Back in the early 1950s, the United States carried out a furious bombing campaign during the Korean War, dropping hundreds of thousands of tons of munitions, mostly napalm, on North Korea.
The bombing, more terrible than those experienced by any other country up to that point except Hiroshima and Nagasaki, wiped out almost all of North Korea’s cities, resulting in the deaths of more than a million civilians.
Due to the incessant bombing, people were forced to live in tunnels. Even the usually hawkish General John MacArthur said he found the destruction caused by the United States abhorrent.[1]
Most controversially, both North Korea and China claimed that by early 1952 the US was using biological or bacteriological weapons against both North Korea and China. The US government categorically denied this.
However, captured American pilots told the North Korean and Chinese military about the use of such weapons. Later, after the prisoners returned to the United States, they were interrogated by counterintelligence experts and psychiatrists. Under the threat of a military tribunal, they were asked to retract their confessions about bacteriological warfare.
The Army criminal investigations officer responsible for interrogating returned prisoners, including airmen who confessed to using biological weapons against North Korea and China, was Army counterintelligence specialist Colonel Boris Pash.
Pash was previously responsible for the security of the U.S. government’s most secret operations during World War II. He was responsible for security at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory as part of the Manhattan Project. (The Manhattan Project is the American program to develop the atomic bomb.)
Immediately after the war, military intelligence officer Pash led the Alsos mission, which sought to locate Nazi and Italian nuclear scientists and fissile materials, and to collect “intelligence on any enemy scientific research applicable to his war effort,” including biological and chemical weapons. Pash later worked for the CIA and in the 1970s faced congressional investigators over his alleged involvement in Agency assassinations.[2]
To convince the world of the truth of their claim that the US had dropped biological weapons on their countries, and after rejecting a proposal that the International Red Cross investigate the allegations, North Korea and China sponsored the creation of a commission of inquiry.
Under the auspices of the World Peace Council, they brought together a number of scientists from around the world, most of whom sympathized with either the left or the peace movement. The most amazing thing is that this commission, which became known as the International Scientific Commission or ISC, was headed by one of the outstanding British scientists of his time, Joseph Needham.
The ISC includes scientists from a number of countries, including Sweden, France, Italy and Brazil. The representative of the Soviet Union, Dr. N. N. Zhukov-Verezhnikov, was the chief medical expert at the Khabarovsk trial of Japanese officers of Detachment 731, accused of participating in bacteriological (also known as biological or bacteriological) warfare before and during World War II, as well as conducting horrific experiments on prisoners to achieve this goal. Zhukov-Verezhnikov continued to write scientific articles throughout the 1970s.
Needham himself, although condemned in the Western press for his views on the US use of biological weapons during the Korean War, remained a highly regarded scientist for many years after the publication of the ISC report. He was elected to the British Academy in 1971. In 1992, the Queen gave him the Knights of Honour.[3]
In the summer of 1952, the ISC visited China and North Korea and by September produced the «Report of the International Scientific Commission of Inquiry into the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in Korea and China,» which supported Chinese and North Korean claims that the United States was using biological weapons on an experimental basis in civilian population.
The brief report was only about 60 pages, but the ISC collected more than 600 pages of documentary material, including statements from witnesses, including airmen involved in the weapons drop, as well as captured enemy agents; doctors’ reports; journal articles from the United States; autopsy and laboratory test reports; as well as photographs and other materials. Much of this documentary material was virtually inaccessible for decades, with only a few copies of the ISC report held in a few scattered libraries across the United States.
Four-chamber bacterial bombs (leaflet bombs) dropped by American aircraft on the villages of Ta-Wai-Tsu, Chia-Tsai-Shui and Chang-Pai-Hsien, Liaotong Province. From the ISC report, page 403
The report concluded that the United States used a number of biological weapons, including anthrax, plague and cholera, which were spread through more than a dozen different devices or methods, including spraying, porcelain bombs, self-destructing paper containers paper parachute, leaflet bombs, etc.
This article is not intended to address the full range of opinions or evidence on whether the United States used biological weapons in the Korean War. Instead, it represents an attempt to publish key documents supporting such claims—documents that have been effectively hidden from the American people and the West at large for decades.
Controversy
Accusations that the United States used biological weapons during the Korean War have long been the subject of intense controversy.
Reliance, in particular, on the testimony of American prisoners of war has led to accusations of US «brainwashing». These allegations later became the basis for the CIA’s covert experiments in drugs and other forms of coercive interrogation and torture that formed the basis of the 1963 KUBARK interrogation manual, and much later had a strong influence on the CIA’s «enhanced interrogation» program. after September 11.
Leading Cold War researchers were quick to refute the ISC report. The most notable efforts in recent years have included the publication of purported letters from Soviet officials that stated there was no evidence of U.S. biological warfare and a decision to create such evidence to deceive the West.[4] Subsequently, the memoirs of Wu Zhili, former director of the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army’s Health Department, were published in 1997, claiming that the alleged US use of bacteriological agents in the Korean War was in fact a «false alarm». [5]
As two Canadian scholars who have spent years studying Chinese-North Korean biological warfare claims point out, if these documents turn out to be true, they would be inconsistent with the bulk of archival evidence, including interviews with relevant witnesses in both the United States and China. [6] Some of this archival evidence has emerged more recently, including the CIA’s declassification of a significant portion of previously top-secret daily intelligence cables from the Korean War.[7]
Cables concerning North Korean biological warfare claims, which were rejected by American officials, prove that the North Koreans took seriously the belief that they were under attack with a biological weapon, and that they were concerned that reports from the field were not falsified by zealous , albeit by ignorant people sending them [reports].
There is no evidence that North Korean officials or personnel ever falsified evidence of biological warfare.
A wealth of archival evidence can also be found in the classified materials of the Needham Report. For example, Wu Zhili’s document states that «for the entire year [1952-1953], not a single sick or dead person related to bacteriological warfare was found.»
Map showing the route of the American B-26 aircraft that entered the airspace of Su Ping and Man Ching on March 14, 1952. From the ISC report, page 470
But the ISC report recorded a number of such deaths, including from pulmonary anthrax, a very rare disease almost completely unknown in China at that time.
Appendix AA to the report, “Report on the Occurrence of Respiratory Anthrax and Hemorrhagic Meningitis Following the Invasion of U.S. Military Aircraft Over Northeast China,” details the presence of anthrax in autopsy and laboratory examinations of five individuals who died in March-April 1952. According to American experts who studied the details of this report, the conclusions about death from pulmonary anthrax could not have been falsified[8].
Until recently, no effort was made to make Needham’s original materials available to other scientists or the public so that they could judge for themselves the truth or falsity of his analysis. Last year, scientist Milton Leitenberg posted a copy of the ISC report on Scribd, but it is a very rough scan and not searchable or easy to use by the public. The report’s release was not publicized, and the public in particular remains in the dark about its findings.
The version of the ISC report published here uses state-of-the-art book scanning equipment and is text searchable.
Censorship Regarding Squad 731-US Collaboration on Biological Weapons Data
One important part of the ISC report ensured that its proliferation in the US was stopped after its initial publication. The report discussed the activities of Imperial Japan’s biological warfare unit, Unit 731, and U.S. interest in its activities.
In 1952, cooperation between the United States and Japanese war criminals who used biological weapons was top secret and completely denied by the American side.
But today, even American historians recognize that between the United States and members of Unit 731 and associated units of the Japanese military, which actually conducted experiments on the use of biological weapons since the mid-1930s, experiments that included human vivisection and the barbaric torture of thousands of human the creatures, most of whom were destroyed in the crematoria, a deal was struck.
In addition, as described in Bernd Martin’s book chapter listed in the bibliography, there was also cooperation on these issues between the Japanese and the Nazi regime.
US collaboration with Japanese war criminals Unit 731 was officially recognized by the US government in 1999, although documents confirming this recognition were not published until almost 20 years later.[9]
The fact that the US government declared an amnesty to the head of the Japanese Unit 731, doctor and general Shiro Ishii and his accomplices, has already become a historical reference. The amnesty was kept a closely guarded secret for decades until it was revealed by journalist John Powell in a landmark article for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in October 1981.
The report, called the Needham Report, due to the fact that the ISC was headed by a reputable British scientist, was immediately criticized upon its release. This report continues to be the subject of heated debate among scientists.
An article published in 2001 by the Historical Association of Great Britain details how the UN and British government officials collaborated in attempts to refute the ISC’s findings.
The British Foreign Office published a memorandum stating that claims of Japanese germ warfare since 1941 are «officially ‘not proven'» (see Tom Buchanan’s entry in the Bibliography).
The sensitivity of the materials discovered by ISC affected two areas of classified US government research.
Firstly, these are the US government’s own plans to research and, possibly, adopt bacteriological weapons.
The second question concerned the confessions of American pilots about how they were instructed and how they tested biological weapons during the Korean War.
China has released confessions from 19 American pilots, but those confessions are also notoriously difficult to obtain. The ISC report published here contains some of these «confessions» and the public can decide for themselves how genuine or reliable they are.
From the testimony of Lt. J. Quinn, ISC Report, p. 614 (PDF)
The US alleged that the flyers were tortured and the CIA promoted the idea that they were brainwashed by diabolical methods, feared by «communist» mind control and «menticide» programs. (menticide), which they used to justify spending millions of dollars on American mind control programs in the 1950s-1970s.
Programs codenamed Bluebird, Artichoke, and MKULTRA, among others, used experiments on unsuspecting civilians as well as soldiers undergoing supposed anti-torture training at SERE military schools.
I have proven through public records that CIA scientists continued to use «stress» experiments in SERE schools after 9/11, and believe that such studies included experiments on prisoners held by the CIA and/or the Department of Defense.
The fact that such research has actually taken place can be seen in the new set of guidelines for research in IR released in November 2011. This newest version of the standard guidance (DoD Directive 3216.02) for the first time specifically prohibits research on prisoners (see section 7c.).
I believe it can be convincingly demonstrated that although coercive methods, most notably isolation, were used against American prisoners of war who subsequently confessed, their confessions were essentially truthful. The idea that torture only leads to false confessions is actually itself false. Although false confessions can be the result of torture (as well as less onerous methods such as the Reed technique used by police departments across the United States today), true confessions sometimes occur. I have direct experience working with victims of torture and know this to be true.
However, the fact remains: all prisoners of war who admitted to using bacteriological weapons subsequently retracted their words upon returning to the United States. But the conditions of their refusal are suspicious. Refusals were made under threat of a military tribunal and after interrogation by American counterintelligence agents and psychiatrists. Archival evidence of pilot interrogations was destroyed or lost due to fire (according to the government). Meanwhile, at least one scientist working at Fort Detrick at the time admitted to German documentarians before his death that the United States was indeed involved in germ warfare in Korea. (See the documentary Code Name: Artichoke [10]).
“The present investigation… could cause both psychological and military damage to the United States.”
Allegations of US use of biological weapons during the Korean War are even more flammable than the now proven allegations that the US granted amnesty to Japanese military doctors and other biological weapons workers who experimented on humans and ultimately killed thousands of people in the process. operational use of these weapons against China during the Sino-Japanese part of World War II.
The amnesty was the price to pay for U.S. military and intelligence officials to gain access to the vast research materials that the Japanese had conducted over years of studying and developing biological warfare weapons, much of it through lethal experiments on humans.
During the Korean War, the United States strenuously denied accusations of using biological weapons and demanded an international investigation through the United Nations. The Chinese and North Koreans rejected these proposals because it was UN-sanctioned forces that opposed them in the war and bombed their cities. But behind the scenes, the US government was mounting a campaign to discredit the ISC report, which turned out to be no easy task for them, according to a CIA document I disclosed in December 2013. The document also shows that the United States considered the call for a UN investigation to be mere propaganda[11].
At a meeting of senior intelligence and government officials on July 6, 1953, American officials admitted behind closed doors that the United States did not intend to seriously pursue any investigation into such allegations, despite the government’s public statement.
According to this document, the reason the US did not want any investigation was that a «factual investigation» would reveal military operations «which, if discovered, could cause us both psychological and military damage.» «The Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) memorandum detailing this meeting stated, as an example of what might be disclosed, ‘Eighth Army training or operations (e.g., chemical warfare)'»[12].
Accusations of American use of chemical weapons during the Korean War were part of a report by a communist-influenced advocacy group that visited Korea and their findings were dismissed as propaganda by US authorities and commentators. But the PSB memo suggests they may have been right.
Shortly after I published the IOW document and accompanying article, scientist Stephen Endicott wrote to remind me that he and his colleague Edward Hagerman, co-authors of the 1998 book The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea. United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea (see bibliography) themselves found materials indicating that the US call for “international inspection to counter accusations from China and North Korea… was less than forthright.”
Endicott and Hagerman discovered that the commander of US forces in the Far East, General Matthew Ridgway, «secretly gave permission to deny potential Red Cross inspectors ‘access to any specific sources of information.'»
They also documented a State Department memo dated June 27, 1952, in which the Department of Defense advised that it was “impossible” for the UN ambassador at the time to say that the United States had no intention of using “germ warfare—even in Korea.” (p. 192, Endicott and Hagerman)
Khabarovsk War Crimes Trial
The ISC report also mentions a war crimes trial that took place in December 1949 in the USSR in Khabarovsk, near the Chinese border. The trial of Japanese war criminals linked to Units 731, 100 and other biological weapons units followed the near silence of similar issues in the larger war crimes trials in Tokyo held by the Allies several years earlier.
During the Khabarovsk trial, American media and government officials either ignored it or denounced it as another Soviet «show trial.»
The Soviets, for their part, published the materials and distributed them widely, including in English. Copies of this report are easier to find online, although they are expensive. Additionally, over the past few years, Google has made a copy of the former Soviet volume available online (see Bibliography). But not a single scientific publication was ever published.
However, American historians over the years have been forced to accept the Khabarovsk trial’s findings, although the general population and media reports remain largely unaware that such a trial ever took place.
Nevertheless, over the years, American historians have been forced to accept the conclusions of the Khabarovsk court. However, the public and the media remain largely unaware that such a trial took place.
The fact that the Soviet Union also documented the use of Japanese biological experiments on American prisoners of war was highly controversial, denied by the US for decades, and considered a rather controversial issue in the 1980s and 1990s. Although a historian associated with the National Archives has quietly established that such experiments were indeed being carried out, the matter has quietly fallen off the country’s radar. (See L. G. Goetz in the bibliography.)
The urgency of these questions is, of course, driven by the ongoing propaganda war between the United States and North Korea, as well as the Pentagon’s reallocation of resources to the Asian theater for a possible future war against China.
But it is the clear threat of a nuclear weapons exchange between North Korea and the United States that demands clarity on issues that have led to mistrust between the two countries. Such clarity requires the release of all information that will help the American public understand North Korea’s point of view. Such understanding and acting on such knowledge may be what separates us from a catastrophic war in which millions of people could potentially die.
The history of the Korean War, as well as US military and covert actions towards China, Japan and Korea, is a subject of almost complete ignorance among the US population.
Accusations of brainwashing American prisoners of war in ongoing attempts to hide evidence of American experimentation and testing of biological weapons are also woven into the propaganda used to explain the American torture and interrogation program after 9/11, as well as to justify past crimes by the CIA and the Department of Defense over the years. illegal mind control programs practiced by MKULTRA, MKSEARCH, ARTICHOKE and others.
I hope that readers will feel free to share this article without any attribution, as well as the ISC report itself, an orphaned Cold War document.
The full report can be viewed and downloaded here: www.documentcloud.org
Author: Geoffrey Kaye is a retired psychologist who has worked professionally with victims of torture and asylum seekers. Active in the anti-torture movement since 2006, he runs his own blog, Invictus , and has previously written regularly for Firedoglake’s The Dissenter , as well as The Guardian, Truthout, Alternet and The Public Record. He is the author of the new book Cover Up at Guantanamo Bay , which examines declassified material about the treatment of detainees at the Guantanamo Bay camp.
Original source: medium.com
Translation source: newsstreet.ru
Bibliography and footnotes:
[1] Robert M. Neer, Napalm: An American Biography, 2013, Belknap Press, pg. 100.
[ 2 ] “Boris Pash and Science and Technology Intelligence,” Masters of the Intelligence Art series, US Army Intelligence Center, Ft. Huachuca, undated. URL: http://huachuca-www.army.mil/files/History_MPASH.PDF (retrieved 1/20/2018)
In regards to Pash’s association with the CIA, we don’t know when his involvement with the Agency began, but it appears to have been quite early. Watergate defendant E. Howard Hunt told Congressional investigators in 1976 Pash was involved in assassination activities for the CIA during the 1960s. See “Executive Session, Saturday, January 10, 1976, United States Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Washington, DC” URL: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/wp-content/uploads/ 2015/12/1976-Executive-Session-Hunt-testimony-on-Pash.pdf (retrieved 1/20/2018)
[3] See URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Needham (retrieved 1/ 20/18). The article drew the information from Winchester, Simon (2008), The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom . New York: HarperCollins.
[4] Leitenberg, Milton. (1998). Resolution of the Korean War Biological Warfare Allegations. Critical reviews in microbiology . 24. 169–94. 10.1080/10408419891294271.
[5] “Wu Zhili, ‘The Bacteriological War of 1952 is a False Alarm’,” September, 1997, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, Yanhuang chunqiu no. 11 (2013): 36–39. Translated by Drew Casey. https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/123080
[6] “False Alarm? The Bacteriological War of 1952 — Comment on Director WuZhili’s Essay” by Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, Department of History, York University (ret.), June 2016, http://www.yorku.ca/sendicot/On%20WuZhili-false -alarm.pdf
[7] “Baptism By Fire: CIA Analysis of the Korean War Overview,” URL: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/collection/baptism-fire-cia-analysis-korean-war -overview
[8] For a full discussion, see “Updated: The Suppressed Report on 1952 US Korean War Anthrax Attack,” https://valtinsblog.blogspot.com/2017/04/revealed-suppressed-report-on-1952- us.html
[9] Jeffrey S. Kaye, “Department of Justice Official Releases Letter Admitting US Amnesty of Japan’s Unit 731 War Criminals,” Medium.com, May 14, 2017, URL: https://medium.com/@jeff_kaye/department- of-justice-official-releases-letter-admitting-us-amnesty-of-unit-731-war-criminals-9b7da41d8982
[10] URL: https://www.cultureunplugged.com/documentary/watch-online/play/ 9586/Code-Name-Artichoke
[11] Jeffrey Kaye, “CIA Document Suggests US Lied About Biological, Chemical Weapon Use in the Korean War,” Shadowproof, Dec. 10, 2013, URL: https://shadowproof.com/2013/12/10/cia-document-suggests-us-lied-about-biological-chemical-weapon-use-in-the-korean-war/# ( accessed May 14, 2017)
[12] For the actual memorandum document, see URL: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80R01731R003300190004-6.pdf
More interesting articles that I don’t have time to translate, but which can be read through online translation, can be found here: t.me/murrrzio
Der Friedensstifter 