Germ Warfare Allegations: The Smoking Gun is Discovered!
New revelations had "lain dormant in a little-known trove of 1300 CIA signals intelligence documents released electronically in 2010 in commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the Korean War."
This article was originally posted at OpEdNews, October 16, 2020. It has been slightly edited by Mr. Powell for publication here. I thank Tom for permission to republish the essay here. — J.K.
The allegation of US use of biological warfare (BW) during the Korean War is one of the lingering bad odors of that long and deliberately forgotten war. The US government and its retainers have vehemently denied the charges for nearly 7 decades, but the allegations of US germ war crimes have persisted because of the mountainous circumstantial evidence which exists supporting the BW charge. For the entire duration of 1952 and well into 1953, the US military undertook a large-scale, experimental campaign of spreading disease pathogens in North Korea and China by dropping infected insects from aircraft over enemy troops and the civilian population, in the hope of initiating disease pandemics to turn the tide of a stalemated battlefield. This large-scale clandestine military campaign failed to change the outcome of the war.
In 1981, my father, John W. (Bill) Powell, in an interview with Morley Safer on 60 Minutes, first used the colloquial phrase the “smoking gun” to acknowledge that after seven years of Freedom of Information (FOIA) search and 20,000 pages of documents reviewed, he had not been able to find an archival document which admitted to this heinous criminal act of germ warfare.
Powell’s research had brought to sunshine the hidden story of Japan’s Unit 731 which had committed horrific war crimes in China and Manchuria during WWII. Unit 731 had run a bio-weapon research facility near Harbin, China, and along with Unit 100 of Japan’s Kwangtung Army had murdered 400,000 people in North China by poisoning water supplies and spreading contagious disease by airplane. Powell had further exposed the US’s quid pro quo role in shielding the Unit 731 war criminals including its mastermind, Dr. Shiro Ishii, from prosecution in exchange for their collaboration and scientific research.[1] These ugly revelations garnered much public attention at the time, but made Powell a scholar-non-gratis. The well-intentioned FOIA did not compel any US military branch or federal government agency to produce any document or even admit to the existence of a document if the information was considered by agency censors to be not in the national interest.
Powell was locked out, but the smoking gun label subsequently gained a life of its own. It became a goal for a few scholars, but more often it became a cudgel wielded by the denial lobby. By labeling new BW revelations as “not the smoking gun”, US defenders could discredit revelations categorically without having to address the findings on their merits.[2] That has been an effective tactic for the BW denial lobby, but it has also set up its own ultimate train wreck, for now, at last, that irrefutable document evidence, the smoking gun, has been discovered and laid bare for public inspection by a dogged researcher named Jeffrey Kaye.
Kaye’s discovery has lain dormant in a little known trove of 1300 CIA signals intelligence (SIGINT) documents released electronically in 2010 in commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War. A collection of these documents – the ones that referenced BW – have been published as a PDF and posted online by Kaye, along with their detailed history and content analysis.[3] Kaye identifies communication intelligence (COMINT), a subset of SIGINT, as intercepted and decoded battlefield radio, telephone, and telegraph traffic. This is a highly prized and reliable form of military intelligence derived directly from the enemy’s internal communication. Kaye states at the beginning of his essay:
The CIA likely did not set out to document the COMINT history of the North Korean and Chinese response to what appeared to be US and/or UN bacteriological, biological, or ‘germ’ weapons, but that is in effect what happened.
The CIA’s Baptism by Fire contains many dozens of intercepted People’s Volunteer Army (PVA) of China and the North Korea’s People’s Army (KPA) internal communications describing US BW attacks by airplane from field commanders with requests to headquarters for instructions, back-up support, DDT and additional provisions. These intercepted communications spread across the war years from 1951 through 1953. They paint a vivid picture of the Chinese and North Korean tactical response to defend themselves from this sustained germ war attack.
The KPA and the PVA took the attack with extreme seriousness. The COMINT documents narrate some of the enormous mobilization efforts of the communist armies during the entire 18 month duration covered by these documents. Epidemic control measures included the formation and deployment of specialized first response units to exterminate insects and to sanitize drop zones, DDT, field hospitals, quarantine, improved sanitation, improved personal hygiene, and vaccines. In addition, a complete blackout on disclosure of infection and mortality rates, which was considered top secret military intelligence by China and North Korea, was imposed. They have still not released these figures today.
The massive scale of this on-going military and public health effort is factually chronicled in these documents. There could be no military rationale for the communist forces to sustain this costly defensive mobilization for so many months if the US BW attack was not real.
The CIA’s own published intelligence reports completely demolish all prior arguments put forward by US officials and apologists. The COMINT documents are the smoking gun. What they confirm is that the US BW attacks against North Korea and China during the Korean War can no longer be dismissed as “alleged”, but must now be understood as established historical fact, confirmed by the existence of these internal CIA documents.
The BW denial arguments which are now proved false are the following:
• The BW charges were all a communist propaganda campaign to discredit the US/UN. This claim was made by Harry Truman, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Sen. Joe McCarthy and by numerous politicians on down the line and across the political aisle. It was loudly parroted in 1952 and 1953 by a zealous, anti-communist Western press anxious to discredit the commission findings of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL) and the International Scientific Commission (ISC). Both fact finding groups traveled to the front lines of the war in North Korea and China to investigate the BW charges and found them to be factual and published detailed reports.[4]
• China, North Korea, and the USSR orchestrated a gigantic BW hoax scheme to tar brush the US.This is the thesis proposed by Milton Leitenberg based upon two documents— a “discovered” Soviet dossier and the supposed memoir of Wu Zhili, a heroic Chinese war medic. Leitenberg, with his academic appointment at the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland, and his connection with The Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington D.C. is the dean of the US BW denial lobby. Kaye points out in his article that the COMINT documents reveal fatal factual errors in both of Leitenberg documents. I have also demonstrated in an earlier paper that Leitenberg’s evidence are forgeries, [5] and that Mr. Leitenberg has a long track record of untruthful academic research.[6]
• China and North Korea over-reacted because they were misled by their own BW threat assessment.This is the argument put forward by Martin Furmanski and Mark Wheelis.[7] It proposes that the Chinese and North Korean communists were well aware of WWII Japanese BW atrocities in Manchuria, and that they were also well aware that the US had acquired the research of Unit 731 along with the collaboration of Dr. Ishii and his former staff. Furmanski and Wheelis propose that North Korea and China anticipated a US BW attack, they were extremely paranoid about it, and they quickly jumped to denounce the US on flimsy evidence from which they could not politically back down, hence, the elaborate fabrication of a hoax and the huge propaganda campaigns. This argument assumes that the communist leadership was not very smart. It further assumes that Korean and Chinese medical science was not sufficiently skilled to perform autopsies and do the requisite lab work to identify pathogens. However, the 1952 ISC Report noted the extensive Western educational credentials of the investigating Chinese scientists, doctors, entomologists, and pathologists, giving this racist argument little credibility even among the denial crowd.
• The insect dropping campaign of 1952 was psychological warfare to sow panic, not to spread disease. The latest theory proposed earlier this year by Nicholson Baker in his new book, Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act, concludes that the US may have resorted to some BW attacks in 1951, but the main insect-dropping campaign of 1952 was psychological warfare to terrorize the population and to divert scarce resources from the communists’ all-out war effort.
The problem with Baker’s conclusion is that it is a complete non-sequitur from the revelations in the rest of his book. Baker’s research into FOIA files is excellent and he succeeds in squeezing much needed detail from heavily redacted CIA and Defense Dept. files exposing the full-scale of the US biological weapons program centered at Ft. Detrick, MD. But the scientists, generals, and policy makers Baker introduces us to are not choir boys who would be squeamish about murdering hundreds of thousands of “evil communists” with deadly germs and viruses. After all, the role of global hegemon requires calculated brutality, viciousness, and overwhelming military interventionism. This has indeed been the unpleasant reality of US foreign policy since WWII. Baker’s conclusion suffers from dualism; must it be either/or? Spread disease or sow fear? Hasn’t germ warfare always done both?
Baker obviously did not find the smoking gun in his ten-year FOIA search and he admits it. After Bill Powell, and the Canadian research team of Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman who gave up on FOIA and went to China for better data, Baker’s is the third laborious effort to fall short searching for the BW smoking gun through FOIA. This makes Jeffrey Kaye’s revelation of the CIA trove all the more remarkable because the CIA voluntarily coughed it up. So why would it do that?
Kaye’s answer to this author cuts right to the chase. “They drank their own kool-aid.” The CIA is the patsy of its own hubris. It has become such an enormous rigidly compartmentalized bureaucracy of “don’t question” and “right think” that the workings and agenda of one part of the agency are unknown to others. A younger generation of archivists did not know the agency’s history or its most jealously guarded secrets. The CIA has always prided itself on its patrician, Ivy League intellectual heritage, and this sycophantic self-image has lulled it into complacency. In other words, they fucked up big time.
The US undertook the BW campaign in the Korean War for multiple reasons both immediate and long-term.
1. The Korean BW campaign was an experiment to see what actually worked in combat after a decade of intense US scientific research and the acquisition of the Japanese research.
2. By late 1951 the US had bombed and napalm firebombed North Korea to rubble. The KPA and the general population had survived by tunneling underground where bombing was ineffective. The war had stalemated into WWI style trench warfare and the US Army needed a game changer. BW was touted to be a weapon which could kill the enemy hiding in its bunkers and bomb shelters.
3. Imperial ideology is always steeped in racism. The US has a long legacy dating from earliest colonial times of violent repression against Native Americans and African slaves. US war planners had no moral qualms about the mass killing of Asians with germs.
4. US war planners did conceive of BW as psychological warfare with the goal to sow terror among the populace to undermine communist resolve. Not all insects dropped were infected with disease. This was a psychological tactic to confuse the enemy into making false claims, and to provide US deniability. This subject is discussed in the 1952 ISC Report in respect to springtail flies.
5. The US perceived North Korea and China as proxy armies of the USSR. From a strategic view, could germ warfare be upgraded from experimental to operational, and used to subdue the USSR across the enormity of its land mass in a final global conflict between capitalism and communism?
The release of Baptism by Fire is the long anticipated smoking gun. The CIA’s own internal documents narrate the struggle of North Korea and China to defend themselves over a period of 18 months from the US germ war assault. With the voluminous quantity of facts and details already uncovered by scholars, this document trove proves conclusively that the US did engage in a large scale, sustained campaign of biological warfare in 1952 and 1953. These charges can no longer be labeled as alleged. By the release of the COMINT documents US BW use in the Korean War is now firmly established as historical fact.
Footnotes
[1] John W. Powell, “Japan’s Germ Warfare: Cover-up of a War Crime”, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Vol. 12, No. 4, Oct-Dec 1980, 2-17
[2] This is precisely what Ed Regis does in his June 27, 1999 dismissive review in the New York Times Book Review of Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman’s meticulously researched book, The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea.
[3] Jeffrey Kaye, “'A real flood of bacteria and germs’ -- Communications Intelligence and Charges of U.S. Germ Warfare during the Korean War”
[4] Commission of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, Reports on Investigations in Korea and China,Brussels, Belgium, March - April, 1952; Report of the International Scientific Commission for the Investigation of the Facts of Bacterial Warfare in Korea and China, Peking, 1952.
[5] Thomas Powell, “On the Biological Warfare ‘Hoax’ Thesis”, Socialism and Democracy, Vol. 33, No.1, March 2018, pp 67-107
[6] Leitenberg’s book, Soviet Submarine Incursions in Swedish Waters, 1980-86, was discovered to be a complete fabrication of facts and events by the official historian. Ola Tunander, The Secret War Against Sweden: U.S. and British Submarine Deception in the 1980’s. Frank Cass, London and New York, 2004
[7] Martin Furmanski and Mark Wheelis, “Allegations of Biological Weapons Use” in Mark Wheelis, Lajos Rózsa, and Malcolm Dando, Deadly Cultures: Biological Weapons Since 1945, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2006
Note from Jeff Kaye: Thomas Powell is, according to his website, “a sculptor, writer, effigy burner, educator, curator, and art history lecturer.” The son of famed journalist, John W. Powell, Tom is also the author of the recently released book, The Secret Ugly: The Hidden History of US Germ War in Korea.
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