The problem with Baker's conclusion is that it is a complete non-sequitur from the revelations in the rest of his book. Baker's research into FOIA files is excellent and he succeeds in squeezing much needed detail from heavily redacted CIA and Defense Dept. files exposing the full-scale of the US biological weapons program centered at Ft. Detrick, MD. But the scientists, generals, and policy makers Baker introduces us to are not choir boys who would be squeamish about murdering hundreds of thousands of "evil communists" with deadly germs and viruses. After all, the role of global hegemon requires calculated brutality, viciousness, and overwhelming military interventionism. This has indeed been the unpleasant reality of US foreign policy since WWII. Baker's conclusion suffers from dualism; must it be either/or? Spread disease or sow fear? Hasn't germ warfare always done both?
Baker obviously did not find the smoking gun in his ten-year FOIA search and he admits it. After Bill Powell, and the Canadian research team of Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman who gave up on FOIA and went to China for better data, Baker's is the third laborious effort to fall short searching for the BW smoking gun through FOIA. This makes Jeffrey Kaye's revelation of the CIA trove all the more remarkable because the CIA voluntarily coughed it up. So why would it do that?
Kaye's answer to this author cuts right to the chase. "They drank their own Kool-Aid." The CIA is the patsy of its own hubris. It has become such an enormous rigidly compartmentalized bureaucracy of "don't question" and "right think" that the workings and agenda of one part of the agency are unknown to others. A younger generation of archivists do not know the agency's history or its most jealously guarded secrets. The CIA has always prided itself on its patrician, Ivy League intellectual heritage, and this sycophantic self-image has lulled it into complacency. In other words, they fucked up big time.
The US undertook the BW campaign in the Korean War for multiple reasons both immediate and long-term.
1. The Korean BW campaign was an experiment to see what actually worked in combat after a decade of intense US scientific research and the acquisition of the Japanese research.
2. By late 1951 the US had bombed and napalm firebombed North Korea to rubble. The KPA and the general population had survived by tunneling underground where bombing was ineffective. The war had stalemated into WWI style trench warfare and the US Army needed a game changer. BW was touted to be a weapon which could kill the enemy hiding in its bunkers and bomb shelters.
3. Imperial ideology is always steeped in racism. The US has a long legacy dating from earliest colonial times of violent repression against Native Americans and African slaves. US war planners had no moral qualms about the mass killing of Asians with germs.
4. US war planners did conceive of BW as psychological warfare with the goal to sow terror among the populace to undermine communist resolve. Not all insects dropped were infected with disease. This was a psychological tactic to confuse the enemy into making false claims, and to provide US deniability. This subject is discussed in the 1952 ISC Report in respect to springtail flies.
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