[News] Dirty little secrets - US used biological weapons against Korea

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Dirty little secrets

http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/peopleandpower/2010/03/201031761541794128.html
By Diarmuid Jeffreys

This summer marks the 60th anniversary of the 
start of the Korean War, a bloody three-year 
conflict that set Communist North Korea against a 
South Korea supported by a UN coalition headed by the US.

It was the first armed confrontation of the Cold 
War and by the time a truce was agreed in 1953, 
two million soldiers and two million civilians had been killed or wounded.

Six decades on, the conflict is still not formally resolved.

Troops from both sides continue to face each 
other across the 38th parallel, while the 
relationship between Washington and Pyongyang, 
the North Korean capital, is dominated by 
acrimonious quarrels over the latter's nuclear weapons programme.

But there is another bitter and intractable 
dispute that continues to haunt both sides.

North Korea alleges that the US used biological 
weapons against Korean civilians during the war– 
dropping "germ" bombs containing insects, 
shellfish and feathers infected with anthrax, 
typhoid and bubonic plague on villages across the country.

The US has always vehemently denied these claims, 
dismissing them as crude and outlandish communist 
propaganda from a secretive and totalitarian state.

Nevertheless, the accusations have refused to go 
away. Pyongyang continues to press for an apology 
for an "outrage" that the US insists never happened.

Twenty-year mystery

In a specially extended edition, People & Power 
set out to investigate this extraordinary story.

Our journey began in North Korea where we were 
given unprecedented access to follow a leading 
Japanese academic, Professor Mori Masataka, who 
has been trying to unravel the mystery for the last twenty years.

On this, his fourth visit to the country, Mori's 
intention was to talk to men who claim to have 
witnessed, first hand, biological attacks on villages in 1952.

But neither he nor People & Power's location 
producer, Tim Tate, were under any illusions.

North Korea is one of the world's most secretive 
states and is usually impenetrable to 
journalists. Everywhere our cameras went, 
government officials went too, strictly 
monitoring where and what we could film.

In a vast museum in the centre of Pyongyang, Mori 
explored a room given over to what the North 
Koreans claim is direct evidence of US germ 
warfare – including specimen jars filled with 
flies, mosquitoes and fleas all allegedly injected with deadly pathogens.

A smartly uniformed army officer, Captain Ryu Uk 
Hui, drew his attention to some salvaged bomb casings.

On impact, she said, they were adapted to split 
open and release the insects to infect the local 
population. A film-show followed.

The grainy black and white footage, purportedly 
North Korean news film from 1952, appeared to 
show masses of insects crawling on the snow 
covered ground beside the bomb casings.

All this could have been phony, of course, and 
that is how the US has always responded to such 
claims, especially to filmed "confessions" from 
36 captured US airmen – also screened in 
Pyongyang's museum – in which they give the North 
Koreans apparently detailed accounts of their 
participation in the US "germ" raids.

Accounts that, it must be said, were all 
retracted on the air crew's' return home to the US after the war.

Hwanjin

But other testimony is more difficult to fake convincingly.

Later, we are driven deep into the North Korean 
countryside, to a village called Hwanjin, where 
two elderly farmers are patiently waiting.

It is clear they have been tidied up for the 
occasion and both wore patriotic badges pinned to 
their tunics, yet their weathered faces, 
calloused hands and still grimy fingernails speak 
of long years spent in the fields.

Although it is impossible to be sure, neither 
seems to be a Communist Party apparatchik primed 
for the occasion. And one speaks with convincing 
passion about the events that took the life of 
his father and many others, in the days after the insects came.

"It was in March", says Yun Chang Bin. "The flies 
were big and their colour was brown-ish.

"Not long after that, about April, terrible 
epidemics like typhoid fever were spread. People 
in the village developed high temperatures. Loss 
of appetite and then aches on the arms and legs, there was much pain."

There were some 50 households in the village, he 
went on, and more than thirty people died.

"My father died. He suffered a high fever, and 
then he was not able to use the lower half of his 
body, he wasn't able to eat and was not able to move."

As his fellow farmer nods encouragingly beside 
him, Yun Chang Bin looks directly at Professor Mori.

"I want you to go and tell the peace-loving 
people in the world about the atrocity the 
Americans committed to inflict pain to us, to 
make us unhappy, to kill all us Korean people, by 
scattering germ bombs to exterminate us."

Tears and grimace

At another village, another eyewitness, Li San, 
Bum holds his arms out as he describe the iron 
bomb that almost six decades ago had tumbled out 
of a low flying plane onto a nearby frozen lake, 
spilling its cargo of insects out onto the snow. 
And then the villagers began to get sick and die.

"When they moved their bowels their stools had 
blood in them. And then they developed fever, and 
the fever made them vomit everything. My 
grandmother died after contracting this fever. 
One of my uncles died as well. So we should 
regard the Americans as arch enemies - how can we 
think well of them," Li San says.

Mori has interviewed dozens of North Koreans over 
the years and has heard similar tales from all of 
them. "They told me their stories, shedding tears 
and grimacing with anger. They told me this germ warfare actually happened."

But however convincing he has found these 
accounts, Mori knows that testimony from North 
Korean citizens will not be enough to convince a 
sceptical world that the US used germ warfare in Korea.

"A scientific investigation or medical or 
biological investigation should be carried out. I 
think it is definitely necessary that a 
non-political purely-scientific organisation 
should be sent to North Korea to investigate", Mori says.

As it happens, within months of the original 
allegations being made back in the 1950s, North 
Korea invited an international commission to visit the country.

International commission

Composed of scientists from France, Italy, 
Sweden, the Soviet Union and Brazil, and led by 
Joseph Needham, a distinguished – if left-leaning 
- British embryologist, the commission toured the 
affected areas, interviewed the sick and the 
dying and carried out a detailed analysis of their infections.

The resulting 600-page report included results of 
post-mortem on the victims: these identified 
bubonic plague, cholera and anthrax.

It concluded that germ warfare had been deployed 
exactly as the North Koreans claimed. Yet despite 
its apparent wealth of scientific evidence, it 
was again dismissed by the US as communist disinformation.

Which is why, if a new international enquiry was 
ever undertaken, it would have to spread its net 
far further than North Korea and to the US, in 
particular, where the truth almost certainly 
lies, buried deep in the Cold War secrets of a superpower.

It was there that People & Power discovered that 
during the 1940s and 1950s American scientists at 
the US Army base in Fort Detrick, Maryland, had 
developed ways of delivering bomb-loads of 
insects infected with bubonic plague and other deadly pathogens.

Our investigations also uncovered two remarkable 
documents in the US National Archives.

Unit 731

They revealed that the US had bought the 
expertise of Unit 731, a Japanese army biological 
warfare team, which conducted human experiments 
in the 1930s and 1940s to perfect the technology 
of bacteriological warfare: in World War 2, the 
Japanese military had dropped thousands of "germ 
bombs" across Northern China, killing millions of civilians.

A third crucial document – marked "Top Secret" 
–  showed that in September 1951, the US Joint 
Chiefs of Staff issued orders to begin "large 
scale field tests
 to determine the effectiveness 
of specific BW [bacteriological warfare] agents under operational conditions."

If these "field tests" were indeed undertaken, 
then they may have drawn again on the expertise 
of the Japanese biological warfare team.

In Japan, People & Power found home video footage 
from one of the former members of that team, shot 
just before his death, in which he claimed that 
its leaders had indeed assisted the US in mounting "an attack" in Korea.

But perhaps the most telling evidence came from a 
former US air force officer who took part in bombing raids over North Korea.

Kenneth Enoch was shot down in January 1952 and held as a POW for 20 months.

"Confessions"

While in captivity, he was one of 36 US air force 
officers who made written and filmed 
"confessions" that they had taken part in "germ bomb" missions.

When these POWs were repatriated in 1953, the US 
department of defence threatened to charge them 
with treason for co-operating with their captors.

Each then retracted their confessions in front of 
military cameras: each claimed they had been 
tortured or indoctrinated by North Korean and Chinese guards.

But when we tracked down and interviewed Enoch, 
now a sprightly 85 and living in a gated 
retirement community in Texas, he denied having 
been ill-treated or indoctrinated – and appeared 
to make at least a partial admission that the US 
did use biological weapons in the Korean War.

"The people who deal in that don't have to go and 
fight, and that's a pretty sweet deal for them. 
You know, but they send it with you," he said. 
Nevertheless, he continued to deny that he 
personally played any part in biological weapons attacks.

Records of Enoch's bombing missions over North 
Korea were removed by US air force investigators 
from the official records in March 1952 – two 
months after he was captured and one week before 
he made his confession to "germ warfare".

People & Power asked both the US state department 
and the department of defence for an interview 
about the issue raised in our film.

They turned down the offer and also declined to 
answer ten specific questions we put to them about North Korea's allegations.

"Baseless claims"

Instead, a spokesman for the US administration 
dismissed the claims as "baseless" and said they 
were "the disinformation campaign that refuses to die."

So who is to be believed? Professor Mori 
Masataka, thinks he knows the answer. "Use of 
germ weapons in war is in breach of the Geneva 
Convention. I think that's why the Americans are 
refusing to admit the allegations. But I have no 
doubt. I'm absolutely sure that this happened."

The clear implication, of course, is that were 
North Korea's claims ever to be proved, the US 
might be open to prosecution for war crimes – 
which would be awkward, to say the least, at a 
time when the US is relying on its moral 
authority to underpin international efforts to 
combat global terrorism and nuclear proliferation.

Either way, one thing is clear. Until the 
allegations are laid to rest and the US's 
innocence or culpability is established beyond 
doubt - perhaps by an independent enquiry – one 
of the most enduring Cold War mysteries will 
continue to haunt Washington's relationship with 
the world's most secretive state.

This episode of People & Power can be seen from 
Wednesday, March 10, 2010 at the following times 
GMT: Wednesday: 0600, 1400; Thursday: 1900; 
Friday: 0230; Saturday: 0530 and 1900.




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