Jeffrey Kaye has spent more than a decade researching the United States’ use of biological weapons during the Korean War (1950 to 1953). When I began “Bitten,” his foundational work helped me understand why, in 1951, the military hired Swiss zoologist Willy Burgdorfer to develop ways of mass-producing germ-laden fleas, ticks, and mosquitoes so that they could be released on enemies.
Kaye believes that the U.S. military significantly enhanced their knowledge on how to weaponize bugs from post-World War II interviews with Japan’s notorious Unit 731 bioweapons group. In exchange for their collaboration, many of these participants were granted immunity from their war crimes, which included inhumane experiments on prisoners.
Kaye’s research paints a disturbing picture of the U.S. military’s decision to use biological weapons on entire populations during the Korean War. The military even crafted a cover-up plan beforehand, which included threats of prosecution against U.S. airmen who confessed to dropping cholera-laced feathers, plague-infected rodents, and spider bombs on China and Korea.
Not surprisingly, Kaye’s evidence challenges the official U.S. narrative on this subject. But in my opinion, he’s pieced together a convincing story, despite the military’s history of document destruction, overclassification, and propaganda.
The takeaway here is that there are important lessons to be learned from this hidden history, namely, how military decisions to develop and release biological weapons were made, and how we can prevent potentially disastrous releases in the future.
What’s your background, and what led you to become an expert on the U.S. military’s use of bioweapons in the Korean War? I’m a retired clinical psychologist who, for 10 to 15 years, spent time doing assessments and psychotherapy with torture victims who were applying for political asylum in the United States. In the course of that work, I joined with other psychologists and doctors who opposed the U.S. government’s use of torture after 9/11. One thing I read at that time was that the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program had been based on the military’s SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) training on how to deal with possible torture by foreign entities of captured U.S. soldiers, spies, or other officials.
According to Congressional investigators and reporters at the time, the SERE training was originally devised to inoculate U.S. soldiers, officers, intelligence agents and diplomats against the forms of supposed Chinese torture used during the Korean War. Such torture was presumed to be effective in producing false confessions. The most famous case of such alleged false confessions was the accusation that two dozen captured U.S. airmen in the U.S. Air Force and Marines dropped biological weapons on Korea and China beginning in January 1952.
Initially, I believed the assertions about the Chinese use of torture in these cases. But I wanted to see examples of the flyer confessions because I thought it would help me better understand the differences between false confessions of torture and the kinds of narratives my clinical clients were providing me. I thought I could use such data when describing in court (where I was considered an expert witness) whether a particular client was being truthful or not.
But what I discovered was that these flyer confessions were unavailable to the U.S. public. I finally obtained a copy of them from the Imperial War Museum in London. As I continued to examine the details around the biological warfare allegations, I also found that many other primary documents were either missing, still classified or had been destroyed. At first, I was intrigued, but as time went on, I became convinced that the Communist bio war allegations were, in fact, true and that their cover-up constituted one of the more bizarre cases of government censorship I had ever heard of. On my own, I began to research the issue. Since, for the most part, the Korean War germ warfare scandal was considered a dead issue by most U.S. historians, I was quite alone in doing this. Along the way, I discovered a small handful of other researchers also working on this same or closely related issues.
Germ warfare poster: “Flies grow in cesspools and love to buzz around people. They carry countless germs and throw germ bombs everywhere.” 1952. NIH Digital Collections.
Could you provide an overview of the biological weapons operations conducted during the Korean War? Due to state secrecy, we have only a rough idea of the course of the U.S. biological warfare campaign during the Korean War. But below, I’ve outlined what we know about these events based on previous investigations, U.S. pilot confessions, and various U.S., Canadian, and UK government documents.
The U.S. had been pursuing an offensive biological warfare campaign since they discovered the Japanese had developed a strong program in the mid-1930s. Even before the Korean War started, the Pentagon’s Research and Development Board created the Stevenson Committee (reporting to the Secretary of Defense), which had the task of assessing the need for greater biowarfare research. In June 1950, the Committee concluded that the U.S. needed to significantly step up research in this regard. There was also the fact that the Nazis, too, had made some moves in the bio war field, though not to the extent of the Japanese. Moreover, there was paranoia about what the Soviets might be up to in this regard.
By the end of 1950, the Republic of Korea (South Korea) had a plan for using biological organisms to poison wells and foodstuffs. This bacterial sabotage plan was discovered by the North Korean army when it occupied Seoul in 1950. The plan was consistent with the activities of Japan’s Unit 731 during World War II. Meanwhile, government documents from the Army Chemical Corps (ACC), which led the U.S. biological warfare program at the time, acknowledged that the U.S. state of biological weaponry was still in its infancy. The germ bombs needed greater refinement, except for the “feather bomb” used to release feathers contaminated with organisms to attack enemy food supplies. Experts agreed that using biological organisms in sabotage situations was quite feasible.
Meanwhile, the Army continued to work on perfecting newer versions of old diseases to make them more lethal. This included developing a strain of smallpox that was resistant to vaccines, and, in 1951, Americans were accused of causing a smallpox outbreak in North Korea.
The U.S. plan to deploy aerial biological weapons came after a significant military setback. Beginning in late 1950, Chinese military “volunteers” entered the war and forced U.S.-led troops to retreat from the border with China to below the 38th parallel. At this time, the U.S. seriously considered using nuclear weapons, but in the end, it was deterred because the Soviets had them, too. The use of biological weapons was meant to cause chaos and confusion in the rear of Chinese and North Korean lines and to precipitate panic among the general population.
But because the U.S. military wasn’t yet ready to use many of their newly designed weapons, they turned to the proven biological weapons used by Japan’s Unit 731, weapons that largely relied upon the use of insects to deliver disease-causing pathogens. It has been alleged that former Unit 731 personnel, including leader Shiro Ishii, were directly involved. (A few years before the Korean War, the U.S. had provided immunity from WW2 war crimes to Ishii and his associates, part of a quid pro quo where the ACC scientists at Camp Detrick would learn from Unit 731’s experiences using and experimenting with biological weapons.) To date, we do not have hard evidence of Japanese participation in the biological warfare campaign in Korea, but it does seem highly likely. Some historians have documented how former members of Unit 731 were integrated into postwar Japanese academia and healthcare organizations. Some were known to have offered assistance to U.S. authorities on health issues, including work with the U.S. Army’s 406th Medical General Laboratory, which has been associated with some accusations of involvement in the germ war campaign in Korea.
In any case, the U.S. saw the use of bioweapons in Korea as an experiment in operational use. I have been able to document at least two individuals who lobbied amnesty for Ishii and company, who went on to hold key positions in the Pentagon’s Research and Development Board and Ft. Detrick’s bioweapons research program.
By December 1951, both Canadian and UK biological warfare officials said in their own internal communications that they expected the U.S. to begin using biological weapons. [KN note: Willy Burgdorfer arrived in the U.S. in December 1951, then traveled to Canada for a US/UK/CN bioweapons meeting in 1952.] According to the US flyers’ accounts, the experimental program on aerial bioweapons drops began in December 1951 and continued to expand over the course of 1952. The program involved use of both US Air Force and Marine Corps planes. Drops were made over villages, train depots, and in the rear or near enemy military units. The organisms used included anthrax, plague, and cholera, and possibly encephalitis viruses and hantavirus. The ordnance included bombs with special compartments that opened up as specific elevations or contact with the ground. Spraying of organisms or insects also apparently occurred.
In 2010, the CIA declassified a number of communication intelligence reports from the Korean War. These reports were based on decrypted intelligence intercepts from Communist military radio transmissions. I found two dozen of these that included overheard conversations by Chinese and North Korean military personnel discussing how to react to the U.S. bioweapons attacks, the importance of testing to exclude false reports, and the health consequences some military units were facing because of these attacks. From what I’ve found, the attacks, which were stepped up in May 1952, continued into 1953.