FBI Smoking Gun on U.S. Use of Biological Warfare in the Korean War
FBI Special Agent told J. Edgar Hoover in November 1950 that the U.S. Chemical Warfare Corps could "effectively use" anthrax and bubonic plague in covert operations, and later in bombs "within a year"
The first smoking gun I discovered was a tranche of CIA documents from the Korean War, released in 2010 in a collection the CIA titled “Baptism by Fire.” I determined that two dozen of these documents — communications intelligence (COMINT) reports analyzing raw intercepts of North Korean and Chinese forces radio reports by the U.S. Armed Forces Security Agency — contained material that documented long-time allegations of U.S. use of biological weapons against Communist forces during the war.
For example, a top-secret March 6, 1952 CIA report read, “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.’”
Another CIA March 1952 report stated that on March 3, a “North Korean coastal security unit in eastern Korea reported… 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.’” [Parenthesis in original]
The discovery of the COMINT documents, a sub-set of which were also noticed by author Nicholson Baker, was a key event in the long-simmering controversy over the Korean War U.S. biological warfare debate over their alleged use. Stating that the discovery of the COMINT documents was a “smoking gun” was my way of saying that after all the evidence adduced thus far, the COMINT documents were near irrefutable evidence.
For one thing, the documents came from U.S. intelligence and military sourcing. In addition, they provided contemporaneous documentation of events that were not otherwise known to non-combatant forces. These reports were not ever communicated in any media or propaganda forum. In other words, they appear totally genuine, from the horse’s mouth, one might say.
There is in fact plenty of other straight-forward evidence of U.S. use of these weapons, including written affidavits from twenty-five downed U.S. flyers, and over 700 pages of documents and analysis released by the World Peace Council-sponsored 1952 report by an International Scientific Commission for the Investigation of the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in Korea and China. But for better or worse, these documents have been considered problematic because of their provenance: they originated from Communist or Communist-sympathetic sources. Not so with the COMINT documents. During the Cold War, and even unto today, almost any information that originated in a Communist country is considered suspect by Western “experts” and authorities.
A FBI Briefing at Dugway
Earlier this year I discovered in a release of FBI documents yet another “smoking gun," a November 1950 admission of the immediate readiness of bioweapons for covert use made by an official at Dugway Proving Ground (DPG) in a top secret briefing to a Special Agent for the FBI.
DPG is a vast 800,000 acre testing facility linked to the Army Chemical Corps’ Camp Detrick headquarters. (“Camp Detrick” became “Fort Detrick” in 1956.) The remote location was used as early as World War II to test chemical and biological weapons, and by the early 1950s it was also used for field tests of “artillery shells, aerial bombs, and aerial spray tanks designed to dispense chemical and biological warfare agents.”
Dugway was also infamous for an incident in March 1968 when thousands of sheep were found dead in eerily-named Skull Valley, some two dozen miles from DPG. Though the Army denied the deaths had anything to do with the work at Dugway, tests confirmed that the sheep had died from nerve gas (VX) tests that had accidentally spread from the facility.
On November 15, 1950, Jay C. Newman, Special Agent in Charge at the Federal Bureau of Intelligence’s Salt Lake City office, wrote a memo to J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI. The subject was a briefing he received from a top military official concerning work on biological warfare experiments at the secretive U.S. Army Dugway Proving Ground (DPG), some eighty miles southeast of Salt Lake City. The Dugway official's name was redacted in the declassified memo.
The Newman report, and a similar report stemming from an earlier FBI briefing at Camp Detrick, are important as they provide a contemporaneous portrait of U.S. biological warfare readiness, at least as much as the secretive Army Chemical Corps was willing to share with FBI officials at the time.
These reports describe a military department ready to conduct covert biowar sabotage activities, while nearing completion of more extensive capabilities using missiles and bombs.
The reports also belie claims from academic biological warfare expert Milton Leitenberg, who has maintained his research shows no bioweapon using a human pathogen was “ready until the end of 1954, about 16 months after the Korean War was over” (pg. 8). Leitenberg’s bogus finding has been cited numerous times over the years.
Despite these and other refutations of Leitenberg’s ostensible refutation of the charges of U.S. use of biological weapons, his narrative of a Communist germ warfare “hoax” during the Korean War remains the mainstream Western account of these war crimes accusations.
Only a few weeks before Agent Newman’s November 1950 memo to Hoover, back on the East Coast Special Agent Ted Beach had just finished visiting Camp Detrick, the Army’s bacteriological research center, for his briefing as the new FBI liaison to Detrick on the work done at the facility. On November 9, a memo from FBI Assistant Director Ralph Harbo to FBI Laboratory Chief, D.J. Parsons, described Beach’s conversations with Detrick scientists.
According to Harbo:
“The general consensus of opinion expressed by the technical personnel at Detrick is to the effect that bacteriological agents (agent being defined as the organism or products of the organism) can be used very successfully in offensive warfare and even more successfully in acts of covert sabotage.”
These U.S. Army Chemical Corps briefings to the FBI followed the breakout of full-scale civil war in Korea at the end of June 1950, and the invasion of large-scale U.S. and UN forces at Inchon in September. Already, there were charges by the Communists that the U.S. was working with South Korean intelligence forces to introduce germ warfare agents into the conflict later that year.
Corroborating such charges, according to a CIA report at the time, while briefly occupying Seoul, North Korean forces found instructions at “ROK headquarters” that described “sabotage plans, based on use of bacteria, against vital North Korean installations, towns, and army units.” The plans appeared similar to that of bacteriological warfare techniques used by Japan’s Unit 731 against Chinese forces and cities during World War II.
All quotes from FBI documents in this article come from a FOIA release to the now-discontinued website, The Memory Hole, as found at this link. The documents were declassified in 2004. The Hasbro document is on PDF pages 112-113, while the Newman memo is on PDF pages 119-122. The full text of the Newman memo is reproduced at the end of the article.
The Newman Memo to Hoover
In Newman’s letter to Hoover, the Salt Lake City Special Agent, famous for having survived being shot in the head by “Baby Face” Nelson, described how on November 1 he interviewed someone at DPG. The declassified document redacted the interviewee’s name, which was possibly Lt. Col. Speers G. Ponder, head of research at Dugway. The official told Newman that his briefing was “considered top secret by the War Department.”
The Dugway official told Newman that the military was working on three types of biological warfare, specifically agents that target “man, animals, and agricultural products.”
Newman’s memo to Hoover continued:
“He advised that research in the field has come to an advanced stage and that the Army has the knowledge to do a very effective job in the covert field, that military use would be effective, but that the knowledge of the engineering aspects of military use of bacteriological warfare has not progressed to a point of practical use…. the dissemination of bacteriological warfare agents through missiles is not developed to a stage for practical use…. the great difficulty in combating bacteriological warfare engaged in by covert agents for sabotage purposes is that on the outbreak of a disease it would be difficult to determine if it were a natural outbreak or a planned infestation….”
The technical problems with munitions continued into at least the first year or so of the Korean War. The U.S. had at least one antipersonnel biological bomb, the M114 cluster bomb, and one anti-crop bomb, the E77 feather bomb. According to the military’s own history of the period, the military turned to “stop-gap” measures to provide “short-term developments where immediate benefit to operational effectiveness would result.”
These “stop-gap” measures appear to have included Japan’s World War II methods of germ war sabotage and other forms of bacterial weapon delivery, including use of insect vectors to deliver disease, as developed by its infamous Unit 731. Japan’s biowarfare knowledge was shared with the United States after the War. But Japan was not alone in investigating the use of insects like fleas, ticks, flies and others to deliberately spread disease in this period. Canada, too, a partner with U.S. and British Cold War biological warfare programs, had been experimenting extensively with the use of insects as biological delivery systems.
“Ready for war use”
Newman’s report to Hoover described how Detrick/Dugway’s research had been “aimed at developing stains of germs impervious to established methods of treatment.”
The Army Chemical Corps had developed strains of germs that were not killed by antibiotics like penicillin or other “wonder drugs”. These new strains had been developed “by culturing surviving organisms in progressively stronger concentrations of the [antibiotic] drug.”
As a result, the Dugway official “advised that through selective culture smallpox strains have been developed against which immunization by vaccination is not effective.” Despite a mountain of articles produced on or about the threats from biological warfare research, especially in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, not one outlet or commentator has seen fit to comment or take notice of the fact the U.S. had produced a vaccine-resistant strain of smallpox, at least so far as I can determine.
In addition, the Army scientists had developed “at least four strains… with five to ten variations” of brucella melitensis, which causes undulant fever. Research had also been done on anthrax, bubonic plague, and psittacosis. Newman’s memo then made the startling admission:
“… the Chemical Warfare Corps is in a position to effectively use these four diseases by covert means and will have perfected methods of distributing them by bombs within a year.”
This revelation appears to corroborate a 1959 sworn affidavit by John L. Schwab, the former Chief of the Special Operations Division (SOD) at Ft. Detrick during the Korean War.
Schwab’s affidavit was produced during the trial of John and Sylvia Powell, charged with sedition for reporting on the U.S. biological warfare campaign in 1952–1953 during the height of the Korean War.
The chief of SOD told the court that from January 1, 1949 until the armistice that ended the Korean War, “the U.S. Army had a capability to wage both chemical and biological warfare, offensively and defensively….” Schwab also contended the weapons never left U.S. soil, but there is plenty of reason to mistrust that. One must recall that the U.S. biowar program was top secret. Those suspected of leaking information were threatened with prosecution, or worse.
FBI Special Agent Newman went on to tell Hoover, the Dugway official “stated that research has been made on botunlinas [sic — botulinum] poison, a chemical compound produced by bacteria, and that it can be produced in quantity and is ready for war use. In use it can be distributed in food or more effectively in water supplies, in which it would be a deadly poison to man.”
Indeed, elsewhere, Newman said the Dugway official stated “the most likely method [of distributing bacteriological agents via sabotage] would be through contamination of water supplies, in which case small amounts would be effective against a large number of people.”
Other research included the synthesis of a substance based on a poison found in mussels. Another project, aimed at synthesis of the powerful curare poison, was meant for possibly use in poison bullets.
Special Agent Newman did not speculate upon the moral qualities surrounding the use of such weapons. The FBI appeared to be concerned with counterintelligence data it could use in protecting the U.S. from the use of biological agents sabotage on American soil.
One wonders how many documents like the COMINT report in the CIA’s Baptism by Fire release, or the Newman memo released via FOIA to The Memory Hole, exist.
In the New Testament’s book of “Matthew,” Chapter Seven, it’s written, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.” What the apostle failed to mention is that if you do seek and you do find, will anyone listen to you?
[Portions of this posting were adapted from an earlier article by this author at Medium.com]
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Thank you for all this research. It's invaluable!
Japanese documents on delivery of biological weapons wasn't "shared" with the US after WW2. It's standard operating procedure for the victor in a conflict to appropriate the documents of the losing side and study their tactics. The US *took* those documents.