Debunking the Debunkers, Part 1: Prelude to a Frame-Up
When censorship & propaganda couldn't definitively sink the truth about U.S. use of bioweapons in the Korean War, Cold War scholars turned to a conspiracy theory originating with Lavrenty Beria
Introduction
It is an irony of the post-Soviet, imperialist-dominated world that the intelligentsia that decry non-mainstream social analyses as “conspiracy theories” have themselves pushed one of the most incredible and bizarre conspiracy theories ever promulgated.
This theory, to be discussed in the article which follows, concerns a conspiracy to falsify evidence of alleged biological warfare. The supposed factual basis for this theory is a relatively small set of documents purportedly discovered in the archives of the former Soviet Union.
The conspiracy appears to have originated in the mind of Stalin’s former secret police chief, Lavrenty Beria — unless it was solely concocted by U.S. and/or British intelligence. Beria was a major figure in the Soviet Union from the mid-1930s, as he rose through the ranks of the security services, until his arrest on June 26, 1953. Six months later he was executed for “terrorism, murder, [and] political treason.” Beria had held many important posts, including chief of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) and deputy prime minister of the Soviet Union.
Beria has been accused of, among other things, having worked for British intelligence, due to his alleged “connections with the Musawat intelligence service of Azerbaijan” and with Georgia’s Menshevik government in 1919-1920 during the Russian Civil War. It’s difficult to assess such charges now, but if true, it might explain why he tried to impugn the charges of U.S. use of bacteriological weapons during the Korean War.
After Stalin’s death in March 1953, Beria was a key player in the intense political infighting to succeed the long-time Soviet leader. Stalin had left no anointed successor. Not long after Stalin died, Beria alleged there had been a conspiracy among Soviet officials posted to North Korea and officials from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) to produce fraudulent evidence of biological weapons (BW) attack by the United States. Accusations of such attack had made a strong impression in the world’s press.
Back in Moscow, the fraudulent BW conspiracy was allegedly covered up by one of Beria’s primary rivals in the world of Soviet intelligence, Semyon D. Ignatiev, then head of Soviet security services. The evidence of this fraud or BW hoax had supposedly been planted at two sites that would be visited by foreign investigators looking into the charges of U.S. use of germ warfare. The idea was that the hoaxers would direct investigators to these stage-managed BW sites.
Whether a result of Beria’s accusations or not, in June 1953 Ignatiev was removed from membership in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and therefore from positions of any real power. But he apparently regained the party’s approval after Beria’s arrest, for by December 1953, the same month Beria was executed, Ignatiev was appointed to lead the Bashkir Regional Committee, the highest Soviet position in the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. (Previously, Ignatiev had held the same position in the last few years of World War II.)
In a bit of a fast forward to a critique of the Beria documents, it’s not clear in the documents just which investigators the DPRK and its Soviet advisers supposedly were trying to fool. There were two teams that came to North Korea and China in 1952 to look into the BW charges: the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, in March 1952, and the World Peace Association-sponsored International Scientific Commission, headed by British scientist Joseph Needham, in July and August of the same year.
To back up his claims regarding the falsification of evidence about germ warfare, Beria, who was in early 1953 the Deputy Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers, produced a confession-style statement from Vladimir N. Razuvaev, the Soviet ambassador to the DPRK. Razuvaev had also served as Chief Military Adviser to the Korean People’s Army (KPA). Other statements were gathered from one Glukhov, a former adviser to the DPRK’s Ministry of Public Security (first name and patronymic not known), as well as from a rather junior officer, a lieutenant who had served as an adviser to the KPA’s Medical Department. In part two of this article, we will look in greater depth at these purported statements.
But it is worth noting here how lurid the “hoax” charges were. Glukhov’s statement detailed a plan to falsify sites of BW attack, which included manufacturing false evidence of bacterial infection. “Two false areas of exposure were prepared,” he wrote to Beria. “In connection with this, the Koreans insisted on obtaining cholera bacteria from corpses which they would get from China” (pg. 180).
Beria himself further described how “[t]wo Koreans who had been sentenced to death and were being held in a hut were infected. One of them was later poisoned” (pg. 182). The implication was that the bacterial evidence in the case proving U.S. use of bioweapons came from these two deliberately infected Korean prisoners.
In the course of this series of articles, I will expose these Soviet-era documents as a crude frame-up by Beria, made to further his rise to power after Stalin died. This analysis deepens similar charges made by historians Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman back in 2001, as well as a more recent critique by author Thomas Powell.
Decades of Lies and Subterfuge
The evidence that the U.S. military engaged in a germ warfare campaign against North Korea and China in the period 1952-53 is based on a number of documents and reports. The most telling evidence comes from a number of top secret CIA communications intelligence (COMINT) reports, declassified fifteen years ago, which I previously have analyzed in some depth. Some of these COMINT reports will be sampled below.
As presented by Cold War scholars in the United States, Beria’s intervention on the Korean War BW issue was meant to save the Soviet Union from disgrace for backing alleged false charges of biological warfare. Yet this episode appears to have never been written about in any Soviet or Russian post-Soviet history book. Nor do the events or accusations related in the Beria documents published in 1998 show up in any of the declassified CIA documents discussing the succession crisis in the Soviet Union after Stalin died. (See, for instance, this formerly top secret 1954 report on the “Purge of L.P. Beria,” written by the CIA’s Office of Current Intelligence.)
It’s worth pointing out that the Beria documents in their original form are not available to researchers. Indeed they have not been seen by anyone except one right-wing Japanese journalist, who was supposedly allowed access to an archive of former Soviet materials, and then made handwritten copies of them. Hence, there is no way to compare the transcribed documents with the originals. The copies of the written statements that Beria gathered and reports he made on the supposed BW hoax only exist for review as typed transcripts in Russian. These latter were deposited at the National Security Archive at George Washington University over 25 years ago.
Perhaps it is even possible that Beria’s campaign on the germ war charges never happened and the documents which claimed to reveal a conspiracy to manufacture false evidence of U.S. germ warfare were in fact clumsy forgeries by Western intelligence agencies. For now, however, I approach these documents with the charitable assumption that they genuinely appeared in Soviet archives, and that they were a frame-up engineered by Beria, possibly the last instance of such a deception by the former head of state security. As we shall see, the unclear provenance of these documents are but the icing on the cake. The documents themselves cannot withstand critical textual analysis.
However, the fact remains that anti-communist historians embraced uncritically Beria’s BW “hoax” theory and built a pseudo-analytic edifice to support the Soviet secret police chief’s accusations. In doing so, these historians, and those who have favorably quoted and helped spread the Beria-originated conspiracy, ignored basic practices of examining historical evidence. They seemed oblivious, for instance, of examining timelines, or looking for convergent and divergent evidence. They have maintained that the Beria documents definitively discredit the Communists’ BW charges. If readers are patient enough to go through all the material which follows, I am content to let them judge the validity of such a conclusion for themselves.
From my standpoint, the most generous conclusion is that these historians saw what they wanted to see, and their analysis was distorted by unconscious biases. Researcher bias is, of course, a danger in all historical research. I try to combat such biases in myself by seeking out opposing points of view, and lining up the data I find with convergent or corroborating evidence from independent sources.
Needless to say, the mainstream press picked up the supposedly authoritative judgments of the academic community about the existence of a BW “hoax,” and helped make the latter’s embrace of Beria’s “evidence” the new orthodoxy when it came to the old Korean War-era biowarfare charges.
This orthodox narrative has also been programmed into the various AI search engines. AI’s great weakness on historical or political subjects is that it tends to reify the past according to the dictates of the most powerful existing forces in a society. By sampling the repetitive government or majority-view renditions of a topic, the AI provides a false stamp of authority on its results, marginalizing minority views without any actual “intelligent” analysis of a subject. On such topics, AI is an echo chamber. (Readers can sample this themselves by asking any AI search engine whether or not the U.S. used biological weapons in the Korean War. You can remark upon your findings in the comments section of this article, if you wish.)
As I see it, this embrace of Beria’s BW conspiracy is one of the most outrageous scandals of the academic and journalistic communities. The apparent purpose of establishing the Beria conspiracy in public circles has been to hide evidence of U.S. use of weapons of mass destruction.
Even before the discovery of the Beria documents, U.S. government denials of the germ war campaign complemented the cover-up of the U.S. postwar alliance with the war criminals of Unit 731. Unit 731 was the primary organizer of Japan’s World War II biowarfare research and operations, and the U.S. government conspiracy to hide their crimes finally fell apart in the 1980s. But the Beria-supported idea of a Communist germ warfare hoax lives on even today.
For more on the history of the charges on U.S. use of biological weapons in the Korean War, and the U.S. alliance with the former Unit 731 scientists, see this excellent 2019 review article by Thomas Powell.
A recent instructive example of the continuing use of the old Beria documents can be found in a March 2022 article in the UK Independent. The article stated that Soviet documents discovered in the late 1990s “showed that North Korea, China and the Soviet Union knew the claims the Russians were making [about U.S. about biological warfare during the Korean War] were false.” The article never mentions Beria. There’s a reason for that.
Beria was long understood in the West to have been involved in frame-up cases against political opponents, especially in the Georgian Communist Party (see pgs. 162-163 at link). Similar stories appeared in Khrushchev’s memoirs, and in Roy Medvedev’s history of the Stalin period, Let History Judge. Beria’s credibility is highly suspect.
But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Beria’s image was reconstituted in the West as some kind of reformer, someone who may have been purged and executed for his attempt to stop the establishment of socialism in East Germany. Or perhaps, it’s claimed, Beria was purged because of his work opposing the frame-up known as the “Doctor’s Plot,” which had a strong anti-semitic component.
Beria was arrested in June 1953, not long after he was said to have submitted to higher Soviet state and Party organizations the documents purporting to expose the plot to falsify BW bombings by the United States. Beria’s history of frame-ups of political opponents, and his years-long leadership of the Soviet secret police, are inconvenient facts for those who wish to push the narrative contained in his “evidence.” The intent of my series of essays on this subject is to deconstruct the Big Lie contained in Beria’s “hoax” BW documents, and the gyrations of historians and journalists who turn a blind eye to the problems these documents present.
Whether we like it or not, Beria’s BW hoax documents, and their promulgation by U.S. historians and journalists, remain at the center of the project to end the cover-up of U.S. use of biological weapons, a crime of mammoth proportions still suppressed after seven decades.
Outlines of a Scandal
Beria’s conspiratorial tale was outlined first in a Winter 1998 article, “Deceiving the Deceivers: Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang, and the Allegations of Bacteriological Weapons Use in Korea,” written by Cold War scholar Kathryn Weathersby. The article was published in the Cold War International History Project Bulletin, Issue 11, along with a companion piece by Milton Leitenberg, “New Russian Evidence on the Korean War Biological Warfare Allegations: Background and Analysis.” The two articles were published jointly as “New Evidence on the Korean War” (pgs. 176-199 of the CWIHP Bulletin).
The same year as the publication of these two essays, Leitenberg published a similar essay in Critical Reviews in Microbiology, Volume 24(3), peremptorily titled, “Resolution of the Korean War Biological Warfare Allegations.” Leitenberg’s discussion of the evidence on the subject permits no objection. “Recently acquired documents from the former Soviet Union prove that the accusations of United States use of biological weapons during the Korean conflict were fraudulent,” he wrote.
The work of Leitenberg and Weathersby was timely, as the same year they published the work on the supposed biowarfare hoax, University of Indiana Press published a work by two Canadian scholars that presented a powerful case that the U.S. had used biological weapons, aka weapons of mass destruction, during the Korean War.
The work of the two Canadian scholars, Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, was densely documented and closely argued. It drew from a number of documentary sources. Meanwhile the opposing evidence from Weathersby and Leitenberg was based solely on documents either gathered by Beria, or responding to Beria’s frame-up. As we shall see, Beria’s evidence was scanty, trumped up, nonsensical and failed to jibe with the historical record.
As I’ve noted above, even the existence of the Beria documents is questionable, as no one except one Japanese journalist, Yasuo Naito of the right-wing Japanese newspaper, Sankei Shinbum, had ever seen most of these documents, leaving open the possibility that they are not at all authentic, i.e., that they are in fact forgeries. Nevertheless, for heuristic purposes, I will accept that these documents actually existed, as claimed, in the Soviet archives, and were in fact gathered by Beria himself.
Problems with assessing the Beria documents were only briefly addressed by Weathersby and Leitenberg. Here, for instance, is how Kathryn Weathersby, the English translator for the purported Beria documents, briefly dealt with the issue of the sketchy origin of the “hoax” documents:
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 other sources.1 As is apparent from the translations below, their contents are so complex and interwoven that it would have been extremely difficult to forge them. In short, the sources are credible. [Weathersby, 1998, p. 176]
In other words, Weathersby legitimates the Beria documents based on her own personal opinion as to “their style and form,” upon which she does not elaborate. The fact that the names of those in the documents are those of people who actually existed is not enough to legitimate the documents. The key events she refers to, i.e., the plot to fraudulently create sites of false BW attack, are not corroborated by other sources, And as we shall see, the most important dates are presented in a contradictory fashion, or can be discarded based on other documentary sources.
Despite all this, an entire generation of historians and media pundits followed Weathersby and Leitenberg’s example because either they cannot read or reason for themselves, or because they are savvy careerists who know that contradicting the Establishment line on U.S. war crimes in general, and on the BW accusations in the Korean War more particularly, meant a one-way ticket to academic or media Palookaville.
As this series of articles will demonstrate, the Beria-derived documents about a Communist BW “hoax” are historically inept, a series of forced or coerced statements that can easily be discounted as lacking even face validity. That historians and journalists have peddled this nonsense for decades will one day be understood as one of the greatest academic and media scandals of both the 20th and 21st centuries.
When in September 1952, the World Peace Congress-initiated International Scientific Commission, published its report examining and condemning the U.S. use of biological weapons (BW) in the Korean War, the U.S. and its allies tried to discredit its scientific bona fides. But they were not successful in doing that.
As I discussed in an earlier essay, secretive high-level U.S. intelligence discussions could not discount the scientific credentials of British scientist Joseph Needham and the other doctors and scientists serving on the ISC, or the integrity of their work. Even an Army epidemiologist, Col. Arthur Long, tasked with making an assessment of the scientific credibility of the ISC report for the White House’s Psychological Strategy Board (PSB), concluded, “very few of [the ISC]... particular items of scientific 'evidence' could be demolished as such."
Even PSB chair, and long-time intelligence operative, Erasmus Kloman, had to admit (internally) that the ISC’s scientists were, he said, "politics aside... highly competent people."
The United States’ ally, Canada, also had difficulties internally delegitimating the accusations made by the DPRK and China concerning U.S. use of germ warfare. The Canadian government secretly solicited statements from three non-military scientists regarding the germ warfare charges. Government officials even helped them write their statements, which were released in a propaganda blitz in summer 1952. The three scientists’ statements harshly criticized the scientific credibility of the Communists’ BW accusations.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the general public at the time, Canada’s top military biological warfare scientist, Guilford Reed, told Exterior Affairs Minister Lester Pearson that the North Korean and Chinese BW charges were “entirely feasible.” Reed, who had intimate knowledge of the U.S., Canadian and UK biological warfare programs, found the charges of use of biological weapons against Korea and China to present “no obvious impossibilities.” Canada responded by suppressing Reed’s opinion, just as the United States never released Colonel Long’s judgment on the ISC report. (Endicott and Hagerman first pointed out Reed’s statement back in 2002.)
Indeed, censorship and carefully curated lying were the primary tools the U.S. and its allies used to suppress knowledge about the U.S. germ war campaign. But even as the Korean War ended, the U.S government was frustrated at the persistence of belief in the Communists’ BW charges. So, a secret government plan was adopted in October 1953 to neutralize critics who persisted in giving credence to the germ warfare claims.
The State Department’s proposed program was titled “Basic Plan for U.S. Action to Destroy and Counter-Exploit the Soviet Bacteriological Warfare Myth.” The CIA was put in charge of the covert operations part of the program. The CIA was directed “to destroy and counter-exploit” the BW proponents, by “targeted seduction and coercion,” if necessary. The results of this campaign were, of course, never made public. But it is now a matter of public record that a month later, in November 1953, one of the biological warfare program’s ostensible critics within Ft. Detrick itself, Frank Olson, was surreptitiously dosed with drugs and thrown out a window to his death.
By the 1990s, the old Communist charges of U.S. use of biological weapons against the DPRK and China had been relegated to the dustbin of supposed bogus propaganda. Establishment historians may have occasionally had some doubts about what had occurred, but the U.S. government’s narrative was that the campaign was false, part of a Cold War Communist “Hate America” initiative by the Soviets. The suppression of the topic was not a subject for analysis. The fifteen-year long program of government destruction of interdicting millions of pieces of mail, including magazines, journals and books from China or Soviet-bloc countries, and destroying them — the largest program of state censorship in U.S. history — was itself forgotten.
Endicott and Hagerman’s 1998 publication of The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea (University of Indiana Press) changed all that. While garnering critical reviews from establishment media, such as The New York Times, the book was a powerful collection of evidence pointing to U.S. culpability in engaging in germ warfare. It does not seem a coincidence to me that the unveiling of the Beria conspiracy and the sudden appearance of “new” evidence that the Soviets and North Korea had falsified the evidence of U.S. germ warfare appeared in the same year as Endicott and Hagerman’s book.
The COMINT Documents
Because of the importance of recent evidence from CIA declassified files as it pertains to the validity of the germ warfare charges, I think it’s important to provide a short description of a number of the relevant 1952 COMINT daily reports. The excerpts from these reports will provide the reader with some context with which to compare the later falsifications put forward in Weathersby and Leitenberg’s supposed Soviet archival documents.
Two quick points: neither Weathersby or Leitenberg were aware of this evidence in 1998, when they wrote their seminal essays on the Communist BW “hoax.” They were made aware of them later by this author, who queried them regarding any effect from them upon their own theories. Neither Weathersby nor Leitenberg has ever answered my queries on this, at least substantively.
The information in these reports, which were highly classified, was drawn from intercepts decrypted and then translated by technicians and linguists working for the Armed Forces Security Agency, the predecessor of today’s National Security Agency. From 1951-1953, Korean War COMINT documents carried the code markings “SUEDE” or “CANOE.” Among COMINT producers and customers, these documents were considered “Special Intelligence,” so secret and restricted even their code words were classified at the time. [1]
Each document below is referenced by the document file name under which the CIA posted it online. [2] The documents are listed chronologically not by date of COMINT report, but by the date of the original communications intercept, as cited in the reports.
The first relevant document in the COMINT collection is a 19 February 1952 report, which read, “North Korean coastal unit reports UN bacteriological warfare: ‘The spies are putting poison into the drinking water’ and are distributing ‘paper’ that causes death to anyone ‘using those papers for the nose,’ a battalion of the 7th Railroad Security Regiment reported on 16 February.” (At [2] 1952-02-19a.pdf)
A 6 March 1952 report stated, “Chinese unit in Korea reports UN bacteria drop: An unidentified Chinese Communist unit on 26 February reported that ‘yesterday it was discovered that in our bivouac area there was a real flood of bacteria and germs from a plane by the enemy. Please supply us immediately with an issue of DDT that we may combat this menace, stop the spread of this plague, and eliminate all bacteria.’” (At [2] 1952-03-06a.pdf)
From a 9 March report: “A Chinese Communist artillery unit was informed on 29 February that ‘all personnel be reinoculated at once’ with bubonic plague vaccine. Healthy individuals, however, are to take only a half-strength shot or may ‘temporarily not be inoculated.’”
“Another message from a Chinese Communist artillery regiment reported on 27 February that ‘we have now fully obtained the vaccine required for smallpox in the spring time, malaria, and bubonic plague.’ The sender notes that the smallpox and malaria shots have already been given, but queries, ‘How shall we administer the bubonic plague shots?’” (At [2], 1952-03-09.pdf) It should be noted that, prior to the Korean War bubonic plague, was not endemic to the Korean Peninsula. The concern about bubonic plague came from enemy attacks utilizing bubonic plague from infected fleas dropped by U.S. planes.
Earlier, a 29 February 1952 report stated: “North Koreans order precautions against alleged bacteriological warfare: A North Korean battalion commander was ordered on 27 February to take special precautions to avoid contamination of his unit’s food and water because ‘the enemy dropped bacteria’ in central Korea. Covering wells and disinfecting United Nations leaflets were additional recommendations.” (At [2], 1952-2-29a.pdf)
A 3 March report read: “The seriousness with which the enemy is treating the charges of BW is evident in a series of 28 and 29 February North Korean messages which contained such instructions as ‘the contaminated area must be covered with snow and spray… do not go near the actual place’ and which ordered that ‘injections with number nine (unidentified) vaccine will be made.’ Another message stated that ‘the surgical institute members left here to investigate the bacteria bombs dropped on the 29th.’” (At [2], 1952-03-04b.pdf)
A 11 March 1952 top secret report, commenting upon the ongoing BW charges, stated: “Another manifestation of the theme is a 1 March query from Pyongyang to a North Korean air unit at Sariwon, in the supposedly contaminated area, ‘Have you not had any victims as a result of certain bacteria weapons?’" (At [2], 1952-03-11a.pdf)
From a 7 March 1952 report: “No sickness from BW reported in North Korean coastal unit: A North Korean unit on coastal security in eastern Korea reported to Naval Defense Headquarters near Wonsan on 2 March that although on the 28th insects were again dropped at Paekyang, Sinpung, and Innam, ‘no one has been infected yet.’" (At [2], 1952-03-07a.pdf)
From the same 7 March report: “North Korean east coast unit claims BW caused hardships: A North Korean coastal security unit in eastern Korea reported on 3 March that UN bacteriological warfare agents in the surrounding area had prevented the movement of transportation since 21 February. Later in the day the unit reported to Pyongyang that ‘Pupyong (just southwest of Hamhung)… is the contaminated area. According to the correct news, no one can pass through it. If you do not act quickly, the 12th and 13th guard stations will have fallen into starvation conditions.’" (Ibid. — parentheses in original)
A 11 March 1952 COMINT report stated, “BW scare continues to occupy Communists in Korea: A long detailed 6 March message from the North Korean 23rd Brigade to one of its subordinate battalions suggested preventive measures to be used against bacteria allegedly dropped by UN aircraft. The report stated that ‘three persons. . . became suddenly feverish and their nervous system have benumbed.’ After treatment, ‘two persons alive and one dead.’ The report concluded with the statement, ‘the government will soon take pictures of specific appearance of the germs collectively and correct photographic data will be provided.’" (At [2], 1952-03-11a.pdf — ellipses in original)
Another COMINT report a few days later, dated 14 March, referenced a different incident also on March 6. A “Chinese Communist message” indicated that one of the soldiers from the 345th regiment had “picked up a UN propaganda leaflet and ‘was immediately poisoned.’” The message said the soldier was “administered ‘fever medicine, the fever abated and he is now recovered.’” All other units were warned not to handle any leaflets. (At [2], 1952-03-14a.pdf)
A 17 March 1952 COMINT report entitled one section of its write up, “Campaign against BW continues unabated in North Korea.” The section began, “A considerable portion of Chinese and Korean communications still are concerned with reports of BW, with preventive measures, and with incidence of disease.”
The same report continued, “Two coastal security stations in northeastern Korea reported on 11 March that ‘the bacteria bomb classified as mosquito, fly, and flea [sic] were dispersed,’ also ‘an enemy plane dropped ants, fleas, mosquitos, flies and crickets.’”
The report went on: “A Chinese Communist unit commander in western Korea demonstrates his conviction that BW is being employed against him in his order to a subordinate unit who captured some UN soldiers. The subordinate unit is instructed to ask the prisoners what ‘type of immunization shots were administered recently’….”
The CIA report also stated, “Two 12 March North Korean naval messages to units in Songjin and Chongjin, cities in coastal northeastern Korea, ordered the units to cooperate with city officials to ‘have a counterplan’ for the BW attacks, ‘which includes injections, vaccinations and rat poison’ and in order ‘to prevent an epidemic the rats. . . must be hunted.’” (ellipses in original)
The same report concluded by referencing two North Korean messages discussing deaths due to cholera in northeastern Korea. It’s not clear from this report if these specific deaths are supposedly due to BW attack, but that seems to be the inference. (At [2], 1952-03-17a.pdf)
A 20 March 1952 report described “a Communist Chinese message” that reported fatalities. According to a top secret CIA daily report, headed “Communists continue organizing to meet threat of BW,” an intercepted 15 March message discussed how "a certain unit discovered a large concentration of plague germs. Many people have been afflicted with this undiagnosed disease and already several persons have succumbed with the illness." (At [2], 1952-03-20.pdf) The confusion between knowledge of “plague germs” and the “undiagnosed” nature of the disease is not explained.
The same report also described a 17 March North Korean message that “detailed preventive steps to be taken by subordinate units ‘to prevent various diseases which may intrude into here by the new weapons used by the enemy.’" Such measures included additional hospital facilities, “stricter hygienic discipline, isolation of infected units, high priority reporting of the outbreak of disease, and strict observation of ‘enemy aircraft… of bacterial bombs’” (ellipses in original, Ibid.)
In contradistinction to the previous reports, a 27 March 1952 CIA daily report detailed a supposed BW incident that was refuted by North Korean authorities. On 25 March, there were messages from a North Korean battalion in the Hamhung area that a civilian police officer had discovered an American “bacteria bomb.” The policeman believed this based on “the coincidence of a UN bombing attack and the appearance of ‘flies’ in the area.” But a “North Korean military sanitation officer, sent to affirm this incident, reported that the policeman's report was false and that the flies ‘were not caused from bacterial weapon but from the fertilizers on the place.’”
The importance of the debunked report is that CIA and U.S. Army communications intelligence personnel were aware that North Korean officials were concerned with validating BW attacks, and, from this example, also appear committed to dismissing reports that fail to meet evidentiary standards. (At [2]. 1952-03-27.pdf)
According to a 21 March 1952 COMINT report, “a North Korean message, probably from the 23rd Brigade in western Korea, reports the alleged dropping of bacteria in the area occupied by the ‘18th Regiment, 4th Division.’” (At [2], 1952-03-21a.pdf)
Another CIA report, dated 4 April, indicated that some inoculations against bacteria dropped by the enemy had failed to take place. As a result, “a ‘grave situation’ has developed because ‘the friendly troops (probably North Koreans) have developed (some sort of disease?).’” [Parentheses in original] (At [2],1952-04-02.pdf)
Elsewhere in the same report, communications intelligence intercepts detailed, “Enemy units still reporting BW agents in Korea: An unidentified North Korean regiment notified its battalions on 30 March that ‘the enemy is actively dropping bacterial weapons in general now.’ All units were to report promptly UN biological warfare attacks.” (Ibid.)
There are at least a half dozen more COMINT files I could reference, of those declassified by the CIA, but for length purposes, I’ll conclude with just one more report, from summer 1952.
An 21 August top secret report, with the codename “CANOE,” read, “North Koreans expect use of BW by United Nations: On 17 August the North Korean 21st Brigade notified a battalion commander of a Chinese Communist intelligence report that on 13 August the US Army shipped ‘creatures for experiment’ from a Seoul suburb to Taegu.
“On the same day, the Chinese report continued, another American Army unit transported five tons of ‘experimental material,’ probably dead rats, from Taegu to an unspecified air base. The sender cautions that all units should be on the watch for the ‘anticipated’ enemy use of bacteriological warfare.” (At [2], 1952-08-21.pdf)
In conclusion, the CIA’s release of COMINT documents from the Korean War show both North Korean and Chinese authorities scrambling to understand the full implications of what appeared to be attack by bacterial weapons on military units of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) and the Chinese People’s Volunteer forces.
Even in the abbreviated release of such documents by the CIA, there is evidence of disease from such attacks (particularly from bubonic plague), some deaths, attempts to distribute both insecticide compounds and vaccinations to meet defensive needs, and medical evaluation of the validity of field reports and dismissal of false alarms. There are multiple descriptions of attack by poison, by insect and animal vectors, by contaminated feathers, as well as less specific descriptions of bacterial “drops” by U.S. military aircraft. In their totality, these documents provide a consistent and believable account of a biological weapons campaign of an unknown size occurring during the chaos of a total war scenario.
Moreover, the instances of germ war attack described by these documents are consistent with the evidentiary accounts provided in the ISC report of September 1952, and the earlier IADL reports of March and May 1952. [3] [4] The reports described in the COMINT records also are consistent with the findings of Endicott and Hagerman,[5] who examined Chinese archival material and interviewed Chinese scientists as well. The archival materials these researchers examined clearly showed evidence of BW attack, and documented the difficulty Chinese authorities encountered and how they tried to deal with it. Maps were drawn showing regions “Where American Military Forces Spread Bacteria in 1952” (Ibid., p. 17).
The Leitenberg/Weathersby Soviet “Hoax” Documents
Up until recently, key documents from the decades-old BW controversy remained classified, or otherwise difficult to obtain. The latter include transcripts of the depositions by U.S. Air Force and Marine prisoners of war, who confessed to use of biological weapons in air flights over North Korea and China beginning in January 1952, as well as the full report, with appendices, of the International Scientific Commission. The ISC report, like a similar investigation by the International Association of Defense Lawyers in March of that same year, confirmed Communist claims of BW attack.
One set of documents has been readily available for decades, however — the twelve purported Soviet documents published in 1998 by the Cold War International History Project at The Wilson Center. The documents, as described earlier, claimed to document the construction of false sites of bacteriological infection as part of a campaign to deceive international investigators looking into the germ warfare charges.
The documents, and the articles by Weathersby and Leitenberg published along with them, made headlines in 1998. A typical news story from an Associated Press article at the time pronounced, “Stories About Germ Warfare in Korea False.” [6] These documents are central to ongoing claims of a Communist germ warfare “hoax” during the Korean War. The references to the Beria documents presented to the public in the 1998 article are so numerous that it is not necessary to document them. Such references are in the dozens, if not hundreds.
The documents presented in 1998 allegedly originated from Soviet archives, though, as discussed above, only transcripts of the documents were published by a right-wing Japanese newspaper and then translated by “independent researcher” Kathryn Weathersby. The documents were apparently also published or distributed by the CIA’s FBIS. “Senior Research Fellow at Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland,” Milton Leitenberg simultaneously published an analysis of the documents in the same CWIHP Bulletin as Weathersby. [7] [8]
Both Weathersby and Leitenberg were long associated with CWIHP and The Wilson Center. Despite the fact that The Wilson Center received a significant part of its budget from the U.S. government, [9] and had close relationships with both the Defense Department and U.S. intelligence agencies, no notice of potential conflict of interest by the authors or publishers accompanied the publication of these documents or their analyses.
— To be continued —
In part two of this series, having considered the context surrounding the Weathersby and Leitenberg essays, we will dive into an analysis of the documents themselves, which supposedly validate the historians’ claims of a Soviet/DPRK/Chinese biowar “hoax.” Subscribe if you don’t wish to miss notice of the publication of Part Two!
Note: This series is adapted from my essay, “‘The enemy dropped bacteria’: CIA Korean War Daily Reports Affirm Allegations of U.S. Germ Warfare,” published at The Journal of American Socialist Studies, No. 3, 2024.
Endnotes
[1] Easter, D. (2012). “Code Words, Euphemisms and What They Can Tell Us About Cold War Anglo-American Communications Intelligence,” Intelligence and National Security, (27)6, 18 July, pp. 875–895, [Online] Available at link. Accessed 20 February 2025.
[2] “Baptism By Fire: CIA Analysis of the Korean War Overview,” 2013, CIA Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room, Available via archived URL. Accessed 21 February 2025.
[3] Commission of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (1952a), Report on U.S. Crimes in Korea, March 31, 1952 [Online]. Available at link. Accessed 21 February 2025.
[4] Commission of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (1952b), Report on the Use of Bacterial Weapons in Chinese Territory by the Armed Forces of the United States, 2 April 1952 [Online]. Available at link. Accessed 21 February 2025.
[5] Endicott, S. and Hagerman, E. (1998). The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press
[6] Feinsilber, M. (1998) ‘Stories About Germ Warfare in Korea False,’ The Beacon Journal, 17 November, p. 9.
[7] Weathersby, K. (1998) “Deceiving the Deceivers: Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang, and the Allegations of Bacteriological Weapons Use in Korea,” CWIHP Bulletin #11, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Winter 1998, pp. 176-185. [Online] Available at link. Accessed 21 February 2025.
[8] Leitenberg, M. (1998a) “New Russian Evidence on the Korean War Biological Warfare Allegations: Background and Analysis,” CWIHP Bulletin #11, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Winter 1998, pp. 185-199. [Online] Available at link. Accessed 21 February 2025.
[9] According to an Internet archived record of the Wilson Center website, dated 16 August 2000, “The Center is a public-private partnership. Slightly less than half the Center's operating funds come annually from an appropriation from the U.S. government, and the Center's building, a wing of the Ronald Reagan Building, was provided by the U.S. government.” — Anonymous (2000). ‘About the Center - Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C.’ 16 August [Online]. Available at link. Accessed: 21 February 2025.