Secret Plan Revealed: CIA Told to “Destroy” Those Supporting Communist Germ Warfare “Myth”
U.S. government officials were unhappy that their propaganda campaign against Communist charges of U.S. use of bioweapons during the Korean War seemed ineffective, so they turned to the CIA for help
In summer 1952, the U.S. government grappled with Communist charges of U.S. use of biological weapons (BW) in the Korean War, labeling the accusations part of a Soviet-instigated “Hate America” campaign. Top officials claimed disingenuously in internal communications that they didn’t understand “the precise reason for choosing germ warfare as the subject of the present campaign.”
The Acting Director of the U.S. Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) wrote to top officials at the Pentagon, State Department and the CIA that Communist charges of U.S. atrocities in Korea, including use of BW, constituted “a horror-weapon… an attack against the very structure of human civilization.”
In the first months following the July 1953 Korean War armistice, the PSB had to admit that the U.S. had failed in its earlier propaganda efforts, and “not supplied the world with authoritative documentation to refute the [BW] charge.”
As a result, according to the high-level psychological warfare Operations Coordinating Board (OCB), the U.S. needed to implement a secret, “specific program of U.S. action to destroy and counter-exploit the Soviet bacteriological warfare myth.”
The aim of the program was “to discredit Soviet propaganda and undo and reverse any belief” in the BW allegations — even though over the past eighteen months, Armed Forces cryptanalysts secretly had been listening in real time to North Korean and Chinese military units’ communications about the extent of and necessary response to multiple biological weapons attacks by U.S. forces.
To achieve the aims of the U.S. government, both overt and covert actions were needed, with covert programs to be under the control of the CIA. Operational plans were proposed to use “counter-propaganda and personalized seduction and coercion” to be “initiated as a matter of urgency against persons and groups where the Soviet [BW] campaign has been especially effective.” [Italics added for emphasis]
Less than two months after the above plans were approved, Frank Olson, a CIA scientist helping lead Ft. Detrick’s Special Operations Division in BW research, was murdered when he apparently became a security risk in relation to the U.S. biological warfare program and possibly other secret programs.
In the immediate months following the armistice that ended the fighting in the Korean War, intelligence officials were extremely frustrated by the resiliency of the Communists’ charges of U.S. use of biological warfare.
Not only did the charges not disappear with the end of the Korean War, but they appeared to accelerate with China’s broadcast on September 6, 1953 of the names of 25 U.S. airmen who “honestly confessed” to involvement in the U.S. germ warfare attacks.
The worldwide impact of the charges became obvious the previous summer when over 8,000 people attended a speech in Toronto by former United Church missionary, Dr. James G. Endicott, who returned from China and reported on U.S. use of biological weapons against North Korea and China.
The germ warfare agitation had even reached the pulpit of the high Anglican Church in England. Around the time of Endicott’s speech, “4000 people paid to hear the Dean of Canterbury [Hewlett Johnson] on his return from China,” describing his encounters with the U.S. germ warfare program in China. Johnson’s pamphlet, I Appeal, was a big success.
The U.S. government agencies most concerned with this issue — the State Department, Pentagon, and CIA — began meeting that same summer to determine the best course of action to meet the Communist BW propaganda offensive. But an organized and approved coordinated governmental response, with its embrace of both overt and covert measures, wouldn’t be fully formed until after the Korean War was over.
This article presents a hitherto unanalyzed secret government plan adopted in October 1953 to neutralize U.S. critics who persisted in giving credence to the germ warfare charges made by North Korea, the People’s Republic of China, and the Soviet Union.
The 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 required “to destroy and counter-exploit” these critics, by “targeted seduction and coercion” if necessary.
Download link above to the full “Memorandum for the Operations Coordinating Board” which contains as an enclosure, the “Basic Plan for U.S. Action to Destroy and Counter-Exploit the Soviet Bacteriological Warfare Myth.” (Alternate link for download)
Suspicious Deaths
Only weeks after the October 1953 “basic plan” was operationalized, the U.S. introduced a major publicity campaign through the United Nations to discredit the Communist charges, shepherded through by OCB stalwart, Army counterintelligence officer, Col. Philip Corso. More ominously, 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 in November 1953.
Whether it was connected or a tragic coincidence, a week before Olson died, nine-year-old Susan Rothschild, daughter of Ft. Detrick’s Colonel Jacquard H. Rothschild, was found strangled in a ditch near her house at Sagamihara, a housing development for U.S. military personnel at nearby Camp Zama.
Col. Rothschild at that time was assigned as Chief Chemical Officer to U.S. Far East Command in Tokyo. If there was a germ warfare program in Korea, as most existing facts argue, then Rothschild had to have been a leader in that effort.
The tensions around the top secret U.S. biological warfare program, and its operationalization during the Korean War, were high. Already, whether by suicide or murder, two other top U.S. biological warfare officials (besides Olson) were found shot to death in the previous few years.
One of the dead was Colonel Arvo T. Thompson, shot to death in his hotel room in Tokyo, 18 May 1951. Thompson had been one of the Army Chemical Corps’ primary debriefers of Lt. General Shiro Ishii, head of Japan’s notorious biological warfare Unit 731. Thompson’s report was passed on to Frank Olson in Camp Detrick’s Special Operations Division. (Camp Detrick was renamed Fort Detrick in 1956.)
These and other suspicious deaths surrounding the biological warfare program at Ft. Detrick, including the possible attempted murder of a high-ranking POW germ warfare confessor, will be explored in a separate article.
Recent reporting, as well as historical reports from the Watergate period, have shown that U.S. and allied governments have repeatedly turned to secret means to discredit or sideline critics of U.S. government policy and whistleblowers of U.S. war crimes. This article demonstrates that this policy was well underway by the end of the Korean War.
The Olson and Rothschild deaths occurred weeks after the implementation of a secret plan approved by President Eisenhower’s high-level Operations Coordinating Board, by which “ counter-propaganda and personalized seduction and coercion” was to be “initiated as a matter of urgency against persons and groups where the Soviet campaign has been especially effective” (bold added for emphasis).
Also noteworthy in the post-armistice period were the steps taken against English-language journalists who reported on the germ war: John W. Powell (U.S.), Wilfred Burchett (Australia) & Alan Winnington (UK). Powell was arrested and tried for sedition for his reporting. Burchett and Winnington were subjected to obloquy and had their passports taken from them.
Before proceeding with further details about the 1953 “Basic Plan” to reverse and destroy the effects of the Communists’ BW propaganda campaign, it’s necessary to review other important background details leading to the government’s action plan of political and extra-legal repression.
Germ Warfare Confessions Induce a Preliminary Plan
On 5 May 1952, two captured U.S. flyers startled the world. Tape recordings broadcast by prisoners of war First Lieutenants Kenneth Enoch and John Quinn, broadcast over “Peiping” (Beijing) Radio, corroborated accusations by the North Korean and Chinese governments regarding U.S. attacks using “bacteriological” weapons, including use of infected insects.
“The decision to use germ bombs, of course, is top secret, but due to the serious nature of this decision it undoubtedly rests with a very high command, probably the Far East headquarters in Tokyo,” Enoch told his captors (September 1952 report of the International Scientific Commission [ISC], pg. 500).
Over the next year and a half, statements were broadcast and/or published from some two dozen captured flyers who stated under interrogation to their North Korean and Chinese captors that the U.S. had undertaken a program of biological warfare. The U.S. government and Western press condemned these revelations as “false confessions,” coerced via torture and other pressures of captivity. This remains the mainstream U.S. narrative today.
By August 1952, the Psychological Strategy Board, which was formed to coordinate covert anti-communist operations and various programs bearing upon U.S. influence abroad, had undertaken a staff study they titled a “Preliminary analysis of the Communist BW Propaganda Campaign.”
The PSB recognized the impact the BW confessions and other propaganda was having worldwide, even if it tended to minimize their effect at this point. Accompanying the staff study was a memo from the Acting Director of PSB to the Director of the CIA, the undersecretaries of State and Defense, and Brigadier General Jesmond D. Balmer, Chief of the Pentagon’s Joint Subsidiary Plans Division, which latter agency coordinated Defense Department support for CIA’s covert operations.
The memo fretted, “By their very nature the Soviet charges might acquire a kind of retrospective credibility if circumstances ever made it necessary for us to use chemical warfare, BW, RW [radiological warfare], etc.”
The staff study, which also looked at possible charges of U.S. gas or chemical warfare, concluded that the “Soviet BW propaganda campaign” was “of sufficient strategic significance to justify close and continuous attention by the PSB.”
Hence the study had a number of recommendations. These take on greater meaning in the light of the “urgent” measures that were adopted a little over a year later by PSB’s successor agency, the Operations Coordinating Board, and are further discussed below.
Some of these earlier recommendations were highly fanciful. None of them were ultimately approved at this time (summer 1952), at least according to the documents we have. One recommendation imagined filing with the World Court, or the UN, an “international libel action” against the Soviets for their claims about U.S. biological warfare.
The PSB also advocated obtaining “coordinated statements” between the UN and neutral governments such as India and Sweden to the effect that the BW charges were untrue. No such coordinated statements were ever obtained.
PSB’s more serious recommendations concerned new “operational planning, additional to that now being done.” Further, the board recommended “further measures to minimize the effects of the present BW propganda campaign and to undercut anticipated future propaganda campaigns similar in nature or related thereto.” The vagueness of the language suggests that PSB was advocating covert operations.
The new measures must “seize and maintain the initiative in the fields of propaganda and operations.” As it was, none of these recommendations were approved at that time, and a stronger approach awaited the adoption of an “action plan” by OCB a little over a year later.
When the flyers were returned to the United States a few months after the armistice that ended the Korean War, their confessions were ostensibly all retracted. But the retractions were themselves not unforced.
Unknown at the time, and subsequently hardly mentioned, the retractions were secretly obtained in concert with threats of prosecution for treason to all those who had confessed, according to a U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Corps officer who was in charge of the returning flyers.
Additionally, Air Force and Marine Corps flyers who were involved in the BW program had been given secret instructions about what to tell interrogators if captured. There was a brief airing of this fact, quickly suppressed, during a 1954 military hearing for high-ranking officer-BW confessor, Colonel Frank Schwable. In effect, Air Force and Marine aviators had been told by their superiors that if captured they could tell interrogators whatever they felt they had to. Meanwhile, all other military personnel were to adhere to a policy of providing only name, rank, date of birth and serial number.
Embarrassed by world-wide publicity from the confessions by high-ranking U.S. POWs, and admitting failure to generate enough doubt about the biological warfare charges by the Soviet Union, China and North Korea, in autumn 1953 the U.S. government undertook a wide-ranging program to “destroy and counter-exploit” those who spread the story about what the U.S. was describing as a communist “myth.”
Contemporary Proof of U.S. Use of Germ Warfare
The facts behind the decades-long allegations by the People’s Republic of China and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea about U.S. use of biological weapons (BW) during the Korean War have long been shrouded in a web of disinformation and censorship, not to mention academic and journalistic indifference.
In September 2020, I released dozens of declassified CIA communications intelligence reports that quoted Armed Forces Security Agency radio intercepts of Communist military communications that cited in realtime the response of North Korean and Chinese military units to U.S. attack by biological weapons. These units likely were unaware that their communications had been compromised.
The following table briefly describes the BW attacks as drawn from the contemporary CIA reports currently available to us:
A few months before I first posted the table above, author Nicholson Baker published Baseless, a book about his years-long attempt to use the Freedom of Information Act to document the U.S. biological warfare program, including any use of BW during the Korean War. Baker’s research and my own had run along parallel but separate tracks. We also came to similar, though somewhat different, conclusions. I have come to rely on much of Baker’s wide-ranging research.
In Baseless, Baker quoted some half-dozen of these same COMINT documents. Despite the efforts of myself, Baker, and a handful of other reporters, podcasters and historians, the mainstream propaganda story that the Communist BW charges were false remains societal orthodoxy, despite the fact that purportedly scholarly essays exposing the supposed Communist BW “hoax” were themselves riddled with errors and had dubious origins.
A particularly controversial aspect of the Korean War BW story concerns the written confessions of twenty-five U.S. airmen to Chinese interrogators about their knowledge of and participation in the germ warfare attacks. I’ve published on this before, and included lengthy excerpts from the statements of four senior officers, including Marine Corps Colonel Frank Schwable and Air Force Colonel Walker Mahurin.
Both Mahurin and Schwable had been tasked to command-level offices in the Defense Department prior to the outbreak of the war. After the war and the return home of all the BW confessors, Air Force officers were spared the ignominy of a court martial or other judicial proceeding concerning what most U.S. government officials felt was collaboration with the enemy.
Unfortunately for him, Marine Corps Colonel Schwable did not escape the wrath of his senior command — one of whom he had directly accused of ordering biological weapons attacks. In 1954, Schwable was subjected to a special Board of Inquiry hearing concerning the circumstances that led to his quite detailed deposition on the U.S. BW program and use of germ weapons in Korea.
Schwable was cleared of any charges, though he never was given a command position in the Marine Corps again, and essentially relegated to a desk job.
The BW Cover-up and the Flyers Who Confessed
The disposition of the returning officers who had been held by China and confessed to use of U.S. bioweapons has been mostly a blank hole in history. In November 2021, Counterpunch published a comprehensive article that described the paranoia that seized U.S. military and intelligence circles upon learning of the BW confessions.
The Counterpunch article established that returning POWs who had confessed to use of germ warfare were isolated aboard ship, and interrogated by the U.S. Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps and other intelligence officials.
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The flyers, who were segregated from other returning POWs, were all threatened with prosecution for treason. As a result, those who had confessed recanted their BW story and alleged their statements had been given under torture or threat of torture. Statements to this effect were submitted to the United Nations, though almost no historical sources mention the fact that the flyers’ recantations were themselves coerced by threats of prosecution.
As we shall see, the retractions submitted to the United Nations were part of the covert PSB campaign to “destroy” the Communist BW “myth.” Today, these retractions read as fantastical epitomes of propaganda, their actual claims of torture almost never reproduced today because of their implausiblity and canned, repetitive accounts of the abuse. (The retractions of Walker Mahurin and Frank Schwable, and a number of other POW confessors, can be read online.)
By contrast — a point made to me by artist and historian Thomas Powell, who has written on this subject — the original germ warfare confessions themselves vary in content, and seem neither implausible nor dictated. In fact, CIA analysts contemporaneously made the same observation!
The Counterpunch story also described attempts by the CIA to interrogate the returning Army POWs of “Little Switch,” the first major prisoner of war exchange in April 1953, with a cocktail of amphetamines, barbiturates and other experimental drugs (likely hallucinogens), along with use of hypnosis and possibly electric shock. One site of such testing was the Army’s Valley Forge Hospital in Pennsylvania.
As the government document embedded earlier in this article proves, the U.S. government’s tortured “false” confessions counter-narrative was crafted by the Department of Defense, CIA, and Truman’s Psychological Strategy Board (later replaced by Eisenhower’s Operations Coordinating Board [OCB]).
On 22 February 1953, Colonel Schwable read his statement describing the U.S. decision to use BW, and the unfolding progress of that campaign, over “Peiping” (Beijing) Radio. A month later, China published Schwable’s statement in the English-language People’s China. It was a very detailed description of the BW program by the officer who had been Chief of Staff of the First Marine Air Wing.
Schwable portrayed himself and other Marine Corps command officers as dismayed about the decision to use biological weapons.
“I do not say the following in defense of anyone, myself included, I merely report as an absolutely direct observation that every officer when first informed that the United States is using bacteriological warfare in Korea is both shocked and ashamed…” Schwable wrote.
U.S. Action to “Destroy” the Germ Warfare Myth
On 29 September 1953, the Operations Coordinating Board, which was made up of ranking representatives of the Pentagon, the CIA and the State Department, submitted for approval a “Basic Plan for U.S. Action to Destroy and Counter-Exploit the Soviet Bacteriological Warfare Myth.”
The new plan was in some respects an internal admission of earlier propaganda failures. Its authors complained, “While various U.S. Government agencies have made efforts at counteraction, the U.S. Government has not supplied the world with authoritative documentation to refute the [BW] charge…” (p. 7).
The “Basic Plan” was written, according to scholar Charles S. Young in his 2014 book on exploitation of Korean War POWs, by an “ad hoc” Prisoner of War Working Group. The “basic plan” was submitted for approval as part of an overall top secret “National Operations Plan to Exploit Communist Bacteriological Warfare Hoax, Mistreatment of Prisoners of War, and Other Atrocities Perpetrated by Communist Forces During the Korean War.”
A separate plan was also submitted under the umbrella of the “National Operations Plan.” This other plan, dubbed the “National Plan for Exploiting Communist Mistreatment of U.N. Prisoners of War,” concentrated, as its name suggests, on stories of prisoner abuse and other presumed Communist atrocities.
In his book, Baseless, a cornucopia of information, Nicholson Baker briefly touched upon the “National Operations Plan,” but did not describe or possibly know about the more specific “Basic Plan for U.S. Action” outlined here. Nor did Young in his book, Name, Rank & Serial Number, despite naming the “Basic Plan,” provide any details from this document about the government plan to discredit the BW charges.
What Baker’s and Young’s books do provide is an excellent description of how the U.S. government oversaw the foreign and domestic propaganda and public relations campaign to promote a narrative about Communist atrocities against U.S. and allied prisoners of war.
The overarching “National Operations Plan” (NOP) had an ambivalent stance toward the POWs who had confessed or otherwise cooperated with their Communist captors. On one hand, the plan called for “necessary medical treatment and protection from public scorn of military personnel who succumbed to communist pressures under excessive duress…” At the same time, the government wanted “[t]o establish the principle that the United States does not condone cowardice or treasonable acts on the part of its military personnel” (pg. 2).
In particular, the CIA mind control and interrogation experiments on a subset of “Little Switch” returning prisoners some six months earlier at Valley Forge Army Hospital appear to have been called off. The NOP stated, “As a result of experience gained from Operation Little Switch, it has been agreed by all agencies that no distinctive medical or psychical treatment or segregation should be accorded to returned prisoners on the basis of apparent collaboration as revealed in communist propaganda.”
However, the segregation of the airmen “confessors” and the composition of their retractions was by this time already a fait accompli. But their medical and psychiatric examinations continued for some time, despite what the NOP mandated.
Interestingly, a slightly altered version of the detailed “Basic” plan to “destroy” the Communist BW “myth” was circulated among government departments only ten days after the first draft. The primary difference between the two extant versions of the document concerned some violent rhetoric and a rare admission of certain covert influence operations in the earlier version of the document.
The 29 September version of the document is embedded earlier in this article, and is also available at this link. The link to the second, somewhat cleaned-up version of the document, dated 9 October 1953, is available here.
The 29 September version was called the “Basic Plan for U.S. Action to Destroy and Counter-Exploit the Soviet Bacteriological Warfare Myth.” The subsequent 9 October version, which was approved by the Operations Coordinating Board and published in the mid-1980s in a book of diplomatic papers of the U.S. State Department, softened the language of the earlier draft, calling instead for “U.S. Action to Discredit the Soviet Bacteriological Warfare Campaign.” (The latter version is the one Charles Young refers to in his book. It’s not clear Young ever knew about the earlier version of this document.)
“A matter of urgency”
Significantly, the title change wasn’t the only revision in the document. The earlier September version described the suggested priorities for the “U.S. positive action program”:
On the basis of the best current operational judgment, without waiting for completion of an exhaustive analysis of the total problem, counter-propaganda and personalized seduction and coercion will be initiated as a matter of urgencyagainst persons and groups where the Soviet campaign has been especially effective. [bold text added for emphasis]
The later October version of the document changed the language of this recommendation, erasing any suggestion of “seduction” or coercive methods against “persons and groups.” The bold highlighted language shown in the September version above was replaced with the more benign admonition to initiate “efforts to induce credence in US innocence of the BW charges… as a matter of urgency against persons and groups where the Soviet campaign has been especially effective.”
But one instance of violent rhetoric was left unchanged in the 9 October version of the paper. As yet another instance of “U.S. positive action,” the OCB ad hoc POW working group’s plan stated:
As appropriate, a campaign will be launched by overt and covert means to neutralize, over-ride, and destroy the Soviet propaganda instrumentalitieswhich purvey the myth, giving priority attention to those which are currently and effectively active. [bold text added for emphasis]
This section was the same in both versions of the Plan. The “action” document also condemned the “ostensible confessions extracted from U.S. prisoners of war by physical and mental torture.”
The plan called for an “inter-agency working group” to implement its recommendations and actions. The group would include representatives from the State Department and the Department of Defense, the Director of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), the Director of the CIA, and such representatives of other agencies as the working group might recommend.
USIA was tasked with the development of “overt propaganda actions.” The State Department was instructed to handle “aspects of the campaign” that touched upon “diplomatic action” or “official international bodies,” like the United Nations.
The Defense Department was instucted to furnish “as rapidly as possible… material obtained from returning prisoners of war.” DoD was told to cooperate with “the CIA, the FBI, and such medical agencies as appropriate” in the analysis of “captured U.S. personnel,” and, with a nod to then-current “brainwashing” propaganda, in the development of “counter-techniques” against supposed “Soviet methods of personality destruction.”
As for the CIA, the OCB plan tasked it with “special emphasis” in regards to the identification, description and evaluation of the Soviet propaganda effort, including “instumentalities and targets.” The CIA was instructed “to plan and conduct all covert operational aspects of the general program.” No doubt this included the call for use of “personalized seduction and coercion… as a matter of urgency against persons and groups” particularly influenced by or vocal about the Soviet and/or Communist charges of U.S. use of biological warfare.
The Outlines of the Plan
According to the 29 September “Basic Plan” document, the “general framework” and “target selection” of the “U.S. positive action program” consisted of the following. Notice the interplay between overt and covert aspects of the program.
1) On the basis of the best current operational judgment, without waiting for completion of an exhaustive analysis of the total problem, counter-propaganda and personalized seduction and coercion will be initiated as a matter of urgency against persons and groups where the Soviet campaign has been especially effective.
2) A dignified, continuing flow of corrective factual information will be launched widely throughout the world, under overt U.S. responsibility, increasing in tempo, intensity, and subject coverage as the development and evaluation of information is accomplished. Covert supplement to such overt action will be added as appropriate.
3) The analysis of Soviet treatment of captured personnel will be completed as a matter of high priority, the results to be used as appropriate for both general propaganda and official action through diplomatic instrumentalities and official international organizations.
4) A special effort will be made to carry U.S. propaganda to the people of the Soviet orbit, by overt and covert means, making effort to get transmission by other Free World governments and especially by the neutralist nations.
5) As appropriate, a campaign will be launched by overt and covert means to neutralize, over-ride, and destroy the Soviet propaganda instrumentalities which purvey the myth, giving priority attention to those which are currently and effectively active.
6) The concentrated attention of official and non-official U.S. facilities will be directed to the development of methods for successful personal resistance to the Soviet techniques of psychological coercion. [bold added for emphasis]
The Murder of Frank Olson
Coincident in time with the adoption of the OCB “Basic Plan,” and highly suspicious, were the events surrounding the death of Ft. Detrick’s Special Operations Division (SOD) officer, Frank Olson, which occurred a little over a week after a CIA-SOD meeting held at a cabin at Deep Creek Lake from 18 to 20 November 1953, only weeks after the Basic Plan was approved.
Olson may or may not have been drugged at Deep Creek Lake. We can’t know for sure. But soon after his return he quit his job at SOD. He was taken to a CIA-linked doctor. He was kept under close surveillance by agency associates.
Olson was not a mere biochemist. In 1950 he was made chief of SOD’s plans and operations branch. Over time, he is said to have become critical of CIA interrogation experiments, part of Project Artichoke, as well as biowarfare actions undertaken by the U.S. government.
Olson’s superior at SOD, John L. Schwab, Chief of Ft. Detrick’s Special Operations Division, was present at Deep Creek Lake that fateful weekend. Five year later, in December 1958, Schwab filed a sworn affidavit in U.S. Federal Court admitting that the United States did have the capacity to wage biological warfare against its enemies as early as 1949, something that had been previously denied.
According to one account, Olson’s duties at Ft. Detrick “included experiments with aerosolized anthrax. After 10 years, he was a senior bacteriologist at the program.”
Aerosolized anthrax was the identified pathogen of at least three U.S. biowar attacks in China in March 1953, as publicized in the report of the International Scientific Commission that visited North Korea and China in the summer of 1952. Had Olson seen the ISC report?
It seems highly likely that Olson knew about — if in fact he wasn’t involved in — the CIA’s Project MKNAOMI, which according to the U.S. Senate Church Committee investigations in the 1970s used SOD facilities in “developing, testing, and maintaining biological agents and delivery systems for use against humans as well as against animals and crops” (pg. 6).
Olson died on 28 November 1953 at age 43. The government maintained he defenestrated from the thirteenth floor of the Statler Hotel in New York (today the Hotel Pennsylvania), while CIA colleague Robert Lashbrook was reportedly asleep nearby. There were many holes in the government story.
In the years since, some researchers have gathered evidence to show Olson was in fact pushed out the hotel window in a blatant act of assassination. Olson’s death was a few years ago the subject of the Errol Morris Netflix documentary, Wormwood. Olson’s son, Eric, runs a website that provides many documents and articles about his father’s death.
Was Olson the first victim of the “covert operational aspects” of the OCB plan, which called for “coercion… against persons and groups”? It would be worth continuing the investigations into CIA and/or Pentagon complicity in Olson’s death, and the deaths of others around the same time who were associated with the U.S. biological warfare program.
CIA activates “all divisions”
Nowhere in the “Basic Plan” document, or the NOP, is it assumed that North Korea and China, which had made their own investigations into and propaganda about the U.S. use of germ warfare, were anything but proxies of the Soviet Union. As an example of China’s own investigations, see the April 1952 report by the “Chinese People’s Commission for Investigating the Germ Warfare Crime of American Imperialists.” This report has never been posted online before.
For purposes of this article, the U.S. effort to break the “Soviet” BW “myth,” includes any actions against targets associated with or originating in North Korea and the People’s Republic of China.
As is usually the case in matters of covert actions, the details of such activities remain classified, and many of the documents involved long ago destroyed. But one memo for Charles Norberg at OCB, posted at the Eisenhower Library and dated 11 December 1953, describes the CIA’s “Implementation of the National Plan for Exploiting the BW Hoax” from 19 November to the date of the memo.
The memo describes CIA’s activation “of all divisions” to spread at the United Nations propaganda about Communist atrocities, as well as ensuring “extensive US news coverage” about this. On 4 December, CIA “made available to all divisions complete documentation submitted by [U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot] Lodge to the United Nations in support of his [Lodge’s] charges” of atrocities supposedly committed upon U.S. POWs, including torture to induce false confessions.
As reported elsewhere, Lodge’s documentation included a statement from the Chief of the Air Force’s Psychological Warfare Research Division, Major James L. Monroe, disavowing any connection between downed fliers and any use of biological weapons. Monroe was a central figure in the post-war debriefings and psychiatric examination of the flyers, and a key CIA figure in the heyday of its MKULTRA program.
In particular, Monroe was the CIA’s finance contact officer between Dr. Ewen Cameron’s brainwashing, “psychic driving” experiments for the CIA and the Agency’s funding cut-out, the Society for Human Ecology. Hence, it’s not surprising that Monroe’s statement provided to Lodge for use at the UN came directly from the CIA.
The December 1953 CIA memo was mum about any covert activities undertaken by CIA to implement OCB’s National Plan. The memo to Norberg concluded, “Certain aspects of CIA implementation of this plan are not suitable for inclusion in this report. The DCI will be briefed on these matters on a continuing basis as reports become available.”
Of side interest, the memo’s author, H. Gary Schumann, is likely the same individual described in a 1994 Rand report on POW/MIA issues as Lt. Col. H. Gary Schumann, who was Assistant Military Attaché, U.S. Embassy, Moscow, in the period between 1945 and 1952. The attaché position was a standard cover for CIA officers abroad, as detailed in this 1979 Washington Post article.
The Strange Career of Philip Corso
Of probable greater importance, as outlined by Baker in Baseless (pg. 344), was the participation of Army counterintelligence officer, Col. Philip Corso, in supplying by his own account the documentation to Lodge for propaganda use at the UN. The documentation included a half-dozen flyer recantations of their BW claims.
Baker quoted Lodge’s praise for Corso’s role in supplying information for a presentation by Dr. Charles Mayo at the UN on 26 October 1953, decrying supposed Communist use of “Pavlovian” methods in forcing false confessions about use of biological weapons.
“The statement was a good example of what can be accomplished by coordination between PSB, Defense and CIA and my advisers tell me that Colonel Philip J. Corso was primarily responsible for assembling this material,” Lodge told Eisenhower’s psychological warfare adviser, and PSB/OCB board member, C.D. Jackson.
“Colonel Corso should be commended for having performed this outstanding job which may prove to be the biggest setback the communists have suffered since the landing at Inchon.” (Baker, Nicholson. Baseless [pp. 344–345]. Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.)
Corso later told a Congressional panel (video) that he himself had been a member of both the PSB and OCB.
Lodge’s assessment about the Communist setback was hyperbole, but nevertheless the presentation can be seen in retrospect as a major propaganda event in the Cold War drive to discredit the Communists’ BW charges. Given CIA’s role in providing Lodge with his material, as described in the November 1953 memo to Norberg, it’s possible that Corso worked for CIA as well. It wouldn’t be the last time Corso acted to deliver propaganda material aimed against North Korea on the POW issue.
Corso is a key player in many events in U.S. history from World War 2 all the way to the 1990s. He certainly deserves more attention from historians. From his work for the Army’s Counter-Intelligence Corps (which agency we have seen was involved in the flyers’ BW recantations), to his assignment to military intelligence (G-2) in General Douglas MacArthur’s staff, to his claims to being present and involved in the armistice talks at Panmunjom, to his supposed oversight of Korean War POWs, to — much later — his campaign to vilify North Korea and Russia for supposedly holding prisoners decades after the Korean War ended, to his membership on the intelligence-heavy Psychological Strategy and Operations Coordinating boards, and, most fantastically, to his claims to having passed alien technology from a crashed spaceship at Roswell, New Mexico on to U.S. industrialists, Philip Corso appears to have been a master at psychological warfare.
After his retirement from the military, he was also, oddly, assigned as an investigator to Senator Richard Russell’s office working on the Warren Commission. During this period, Corso was caught trying to direct the Commission’s attention away from Lee Harvey Oswald’s CIA connections to an apparently bogus claim that Oswald was an FBI asset. Strange work for a retired lieutenant colonel!
Reconsidering the Germ Warfare Charges
The campaign to discredit or disprove the Korean War-era germ warfare allegations continues even to the present day. Thomas Powell has written about the role of Milton Leitenberg, an arms control expert and senior research associate for Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland. Leitenberg appears to monitor the issue of the old Communist BW charges as they appear in public, and springs into action when the mainstream narrative is threatened.
Leitenberg’s own contributions to documenting the supposed Soviet BW “hoax” have been exposed as lacking historical reliablity and validity. A recent attempt by this author to get Leitenberg to answer a number of questions about his work was rebuffed.
The primary problem with Leitenberg’s work is that he relies on dubious documentation, and refuses to address new data as it becomes available. Important information that might challenge his theories are never even addressed. What’s strange is that so many historians would bow to Leitenberg’s expertise, and never even really examine his supporting documentation and make their own independent assessment.
For instance, Leitenberg claims that in March 1953, the Soviet leadership discovered the truth about China and North Korea’s attempt to falsify two sites of biological weapons attack, supposedly achieved with the connivance of Soviet officials then assigned in North Korea. As a result, by April 1953, the Soviets had pulled back from accusations of U.S. use of biological agents. China and North Korea, too, were said to have ended their propaganda about U.S. germ warfare about the same time.
But the claims that the Soviets and China had ended their accusations of U.S. biowarfare by early 1953 are easily falsified by reference to newspaper accounts of Soviet and Chinese claims of U.S. use of biological weapons that continued well into 1953 and even beyond.
The very issuance of the “Basic Plan” to counter the Communist BW narrative in October 1953 belies the claims in Leitenberg’s articles. The documents from Soviet archives that Leitenberg relies on to make his claims must be either forgeries, or (what I believe) crude attempts at frame-up of a bureaucratic rival by Soviet state security minister, Lavrenti Beria. Beria was arrested for treason by Soviet officials in June 1953 and executed towards the close of the year.
My working assumption is that Leitenberg, or Kathryn Weathersby, who first translated and published the documents in 1998, or someone else perhaps, jumped on these documents when they were first discovered (or leaked) as a means to discredit new claims then arising about the germ warfare program in a University of Indiana Press book by two Canadian scholars, Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman. Stephen was the son of James Endicott, who is discussed briefly earlier in this article.
Most telling is Leitenberg’s refusal to address the issue of the CIA’s declassified communications intelligence reports detailing numerous decrypted messages from Chinese and North Korean military units describing attacks by U.S. biological weapons. In August 2016, I emailed Professor Leitenberg to report the existence of the CIA’s communications intelligence reports detailing the biological warfare attacks. I provided an example of the material and links to the entire collection of reports. I did not receive any reply.
Only a wide-ranging reconsideration of the history of the Korean War, based on existing documents and documents yet to be declassified, can undo decades of misinformation and ignorance on this issue. With the acceleration of military tensions and build-up in and around the Korean peninsula, the time grows short to restore truth to its proper place and role, and slow down or stop the rush to catastrophic war.
This article was originally published at Medium.com on December 5, 2022.
There is another connection of all this to Oswald. See my Substack, White Gloves legend or/and message me