Socialism and Democracy ISSN: 0885-4300 (Print) 1745-2635 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csad20 On the Biological Warfare “Hoax” Thesis Thomas Powell To cite this article: Thomas Powell (2018) On the Biological Warfare “Hoax” Thesis, Socialism and Democracy, 32:1, 1-22, DOI: 10.1080/08854300.2018.1441118 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/08854300.2018.1441118 Published online: 17 Apr 2018. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 200 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=csad20 Socialism and Democracy, 2018 Vol. 32, No. 1, 1–22, https://doi.org/10.1080/08854300.2018.1441118 On the Biological Warfare “Hoax” Thesis Thomas Powell I Milton Leitenberg’s biological warfare (BW) hoax theory is not believable. For the past three decades, Leitenberg has paraded the thesis that the allegations of BW use leveled against the US by North Korea and China during the Korean War has all been a nefarious hoax – a grand piece of political theater – deviously orchestrated by Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and the swarthy Joseph Stalin. Leitenberg’s thesis epitomizes the deeply embedded racism of America’s Cold War politics. He has enjoyed bounteous support from right-wing academia and quasi-government think tanks. The BW hoax thesis has impacted scholarship and US foreign policy, and it is a major stumbling block to improving US relations with North Korea. In this article I will argue that Leitenberg’s thesis is a house of cards built on forged docu- ments, false claims and fake facts. Arrayed against the hoax thesis is the entirety of collected material evidence and eye-witness testimony.1 That body of evidence includes the depositions of Korean and Chinese civilians who witnessed US aerial attacks during the war;2 it includes the testimony of a British soldier of a ground deployment by US paramilitary personnel during the retreat from the Yalu River in the winter of 1950–51;3 and it further includes the leveling of criminal sedition charges 1. Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman lay out the most convincing case for US bio- warfare in the Korean War in, The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1989. 2. This recent article contains eye-witness testimony of BW deployment in North Korea in 1952. Julian Ryall, “Did the US use germ warfare in Korea,” The Telegraph, 10 June 2016, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/7811949Did-the- US-wage-germ-warfare-in-Korea.html 3. “It was all very fishy. They were surprised and unhappy to see us. It was obvious that something suspicious was going on, and that it was a clandestine affair.” From an eye- witness account by a British soldier of an American Army special detachment dressed in “parkas” spreading chicken feathers into private homes in a North Korean village behind retreating UN Forces. The narrative is quoted at length in Peter Williams and © 2018 The Research Group on Socialism and Democracy 2 Socialism and Democracy against American journalists for reporting the allegations of germ warfare.4 Additional evidence includes the revelation of a highly advanced Japanese BW program Unit 731 during WWII located near Harbin, China which was responsible for the deaths of 400,000 Chinese and Russian nationals, the secret acquisition of this BW program by the US Army,5 the quid pro quo granting of immunity to Unit 731 director Shiro Ishii and his subordinates from war crimes prosecution,6 the Soviet Union’s prosecution of General Otozo Yamada at the 1949 Khabarovsk War Crimes Trial and the rev- elations of that tribunal,7 the anchorage in Wonsan Harbor of US Infantry Landing Craft No 1091 described by Newsweek Magazine as the “bubonic plague ship,”8 the strange mission of its commander, General Crawford Sams, to abduct an infected enemy soldier from a North Korean hospital bed,9 the appearance of diseases hitherto unknown to the region, namely, pulmonary anthrax and hemorrhagic meningitis,10 the lab reports of Chinese medical examiners published in the December, 1952 Chinese Medical Journal,11 the confessions of 19 American pilots and crew shot down and captured behind enemy David Wallace, Unit 731: The Japanese Army’s Secret of Secrets, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1989, 265–266. 4. John W. Powell, an American journalist living in Shanghai who published the news magazine, China Monthly Review, was indicted along with his wife, Sylvia Powell and their colleague, Julian Schuman on charges of Sedition for their coverage of the BW allegations during the war. For a concise history of the Powell-Schuman Sedition Trial, see Stanley Kutler, The American Inquisition: Justice and Injustice in the Cold War, Hill & Wang, New York, 1982. 5. A Bruise—Terror of the 731 Corps,afilm by Haruko Yoshinaga, broadcast November 1976, Tokyo Broadcasting System. Yoshinaga succeeded in locating and interviewing 20 former members of Unit 731. 6. John W. Powell, “Japan’s Germ Warfare; The US Cover-up of a War Crime,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Vol. 12, No. 4, Oct.–Dec. 1980, 10. 7. On the Trial of Former Servicemen of the Japanese Army Charged with Manufacturing and Employing Bacteriological Weapons, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1950 8. Williams and Wallace, Unit 731, 263 9. Ibid., 260 10. “Anthrax infection by the respiratory route is significant with the work of bacterio- logical warfare carried out in the US. Research from Camp Detrick published in 1946 and 1947 (see App. AA & II) show that it has been possible to obtain new strains of anthrax bacilli cultured in synthetic media which not only possess unu- sually high virulence, but are especially adapted to the respiratory route of infection.” Report of the International Scientific Commission for the Investigation of the Facts Concern Bacterial Warfare in Korea and China (ISC Report), Peking, 1952, 34 11. Chinese Medical Journal, Sept.–Dec. 1952, 335–660. Thomas Powell 3 lines,12 the mysterious and dramatic murder of CIA bio-weaponer Frank Olson,13 and not least, the extensive findings of the International Scientific Commission (ISC) led by Joseph Needham which investi- gated the BW allegations and concluded unequivocally that the US had indeed engaged in germ warfare attacks by air against North Korea and China at identified locations on specific dates and times.14 The preponderance of all this evidence is indisputable, yet the US government continues to this day to refuse to address any of this evi- dence case by case. The government’s defense tactic at the time (and remains today) was to lump all BW war crime evidence against it into one basket which it then ignored or dismissed as communist propa- ganda. There was never any attempt to refute or provide countervailing evidence of any charge in any of the specific evidence categories. Instead, the US embraced the inherently racist strategy of employing authority figures in government and academia to heap scorn upon the Chinese and North Korean accusers. Disparaging speculations regard- ing the motives of victims were openly aired in Congress. A systematic purging of Korean War records was secretly begun, and the national “forgetting” of the Korean War became unspoken policy. Finally, the US initiated the vigorous prosecution and the threat of prosecution against whistle blowers to silence the truth. US denial has also consisted of a continuous disinformation cam- paign. The official denial mantra asserted the BW allegations were false accusations intended to smear the US. When Secretary of State Dean Acheson sanctimoniously denied any “UN Command” involve- ment in BW deployment, this denial served as a diversionary smoke- screen for what was largely a CIA paramilitary operation outside UN Forces command.15 The US-led UN Command could claim clean hands because the dirty work was provided by outsourced CIA covert operatives. 12. Endicott and Hagerman give an interesting account of the pilot’s recantations of their confessions in The United States and Biological Warfare, 166–170. 13. Eric Olson has worked tirelessly to shed light on his father’s murder. Here is a summary of the Frank Olson murder case with sources [www.serendipity.li/CIA/ olson2.htm]. The Netflix six-part documentary, Wormwood, directed by Errol Morris, investigates the Olson assassination and the shadowy CIA operations which surrounded it. 14. ISC Report,1–62. 15. Thomas Powell, “Korean War Biological Warfare Update,” Socialism and Democracy, Vol. 31, No. 3, 2017, 133. This does not mean that the Army, the Air Force and the JCS were not operational in germ war deployment, but the CIA provided the covert over- sight to bury the evidence. 4 Socialism and Democracy In 1998, the false allegations claim of the US morphed into a more sophisticated version with the publication of two papers by scholars, Kathryn Weathersby and Milton Leitenberg of the Woodrow Wilson Center.16 Leitenberg claimed that new evidence consisting of 12 docu- ments, collectively the “Russian dossier,” allegedly smuggled from the Soviet Union Presidential Archive proved beyond any doubt that the BW allegations by North Korea and China were a complete fabrica- tion. The communist had staged a Cold war political gambit to tar brush the US on the international Cold War propaganda front. It was a devious but failed tactic in the larger struggle between the competing hegemonic systems of communism and capitalism. Leitenberg’s “hoax thesis” has been generously underwritten by the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Cold War International History Project (CWIHP). In 2016, Leitenberg revisited this subject for CWIHP with a second essay claiming additional documentary evidence to support his theory.17 Documents #1–16 consist of cable correspondence between Mao, Zhou and Stalin regarding immediate measures necess- ary to combat the new BW threat.