The KPA and the PVA took the attack with extreme seriousness. The COMINT documents narrate some of the enormous mobilization efforts of the communist armies during the entire 18-month duration covered by these documents. Epidemic control measures included the formation and deployment of specialized first response units to exterminate insects and to sanitize drop zones, DDT, field hospitals, quarantine, improved sanitation, improved personal hygiene, and vaccines. In addition, a complete blackout on disclosure of infection and mortality rates, which was considered top secret military intelligence by China and North Korea, was imposed. They have still not released these figures today.
The massive scale of this on-going military and public health effort is factually chronicled in these documents. There could be no military rationale for the communist forces to sustain this costly defensive mobilization for so many months if the US BW attack was not real.
The CIA's own published intelligence reports completely demolish all prior arguments put forward by US officials and apologists. The COMINT documents are the smoking gun. What they confirm is that the US BW attacks against North Korea and China during the Korean War can no longer be dismissed as "alleged", but must now be understood as established historical fact, confirmed by the existence of these internal CIA documents.
The BW denial arguments which are now proved false are the following:
- The BW charges were all a communist propaganda campaign to discredit the US/UN. This claim was made by Harry Truman, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Sen. Joe McCarthy and by numerous politicians on down the line and across the political aisle. It was loudly parroted in 1952 and 1953 by a zealous, anti-communist Western press anxious to discredit the commission findings of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL) and the International Scientific Commission (ISC). Both fact finding groups traveled to the front lines of the war in North Korea and China to investigate the BW charges and found them to be factual and published detailed reports.
- China, North Korea, and the USSR orchestrated a gigantic BW hoax scheme to tar brush the US. This is the thesis proposed by Milton Leitenberg based upon two documents- a "discovered" Soviet dossier and the supposed memoir of Wu Zhili, a heroic Chinese war medic. Leitenberg, with his academic appointment at the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland, and his connection with The Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington D.C. is the dean of the US BW denial lobby. Kaye points out in his article that the COMINT documents reveal fatal factual errors in both of Leitenberg documents. I have also demonstrated in earlier papers that Leitenberg's evidence are forgeries, and that Mr. Leitenberg has a long track record of untruthful academic research.
- China and North Korea over-reacted because they were misled by their own BW threat assessment. This is the argument put forward by Martin Furmanski and Mark Wheelis. It proposes that the Chinese and North Korean communists were well aware of WWII Japanese BW atrocities in Manchuria, and that they were also well aware that the US had acquired the research of Unit 731 along with the collaboration of Dr. Ishii and his former staff. Furmanski and Wheelis propose that North Korea and China anticipated a US BW attack, they were extremely paranoid about it, and they quickly jumped to denounce the US on flimsy evidence from which they could not politically back down, hence, the elaborate fabrication of a hoax and the huge propaganda campaigns. This argument assumes that the communist leadership was not very smart. It further assumes that Korean and Chinese medical science was not sufficiently skilled to perform autopsies and do the requisite lab work to identify pathogens. However, the1952 ISC Report noted the extensive Western educational credentials of the investigating Chinese scientists, doctors, entomologists, and pathologists, giving this racist argument little credibility even among the denial crowd.
- The insect dropping campaign of 1952 was psychological warfare to sow panic, not to spread disease. The latest theory proposed earlier this year by Nicholson Baker in his new book, Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act, concludes that the US may have resorted to some BW attacks in 1951, but the main insect-dropping campaign of 1952 was psychological warfare to terrorize the population and to divert scarce resources from the communists' all-out war effort.
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