In 2019, the CIA proved that it had been lying to the public for decades about germ warfare in Korea when it released a trove of signals intelligence documents from the Korean War in a publication called Baptism by Fire: CIA Analysis of the Korean War.
The documents detail communications from CIA listening posts around the world that narrate the People’s Volunteer Army (PVA) of China and the North Korean People’s Army (KFA) responses to U.S. biological warfare (BW) attacks by airplane in North Korea from May 1951 through July 1953.
The communications include discussions of requests from field commanders to headquarters for instructions, back-up support, DDT (Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) and additional provisions to protect the local population from BW attacks that were designed to spread bubonic plague and other diseases among the local populations.[1]
For years, academic historians had dismissed the allegation that the U.S. had engaged in germ warfare in Korea as communist propaganda.
The CIA’s unintended smoking-gun revelations, however, make clear that these historians, wittingly or unwittingly, were themselves part of a U.S. government propaganda effort dating back to the 1950s.
The propaganda embraced racist caricatures of the North Koreans and Chinese as being devious and manipulative schemers who somehow—at the height of a deadly war against a world superpower—coerced thousands of eyewitnesses, scientists, public health specialists and 25 U.S. pilots into giving false testimony through brainwashing techniques the CIA later sought to itself apply in interrogation of enemy suspects.
Thomas Powell is an artist living in New Mexico who has written an important new book, The Secret Ugly: The Hidden History of US Germ War in Korea (Sacramento, CA: Edgewater Editions, 2023).
The thesis of the book is that the U.S. very clearly deployed germ warfare in the Korean War as an experiment to see if BW worked in combat, to terrorize the North Koreans into submission, and as a magic weapon to break the war’s stalemate by killing the enemy when it was hiding in underground bunkers and bomb shelters it had built to withstand withering U.S. bombing and napalm attacks.[2]
Powell’s parents, Bill and Sylvia Powell, were indicted in the heart of the McCarthy era on sedition charges for reporting on U.S. germ warfare and other Korean War atrocities in The China Monthly Review, an English language journal published in Shanghai. Each count carried a penalty of 20 years in prison, a $10,000 fine or both.
Bill’s father John B. Powell had founded the China Monthly Review in the 1920s.[3]
After World War II, Bill became increasingly critical of the U.S. support for General Chiang Kai-shek and enthusiastic about the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which triumphed in the Chinese Civil War in 1949 after winning over the peasant population by promoting land reform, literacy campaigns and women’s rights.
When the Korean War broke out, Powell was appalled by the brutality of U.S. troops. He wrote in the China Monthly Review:
“With millions of people dead and homeless in Korea as a direct result of the deliberate U.S. campaign of extermination, the latest American crime to come to light has been the launching of bacteriological warfare in Korea. Not content with wiping out entire cities and towns by napalm, bombings, massacres of military and civilian prisoners, and campaigns such as ‘Operation Killer,’ the Americans have resorted to one more bestiality in their frantic efforts to conquer the Korean people and extend their aggression in Asia.”[4]
The Powells’ sedition trial ended in a mistrial in 1959, though the couple was blacklisted from working in the journalism profession in San Francisco where they had settled.[5]
In 1980, after earning a living running a home renovation business and antique shop, Bill published an important article in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars entitled “Japan’s Germ Warfare: The U.S. Cover-up of a War Crime,” and another piece two years later, “A Hidden Chapter in History” in the prestigious Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
The two articles detailed how General Douglas MacArthur, as commander of the U.S. military occupation of Japan, cut a secret deal with Surgeon General Shiro Ishii and members of the Japanese Kwantung Army’s infamous Unit 731 who orchestrated large-scale germ warfare attacks in Manchuria and China during World War II and set up medical centers where they carried out sadistic medical tests on Chinese and other prisoners of war (POWs).[6]
Under the terms of the deal, General Ishii and his colleagues were saved from prosecution and paid to turn over their research to assist in the development of the U.S. bio-warfare program headquartered at a secret U.S. Army laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland, where Ishii was invited as a guest lecturer.[7]
One of Powell’s major contributions in The Secret Ugly is to show, building off the pioneering research of his father, that the germ warfare adopted by the U.S. in Korea was a joint U.S. and Japanese project. Besides Fort Detrick, U.S. germ-warfare capabilities were developed at the U.S. Army base at Atsugi, the CIA’s largest base of operations in Japan.
In order to preserve absolute secrecy, Powell believes that at least two Americans were killed: a) Dr. Frank Olson, a CIA biochemist working under Dr. Sidney Gottlieb (the CIA’s Dr. Death) at Fort Detrick who was beaten over the head and thrown out of a hotel window in New York after he expressed misgivings about his work; and b) Lt. Col. Arvo Thompson, who interviewed General Ishii about his BW activities and was found dead in his Tokyo hotel room under suspicious circumstances in May 1951, the same week that North Korean Foreign Minister Pak Hon-yong first announced the commission of U.S. BW attacks using smallpox-laced chicken feathers.[8]
Powell in his study lays out three positions in the BW debate that has gone on for 70 years. The first faction is the BW accusers, who include left-wing historians, journalists and a handful of independent scholars in which he includes himself.
The opposing denier faction is composed of powerful academics, State Department and Justice Department personnel, Pentagon generals, and quasi-government right-wing think tanks like the Woodrow Wilson Center.
A third group is the academic avoiders, Cold War historians who have opted to stay clear of this particular can of worms, whose silence protects their careers and indirectly supports the power structure.[9]
Powell makes clear that the accusers provided extensive and convincing evidence to back up their allegations. The most important evidence that he relays includes:
- Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett’s observation of clouds of insects hovering above the Yalu River shortly after a U.S. plane flyover there.
- The findings of an investigation by Canadian Reverend James Endicott who went to hospitals in Mukden, Manchuria, where he was shown reports and results of autopsies revealing cases of encephalitis, a disease which had never been known before in Manchuria. Medical workers told him that American aircraft were spraying airborne viruses mixed with dust and gelatin; in some cases, the germ turned out to be a deadly toxin causing botulism. Endicott was told by one authority of 44,000 casualties in three weeks in one small area as a result of aerosol spraying.
- Testimony by North Korean and Chinese farmers who observed flies they had never seen before in cold temperatures hovering over the snow. These flies were not organic to the regions and could only have been imported.
- Testimony of Chinese scientists who held a commitment to the truth.
- The findings of three independent fact-finding missions, including one led by Dr. Joseph Needham, a distinguished British scientist, which were thorough in their methods and unequivocal in their findings that BW had been adopted by the U.S. in the Korean War.[10]
- Depositions given by 25 captured U.S. pilots who, after being taken prisoner, confessed to carrying out germ warfare attacks. The pilots later retracted their confessions under duress from U.S. authorities who accused the Chinese of adopting brainwashing techniques to induce the confessions. However, Powell and other independent historians consider the confessions authentic because of the breadth of detail in them that could only have been known by people who did what they said.
- Evidence of a well-planned Chinese and North Korean public health campaign that was adopted to help the populations withstand the BW attack and survive it.
- The incriminating behavior of Dr. Crawford Sams, MacArthur’s chief of Public Health and Welfare Section in occupied Japan who, according to Powell, was “the initial kingpin of BW production and deployment in Korea,” and brought General Ishii on a floating medical laboratory where North Korean prisoners were experimented on. Sams tellingly wrote about diagnosing North Korean and Chinese prisoners with hemorrhagic smallpox. This disease never existed in Korea before and could be disbursed airborne using chicken feathers as the vector, Ishii’s pet invention and the method about which DPRK Foreign Minister Pak Hon-yong accused the U.S. of spreading smallpox.[11]
The deniers tried to undercut the massive evidence produced by the accusers by smearing their characters and denouncing them as communist dupes.
Over the last generation, one of the most vehement of the deniers is Milton Leitenberg, a research scholar with the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland (CISSM).
He claims that documents from the Soviet archive transcribed by a right-wing Japanese journalist point to the germ warfare allegations being a hoax masterminded by the Chinese.
However, the supposedly incriminating documents have never been authenticated and it is not known if they even exist. They supposedly discuss contamination in only two potential BW sites, and contain superfluous information that make them (if they actually exist) appear to be inauthentic or forged, according to Powell.
Leitenberg’s own credibility is put into question by his fabrication of an alleged Soviet submarine attack on Sweden in the early 1980s that was staged by Western intelligence agencies in order to ratchet up Cold War tensions and undermine the Swedish government led by Olof Palme which had sought to ameliorate relations with the Soviets.
Leitenberg has collaborated with Kathryn Weathersby, a scholar with the Woodrow Wilson Center, to try to discredit researchers who have published critical books, including James Endicott’s son, Stephen, who in 1988 published with Ed Hagerman, The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988).
Powell’s book shows Leitenberg’s and Weathersby’s efforts to be little more than an extension of a decades-long psychological warfare campaign to cover up U.S. war crimes in Korea and to preserve the myth of American exceptionalism.
Powell points out that Americans have long been taught that the U.S. fought in Korea to prevent the spread of communism, though he sees the war more realistically as a colonial land grab designed to set up a strategic beachhead—like in the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century—which the U.S. could use as a launching pad for military operations in Communist China.
The germ warfare attacks, sadly, were but one episode in a shameful imperial history that extends back to the era of the Indian Wars and continues through the present day, with the whitewashing of history helping to ensure the pattern of continuity.
[This article was originally published in Socialism and Democracy.—Editors.]
Thomas Powell, The Secret Ugly: The Hidden History of US Germ War in Korea (Sacramento, CA: Edgewater Editions, 2023), 288, 289, 290, 291. ↑
Powell, The Secret Ugly, 293. ↑
Sylvia Powell, Thomas’s mother who served as the China Monthly Review’s managing editor, was a press secretary of Madame Sun Yat-sen, the wife of Chinese revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen. ↑
Powell, The Secret Ugly, 16. ↑
Powell had been denounced in the Henry Luce-run Time magazine for “turning his father’s magazine into a mouthpiece for the Chinese reds.” (Powell, The Secret Ugly, 149, 150). ↑
Powell cites historian Daniel Barenblatt who estimates that 400,000 people in Manchuria and China were killed by well-orchestrated Japanese disease attacks employing plague, cholera and anthrax, all under the extremely grim and ruthless leadership of General Ishii. (p. 37) ↑
Ishii served as a consultant to the U.S. Army bio-warfare programs, making two visits to South Korea during the Korean War. The facts surrounding the U.S. acquisition of Japanese BW research came to light at the Khabarovsk war crimes trial of twelve Kwantung army soldiers captured by the Soviets, which was held December 25-30, 1948. (Powell, The Secret Ugly, 55) ↑
Powell, The Secret Ugly, 49, 50. ↑
Powell, The Secret Ugly, 60. ↑
The three reports were: We Accuse! Report of the Commission of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) in North Korea, May 16-27, 1951; Report on Investigations in Korea and China, March-April 1952, produced by the Commission of International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL); and the Report of the International Scientific Commission for the Investigation of the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in Korea and China (1952), produced under the auspices of the World Peace Council. The latter report, headed by Dr. Needham, found that the BW was similar, if not identical, to the BW employed to spread plague by the Japanese in World War II. ↑
Powell, The Secret Ugly, 113, 114. Powell calls Sams, who believed nuclear war was winnable, a “pathological mass murderer.” ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Left on Left.” He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of five books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), and Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023). Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency . He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
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