his article was originally published by INSURGE Intelligence.
Back in the early 1950s, the U.S. conducted a furious
bombing campaign during the Korean War, dropping hundreds of thousands
of tons of ordnance, much of it napalm, on North Korea. The bombardment,
worse than any country had received up to that point, excepting the
effects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, wiped out nearly every city in North
Korea, contributing to well over a million civilian deaths. Because of
the relentless bombing, the people were reduced to living in tunnels.
Even the normally bellicose Gen. MacArthur claimed to find the
devastation wreaked by the U.S. to be sickening.[1]
Most controversially, both North Korea and China alleged
that by early 1952, the U.S. was using biological or germ warfare
weapons against both North Korea and China. The U.S. government has
strenuously denied this.
Nevertheless, captured U.S. flyers told their North Korean
and Chinese captors about the use of such weapons. Later, after the
prisoners were returned to U.S. custody, counterintelligence experts and
psychiatrists interrogated them. They were told under the threat of
court martial to renounce their confessions about germ warfare. They all
did so.
The Army Criminal Investigative Division officer in charge
of interrogating returning prisoners, including airmen who confessed to
use of biological weaponry on North Korea and China, was Army
counter-intelligence specialist, Col. Boris Pash. Pash had previously
been in charge of security for the most sensitive classified operations
of the U.S. government in World War II. He was in charge of security at
the Manhattan Project’s Berkeley Radiation Laboratory. (The Manhattan
Project was the U.S. crash program to develop the atomic bomb.)
In the immediate aftermath of the war, military
intelligence officer Pash led the Alsos Mission, which searched for Nazi
and Italian nuclear scientists and fissionable materials, as well as
gathering “intelligence about any enemy scientific research applicable
to his military effort,” including biological and chemical weapons.[2]
To convince the world of the truth of their claim the U.S.
had dropped biological weapons on their countries, and after turning
down the suggestion that the International Red Cross look into the
charges, the North Koreans and Chinese sponsored an investigating
commission. Using the auspices of the World Peace Council, they gathered
together a number of scientists from around the world, most of whom
were sympathetic to either the Left or the peace movement. Most
surprisingly, this commission, which came to be known as the
International Scientific Commission, or ISC, was headed by one of the
foremost British scientists of his time, Sir Joseph Needham.
The ISC included scientists from a number of countries,
including Sweden, France, Italy, and Brazil. The Soviet Union
representative, Dr. N. N. Zhukov-Verezhnikov had been the chief medical
expert at the Khabarovsk Trial of the Unit 731 Japanese officers accused
of participating in bacteriological (aka biological, or germ) warfare
before and during World War II, as well as conducting hideous
experiments on prisoners to further that aim. Zhukov-Verezhnikov went on
to write scientific articles through the 1970s.
Needham himself, though pilloried in the Western press for
his opinions on the controversy of U.S. use of biological weapons during
the Korean War, remained a highly lauded scientist for years after the ISC report. He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1971. In 1992, the Queen conferred on him the Companionship of Honour.[3]
The ISC travelled to China and North Korea in the summer of
1952 and by September produced the “Report of International Scientific
Commission for the Investigation of the Facts Concerning Bacterial
Warfare in Korea and China,” which corroborated the Chinese and North
Korean claims that the U.S. had used biological weapons in an
experimental fashion on civilian populations.
The summary report was only some 60 pages long, but the ISC
included over 600 pages of documentary material comprising statements
from witnesses, including airmen involved in dropping the weaponry, as
well as captured enemy agents; reports from doctors; journal articles
from the United States; autopsy reports and lab tests; and photos and
other materials. Most of this documentary material has been all but
inaccessible for decades, with only a handful of copies of the ISC
report in a few scattered libraries in the United States.
The report concluded that the U.S. had used a number of
biological weapons, including use of anthrax, plague, and cholera,
disseminated by over a dozen of different devices or methods, including
spraying, porcelain bombs, self-destroying paper containers with a paper
parachute, and leaflet bombs, among others.
This article is not meant to examine the full range of
opinions or evidence about whether or not the U.S. used biological
weapons in the Korean War. It is instead an attempt to publish essential
documentation of such claims, documentation that has effectively been
withheld from the American people, and the West in general, for decades.
Controversies
The charges of U.S. use of biological warfare during the
Korean War have long been the subject of intense controversy. The
reliance, in part, on testimony from U.S. prisoners of war led to U.S.
charges of “brainwashing.” These charges later became the basis of a
cover story for covert CIA experimentation into use of use of drugs and
other forms of coercive interrogation and torture that became the basis
for its 1963 KUBARK manual on interrogation, and much later, a powerful
influence on the CIA’s post-9/11 “enhanced interrogation” program.
Establishment Cold War scholars have been quick to debunk
the ISC report. The most notable attempts in recent years included the
publication of purported letters written by officials of the Soviet
Union discussing the lack of evidence of U.S. biological warfare, and
the decision to manufacture such evidence to fool the
West.[4] Subsequently, a 1997 memoir by Wu Zhili, the former director of
the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army Health Division, was published
declaring the purported U.S. use of bacteriological agents in the Korean
War was really “a false alarm.” [5]
If these documents were to be true, as two Canadian
scholars who spent years researching the Chinese-North Korean claims of
biological warfare, then it would go against the bulk of archival
evidence, including interviews with pertinent witnesses in both the
United States and China.[6] Some of this archival evidence is quite
recent, including the CIA declassification of a good deal of formerly
top secret daily signal intelligence cables from the Korean War.[7]
The cables dealing with North Korean claims of biological
warfare, which claims were dismissed by U.S. officials, prove that the
North Koreans were serious about the belief they were being attacked by
germ weapons, and that they were concerned that reports from the field
not be falsified by assiduous if uninformed people sending in reports
from the field. There is no evidence that North Korean officials or
personnel ever engaged in falsification of evidence of biological
warfare.
There also is plenty of archival evidence to be found in
the suppressed Needham report materials. For instance, the Wu Zhili
document claims, “‘for the entire year [1952–1953] no sick patient or
deceased person was found to have anything to do with bacteriological
warfare.”
But the ISC report documents a number of such deaths,
including deaths from inhalational anthrax, a very rare disease almost
completely unknown in China at that time. Appendix AA of the report,
“Report on the Occurrence of Respiratory Anthrax and Haemorrhagic
Anthrax Meningitis following the Intrusion of U.S. Military Planes over
Northeast China” details the presence of anthrax by autopsy and
laboratory examination in five deaths during March-April 1952. According
to U.S. experts who have looked at the details of this report, the
conclusions regarding death from inhalational anthrax could not have
been faked[8].
Until recently, there has been no effort to make the
original Needham materials available for other scholars or the public to
assess for themselves the truth or falsity of their analysis. Last
year, scholar Milton Leitenberg uploaded a copy of the ISC report to
Scribd, but it is a very rough scan, and not searchable, or easy to use
for the public. The release was not advertised and the public in
particular remains ignorant of its findings.
The version of the ISC report published here utilized state-of-the-art book scanning equipment and is text searchable.
Censorship of Unit 731-U.S. Collaboration on Biological Warfare Data
One important part of the ISC report guaranteed its
suppression in the United States after its initial publication. The
report discussed the activities of Imperial Japan’s biological warfare
detachment, Unit 731, and the U.S. interest in its activities.
Back in 1952, collaboration between the U.S. and Japanese
war criminals using biological weapons was top secret, and totally
denied by the U.S.
But today, even U.S. historians accept that a deal was made
between the U.S. and members of Unit 731 and associated portions of the
Japanese military that had in fact been experimenting on the use of
biological weapons since the mid-1930s, experimentation that included
use of human vivisection and barbaric torture of thousands of human
beings, most of whom were disposed of in crematoria. In addition, as
described in the book chapter by Bernd Martin noted in the bibliography,
there was collaboration between the Japanese and the Nazi regime on
these issues.
The U.S. collaboration with Japanese war criminals of Unit
731 was formally admitted in 1999 by the U.S. government, though the
documentation for this confession wasn’t published until nearly 20 years
later.[9]
It is a matter of historical record now that the U.S.
government granted amnesty to Japan’s chief at Unit 731, doctor/General
Shiro Ishii and his accomplices. The amnesty was kept top secret for
decades, until revealed by journalist John Powell in a landmark article
for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientistsin October 1981.
What came to be known as the Needham report, due to the
fact the ISC was headed by the prestigious British scientist, came under
immediate fire upon release. The report still remains a flashpoint for
scholars. A 2001 article by the UK’s Historical Association detailed how
UN and UK government officials collaborated in attempts to debunk the
ISC findings. The UK Foreign Office released memoranda saying that
claims of Japanese bacteriological warfare, going back to 1941, were
“officially ‘not proven.’” (See article by Tom Buchanan in
Bibliography.)
The sensitivity of the material uncovered by the ISC
touched two areas of covert US government research. First was the US
government’s own plans to research and possibly implement germ warfare.
The second issue concerned the confessions of U.S. flyers as to how they
were briefed and implemented trial runs of biological warfare during
the Korean War.
China published the confessions of 19 U.S. airmen, but
those confessions are also notoriously difficult to obtain. The ISC
report published herein does include some of those “confessions,” and
the public can be allowed to decide for themselves how authentic or
genuine they are.
The U.S. claimed that the flyers were tortured, and the CIA
promoted the idea they were “brainwashed” by diabolical methods,
causing a scare about “commie” mind control programs and “menticide,”
which they used to justify the expenditure of millions of dollars for
U.S. mind control programs during the 1950s-1970s.
The programs, codenamed Bluebird, Artichoke, and MKULTRA,
among others, used experiments on unwitting civilians, as well as
soldiers undergoing supposed anti-torture training at the military’s
SERE schools. I have shown via public records that CIA scientists
continued to use experiments on “stress” at SERE schools after 9/11, and
believe such research included experiments on CIA and/or DoD held
detainees. That such research did take place can be inferred from the
release in November 2011 of a new set of guidelines concerning DoD
research. This newest version of a standard instruction (DoD Directive
3216.02) contained for the first time a specific prohibition against
research done on detainees. (See section 7c.)
I believe a strong case can be made that while coercive
methods, primarily isolation, was used on the U.S. prisoners of war who
later confessed, that their confessions were primarily true. The idea
that only false confessions result from torture is in fact false itself.
While false confessions can result from torture (as well as less
onerous methods, such as the Reid Technique, used by police departments
throughout the United States today), actual confessions can also
sometimes occur. I have first-hand experience working with torture
survivors to know that is true.
Even so, it is a fact that all the POWs who confessed use
of germ warfare later recanted that upon return to the United States.
But the terms of their recantations are suspect. The recantations were
made under threat of courts-martial, and after interrogations by U.S.
counterintelligence agents and psychiatrists. The archival evidence of
the flyers debriefings have been destroyed or lost due to fire
(according to the government). Meanwhile at least one scientist working
at Ft. Detrick at the time admitted to German documentary investigators
before he died that the U.S. had indeed been involved in germ warfare in
Korea. (See the documentary video, “Code Name: Artichoke.”[10])
An “actual investigation… could do us psychological as well as military damage”
The charges of U.S. use of biological weapons during the
Korean War are even more incendiary than the now-proven claims the U.S.
amnestied Japanese military doctors and others working on biological
weapons who experimented on human subjects, and ultimately killed
thousands in operational uses of those weapons against China during the
Sino-Japanese portion of World War Two. The amnesty was the price paid
for U.S. military and intelligence researchers to get access to the
trove of research, much of it via fatal human experiments, the Japanese
had developed over years of studying and developing weapons for
biological warfare.
During the Korean War, the U.S. strenuously denied charges
of use of germ weapons and demanded an international investigation
through the United Nations. The Chinese and North Koreans derided such
offers, as it was United Nations-sanctioned forces that were opposing
them in war and bombing their cities. But behind the scenes, the U.S.
government initiated a campaign to impugn the ISC report, something they
found difficult, as it turned out, according to a CIA-released document
I revealed in December 2013. The document also showed the U.S.
considered the call for a UN investigation to be mere propaganda.[11]
At a high-level meeting of intelligence and government
officials on July 6, 1953, U.S. authorities admitted behind closed doors
that the U.S. was not serious about conducting any investigation into
such charges, despite what the government said publicly.
According to this document, the reason the U.S. didn’t want
any investigation was because an “actual investigation” would reveal
military operations, “which, if revealed, could do us psychological as
well as military damage.” A “memorandum from the Psychological Strategy
Board (PSB) detailing this meeting specifically stated as an example of
what could be revealed “8th Army preparations or operations (e.g.
chemical warfare).”[12]
Charges of chemical warfare by the Americans during the
Korean War were part of a report by a Communist-influenced attorneys’
organization visiting Korea, and their findings were dismissed as
propaganda by U.S. authorities and commentators. But the PSB memo
suggests perhaps they were right.
Not long after I published the PSB document and
accompanying article, scholar Stephen Endicott wrote to remind me that
he and his associate Edward Hagerman, co-authors of the 1998 book, The
United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War
and Korea (see bibliography), had found material themselves that
indicated U.S. calls for “international inspection to counter the
Chinese and North Korean charges… was less than candid.”
Endicott and Hagerman found that U.S. Far East Commander,
Gen. Matthew Ridgway, had “secretly given permission to deny potential
Red Cross inspectors ‘access to any specific sources of information.’”
In addition, they documented a State Department memo dated June 27, 1952
wherein the Department of Defense notified that it was “impossible” for
the UN ambassador at the time to state that the U.S. did not intend to
use “bacteriological warfare — even in Korea.” (p.192, Endicott and
Hagerman)
The Khabarovsk War Crimes Trial
The ISC report also references the December 1949 war crimes
trial held by the USSR in Khabarovsk, not far from the Chinese border.
The trial of Japanese war criminals associated with Units 731, 100 and
other biological warfare divisions followed upon a near black-out of
such issues at the larger Toyko war crimes trials held by the Allies a
few years before.
At the time of the Khabarovsk trial, U.S. media and
government officials either ignored the proceedings, or denounced them
as yet another Soviet “show trial.” The Soviets for their part published
the proceedings and distributed them widely, including in English.
Copies of this report are easier to find for purchase used, though
expensive, on the Internet. Additionally, in the last few years Google
made a copy of the former Soviet volume available online (see
Bibliography). But no scholarly edition has ever been published.
Even so, U.S. historians have been forced over the years to
accept the findings of the Khabarovsk court, though the general
population and media accounts remain mostly ignorant such a trial ever
took place. The fact the Soviets also documented the use of Japanese
biological experiments on U.S. POWs was highly controversial, denied by
the U.S. for decades, was a quite contentious issue in the 1980s-1990s.
While a National Archives-linked historian has quietly determined such
experiments did in fact take place, the issue has quietly fallen off the
country’s radar. (See L. G. Goetz in bibliography.)
The relevancy of these issues is of course the ongoing
propaganda war between the United States and North Korea, as well as
Pentagon reallocation of resources to the Asian theater for a possible
future war against China. But it is the clear threat of a nuclear
exchange between North Korea and the United States that calls for
clarity around the issues that have led to the mistrust between the two
countries. Such clarity demands the release of all information that
would help the U.S. populace understand the North Korean point of view.
Such understanding, and acting upon such knowledge, may be all that
separates us from a catastrophic war that could potentially kill
millions of people.
The history behind the Korean War, and U.S. military and
covert actions concerning China, Japan, and Korea, are a matter of
near-total ignorance in the U.S. population. The charges of
“brainwashing” of U.S. POWs, in an ongoing effort to hide evidence of
U.S. biological warfare experiments and trials, also has become entwined
in the propaganda used to explain the U.S. post-9/11 torture and
interrogation program, and alibi past crimes by the CIA and Department
of Defense for years of illegal mind control programs practiced as part
of MKULTRA, MKSEARCH, ARTICHOKE, and other programs.
I hope that readers will feel free to disseminate this
article without any copyright reservations, as well as the ISC report
itself, an orphaned document from the Cold War.
Read report
Source: https://shadowproof.com/2018/02/22/read-long-suppressed-official-report-us-biological-warfare-north-korea/
