Màlik on biological weapons reveals this eagerness:

The most powerful argument in favor of the use of microbiological techniques of warfare aimed at population destruction is the relatively great variety of possible agents, often with completely different routes of infection, ways of spreading, incubation periods, and very limited possibilities of prevention, defense and cure.³⁷

What Màlik celebrates is nature’s cornucopia of deadly pathogens, and just how much fascinating “dark” bio-chemical discovery had been going on in secrecy at Porton Down and Ft. Detrick. The war and post-war decade were salad bowl times for bio-weaponers. The list of accomplishments in the craft of depopulation with weaponized disease and mass produced insect vectors was long and terrifying. It was precisely this cornucopia of death and mayhem which was reported in the ISC report. The Korean War had been the experimental proving ground for this new biological and entomological war industry. But just how effective had it been?³⁸

That question greatly influenced Richard Nixon when he first proposed, then signed an executive order on November 25, 1969 terminating all production of biological weapons in the US.³⁹ Nixon’s order further called for the destruction of all US BW stockpiles, though the CIA managed to hide its deadly snake venom supply.⁴⁰ Nixon was the first “modern vice-president” under Dwight Eisenhower, who brought Nixon into the Cabinet and National Security Council, and delegated important tasks to him. Eisenhower sent Nixon on a 1953 tour to Japan, Korea, and Viet Nam. Nixon was likely apprised at that time of the inconclusive results of the US BW campaign in Korea.⁴¹

By 1969, Nixon was president and he and Henry Kissinger had secretly expanded the unpopular Viet Nam War into Laos and Cambodia. The US was using both CW (napalm) and CW herbicide (Agent Orange) as operational weapons in that war. Nixon needed a political smokescreen to deflect the criminal conduct of the US government and the massive anti-war protest movement. On the campaign trail for his second presidential term, Nixon signed the 1972 International Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention.⁴² This action was not totally hypocritical as the 1972 protocol banned “development, production, and the stockpiling of microbes or their poisonous products except in amounts necessary for protective and peaceful research.” Even with this barn door loophole, the regulations were far more stringent than the previous constraints of the 1925 Geneva Convention. The US stockpiles were destroyed, and US BW production was largely decommissioned. The global future of BW disarmament looked promising until the deadly 1979 Soviet anthrax spill at Sverdlovsk. Subsequently, it was discovered the Soviets had immediately cheated on the treaty by secretly ramping up a massive BW industry called Biopreparat which employed 25,000 people at eighteen research centers and six bacterial production plants across the country.⁴³

The third book to appear in 1968 was Seymour Hersh’s Chemical and Biological Weapons: America’s Hidden Arsenal.⁴⁴ Hersh’s discussion of Korean War BW is deeper, relying largely on Clarke, the ISCR, and the 1949 Khabarovsk Trial transcripts. From the Soviet court record, Hersh quotes trial testimony and confessions of the twelve accused Japanese officers which reveal the gruesome and brutal live experiments on Chinese, Russian, and American prisoners performed by the Japanese Kwangtung Army medical personnel at Unit 731. The findings of the Khabarovsk trial were reported in some US newspapers, but downplayed as a show trial for communist propaganda. Hersh’s revelations a decade later were muckraking research which also never became headline news. He reported the ISC’s observation of the similarities of the Japanese entomological weapon (EW) attacks in China in 1942 with the US EW attacks of 1952. However, Hersh never learned of Shiro Ishii, and the Unit 731 amnesty deal Gen. MacArthur guaranteed, and so his investigation ended there. Hersh concluded that the lack of sustained international traction for the Chinese and North Korean allegations made them not supportable.

Hersh bolstered this conclusion with another lead from the Powell sedition case. He followed defense attorney A.L. Wirin’s eight-week evidentiary trek to China where Wirin took depositions, and reviewed the Chinese evidence. Wirin returned to San Francisco via England where he met with Joseph Needham. Hersh quotes Wirin as expressing doubts in an interview with a reporter several years later in life regarding the Chinese allegations. However, Wirin had been the star defense attorney in this high stakes show trial. A month before the trial was scheduled to begin, Wirin suffered a debilitating heart attack . Judge Goodman denied a defense motion to delay the trial for three months to allow Wirin to recover. Charles Garry was quickly hired to replace Wirin. A disappointed Wirin had to sit out the trial he had put three years and a trip to Asia preparing for.⁴⁵

The mistrial was a strategic break for my parents, but Bill Powell earned it the hard way. In 1977, he retired to research and writing. Using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), he was able to amass thousands of pages of archival documents from the Army Chemical Corp., Ft. Detrick, the National Archives, and other government sources. In 1980, he published an article in the obscure Journal of Concerned Asian Scholars⁴⁶ detailing the horrific human experimentation and mass murder which had taken place at the Ping Fan BW factory. More importantly, he expanded the revelation by naming Shiro Ishii as Axis Japan’s Dr. Mengele, and exposing the amnesty for collaboration deal between Unit 731 and the US, which MacArthur had privately guaranteed. To acquire the Japanese BW research which was far advanced over the Soviets and the US, MacArthur had shielded the Japanese doctors from war crimes prosecution, and quietly inserted them back into important medical roles in the post-war occupation.⁴⁷

The article came to the attention of the editors of the prestigious Bulletin of Atomic Scientists who invited Powell to produce an abridged version for their journal.⁴⁸ This 1981 article caused an immediate uproar; it became a major exposé, a news feeding-frenzy as happens when there is ample dirt and skeletons. Bill Powell was interviewed for People Magazine, 60 Minutes, and 20/20, as well as Japanese and South Korean TV. His likeness was plastered on subway posters in Japan advertising Seiichi Morimura’s Unit 731 exposé novel, The Devil’s Gluttony, and he was invited to speak at conferences in China, Japan, and the US.

Exposing the war atrocities of Unit 731 and the US complicity in the war crimes cover-up was sweet vindication. Powell was happy to grant interviews and share research documents when a new generation of researchers came calling. He had uncovered many incriminating documents, he could demonstrate that the US had the capability – and certainly the motive – to wage BW during the Korean War, but he had not been able to uncover the document trail which established unequivocally that the US had dropped germ bombs on Korea and China. Still, he felt reconciled, and he was ready to pass the baton to the professional historians.

Revelation and Censorship

The 1980’s brought new titles and new forms of information suppression. Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxton, a pair of British authors, produced the 1982 volume, A Higher form of Killing.⁴⁹ Their focus was primarily on the British BW program centered at Porton Down. They raised the interesting topic of the British government’s 1943 placement of an order for 500,000 Porton Type F 4-pound anthrax bomblets with Ft. Detrick to “de-populate” Germany should it become necessary.⁵⁰ In May 1944, the initial batch of 5,000 bomblets came off the Ft. Detrick assembly line.⁵¹ Detrick farmed out the rest of the run to a new satellite production facility at Vigo, Indiana, and sent staff to run it.

Industrial scale production of pathogens brought new technical challenges and safety concerns which caused delays. The new plant was not ready to begin production until August of 1945, by which time the war had ended.⁵² Subsequently, the anthrax production order was cancelled and the Vigo factory decommissioned. However, the importance of this revelation is that it disproves a claim often made by deniers that the US military did not have the “operational capacity” to wage BW until 1953, a full year after the North Korean and Chinese allegations.⁵³ Clearly this claim for US BW impotency was false.

Another pair of Brits, journalists Peter Williams and David Wallace produced a 1989 book, Unit 731: The Japanese Army’s Secret of Secrets.⁵⁴ This is a thorough telling of Japan’s pursuit of both empire and bacteriological weapons. It begins with Shiro Ishii’s medical school days in the 1920s, then follows the saga of the Kwangtung Army’s invasion and occupation of Manchuria, the Sino/Japanese war, Ishii’s patronage in the Kwangtung army, and the Unit 731Water Purification Plant and BW death factory at Ping Fan. The book details the gruesome experiments on prisoners with disease shrapnel bombs, toxin injections, frostbite, and live vivisection. It describes BW attacks on Chinese cities with germ bombs, insect vectors, the aerosol spraying of toxins, the poisoning of water supplies, and the hundreds of thousands of deaths and casualties. The depth of human savagery exposed is truly terrifying.

With the atomic bomb obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, Japan’s war was lost. Ishii and Unit 731 staff killed and incinerated their remaining prisoners, dynamited the Ping Fan factory, and promptly headed south to Japan in front of the advancing Soviet Red Army. Williams and Wallace pick up the story in Tokyo where Ishii’s longtime friend and colleague, Ryoichi Naito, attempts to ransom the freedom of Unit 731with the American occupation victors. Naito and Murray Sanders meet, thus initiating the eventual war crimes amnesty deal.

Williams and Wallace next follow the BW trail into the Korean War allegations. They cover the Khabarovsk trial revelations of 1949, the first North Korean BW allegation of May 1951, the second North Korea charges of February 1952, and the Chinese allegation of March 1952. They discuss the international investigation led by Joseph Needham and the findings of the ISC, and they cover the international uproar followed by official censorship and denials. They discuss the Korean War dispatches of Wilfred Burchett, the case of James Endicott in Canada, and they investigate the Powell sedition trial in the US. And very interestingly, they discover and quote at length a British soldier who claimed to have eye-witnessed, during the November 1950 retreat from the Yalu River, a US Special Forces contingent including men dressed in “parkas” distributing chicken feathers into the abandoned homes of North Korean villagers.⁵⁵

While the authors refrain from expressing their personal opinions, there remains little doubt from the evidence they present that the US was, in fact, guilty of germ warfare, and the authors believed it too. This highly incriminating evidence is discussed together in one 50-page chapter (Chapter 17). The book was published in 1989 in London by Hodder & Stroughton. The American edition was simultaneously published in New York by Free Press. The Free Press edition appeared without Chapter 17. No prior explanation was announced by the publisher. The version for American distribution had been privately censored.^{56 57}

The next book to follow, in 1994, was Sheldon Harris’s much acclaimed Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-1945, and the American Cover-up.⁵⁸ Harris retells the same story Bill Powell laid out 14 years earlier. His contribution to the historical record is the mountain of detail he adds. But historians are not journalists, and unlike Wallace and Williams before him, Harris does not advance the BW story past his subtitle—the Unit 731history in China, and the amnesty/collaboration deal. The elephant in the room remains the Korean War allegations. Harris waits until the end of his book to tip-toe into the subject. In three brief pages he lamely suggests that the evidence supporting the allegations is not conclusive. Perhaps he really meant “not exhaustive,” like his own scholarship. In truth, Harris hasn’t examined the Korean War BW evidence in Factories of Death because chronologically in time these events occurred after his abbreviated topic.

Factories of Death propelled Harris to international historian celebrity status, and he was much feted. By claiming from a lofty perch of academic authority that the evidence of US BW war crimes in Korea was inconclusive, without bothering to review any of the evidence on its individual merits, Harris replays the same tactic of wholesale dismissal that US BW deniers have relied upon right from the very beginning.

The next volume in the debate was Stephen Endicott⁵⁹ and Edward Hagerman’s 1998 indictment, The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea.⁶⁰ Endicott and Hagerman take up Harris’s challenge of proof. Their exploration begins with early pro and con BW position papers undertaken by Army Chemical Corp staff in 1933 and 1941.⁶¹ Subsequent higher-level WWII policy debates covering practical, ethical, and propaganda concerns were shepherded through committee channels by Harvey H. Bundy, special assistant to Secretary of War Henry Stimson. While neither Roosevelt nor Stimson liked the idea of germ warfare, they were persuaded by pragmatism— other countries already had BW programs; the US must stay abreast.

Endicott and Hagerman then walk the reader through a concise step by step history of the creation of America’s BW war machine in the midst of WWII. We learn of the civilian Chemical Biological Warfare Committee (WBC), chaired by George W Merck, the pharmaceutical executive. We also meet Ira Baldwin, Ft. Detrick’s first science director, whose story we will return to later. We are told of the founding of Camp Detrick, later Ft. Detrick, the testing facilities set up at Horn Island, Mississippi and Dugway Proving Ground, Utah. We learn of the British and Canadian collaborative BW projects and the British anthrax bomb experiments on Gruinard Island, Scotland, which left the island toxic and quarantined for 40 years. And we hear again of the British military’s order for 500,000 anthrax bomblets, irrefutable evidence of US preparedness to wage offensive BW by 1945.

The authors also walk us through two seminal policy papers which established wartime and post-war US BW strategy. The secret 1946 Merck Report⁶² first made the cost/benefit analysis that BW was inexpensive to make, and then, the utility pitch that bacteriological weapons were highly effective. Merck pounded again the pragmatic argument (competitor states already had BW) and the fear hook (the US could not afford to lag). The Merck Report further proposed an ethical calculus— that a bacteriological weapons system was not a morally distinct system from any other weapon system of mass annihilation. Merck suggested the public could be persuaded to accept BW through effective propaganda campaigns. Lastly, the report claimed BW research would produce beneficial breakthroughs in immunology and medicine. Merck was an accomplished pitchman.

The second policy paper came out in June 1950 following initiatives from the Defense Department to rekindle Congressional interest in the Army Chemical Corps BW program which had experienced a funding rollback in the demobilization of the immediate post-war years.⁶³ The Stevenson Committee, comprised of familiar interests in the private sector pharmaceutical industry, defense contracting, academia, and military brass, produced a report which introduced into BW literature the concept of “total war”:

From the time that wars became total struggles between peoples, wars have gone on until the suffering and losses of the people on one side or the other have been sufficient to produce surrender or collapse. . . . Whatever methods of weapons are used, wars between peoples are terrible wars, and if the people, whether from wisdom or ignorance, firmly embrace a cause, the ensuing war will be one of total destruction. . . .

Neither the people who defend liberty nor those who would destroy it can limit their efforts or their weapons in the contest; nor, as a matter of fact, have they.⁶⁴

This formulation of why nations go to war is as insidious as it is fraudulent. It is not “the people” of any nation who desire war; war is only desired by a ruling cabal of militarists, opportunists and war profiteers, who have grabbed power, and who lead a nation to war through demagoguery, fear-mongering, and repression— a cabal not unlike the composition of the Stevenson Committee.⁶⁵

Endicott and Hagerman uncover many incriminating documents through FOIA. One stunning discovery was the official, classified History of the Air Force Participation in the Biological Warfare Program, 1944-1954, vol. 1 (1952) and vol. 2 (1957) written by military historian Dorothy Miller.⁶⁶ Miller’s history reveals the rapid tool-up of the US BW program in 1950 following the Stevenson Report. BW became a rapid growth industry. Government funding skyrocketed as literally hundreds of new contracts for BW research from Ft. Detrick and the military service branches were quickly awarded to private biotech labs, pharmaceutical corporations, and public university research labs. Miller described the various bombs and aerosol methods adapted and developed for BW delivery, and the competition between the Air Force, Navy, and Army Chemical Corps to develop operational BW first.

Germ warfare was the newest secret WMD system, and while there was high-level military enthusiasm for it, there was simultaneously an undercurrent of revulsion at the Pentagon towards killing soldiers and civilians with germs. Repugnance from both professional soldiers and the general public, and international law had not prevented modern CBW technologies from military use in combat in the past, but such broad popular antipathy and the fear of in-kind reprisal had served to some extent as a moral restraining leash on the use of these weapons by their proponents.

However, when the former colonized state of China entered the war in October 1950, the US Army suffered its most humiliating rout ever (until Viet Nam), and the racist psychology of American military interventionism greatly intensified.⁶⁷ When napalm and carpet bombing became ineffectual by mid-1951, and the war had become stalemated at the 38th Parallel, Truman authorized BW deployment to begin. Moral qualms gave way to pragmatic strategy, and the pathological need (voiced by John Foster Dulles) to “teach the Chinese a lesson.” However, the adversary and the battlefield conditions were very different from those of Axis Germany in 1944, and the Vigo production facility by then had been decommissioned. Endicott and Hagerman argue that due to the urgency of the war situation, the entire BW program was rushed into combat.

The authors cite Miller to differentiate between “fully operational” and “immediately operational” BW. Fully operational BW is an integrated combat system requiring a large and sustained production of toxic agents, and repeated contamination of sites with hundreds of bombing sorties. Immediately operational BW is “covert or experimental” meaning a small-scale deployment which does not require such massive infrastructure. Again citing Miller, the authors claim a major weakness in the US BW deployment appeared in the delivery mode. The refrigeration units needed to optimally transport germs and vectors on long plane flights from Ft. Detrick to Tokyo were not available until August, 1952, months after the campaign had begun.⁶⁸ Multiple take offs and landings (California, Hawaii, Midway Island), temperature swings, atmospheric pressure, and turbulence may well have diminished the potency of agents.

Endicott and Hagerman devote an entire chapter on BW as a psychological weapon in addition to its lethal capacity. One of the noted benefits of this weapon as anticipated by war planners would be the ability of BW to sow fear and widespread panic among the civilian population, thus undermining the necessary supporting role of civilians in the total war machine of the enemy. However, mass hysteria did not incapacitate the North Korean and Chinese civilian population, and this was a grave disappointment to US war planners. They also note the psychological antipathy towards BW within the Pentagon resulted in the failure of all the service branches to indoctrinate an officer corps into the theory and ethics of BW before the Korean War began, thus hindering deployment logistics.

Along with the inherent technical problems of rushing an offensive BW attack into battle, the failure of indoctrination of a mid-level officer corps appears to be just the tip of the iceberg of a far greater source of the poor results of the US BW campaign in Korea. The biggest obstacle was the political need to run the entire BW campaign in secrecy. Nothing had been done to prepare the American public for the new future of germ warfare. There had been no advance propaganda effort, no sales pitch, no subtle ideological manipulation as George Merck had recommended. The racial hatred stirred up against Japan which would have allowed public acceptance of military BW use in WWII had not been resurrected to a similar pitch in Korea. The American public was simply not indoctrinated for mass annihilation of an enemy with disease. Truman knew it, Acheson knew it, Ridgeway knew it. And that is why they all lied so vehemently when North Korea and China quickly discovered them out.

The first denial lie by Acheson snowballed, and the lie grew with each additional telling until it became “the big lie,” and there was no way to get out of it. If the BW truth in Korea came out, then the other BW lies and war conduct would surely follow— the failure to prosecute Shiro Ishii and the Unit 731 war criminals, the amnesty-for-collaboration deal, the windfall of deadly Japanese germ weapons, the horrific bombing campaigns waging total war against the civilian population of Korea —America’s highest political and military leaders were implicated in multiple war crimes, and Harry Truman did not want this buck stopped at his desk.

In their concluding remarks, Endicott and Hagerman argue that the war in Korea reveals a military culture within the US Army which allowed it to resort to the scorched-earth tactics of “incendiarism” and total war, including the condoning of war crimes. US war planners including President Truman viewed the war as a life and death struggle for global hegemonic supremacy between Western capitalism and Eastern communism. Moral certitude such as that expressed by General Ridgeway— that God was on America’s side— and a long history of entrenched racial bigotry encouraged ethical blindness and required the utmost secrecy and deception to prevent the American public from discovering such atrocities. The Korean War created the opportunity for the US Defense Dept. to revive and fund a coalition of military, private, and public sector interests from WWII to implement a crash program of biological warfare. The Korean War further provided both a pretext and a remote location for testing new BW weapons in combat conditions in anticipation of a future total war against the USSR.

The United States and Biological Warfare by Endicott and Hagerman is a meticulously researched indictment of the US’s germ war attack on Korea and China. Any twelve random American jurors presented with this case in a court of law would not fail to unanimously convict the US as charged. But few people have heard this case today because a professional hit was put on it.

The Denial Machine Ratchets Up

The hit on Endicott and Hagerman’s book consisted of three well-placed, highly negative reviews which successfully cut bookstore orders, shelf space, second tier reviews, and sales on what would likely have been a best-seller exposé sequel following Sheldon Harris’s Factories of Death. The first attack came from John Ellis van Courtland Moon in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Moon was a retired history professor who had written articles on US chemical war policy during the Cold War. In his review, Professor Moon recycles old racist claims that the ISC report was flawed because of the Chinese lab work, that the 19 pilots’ confessions were worthless as evidence, and that the US had no offensive BW capacity during the Korean War, and he denies that the secret Unit 731 amnesty/collaboration deal directly implicated the US in further secret BW machinations in Korea. These denier arguments are stale and do not hold up to current scholarship.

Three of his points deserve special response. Moon argues that during the Korean War, in accordance with National Security Council policy NSC62, CW and BW were only to be used in retaliatory capacity, and therefore, the US could not have used offensive BW by presidential fiat. What he omits is that the NSC was a new White House office set up by Truman in 1947 as part of a larger reshuffle which created the CIA to consolidate intelligence and combined War and Navy into a unified Defense Dept. The inner circle of BW conspirators was very small indeed. It did not necessarily include the full NSC with its policy decrees. Excluding the NSC shielded its non-informed members from direct knowledge and created the basis for plausible denial.⁶⁹

Professor Moon also trundles out Milton Leitenberg with his 12 Soviet documents. I have previously demonstrated that Leitenberg’s evidence is in all probability a forgery. It consists of typed copies of handwritten copies which cannot be connected by evidentiary trail to their purported source in the Presidential Library of the Kremlin. Furthermore, the contents of this “Soviet dossier” do not reveal the information Mr. Leitenberg claims, but relate instead to the power struggle in the Soviet Politburo following Stalin’s death.⁷⁰

Lastly, Moon takes umbrage with a claim by Endicott and Hagerman that Truman was prepared to use the 500,000 anthrax bomblets primed for production at the Vigo factory against Japan in 1945. Both the Manhattan Project which built the atomic bomb and the Ft. Detrick BW operation were top secret. Unbeknownst to each other, they were in head-to-head competition to build the world’s first super-weapon of mass destruction. If there had not been production delays at Vigo, or if the Trinity Site A-bomb test in New Mexico had been a dud, who is to say that Truman wouldn’t have changed horses? The atomic bomb was certainly the more sexy weapon, but the racial rage stirred up against Japan, and the desire for a quick end to the war overcame any reservations Truman had about BW. Moon concludes his review by agreeing with the authors on the need for full disclosure from the US. This is something both accusers and deniers can agree upon.⁷¹

Sheldon Harris’s tar brush in the Journal of American History is particularly smarmy. Harris cites three lamentable proofreading errors in a first edition as major blunders of historical fact.⁷² He is outraged that “anti-American bias pervades virtually every chapter in the book,” and that the authors cite Chinese and North Korean historical documents to try to understand the communist perception and response to the BW attack at the height of the Korean War. Isn’t that what historians are supposed to do—gather material from many sources? This book is an unapologetic indictment of US war crimes by Canadian authors. Why should they uphold loyalty to the US, or pretend journalistic neutrality? Harris’s sanctimony is misplaced.

What Endicott and Hagerman’s history does uncover is a huge shortcoming in Harris’s own research. Harris’s book, Factories of Death, makes much of blaming the Japanese war criminals of Unit 731, and it chastises the US handlers for shielding their heinous crimes, but it gives us no information on how this valuable trove of Japanese BW data, so worth covering up and so scandalously lied for, was incorporated into the American BW arsenal at Ft. Detrick. Surely some discussion of the utility and application of this advanced military windfall should have been a chapter of Harris’s book.

 

The attacks by Harris and Moon were targeted to the academic and public policy crowd. The hit which most affected book orders and American public awareness came in the highly influential New York Times Book Review, and was written by Ed Regis, whose own book, The Biology of Doom,⁷³ was due out the following year. Regis, a retired philosophy professor, had written previous popular books on non-fiction science subjects.

Regis takes the authors to task for not producing a “single document in American archives that provides direct evidence for their claim.” This taunt is meant to question 20 years of research by Endicott and Hagerman who struggled continuously against government censorship. By contrast, Regis’ enters this contentious topic remarkably quickly with a completed book and without a prior track record of research articles. It is further apparent he has been given privileged access to some Ft. Detrick records.⁷⁴ Compartmentalization of record keeping as a means for restricting information flow works very well. The US government is not going to release any top-secret confessional documents on BW, and it cannot be compelled to through FOIA. Bill Powell learned this years ago. Endicott and Hagerman gave it a second shot, then found other sources. Regis understands the methodology of secret-keeping, and agreeably collaborates through self-censorship. His book contains no chapter titles, no reference citations, no document citations, no photographs, and his bibliography is abridged.

The Ideology of Doom

Ed Regis’s Biology of Doom is the flagship of denial literature as Endicott and Hagerman’s is for the prosecution. His literary psychology and stylish writing lift it above others. Regis’s denial strategy is the same as Harris’s denial strategy in Factories of Death— denounce the US for many sordid crimes, finger particularly despicable villains like Shiro Ishii and Sid Gottlieb, who will be discussed later, and give the appearance of a tell-all-tale.

In this way, the big lie remains smoke screened. As a result there are troubling and titillating revelations in Doom. However, it is really Regis’s moral philosophy which deserves scrutiny. Early in Doom, Regis tackles the moral issue of killing people with germs. We find ourselves privy to the inner dialogue of Ira Baldwin, the founder and first director who built Ft. Detrick during WWII,⁷⁵ alone with his daemons.

[H]e now had to wrestle with the considerable moral problem of using microbes to kill people, instead of killing the microbes to save people. This would require a complete shift in moral perspective.⁷⁶

Baldwin was a professor of bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin when George Merck recruited him in 1943 to build a BW weapon lab for the US government. It was top secret defense work; it would impose enormous responsibilities upon him, demanding upmost competence. It was a tremendous opportunity, and he was patriotic. He just needed to get past the moral qualms.

Would he rather be maimed by high explosives, dismembered, burned to death by fire and flame, ripped open by bayonet, his ruptured guts spilling out in front of him. . . . or would he rather die of the worst disease he could possibly think of?⁷⁷

Baldwin’s back story now unfolds and we are told of the two great tragedies which imprinted his life. During WWI, Baldwin had burial duty at Camp Taylor, Kentucky during the great flu pandemic of 1918, and buried some of his buddies. More tragically and recently, Baldwin’s teenage daughter was crushed in a freak traffic accident where she had been a pedestrian. Disease versus violence; the moral conflict is set: “So it turned out to be a simple decision in the end. . . . germs and diseases, bad as they were, were less bad than bullets, flames, or shrapnel. . .”⁷⁸ According to Regis, it took Baldwin all of 24 hours to make this Faustian calculation (illustrating poignantly why we each prefer our familiar circle in hell.) Within days, Baldwin had found the future lab site, a little-used landing field amidst open farmland in rural Maryland, not far from Washington DC. Over the next several months, he directed the design and construction of the Camp Detrick BW lab with its cloud chamber, fermentation vats, safety features, and security needs. Baldwin recruited the core brain trust of research scientists, and oversaw major expansion of the facility into Ft. Detrick, including development and staffing of the Horn Island test site, and the Vigo production plant.⁷⁹

Regis understands that Baldwin’s logic is the classic false dichotomy of pitting two evils. Baldwin chooses what he prays to be the lesser evil, thus blinding himself to the righteous moral path of rejecting both visions of evil. Professor Regis performs the moral sleight of hand, but it is not sufficiently convincing on its own. There follow captivating revelations of General Ishii’s rise in stature, and of his associate, Ryoichi Naito, making an unannounced visit to the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York in 1937 to request samples of yellow fever virus. We learn of CIA operative Sidney Gottlieb, who dosed Frank Olson with LSD leading to his premeditated murder by CIA thugs.⁸⁰ We are told of scientific breakthroughs at Ft. Detrick, of great brewing vats of toxins, state of the art technology, projects with codenames like “Shady Grove,” dangerous field tests at Dugway, unreliable wind conditions, the heroic volunteers of Operation Whitecoat⁸¹ -- all recounted with literary flair amidst the bonhomie of men working together with the single-minded devotion of a great cause. Thus are we led into the next Faustian bargain which Professor Regis dubs “green warfare.”⁸²

Green Warfare elevates Baldwin’s private angst into the political arena. Regis evokes modern conventional warfare, in which cities are bombed to rubble, infrastructure pulverized, people maimed, flesh burned, bodies torn asunder. He argues that death by disease from a BW attack is more natural, less traumatizing and painful to victims generally. Additionally, property and infrastructure are saved, making industrial recovery and repopulation after the war more efficient: “The final goal of warfare, after all, was not to kill, maim, or sicken— those were only means to an end. The end of warfare was to force the adversary to surrender and submit.”⁸³ In Regis’s moral calculus, the vanquished should choose subjugation over death. But Regis’s “final goal of warfare” is demonstrably false; many wars throughout human history were intended as genocides and land seizures. The proposition Regis makes here, assumes that war is an inevitable and perhaps a necessary human scourge. It is the Biblical formula of fallen man forever banished from Eden. Given this premise, why not favor weapons that cause less trauma and physical damage? Would this not be more humane? Baldwin’s torment is blown into hegemonic proportions. The moral path out of this greater quandary for the reader is discreetly slipped offstage.

Green Warfare is a deeply cynical ideology which abandons humanity to the endless treadmill of war, and nowadays, of total war. It denies us any possibility of escape from our perpetual folly. Regis’s real topic is more aptly the philosophy of doom. Germ warfare serves as the Petri dish in which to illustrate this problematic moral thesis.

In one important revelation from Biology of Doom, Regis confirms that the Japanese Unit 731 data— the 8000 slides and the lab research acquired by Ft. Detrick in 1947—was indeed a windfall, and he quotes Detrick scientists to that effect. This contradicts claims by a few deniers that: 1) the Japanese data was not sufficiently rigorous; and 2) Ft. Detrick scientist had already moved beyond it.⁸⁴

Regarding the Chinese and North Korean BW charges, Regis dismisses them categorically. He also rejects the ISC’s lengthy enumeration of the physical evidence with a new, unusual, and counter-intuitive argument. The evidence against the US was over-abundant, he claims. It was far too plentiful, and this quality of being too much made it suspect:

The real problem of the alleged evidence, however, was not that it was too weak, but that it was too strong. . . . if the Korean charges were true, then in 1951 and 1952 a tidal wave of pathogens, insects, plants, and animals had fallen out of the skies of North Korea and China. . . . littering the countryside with smoking guns.⁸⁵

Regis finds this scenario incredible, and ridicules it as “everything but the kitchen sink.” He inquires, given the strictest top secrecy the US had always imposed upon Ft Detrick and its germ war program, why would the US army suddenly break its vow of secrecy to attack the enemy so openly with BW?

Once again Regis misdirects our attention. The US war planners did not expect the BW attack to be found out so quickly, if at all, but it was discovered promptly because the enemy anticipated it following the small pox chicken feather incident of November 1950. The 1952 BW campaign was ill-conceived and rushed into action in the midst of the Korean winter when the modified 500 lb. leaflet bomb containers dumped moribund insects onto the frozen snow. This winter attack stupidly telegraphed US intentions to the KPA and PVA, allowing them precious time to mobilize the public, set up extermination and quarantine protocols, and rush in vaccines and DDT from the USSR.⁸⁶

North Korea and China along with their Soviet allies screamed bloody murder on the international stage, but BW secrecy in the US remained tightly controlled with a compliant press corps reporting official outrage, denials from the White House, and racist public scorn. The ISC evidence was never seriously examined on its own merits. And then there was the political repression of McCarthyism, and the threats of court-martial against the POW airmen. This secret held fast for three decades, and only began to crack in 1980. Ed Regis wants to insinuate that the Chinese scientists produced their own evidence. But both China and the USSR were countries devastated by recent catastrophic wars. How likely was it that either of these two countries had the science and the resources to produce such an exotic menu of pathogens and vectors in 1952?

Regis winds down his book with a sentimental description of a reunion many years later of former Ft. Detrick bio-weaponers at Dugway Proving Grounds, Utah: “[T]he masterminds of Shady Grove, Night Train, Magic Sword, Eager Belle, Autumn Gold, and all the rest, as kindly and gentle a group as you could hope to find anywhere...”⁸⁷ It seems the author would like us to forget that these kindly old gents from Ft. Detrick routinely, as their day job, plotted depopulation metrics, that is, the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of human beings. What philosopher Ed Regis wants us to accept as a kindly and gentle activity is the aesthetic transformation of mass murder into problem solving. It is precisely this aesthetic reductionism that philosopher Hanna Arendt described after observing the trial of Adolph Eichmann as the “banality of evil.” Biology of Doom is a shocking attempt not just to sanitize mass murder, but to normalize it. Regis concludes his 20th Century history of US BW program on a folksy note, but Doom, like Factories of Death before it, has completely omitted a critical piece of the story— whatever happened to the insects, Ed?

Six-Legged Soldiers

For the entomology of doom, let’s turn to Jeffrey A. Lockwood’s 2009 book, Six-legged Soldiers, Using Insects as Weapons of War.⁸⁸ Lockwood is a biology professor at the University of Wyoming. He tracks the US Army’s early interest in entomological warfare (EW) from the Civil War to Theodore Rosebury at Ft. Detrick. Lockwood cites funding records at Ft. Detrick from 1951 for entomological studies including $160,000 for “arthropod dissemination” and a grant to John Hopkins University for $390,000 for investigating “mosquito vectors of encephalomyelitis viruses.”⁸⁹ Ft. Detrick’s budget swelled from $5.3 million to $345 million over the next three years.⁹⁰ The US, UK and Canada were simultaneously engaged in BW research, and early results were shared between the three countries.⁹¹ The Defense Research Laboratory at Queen’s University, Ontario produced an irresistible germ-laden fly bait to attract local insects and turn them into disease carrying vectors.⁹²

Lockwood discloses another, previously hidden, offshore US BW research facility set up in 1946 at the Agsugi Air Base in Yokohama. It was called the 406 Medical General Laboratory (Unit 406), and was commanded by army bacteriologist Lieutenant Colonel W.D. Tiggert, an expert on Japanese B encephalitis. While originally tasked to provide medical services for US soldiers, Unit 406’s mission quickly morphed into a full service BW research and development lab with 309 personnel divided into four departments—bacteriology, entomology, epidemiology, and virology.⁹³ When Colonel Richard P. Mason took command of Unit 406 in 1951, both BW and EW production were greatly ramped up. Satellite production facilities with vector breeding and packaging were established in Kyoto and Tokyo which employed Japanese nationals. Some employees were secretly members of the Japanese Communist Party, which exposed these hidden germ-breeding factories in party newspapers and pamphlets.⁹⁴ The existence of Unit 406 and its satellite facilities in Kyoto and Tokyo implicates the post-war Japanese government of collaboration with the US military in the 1952 BW and EW attacks on Korea and China. The Japanese Communist Party revelations never made it into American public awareness.

Lockwood brings his scientific curiosity to the 1952 Needham Report. The ISCR lists 18 distinct species of insects identified by Chinese scientists, 11 of which were discovered to be disease carriers of anthrax, cholera, rickettsia, bubonic plague, typhoid, and crop diseases.⁹⁵ Lockwood also lends credence to eye-witness reports from North Korean farmers who testified before the ISC. “Whether such eye-witness statements constitute rigorous evidence is debatable, but testimonials were persuasive . . .” This discussion of testimony raises the question of whose voice will be heard? Are victims of germ and insect attacks allowed to testify in international BW allegations? Will their testimony be respected and given evidentiary weight?

Witness testimony raises the further critical question of what constitutes the standards of proof of BW allegations. Is it to be “the preponderance of evidence” as in civil torts? Or should it be “beyond reasonable doubt” of criminal complaints? Should it be the scientific standard of the unbroken evidence chain? Or the equally scientific standard of statistical probability? Or, is there a hidden and variable standard exercised within hegemonic power?

Citing a partially declassified 1981 US Army evaluation paper, Lockwood also lends credibility to Cuba’s claims of many US BW & EW attacks on that island over many years.⁹⁶ This is a separate, but interconnected subject, which deserves its own investigation.

Another interesting voice on Korean War entomology is Ruth Rogaski. Rogaski, a history professor at Princeton University, is skeptical of the 1952 North Korean and Chinese BW allegations when she discovers China’s Patriotic Hygiene Campaign (Aiguo weisheng yundong), the civilian BW defense strategy set in motion by Zhou Enlai:

The goal of the campaign was nothing less than the annihilation (xiaomie) of all the flies, mosquitoes, rats, and fleas in the entire country. Villagers scoured and chemically disinfected barns, latrines, ponds, wells, storerooms, and grain mills. They burned all their bedding, and set fires to the surfaces of their floors and kangs. When this had been accomplished, government personnel doused every man, woman, and child with a 5 per cent liquid solution of DDT. Finally, the thousands of cats and dogs kept by families in Gannan county were sacrificed and incinerated. . ..⁹⁷

The combat strategy adopted by the communist leadership of China to defend against the US germ attack created both a military and civil response which favored all-out vector extermination. As the US BW attack continued into spring and summer of 1952, PVA operational response was to track bombing sorties with visual spotting and radar. Quick containment of drop zones was established; next hygiene cadres were sent out to destroy insects and decontaminate with fire and DDT. In cities and villages across China, millions of flyswatters were passed out to schoolchildren, while DDT pump sprayers became common in public markets.⁹⁸ A great patriotic fervor of mass killing of insects and rats occurred all across China and North Korea simultaneous with the war effort. Pesticides, immunization shots, new public sanitation works, cesspool drainage, new sewage lines, strict quarantines when needed, mass mobilizations, improved public health, hygiene education—the people didn’t panic, the leadership was inspired, and it was a grand experiment in social engineering. Rural China in 1952 remained mired in Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhist beliefs. The US BW attack provided Mao and Zhou Enlai the opportunity to mobilize a nationwide public health and sanitation drive to transform China into a modern, 20^th Century, scientific state.

Rogaski doesn’t see this as commendable in 2002, but perhaps she has changed her mind. The successful insect annihilation strategy was simplistic and lucky in combat, and it was achieved through the urgency and universality of the threat which energized mass propaganda and mass mobilization. It worked in setting public health goals of disease containment and mass inoculations, and it worked as the political vehicle of modern nation-building. It was a tremendous accomplishment, certainly Mao’s greatest achievement after winning the revolution and defeating the US Army in Korea. However, the success of the BW/sanitation campaign, and the successful outcome of the war emboldened Mao in his future grandiose failures. Judith Shapiro’s Mao’s War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China,⁹⁹ is a fascinating account of the string of great environmental disasters which accompanied the Great Leap Forward in 1958 and all Mao’s subsequent great revolutionary schemes. Rogaski’s and Shapiro’s research greatly expands our knowledge of the Chinese defensive tactics against the US BW attack and the later repercussions of its success, but neither work refutes the BW allegations; to the contrary, they affirm it.

Deadly Cultures/Bogus Claims

The final volume we will look at is Mark Wheelis, Lajos Rózsa, and Malcolm Dando, eds., Deadly Cultures: Biological Weapons Since 1945.¹⁰⁰ The editors present a descriptive inventory of BW programs in a dozen countries. It is a complete smorgasbord of death and despair to witness how much human effort and funding has been channeled into depopulation metrics, and just how much toxic disease is warehoused in repositories across the globe ready to be unleashed. The first essay, “The US Biological Weapons Program” is authored by John Ellis van Courtland Moon whose review of the Endicott and Hagerman book was discussed earlier.

Professor Moon’s history of the US BW program in the critical decade from 1943-1953 is vague and brief to the extreme. Moon makes little use any of the numerous books, articles, people, news reports and contentious topics mentioned in this essay. His discussion of the Korean War allegations is one sparse paragraph in which he makes the outlandish proposal that, “American officials feared that the Communists powers were charging the US with germ warfare to justify their intended use of BW.” Surprisingly, Moon produces no citation to substantiate this claim because later in the article it becomes abundantly clear that Moon’s focus is documents, evaluations, reports, policy declarations, treaties, and protocols. He is an historian of paperwork, and never a chronicler of actual deeds. Later in the text, Moon does provide one memorable quote from Dorothy Miller which sheds considerable light on BW weapons development in this early period.

Many authorities were agreed that the efficiency of biological weapons would never be known short of actual use in large-scale military operations and until that time any evaluation could only be an “educated guess.”¹⁰¹

Moon’s article focuses on the subsequent 15 years of American BW development from 1954 to 1969 when President Nixon dissolved the US BW program. Foraging through government documents and NSC policy papers, Moon shows us that post- Korean War BW program did not live up to the heightened expectations of its advocates. The real setback, it seems, was not in the research and mass production of deadly bacteria, toxins, herbicides and viruses. That work had been successfully demonstrated at Ft. Detrick during the heydays of WWII and Korea. The critical problem going forward concerned applied BW— how to deliver biological destruction in a general war against the huge and technically sophisticated conventional forces of the Soviet Union across its enormous land mass.

In Korea, the US controlled the air and could fly lumbering WWII aircraft at low altitudes at will, dropping modified 500 lb. leaflet bombs loaded with pathogens and insects. This delivery mode was not viable against a modernized defense. BW would need to be delivered by munitions projectiles and ballistic missiles, and this technology proved difficult as high-speed impacts incinerated toxic cargo. With the litany of technical setbacks of the late 1950’s and 1960’s which Moon’s documents describe, it was not a difficult decision for the image conscious Nixon to axe BW.

There are additional problems with document research. Moon explains that policy is not an integrated whole, free from internal contradictions. It falls into four categories: legal, declaratory, agreed, and implemented. Legal policy consists of treaties and laws which presumably place limits upon what a government can do. Declaratory policies are the public statements of governments as to their policies. Agreed policy is the result of internal discussions of a government (often kept secret) as to what is feasible or possible to do. Implemented policy is how a nation actually behaves.¹⁰² Given this modality, it is easy to see how governments can frequently do the opposite of what they profess to be their policies.

Deadly Cultures contains two essays co-authored by Martin Furmanski. The first with Malcolm Dando is titled “Mid-spectrum Incapacitant Program.” The authors claim that in Great Britain, “studies in LSD had commenced by 1956.” This seems like a late date because by 1953, LSD had already been used for CIA mind-control experiments by Sid Gottlieb, mentioned earlier in regards to the Frank Olson murder. Gottlieb, in addition to being the CIA liaison officer with Ft. Detrick, was the director of the agency’s Technical Support Staff which in 1953 began the covert MKUltra program combining psychoactive drugs with physical torture to interrogate suspected Soviet spies at black sites in Germany.

Furmanski and Dando report that LSD was studied for many years throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s on human subjects as an incapacitant, as were THC, DMT, DET, mescaline, and another psychotomimetic substance called BZ. The authors conclude that “the effort in the West to find a non-lethal chemical incapacitant during the Cold War was a distinct failure.” The word omitted in this claim is “operational,” meaning an incapacitant that would work on a massive scale over large terrain. However they exit on the hopeful note that recent revolutionary advances in genome sequencing and brain mapping have opened new doors for highly targeted incapacitating products.

Furmanski’s second article co-authored with Mark Wheelis is titled “Allegations of Biological Weapons Use.” The authors begin by trying to paint themselves as “neutral observers.” This is not a believable proposition. Only the vast and forgotten slumber of American ignorance remains “neutral” and untouched. Individuals can arrive at the subject of BW with an open mind, but the moral quandary of killing people with disease does not permit neutral observation. Even the avoiders must privately acknowledge their fears. Those few informed on this topic have weighed the evidence and made the moral judgment to either believe or deny the North Korean and Chinese allegations, and/or the guilt or innocence of the US generals. Furmanski and Wheelis are bona fide deniers.

As with all previous denials, we see the heavy-handed editing of evidence. The eye-witness testimony of Korean farmers is summarily dismissed, while the tactic of admitting some dirt to cover up the big lie continues. Therefore, the authors admit the preparedness of Ft. Detrick to provide the pathogens and vectors identified in the ISC report. They confirm that while a full-scale BW campaign was not evidenced, combat field testing of BW was certainly possible:

The practical and political barriers that make the alleged full-scale BW campaign impossible do not necessarily apply to limited BW field tests. Sufficient munitions were available, and pilot plant production could have provided sufficient agent. Clandestine operations and plausible deniability could have allowed freedom from policy restrictions that applied to the mainline US BW program.¹⁰³

In essence, this is the argument which has been made by Wallace and Williams, Endicott and Hagerman, and all other researchers who have come to the same conclusion— that the US was guilty as charged of Korean War BW. The authors go on to admit the eagerness of US Army generals to start the killing.

On February 8, 1952, Major General E.F. Bullene, chief chemical officer made a “hawkish” speech supporting the military values of CW and BW and this was printed in the Congressional Record, at the request of an influential congressman. Brigadier General Creasy, chief of the Chemical Corps Research Command, gave a speech in Washington on 25 January praising “germs, gas, and radio-active materials” as efficient weapons of war. His comments were reprinted in the US Army newspaper Stars and Stripes.”¹⁰⁴

The ability, the opportunity, and the motivation to launch the 1952 BW attack are starkly revealed. The zealousness of the US generals to begin BW depopulation and psychological warfare they divulge was palpable. In March 1952, one of the very few (and likely the last) public disclosure of BW casualty figures by official North Korean sources was printed in the China Monthly Review. The “in retreat” BW attack of smallpox laced chicken feathers in November 1950 had caused an outbreak in North Korea that exceeded 3500 cases with a 10 percent mortality rate.¹⁰⁵ This revelation surely whetted the generals’ appetite.

Furmanski and Wheelis have walked back the denier case into a stark admission of the North Korean and Chinese allegations. However, the authors continue to deny the truth of what they admit with an explanation which is stupifying. They propose that in spite of all the evidence that led Chinese authorities to believe they were being attacked with BW in 1952, the Chinese leadership was deceived by its own threat analysis. In other words, they were simply mistaken. This is an incredulous and patently racist proposition. It presumes the Chinese side was not very smart and succumbed to their own fear projection. It also presumes the US generals, given the wide open opportunity and means to test a deadly new weapon system in combat with little risk, instead acted like choirboys and stayed in their barracks, and finally it presumes that President Truman and Secretary Acheson were incapable of flat out lying to the world. Would anybody believe that today of Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo? Furmanski and Wheelis’ understanding of male war psychology is woefully naïve.

Yet, the authors insist that the only evidence which counts must be the scientific findings. Furmanski and Wheelis dismiss the entirety of the ISC evidence on one “scientific” pretext or another. By creating categories of their own device, every incident involving insects is dismissed. Every reported BW incident from Korea is dismissed as tainted by Soviet presence. However, the Chinese scientists were “scrupulously accurate,” and the lab work was performed at university laboratories. This evidence must be taken seriously; still, the authors create additional categories to dismiss, finally permitting only four cases of inhalation anthrax to advance through their reductive process. The authors announce that they have acquired 1952 samples of the anthrax spores and through genetic sequencing they have ascertained that the anthrax was a native Chinese strain, and not an American one. Therefore, the anthrax was local and natural and could not have come from US BW.

There are several problems with Furmanski and Wheelis’ methodology and their conclusion. First, having claimed to be neutral they are ignorant of their own prejudices which contaminate their findings with unwarranted Western assumptions. Second, they are ignorant of their own racialism which considers the North Korean evidence to be inferior. Third, just how “scientifically neutral” are their category assumptions? Fourth, the authors offer no explanation of how they obtained the 1952 anthrax samples. Were they freely given to them upon request from the Chinese universities? Or were they obtained through some subterfuge? Wouldn’t a clandestine acquisition of the anthrax spores make their findings suspect?

Lastly, Furmanski and Wheelis appear to be too clever by insisting that the native Chinese origin of their anthrax samples rules out US BW. The anthrax strain the authors analyzed could just have readily been collected by Japanese Unit 731 scientists in Manchuria. It could have been handed over to Ft. Detrick scientists in 1947. It could have become weaponized at Atsugi Air Base Unit 406 in Yokohama. Since they have not revealed the source of their anthrax samples, they cannot claim any reliable unbroken custody chain.¹⁰⁶

There is also the question of the evolution of science. Science is not a static, monolithic thing as many people presume it to be when the word is capitalized. Lord Ritchie-Calder’s observation of the psychological inhibitions of scientists not wanting to see evil come out of their work is important. We have heard this message from Theodore Rosebury too. Furmanski and Wheelis’ genome lab is good for the specialized task that it performs. But today’s forensic science is quite distinct from the investigative field work performed by Joseph Needham and his ISC colleagues in 1952 under conditions of a brutal trench war, and while the BW campaign was in full swing. Nobody has ever come forward to challenge as unscientific the ISC methodology as stipulated in its flow chart, nor can it be claimed the committee’s conclusions weren’t scrupulously derived from that methodology. It was apparent to the ISC members that the evidence was sufficient, obvious and conclusive. As a jury, they had no difficulty reaching a unanimous verdict.

The core problem of the research of Furmanski and Wheelis, and Dando, and Ruth Rogaski, and van Courtland Moon, and Sheldon Harris, and Ed Regis, and the whole, post-1994 denier crowd, is that they have all fallen under the patronage of Milton Leitenberg. These authors are all highly intelligent and articulate researchers, yet every one of them cites Leitenberg’s Soviet dossier as convincing proof of China’s false accusations of US BW. They have each slavishly accepted Leitenberg’s bogus evidence for what he claims it to be, rather than apply their abundant skepticism towards analyzing it. Surely Mr. Furmanski would have to agree that a document which is a typed copy of a handwritten copy of an alleged secret document which nobody in the West can ascertain actually exists, is hardly scientific evidence of the great BW hoax scheme Mr. Leitenberg claims it to be.

As I have previously discussed the content of the twelve Soviet documents, let’s focus instead on their authentication by Katherine Weathersby, a Russian language scholar from the University of Florida, Tallahassee.¹⁰⁷ After describing the unusual circumstances of the documents’ acquisition by Yasuo Naito, ¹⁰⁸ a Moscow correspondent for the Japanese right-wing newspaper, Sankai Shinbum, and their lack of archival identification marks, Weathersby explains her thought process:

Are the contents of the documents persuasive enough to overcome the skepticism raised by their irregular provenance? Their style and form do not raise suspicion. The specifics of persons, dates and events are consistent with evidence available from a wide array of sources. As is apparent from the translations below, their contents are so complex and interwoven that it would be extremely difficult to forge them. In short, the sources are credible.¹⁰⁹

Weatherby’s credibility is not convincing. Yes, the right Soviet Politburo people are present; yes, the power struggle after Stalin’s abrupt death is dramatic; yes, the contents are complex and interwoven; yes, it reads breathlessly like a Dostoyevsky novel; but extremely difficult to forge? Not really; after all, what good is a sloppy forgery? Every major intelligence service in the world has historians and foreign language scholars, document forging capabilities, and the tradecraft to surreptitiously slip documents to an unwitting courier. Mr. Naito, who today is very much a public figure and right-wing political pundit in Japan, has long been silent on this subject after his initial role as courier to the West. Naito’s handwritten copies held by Sankai Shinbun deserve new sunshine scholarship.

Some denier authors have also been especially grateful to Milton Leitenberg for providing them with hard-to-find documents on the BW allegations in their book acknowledgments. But Leitenberg’s documents are iffy. As I pointed out in an earlier essay, Leitenberg’s history, Soviet Submarine Operations in Swedish Waters, 1980-1986,¹¹⁰ was determined to be a complete fabrication of evidence by Ola Tunander,¹¹¹ the official historian who discovered it was US and UK high-tech, submersible, seafloor-crawling vessels harassing Sweden, not Soviet ones. My own research has revealed that the “memoir” of Chinese war medic, Wu Zhili,¹¹² much feted by Leitenberg as further evidence of his BW hoax thesis, is a 9-page rambling forgery greatly embellished from the one concise page of Wu Zhili’s actual autobiography.¹¹³ The two documents were not written by the same author.¹¹⁴

Leitenberg’s leadership role among the denier authors is evident, and his patronage has facilitated grant applications and publishing contracts. From his perch at the Center for International and Strategic Studies, Maryland (CISSM), Leitenberg has done a yeoman’s job of protecting the big lie. He has successfully propped up the BW denial lobby for an additional two decades, when historical momentum was against it and it should have collapsed in 1998 with Endicott and Hagerman’s book. Instead, Leitenberg engineered a well-scripted reversal of fortune with his hoax thesis built on the Soviet dossier, and his able accomplices, Ed Regis and John Ellis van Courtland Moon. However, there are strings attached to Leitenberg’s largesse, as Sheldon Harris discovered when he was pitched the task of delivering papers from Leitenberg to the Soviet Ambassador in Beijing.¹¹⁵ It’s highly unlikely Harris would have agreed to be the mule. He was not planning a sequel to Factories of Death at the time of his death, and though he produced the negative review of the Endicott and Hagerman book, for Harris in hindsight, the denial shtick had lost its luster.

Conclusions

The US BW denier cause is back on its heels, but doesn’t realize that fact yet, and with concerted pushing may topple soon. Furmanski and Wheelis have already back pedaled the denier position into a full confession for the US. Donald Trump needs to score a foreign policy victory to salvage his dismal presidency, and he may tweet out some Korean War BW indiscretion on one of his golfing summits with President Xi or Kim Jong Un. A peace treaty with North Korea will require a BW confession from the US. That will be a loss of face, but it would be temporary, and it would be spin-able to blame it all on America’s Cold War cabal of militarists, war profiteers, politicians, capitalists, and their successors—Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex— who unwisely set America on this imperial course.

Fessing up to the Korean War BW war crimes would be of great and practical benefit to the US, in both the short term and the long run. We should learn from the examples of Germany and Japan. Bill Powell described it this way in 2004:

I believe the Japanese government is making a serious mistake in not coming to terms with the country’s imperialist past. The issue has become a public relations disaster. . . .A comparison with post-war Germany is useful. Germany’s leading political and economic role in Europe is roughly comparable to Japan’s in Asia. Post-war Germany has pretty well faced up to its wartime misdeeds and European hostility has lessened measurably. The situation is not the same in Asia.¹¹⁶

Japan still clings to post-WWII denialism, and it remains an obstacle in its relations with other Asian states. The US will isolate itself in a similar manner if it continues down the denial road, and as global economic and political power shifts across the Pacific. The maintenance of the US’s huge war machine to prop up the imperial ambitions of a small minority of American capitalists and war profiteers has run up trillions of dollars in war debt. This militaristic path is not sustainable. Continuing belligerence is not affordable especially as sea levels rise and dry land shrinks, and the disaster costs of global warming come crashing upon us. In the light of pending global catastrophe, an acknowledgement of past war crimes may seem insignificant, but it is not. Korean War BW is a fulcrum issue—a moral judgment on American national character and the dangers of long-held secrets. Full acknowledgment of past wrongdoing will help turn the American ship of state in a safer and saner direction.