Devil's Bargain: U.S. Covered-up Japan's Ethnic-Racial Bioweapons Experiments on U.S. POWs
The Soviet Union publicized the fact that Japan's WW2 germ war division, Unit 731, had used US POWs as guinea pigs. But the US suppressed the story in favor of a deal with Japan's biowar criminals!
Of all the Western reactions to Russia’s claims of a U.S. biological warfare program aimed at its country, none have reached the pitch of hysterical ridicule as the sarcastic and dismissive critique of Russia’s claim that the U.S. is developing a biological weapon aimed specifically at ethnic Russians.
A March 22, 2022 article at Duma-TV quoted deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee on Health, Sergey Leonov, [machine translation] accusing the West of funding “the most terrible and vile research… the creation of genetically selective strains of viruses that infect this or that people, this or that ethnic group.” Leonov cited research being conducted against Slavs in general, not just Russians.
But a supposed ethnic bioweapon threat was raised by Russia long before even the Russia-Ukraine war, at least as far back as May 2007, when the chief of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), Nikolai Patrushev, told Vladimir Putin (machine translation) that bio-samples from clinical trials sent to medical centers in the West were being used in a “program for the development of ‘genetic biological weapons’ against the Russian population.”
According to U.S. Cold War scholar (or propagandist, if you prefer), Milton Leitenberg, FSB singled out a number of “medical centers” accused of such research, including the Harvard School of Public Health, the American International Health Alliance, the Environment and Natural Resources Division of the US Department of Justice, the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, the Swedish Agency for International Development, and the Indian Genome Institute.”
Leitenberg has gathered dozens of pages of supposed evidence of Russian “disinformation” on Western biowarfare research. For Leitenberg, a key figure in the denial of U.S. use of biological weapons during the Korean War, Russia’s “false allegations [against the West] may serve as a cover for a Russian offensive BW program, never abolished or accounted for.” Even so, Leitenberg admits, “There is no direct evidence available to support this fear….” (p. 118).
The May 2007 Russian article quoted above described what it called “very fantastic details of the development of a ‘bioweapon’ that is supposed to be ‘ethnically oriented’ — that is, capable of damaging the health of members of the Russian people, including infertility and death.” As a result of these fears, Russia banned sending bio-samples out of the country in 2007, a policy that has been much criticized.
Genetic engineering of bioweapons?
“War propaganda,” claimed Douglas Selvage at The Wilson Center. Selvage was talking about Russian claims in 2022, echoed by supposed “Twitterbots and ‘troll factories,’” “that the US, Ukraine, or both countries have been developing biological weapons in secret laboratories on Ukrainian soil to use against Russians or Russian-speaking Ukrainians.”
“Another disinformation narrative,” intoned Roman Osadchuk of the pro-NATO Atlantic Council about the Russian charges. An article at The Intercept quoted Russian biologist Eugene Lewitin, who belittled Russia’s charges of an ethnic germ weapon as an “absolutely wild idea.” The “existence of special ‘DNA of the Slavs,’ which could be used to target ethnic Russians with a biological weapon… ‘is nonsense’ that echoes ‘German Nazi propaganda’”!
Yet genetic engineering of bioweapons, and the danger of targeting specific ethnic-national groups is something that some responsible scientists have been worried about for decades! As recently as 2019, Cambridge University’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk warned, “a bio-weapon could be built to target a specific ethnic group based on its genomic profile.”
While there are good scientific reasons to believe that such an ethnic or national bioweapon would be difficult to create, according to a 2004 article by Dr. Michael J. Ainscough, republished in 2019 for the U.S. Air Force Counterproliferation Center (“Next Generation Bioweapons: Genetic Engineering and BW”), “‘biological ethnic cleansing’ is a theoretical possibility” (PDF, pg. 274).
A recent unpublished paper speculated that new gene-splicing technologies, such as CRISPR, could be used to create biological agents with targeting specificities accurate enough to be considered “ethnic” in aim. The same author wondered, though, if for sound biological reasons, such a weapon “may be an unsurpassable challenge.”
(See footnote 1 for a greater discussion of the scientific issues involved in any potential creation of targeted ethnic bioweapons.)
The point of this article is not whether or not such a weapon is feasible, has been created, or could be created. The point is that the idea is not bizarre, and that dismissing it as mere Russian propaganda buries the important role the research into such an ethnic cleansing bioweapon had in the U.S. biological warfare program. It was so important that evidence of such research in World War II by Japan’s Imperial Army was covered up by the United States so it could incorporate the secret data from such research into its own biowarfare program. While it’s not clear the U.S. then was interested in an “ethnic” germ bomb, its Japanese partners certainly had been!
Unit 731 at Mukden
In the late 1940s, the U.S. received a great deal of research data from experiments from Japan’s bioweapons research and BW operations agency, Unit 731, regarding experiments done on prisoners of many nationalities, including American prisoners held in the large Mukden prisoner of war camp. The person most responsible for organizing and running Japan’s BW program was Major General Shiro Ishii. (A facsimile of the U.S. June 1947 interrogation of Ishii can be accessed online. Ishii was only partly forthcoming about the extent of Japan’s full BW program and operations.)
Japan’s information on anti-personnel biological weapons was derived from criminal, unethical experiments on human beings, many of whom were dissected while still alive! The information from all this was kept within American “intelligence channels”, and the Japanese scientists and military doctors involved, including Ishii, were all granted immunity for war crimes. This was despite the fact that operational field trials of the germ weapons were known to have killed hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians.
In December 1949, after the multi-nation war crimes trial of Japan’s war criminals, led by the United States, refused to prosecute the bioweapons war criminals, the Soviet Union held its own trial of captured Unit 731 and Kwangtung Army personnel associated with BW war crimes. During the trial, held in Khabarovsk, Russia, testimony from Major Tomio Karasawa, chief of the biological production section for Unit 731, confirmed that his department had studied “the immunity of Anglo-Saxons to infectious diseases.”
From the trial transcript, pg. 268:
[Karasawa:] As far as I can recall, that was at the beginning of 1943. I was in hospital at the time in Mukden, and Minata, one of the researchers of the detachment, came to see me. He told me about his work, and said that he had come to Mukden to study immunity among American War prisoners.
Minata was sent specially by Detachment 731 to camps where Allied war prisoners were kept in order to study the immunity of Anglo Saxons to infectious diseases.
Question: And for this purpose tests were made of the blood of American War prisoners?
Answer: That is so.
The long-buried truth of the Japanese biological weapons experiments on U.S. POWs started to leak out in the 1980s and 1990s, spurred on by the aging POWs themselves, and some sympathetic congressmen. A March 1995 Los Angeles Times article, “Truth Emerging on Ailing POWs, Japan Germ Unit,” described how the U.S. had been alerted by the Soviets’ interrogation of prisoners captured from Unit 731 and allied Japanese biological departments at the close of World War II:
One now-declassified memo, dated March, 1948, cautioned: “Independent investigation conducted by the Soviets in the Mukden Area may have disclosed that American prisoners of war were used for experimental purposes of a BW (biological warfare) nature and that they lost their lives as a result of these experiments.
“There is a strong possibility,” the unsigned document noted, “that the Soviet prosecutors will . . . introduce evidence of experiments conducted on human beings by the Ishii BW (biological warfare) group, which experiments do not differ greatly from those for which this government is now prosecuting German scientists and medical doctors at Nuremberg.”
The BW evidence was spiked at the post-WWII Tokyo War Crimes trials of Japan’s war criminals. Fifty years later, the revelations alluded to in the Times’ article, and in Congressional hearings, never went anywhere. U.S. government officials continue — I believe to this day — to deny that U.S. POWs were victims of Ishii and company. Certainly, this was the case when the National Archives published in 2006 their online book, “Researching Japanese War Crimes.” The NA historians assured their readers that more than sixty years since the end of World War II, “The question of whether Allied POWs at Camp Hoten, in Mukden, Manchuria, were experimental subjects remains unresolved” (p. 36).
Even so, the documentary record shows that Americans were not the only group Japan’s military researched for possible ethnic susceptibility to biological diseases, which then could be weaponized. According to the Khabarovsk trial transcripts (published online), a Unit 731 researcher named Uchimi was sent to Inner Mongolia in 1943, “where he studied the blood of the Mongolians, also in connection with the question of immunity” (p. 268).
Major Karasawa elaborated on his testimony at Khabarovsk in an affidavit turned over to the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), though it never saw the light of day in court. The affidavit is not online, but the late historian Linda Goetz Holmes reproduced part of the text in her book, Guests of the Emperor: The Secret History of Japan’s Mukden POW Camp (Naval Institute Press, 2010, pg. 30):
“A research was conducted in the unit to decide the reaction of an immunizing serum inoculation according to races. To accomplish this purpose, Mr. Minato, a technical expert, examined the blood of American prisoners of war who were near Mukden about the summer of 1943…. About this Minato told me that as a result of the study of blood which was started simultaneously with the experimental research of strengthening the power of bacteria, no distinction had been found in serum immunity between races.”
(Warning: the screenshot photo of an old, but relevant, newspaper report contains a racist epithet used in place of the word “Japanese.”)
As Holmes put it, Japan’s biowar research program wanted to “to see if Caucasian Americans reacted to bacterial infections in the same way as Asians” (Holmes, Guests, pg. 30).
Mysterious Injections
The blood tests were not the only experiments the Japanese conducted at Mukden prison camp. Many years later, U.S. prisoners described receiving mysterious injections, after which many died. Some recalled waking up to see Japanese researchers waving feathers under their nose!
Feathers were a favorite instrument for spreading disease organisms or spores. A September 30, 1944 “summary report” on Japanese bacteriological warfare, sent from the U.S. Joint Intelligence Collection Agency to Military Intelligence Staff in the War Department, cited “Japanese dropping feathers from planes and of increased fear of BW attack” (PDF, pg. 67). By the time of the Korean War, the U.S. had developed their own biological feather bomb!
One Mukden prisoner, Sgt. Herman Castillo, recalled being kept in a cage fifty feet by thirty inches, and measuring twelve inches high at one end and two feet high for the rest of the cage. According to Holmes, Castillo told Japanese investigators for the Nippon TV network in 1995, “the Japanese medical personnel sprayed something into his mouth, moved a bird feather in front of his nose, injected powder into his mouth, and inserted a glass rod into his anus” (Holmes, Guests, pg. 19). For two weeks he was kept in the cage without any release, and suffered fever, chills, vomiting, and dysentery.
For decades the United States denied that the Japanese had experimented on U.S. prisoners of war. Hearings on the subject in the 1986 before a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee concluded the charge lacked sufficient evidence. But it was a cover-up.
Linda Goetz Holmes’ book, Guests of the Emperor, conclusively settles the controversy over the experiments on U.S. POWs, yet it received barely any mention in the world’s press. Ironically, it was published not by any leftwing or conspiracy outlet, but by the book-publishing arm of the U.S. Naval Institute.
By reference to prisoners’ testimonies, diaries from the Mukden camp, Unit 731 documents, the trial transcripts from both Khabarovsk and Tokyo IMTFE trial, and evidence in the U.S. National Archives, Holmes felt her work provided “some definitive answers, at long last, to the controversy and confusion that have surrounded the question of whether some prisoners at Mukden were experimented upon by Japanese doctors who visited the camp on several occasions.”
It is certainly strange that the Russians never seem to bring up the fact that they tried to warn the Americans about how their prisoners were killed in biological warfare experiments by the Japanese, nor do they ever mention the Khabarovsk trial. Perhaps they are leery of saying anything that would praise the Soviet regime that Putin’s mentors and sponsors helped overthrow. Or perhaps they don’t want to touch any issue that might raise questions about the Soviets’ own BW program, or any later possible Russian research.
Critics have charged Russia with irresponsible charges about the biowar origins of AIDS and Covid-19. One could argue that some in the U.S. have made their own outrageous charges about China’s supposed construction of the SARS-Cov-2 virus, and/or its intended use as a bioweapon.
I haven’t evaluated the charges the Russians may or may not have written about SARS or Covid, so I will not comment on them here. I’ve learned that what gets reported is too often so biased or mischaracterized that, especially when it comes to claims about the “enemies” of the United States, I have to carefully evaluate such things myself. My apologies to those who may have wished me to comment on these particular charges. I will say, however, that I will have to analyze and write at greater length about the whole topic of propaganda and biological weapons more generally. It’s a long, long history, and I did write recently one article on this subject.
In any case, I have raised the issues in this article to show that whatever the Russians may or may not say, the U.S. government and the mainstream press are themselves guilty of helping cover-up, or at best minimize, the crimes of the U.S.’s own biowarfare program, and an episode in history — its alliance with Unit 731 — which many people today know little, if anything, about. It is at the very least ironical, given U.S. ridicule of Russia’s claims about an ethnic bomb, to consider that some of Japan’s research concerned constructing “ethnic” or racial bioweapons, and that such research was undertaken on captive American prisoners. That the U.S. government still essentially denies this happened may be politic for their alliance with Japan, but from a historical and moral standpoint, the denial amounts to historiographical malpractice, and also an obscene betrayal of its own war veterans.
As for the U.S.’s propagandistic aims of countering Russian BW charges, it’s important to reflect upon the fact that at least some of those charges are not nonsense at all. The specter of an ethnic, racial, or nationalities BW weapon, while probably somewhat remote, is not out of the realm of possibility, and some Western scientists have raised alarms about the possibility. Since much of the research on biological weapons is classified, we really can’t say what has or has not been done in relation to this particular type of biological weapon.
Truth, as is commonly said, is the first casualty of war. It appears to be true in the case of biological weapons charges as much as it is anything else.
Footnote 1
The relevant paragraph in Ainscough’s essay reads:
“There have been reports of biological agents to target specific ethnic groups. Although ‘biological ethnic cleansing’ is a theoretical possibility, most experts are skeptical of this potential. Analysis of the human genome sequence to date has failed to reveal any polymorphisms that can be used to absolutely define racial groups. Several studies have shown that genetic variation in human populations is low relative to other species and most diversity exists within, rather than between, ethnic groups” (pg. 274, reference numbers within the quote have been removed for reading clarity here).
A May 2001 article in Science, “The Bugs of War,” said of the scientific difficulties of an ethnic bomb:
“One disturbing possibility is that knowledge of pathogen genomics could be combined with insights gleaned from human genetics to target particular ethnic groups. But most experts are sceptical of the potential for bioweapons as agents of ethnic cleansing. Although it is true that certain ethnic groups are unusually susceptible to particular pathogens, genetic variation in susceptibility to disease is likely to be greater within ethnic groups than between them. ‘You’d have a lot of collateral damage,’ predicts Paul Ewald, an expert on the evolution of disease at Amherst College in Massachusetts.”
While recent advances in genetic engineering make construction of new viruses and bacteria easier to accomplish, it isn’t clear at this time if it has facilitated the work of creating an “ethnic” bioweapon, if one was so desired.
This article is adapted from one originally published by the author at Medium.com on April 14, 2022 under the title, “U.S. Covered Up Attempts by Japan to Construct Ethnic-Racial Bioweapons.” It has been lightly edited and significantly expanded for Substack publication.
I'd be interested to see if the Japanese or German files contain information regarding the effects of fluoride and heavy metals on the human organism.