Readers of Socialism and Democracy may already be familiar with Tom Powell’s work. Between 2017 and 2020 this journal published a series of Tom’s articles concerning biological warfare in Korea. These articles, com-prised of preliminary investigation and analysis, would ultimately result in the book, The Secret Ugly, published in English in 2023 and in Chinese in 2024. The significance of this book is not confined to its exposure of yet another heinous crime carried out by US Imperialism, although that is cer-tainly among its achievements. What we learn from the copious research is how these weapons were developed, deployed and to what specific end. We also learn how coverups work, not only in the direct attack on whistleblowers like John and Sylvia Powell (Tom’s parents), but in the large-scale campaign of denial orchestrated by various government agencies. Along with the usual patriotic posturing is the employment of “experts” to lend credibility to the coverup. These “experts” are credentialed individuals who uphold the official narrative while heaping scorn on anyone daring to question it.
The pattern thus established has been effective ever since. While such nefarious activity met with resistance in the tumultuous sixties, leading to efforts at reform such as the Church Committee of 1975, the US government has never ceased to use illegal and deadly means to advance the cause of con-quest and domination. The case of Julian Assange, the question of the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the exposure of US bio-weapons labs in Ukraine remind the world that the policies developed in Korea have become standard operating procedure. To explore these issues, I asked Tom Powell for an inter-view. Tom graciously agreed and we conducted the following exchange in July 2024.
Mat Callahan: In your book, The Secret Ugly, you build a case against the US government for the use of bacteriological weapons (BW) in the Korean War. You claim that the US BW campaign was operational for the last 18 months of the war, that is, from January 1, 1952, until the cea-sefire in July 1953, and you present evidence and testimony to that effect. What would you say is the most damning evidence you present and why?
Tom Powell: My evidence is from Western sources. No doubt the Chinese and North Koreans have their own evidence, and we are still waiting for that evidence to be released.
There are four bodies of evidence and testimony which I think are individually damning, and taken together present a conclusive verdict. The first body of testimony is that of the Westerners who were in North Korea and China in 1952, especially the testimony of Wilfred Burchett and James Endicott who were in the war zone and were given direct access to the POWs and the physical evidence respectively. Also the witnesses of the women’s truth delegation of the WIDF (Women’s International Democratic Federation) and the jurists’ group of the IADL (International Association of Democratic Lawyers) made very important findings. These brave civilians risked life and limb to travel to the war zone of North Korea. The WIDF investigation pre-ceded the BW charge, but it revealed the abject sadism of the US occu-pation of North Korea – the mass murder, mutilation and wanton violence perpetrated on the unarmed civilian population – and it becomes apparent that the prosecutors of this war Truman, Acheson, MacArthur et al., had no moral restraints.
The women’s truth commission was smeared in the most misogy-nist manner at the UN and in the US Senate when it released its report, and this must be considered as further evidence of the truthfulness of its findings. The jurists were presented with the actual physical evi-dence of the US BW campaign – the contaminated insects, the lab reports, and they were able to interview witnesses. The US campaign was in full operation by this time, and the IADL Report states its find-ings in unequivocal terms.
The second body of overwhelming evidence and testimony is the 667 page Report of the International Scientific Commission. The con-demnation of this report at the time by the US government and its agents, and the subsequent degree of effort put into the long-term sup-pression of the report must again be considered as further evidence of its truthfulness. The methodology of the investigation and the volume of evidence collected by the scientists made this report conclusive, which is why the US chose to attack it politically and not on its scientific merits.
The third body of evidence which I consider totally damning is the testimony of the 24 American airmen who were shot down over North Korea or China. This evidence has long been hidden away from US Korean War scholars, and has only recently come to light through the marvel of the internet. The pilots’ confessions are individual and remorseful, and certainly not scripted. This becomes apparent when the confession of the individual pilot is contrasted side by side with his subsequent retraction made under the watchful eye of an army psy-chologist and under threat of court martial. In the testimonies you dis-cover that pilots did enquire what they could admit to if shot down, captured and interrogated. They were told by briefing officers that they should say whatever they believed they needed to say, that it didn’t matter because the US would deny the BW allegations categorically.
The final conclusive evidence in my book is the “smoking gun” which Jeff Kaye found lying out in the open. This is the CIA’s own self-confession, and it doesn’t get much better than that for conclusive evidence of guilt. It was produced in-house by the CIA’s propaganda department to polish the agency’s star on the 60th anniversary of the war by a younger generation of archivists who did not understand the significance of the documents they were revealing. It’s a bit long to explain here, but I spend a whole chapter on this remarkable trove of 1100 COMINT reports in The Secret Ugly.
Callahan: Most of our readers are familiar with Wilfred Burchett and his reportage of both the Korean War and the Viet Nam War from the communist side. You also mentioned James Endicott. Could you tell us a little about who he was and what his role was in this chapter of history?
Powell: James Endicott was a second generation Christian missionary in China with the Canadian Church of Christ. He was born in Szechuan Province in 1898 and grew up with Chinese playmates speaking English and Chinese interchangeably. As a young man he opted to follow the missionary calling and was sent back to Canada to attend seminary school. In Canada he learned to preach. He read Reinhold Niebuhr, earned his Doctor of Divinity degree, met his wife, Mary Austin, and returned to missionary work in China with a new young family. Endicott advanced steadily within the mission administration until he eventually came to head the Canadian Church of Christ’s entire missionary operation in China. The mission was an extensive and complex social-economic-religious enterprise with a large hospital, school, residential compound, farms, and orchards. It included outlier clinics, grade schools, chapels, and agricultural stations. Endicott was a skilled administrator and a compelling orator, and under his leader-ship the mission prospered through the Japanese occupation and the political turmoil of pre-WWII China.
At that time one could be a devout Christian and a progressive socialist, and it was not considered a conflict of values. The Church of Christ was well connected in China with the Nationalist govern-ment. But Endicott was a savvy politician and had reached out to the communists too. He was on cordial terms with both Chiang Kai-shek and Zhou En-lai. However, with the communist victory in 1949 and for Canadian domestic political reasons, the Church of Christ decided to pull back its operation in China. Endicott was recalled and moved into a role in the Church hierarchy in Toronto.
Then the Korean Civil War broke out in 1950. The US intervened to escalate a domestic civil war into an international Cold War conflict. When the US BW campaign began in January of 1952, Endicott’s col-leagues in China notified him, and he flew immediately to China to investigate on behalf of the Church of Christ. Endicott spent two weeks in China inspecting the evidence and interviewing witnesses. He was the first Westerner to do so, and he was the first Westerner to publicly accuse the US of germ warfare.
James Endicott returned to Toronto and produced the booklet, I Accuse, in which he presented the evidence and stated unequivocally that the US was indeed guilty of this war crime. The Canadian govern-ment confiscated his passport, but could not further harass him because of his stature in the powerful Church of Christ.
James Endicott’s son, Stephen Endicott, has written a biography of his father titled, Rebel Out of China, which reveals a man who always embraced challenges and championed human dignity for all people. He was an exceptionally brave soul who was not afraid to speak truth to power, and in the process created a moral and fascinating life for himself. Stephen Endicott is also the co-author of The United States and Biological Warfare which is the history of the US BW industry from WWII through 1990 including the Korean War. It is a meticu-lously research exposé which has been of great use to me in writing The Secret Ugly.
Callahan: Another individual you discuss in The Secret Ugly in relation to the WIDF fact finding group of 22 women who traveled to North Korea to investigate allegations of US war atrocities against the civilian population is Monica Felton. Could you tell us a bit more about her?
Powell: Monica Felton was a truly remarkable individual of her gener-ation. There is no one I can think of who is more deserving of an in-depth biography as she has been overlooked by history. So what I know of her is limited to what she wrote herself – a published mono-graph titled, What I Saw in Korea, and a later, more expansive pub-lished memoir, That’s Why I Went, which describes in considerable detail her experience on the WIDF fact finding mission to North Korea. Twenty-two women from nineteen countries were smuggled from China into North Korea at night to avoid US bombing raids. In Pan-munjom, they were quartered in a deep basement of a building which had been reduced to rubble. Seventy-five percent of the city had been completely destroyed by bombs and napalm fire bombs. Every city in North Korea had been similarly destroyed. The women split up into six groups of three to four individuals with accompanying translators and photographers and disbursed across North Korea to take testimony and collect photographic evidence. When they reunited ten days later in Panmunjom to compare reports, what they discovered was a staggering record of mass murder, mass rape, mass torture, plunder, destruction and brutality which was far too appalling to fully comprehend in the moment. Felton later described it as a “lavish-ness of cruelty.” This topic will be addressed again in my forthcoming book on the Korean War when I discuss Gen. MacArthur’s strategy of using extreme violence and wanton cruelty in the invasion of North Korea to break the will of the Korean people in order to “Philippinize” all Korea as an American colonial possession.
As I mentioned earlier, when the WIDF truth commission sub-mitted its report to the UN, its parent organization, it was met with the most scandalous, misogynist treatment imaginable. Members of the commission were demeaned, heckled, called communist dupes, and many suffered reprisals in their home country. Felton was fired from her job as an urban planner and run out of the British Labor Party.
Remarkably, Felton appears to have returned to China in 1953. She is mentioned by name in the memoirs of a couple of “reactionary” US POWs who revile her for visiting the POW camps at the Yalu River. No doubt she gave them hell for the horrible crimes they had committed against the women and children of North Korea. She was not one to mince words. My father published an article by Felton in the China Monthly Review. I do not know if she met my parents at that time but it seems likely. Felton’s memoir covers only her Korean War experience. Her early life, education and organizing for the Labor Party and her later years as an international peace activist deserve light.
Callahan: One chapter of your book discusses Gen. Sams’ “plague ship” and his infamous kidnapping raid at Wonsan Harbor, North Korea. I understand that there have been new developments regarding this vessel since your book was published. Could you share these developments with us?
Powell: Yes, Sams’ plague ship was originally designated LCI (L) 1091 (landing craft) though it had later enumeration. The astounding thing about this craft is that it still exists! I located it recently beached on Samoa Island which is the sand bar that creates Humboldt Bay in Northern California. It’s a complete rust bucket today, but there it is hauled up out of the water on blocks – our second piece of smoking gun evidence just lying out in the open. It is completely unimaginable that the US government would be so careless as to leave this bauble of Korean War criminality just lying around for me to find. I’m writing an article about it right now that will detail its history. It is a WWII war relic on par with the Enola Gay.
Gen. Sams was one of MacArthur’s inner circle. He was the Army surgeon who ran the entire health care, education, and social service systems of occupied Japan. Sams requisitioned this ship in 1951 and had it outfitted with a complete biology laboratory with holding cells for prisoner/guinea pigs. After the Chinese Red Army kicked MacArthur out of North Korea, Sams sailed his floating BW lab into Wonsan Harbor. He was able to do this because neither China nor North Korea had a navy to challenge him. On board as Sams’ working guests were none other than the top three Japanese BW war criminals, Ishii Shiro, Wakamatsu Jiro, and Kitano Masajo. After Sams’ commando shore raid to kidnap a sick soldier to verify bubonic plague in North Korea, he and Ishii were transported back to Tokyo while Wakamasu and Kitano continued on to the sprawling US prison camps at Koje Island where they orchestrated dysentery epi-demics among the prisoners. Our source for this intelligence is the private correspondence between Mao Zedong and Josef Stalin.
Sams was the kingpin and financier of the entire US BW operation in Japan and Korea. His shore raid was insanely foolhardy and it would have been disastrous politically for the US should such a key general been captured. I can only imagine he acted on his own cock-strutting, 50-something initiative to impress his Japanese guests. He would never have gotten official clearance to personally participate in this kidnapping raid. Back in Tokyo, the Army covered its butt by giving Sams a hero’s medal.
After the Korean War, LCI (L) 1091 was sold to a private entrepre-neur. The biolab was stripped out, and the ship was converted into a floating fish cannery. Later it was sold again and converted into a fishing trawler. There are more interesting details but they will have to wait for the article.
Callahan: Your parents sedition trial features prominently in The Secret Ugly and was very formative of your childhood. You write about the support network your parents built in San Francisco. Could you talk about that, and then could you address the question of how your parent’s sedition trial acts as evidence of the US BW campaign in Korea?
Powell: Let me address the second question first. The single most important contribution of the Powell-Schuman sedition trial to estab-lishing US guilt in the Korean War BW campaign was to force the gov-ernment to admit that it did indeed possess the product and the capability to wage operational BW in Korea in 1952. This was a huge concession by the prosecution, and they did not give it up willingly. State, Defense, Justice, and the JCS all had to sign off on it, and the truth is they were coerced into it by my parents’ lawyer, Doris Brin Walker, who was demanding that Defense and State produce specific itemized documents under subpoena that they did not want to give up.
My parents’ role in exposing war crimes is different from the role of James Endicott or the IADL jurists. These individuals were eye wit-nesses to physical evidence and testimony. Bill Powell was in Shang-hai. He was not a witness in this manner; he was a publicist, a clarion. He played the same role that Julian Assange plays today. Like Assange, he was aggressively persecuted for his role as a journal-ist. This type of legal repression is a secondary form of evidence. The more the government persecutes, the more likely the alleged war crimes are true.
The support network my parents gathered together was a broad spectrum of the political left of the Bay Area. The core group who would come regularly to Sylvia’s parties was about 100 friends who all knew and loved each other, and were happily growing old together. They ranged from professionals to union rank and file, and there were many artists, performers and writers which no doubt influenced my future career choices. They were educated, articulate, loved to argue politics, and believed in socialism and collective struggle. There was also a broad national support network of former subscribers of the Review and an international component as well. James and Mary End-icott raised money in Canada for their defense, and Rewi Alley led a support network of ex-pats in Shanghai.
Callahan: What was the relationship between the Red Scare, known as McCarthyism, and the biological weapons that were being used in in Korea. We are led to believe it was directed at communists infiltrating the US, its government, its military and above all its arts and sciences. What connects what the US Government was doing in the United States, for example, blacklisting people, attacking people like your parents, and what they were doing in Korea?
Powell: You have to start with the National Security Act of 1947. This was a de facto coup d’état of the American government. This act created the security state. It created the CIA. It consolidated the Departments of War and Navy into the Defense Department. It separated the Air Force from the Army and made the Air Force co-equal partner. It created the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Security Council and the Office of National Security Advisor to the President. This was the origin of the security apparatus we’re dealing with today.
Korea was the first time this security apparatus was put to use. The aim was to colonize Korea, Korea was to be the next Philippines, it was going to be a U.S. foothold on the Asian mainland. That explains why the invasion of North Korea was so horrifically vicious. That’s why there was so much carnage. That’s also the reason the Russians and the Chinese were so willing to work together to stop this, to put an end to this land grab by the US government. So a lot of the repression in the United States, the Red Scare, was a smokescreen to cover up what was going on overseas.
Callahan: In researching the Korean War BW campaign, you must have developed some ideas on the origins of SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 pandemic. Would you please share your thoughts on this subject?
Powell: I am not as well informed on the details of this subject as some of your readers might be. What I know is that the Chinese have been searching for the elusive COVID bat cave for 3 1/2 years without success which makes the zoonotic transfer theory increasing remote. Robert F. Kennedy’s new book, The Wuhan Cover-Up, is quite informa-tive for laymen. He succeeds in fingering the real villains in this crime against humanity. First we have the arrogant Dr. Ralph S. Baric, who in spite of a general moratorium on gain-of-function research imposed by the Obama administration in October 2014, continued his GOF research at the University of North Carolina. Baric is the creator of the chimeric virus which required two mutations to add the spike protein which became known as SARS-CoV-2. Because Baric’s work came under scru-tiny, his good buddy Peter Daszak, who runs a clearinghouse for CIA money called EcoHealth Alliance arranged to have his pet project relo-cated to the Wuhan Institute of Virology where Baric’s collaborator, Dr. Shi Zhengli, happened to work. To legitimize the technology transfer, Daszak asked his buddy, Dr. Anthony Fauci, to underwrite the expenses to the tune of several million $$$ and to give the project legiti-macy with the imprimatur of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID). Fauci then contacted his buddy Bill Gates to get a blank check with promises of future lucre beyond imagine. Baric, Daszak, Fauci, and Gates are all at the center of the COVID-19 pandemic, and they should be criminally investigated. Shi’s story continues in Wuhan following the outbreak.
On August 6, 2019, which happened to be Hiroshima Day, the Center for Disease Control ordered the immediate closure of Fort Detrick, the US Army’s flagship bioweapon laboratory, due to a dangerous lab leak. This news was widely carried in the press, though the specific leaked pathogen was not identified.
From Sept 14 to Oct. 10, the US Army trained its athletic team at Fort Belvoir for the Military World Games to be held at Wuhan, China. Fort Belvoir is only 65 miles from Fort Detrick. The performance of the US team at Wuhan was abysmal. The US was expected to place 2nd or 3rd in the medal standings, but instead won only 3 silver medals and 5 bronze medals finishing in 19th place overall. The US team was the laughing stock of the games and was quickly ushered back on board the airplane for the long dismal flight home.
Following the outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, the Trump Administration was quick to accuse China of causing the outbreak. Trump called it the “Wuhan disease.” A high ranking Chinese official counterclaimed that COVID-19 was the American disease brought to Wuhan by infected US military athletes. The Chinese government responded to the COVID-19 outbreak as if it were a military BW attack by the US. The entire country was put on lockdown for nearly three years.
Milton Leitenberg, in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist, was the first American academic to accuse the Wuhan Institute of Virology of a lab leak of the virus into the Wuhan Live Animal Market. He blamed Dr. Shi Zhengli for sloppy virus handling techniques at WIV. Dr. Shi responded that the SARS-CoV-2 virus samples received from Baric via Daszak were a different strain of the virus from the one at large in Wuhan. Leitenberg is a professional disinformation specialist. His main tactic is blaming others for US crimes.
Given the proximity of Fort Belvoir to Fort Detrick, and the mystery of the Fort Detrick lab spill, the picture that emerges from the above facts is the possibility that there could have been a COVID-19 infected athlete on the US team on the long charter flight from Washington to Wuhan. This flight could last anywhere from 23 to 30 hours or more given the route and any refueling stops or lay-overs. Regardless of the plane’s air filtration system, this is plenty of time for everyone on the plane to become exposed to COVID-19. If the US athletes were fending off a dangerous virus attack, this would account for their lowered performance level. If one US athlete (patient #1) was sick with COVID-19 which originated from the Fort Detrick lab leak, and spread this virus into the population of Wuhan which had no natural immunity, this would account for the difference in strains of virus noted by Dr. Shi. The most telling evidence for me however that confirms COVID-19 as a novel US bioweapon which leaked out prematurely was the prompt appearance of Milton Leiten-berg on the scene to blame the Chinese. This has been his consistent role as a professional academic liar for the past several decades. The one thing we can be sure of is that all “vaccine research” going forward will be weaponized. Vaccine research has become a euphe-mism for biological warfare research.
Callahan: Victoria Nuland admitted in testimony before Congress that there were bioweapon labs in Ukraine. Why were there bioweapon labs in Ukraine? Why was the US afraid of them falling into Russian hands? Did they fall into Russian hands? Why haven’t we heard any more about it since? Is the attention paid to nuclear war a cover for ignoring the “real” threat of bioweapons (which are already being deployed and may be “acceptable” to the US public since it doesn’t have the big bang of nuclear war?)
Powell: The Chinese ambassador to the UN raised this issue of US BW labs in Ukraine on the Security Council, and that created the internet buzz. As China believes the COVID-19 pandemic was a US BW attack against China, this is a real hot button topic for them. Posted docu-ments online revealed US funding for a dozen biochemical labs in Ukraine which claimed to be engaged in everything from agricultural research stations to vaccine development. These uses can easily mask weapon development.
Senator Marco Rubio in a committee hearing, hoping to squelch the internet buzz, lobbed Secretary Nuland a softball question about the BW lab rumors expecting her to deny outright the Chinese allegation, but she totally flubbed her answer and acknowledged “certain biologi-cal installations” that we would not like the Russians to get their hands on. The remaining labs were quickly shut down following Nuland’s gaff, though some have been restarted. The Russians claimed to have captured US BW installations early in the invasion of Ukraine. They have not raised this topic again publicly. Perhaps they remain hopeful of capturing more labs.
The US built its first overseas BW production factory at Atsugi Air Base in Yokohama, Japan in 1945. It was built as the base hospital for occupation troops, and then quickly expanded its mission. BW labs are, modular, cheap and easy to build which is part of BW attractive-ness as a WMD to war planners. However, the long-term cost of BW deployment against an enemy is really dependent on no boomerang effect. The fact that COVID-19 boomeranged so heavily on the US and the entire world is reason to believe its release was accidental and not pre-planned. Global Times reported in April 2022 that “the US openly admitted it ran 336 biological laboratories in 30 countries around the world, including 26 in Ukraine.” About half of this number are surrounding Russia and China. BW will be the weapon of future wars between great powers where population destruction of the adversary is the strategy. The US Army is preparing to use BW as a first strike weapon. Whether or not the US populace can be propagandized into accepting the mass murder of Russians and Chinese civilians with genetically modified viruses remains to be seen.
Callahan: You mention in The Secret Ugly that you have a sequel in the works which will be a history of the Korean War. You suggest that this will be a completely different take on the war from previous histories. Can you tell us how it will differ? What themes will you emphasize? When will the book become available?
Powell: I am a trained visual artist researching and writing history so naturally I did not know the theory of history writing that students are taught when I began this project. But one thing I have learned and come to appreciate is how routinely historians aestheticize their subject matter through language. Historians stake claims to the accu-racy of their facts and the correctness of their interpretations of events and documents. They can become quite defensive when chal-lenged. But every historian strives to be convincing to their audience, so good sentences and good story telling are a minimum requirement. I like to write good sentences too, but I reject the neutral observer role. I’m writing historical polemics, and I’m up front about that.
The working title of my book is, Remembering is an Act of Civil Dis-obedience, so that gives away my agenda from the start. The book is not the daily log of war events, though I do raise specific events of the war to discuss in depth. My topic more generally is the internal and external machinations of US imperialism in its attempt to subjugate the Korean people following WWII, and to turn all of Korea into a US client state. South Korea is a dangling peninsula jutting out into the sea, a good locale for a naval base, while a united Korea is a huge foothold on the East Asian mainland with lengthy, rugged and defensible borders with both China and Russia – a military higher ground with tremendous natural resources to destabilize these two giant rivals. It would be like Russia still owning Alaska. And that is why Stalin and Mao worked together so diligently to contain this US land grab.
Another area where I diverge from conventional wisdom is with the word “communism” and what this word actually means to most marginally educated Americans, to US politicians who use this charged word to grab and hold political power, and to the handful of elite racist empire builders who actually own our ship of state. A nation, a revolutionary movement, a political party, a trade union, any individual so labeled communist – is no longer white and is ripe for elimination within the subtext of US racialism.
The word communism denies whiteness – racial purity, goodness, and moral rectitude – to Russia. As I wrote in The Secret Ugly, the real fear that US empire builders saw in Russia after WWII was not its five-year plans or cooperative farms, instead they saw their own self-reflec-tion – a highly competent white race which had consolidated an enor-mous Soviet Union at the same northern latitude as North America, and was as ambitiously bent on global expansion as the USA.
My experience schlepping The Secret Ugly to commercial publish-ers and literary agents, even the left-wing press, was a total dud, and
I don’t want my book imprisoned behind the pay wall of the academic press, so I will probably self-publish again to keep the price reasonable. I expect to finish writing in the late fall and publish next spring.
