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Similarly, Baker cites my 2018 release of the Joseph Needham-authored, 700-plus page International Scientific Committee (ISC) September 1952 report on its investigation into the BW charges. The members of the committee were drawn from six different countries, mostly in Western Europe.
"It's a remarkably detailed document, worth taking a look at,"Baker writes of the report (p. 219), but he barely mentions any of the evidence the ISC presented.
The one ISC-detailed incident Baker does relate in some depth misreports the facts, and hence comes to a conclusion diametrically opposite to those of the ISC investigators.
This is a crucial section of his book, as it pertains to the veracity of the germ warfare charges, and tests Baker's own thesis about what all the seeming germ warfare activity was really about. We therefore must look at it in more detail here.
The Kan-Nan Plague Attack
The episode Baker analyzes from the ISC report concerns the dropping by U.S. airplanes in April 1952 of hundreds of voles over villages gathered around the town of Kan-Nan (Kan-Nan hsien) in far Northeast China. The entire narrative cannot be rendered here, but in summary, the voles were reportedly infected with plague.
The problem was, in the heat of the attack, health officials saw to it that nearly all the voles were immediately destroyed, as a wartime public health measure. (Most commentators today, even Milton Leitenberg, believe that the mass of North Koreans and Chinese believed they were being attacked with biological weapons, including infected insects and small animals.)
Baker says that the ISC report concludes that from a single vole that was rescued from destruction, no colonies of plague could upon examination be observed. He takes this to be an example of a massive CIA deception operation to make the North Koreans and Chinese believe they were the victims of germ warfare attack. The voles, according to this theory, were blank bullets, so to speak. They were real, and American planes dropped them, but they were not infected with plague or any other bacteriological toxin.
Baker's own thesis derives from, one, the fact that no fatalities were observed from this attack; and two, his belief that subsequent evidence of plague bacteria was manufactured. (Other plague attacks discussed in the ISC report did have documented fatalities, but Baker never notes this.)
He writes that the sole Soviet member of the ISC "shows up, injects a guinea pig with the experimental material saved months earlier, and easily finds evidence of plague bacteria. Presto. Not convincing" (p. 221).
But that's not what the documentary record in the ISC report states! Baker relates the ISC investigators found only "partially obscured colonies that might possibly resemble plague." But the findings of two prominent Chinese plague experts, reproduced in the ISC report, concluded, "From the vole, Pasteurella pestis [plague] was isolated" (ISC report, p. 251).
True, the Chinese scientists found it difficult at first to determine if plague were present. This was because the singular sample they had was contaminated with coliform bacteria. Such contamination is, as one modern scientific paper I reviewed put it, "a widely occurring phenomenon and a prominent problem in microbiological research and microbial production."
But the scientists looking at the Kan-Nan material did not give up. They selected two of the colonies they had that weren't completely overgrown with coliform bacteria and cultured them on an agar plate. Then they injected the material into two mice, one albino rat, and two guinea pigs. The result? The mice died. "Autopsy revealed typical pathological changes of plague." (ISC report, p. 250). Other similar results followed. From the spleen and liver of one rat and and a guinea pig "typical colonies
of Pasteurella pestis were obtained."
So how did Baker conclude that a Soviet member of the ISC team had doctored the results? If this was all an elaborate hoax, why did the ISC publish the detailed protocols of the bacteriological examination of the vole, presenting all the difficulties of producing the plague evidence from the sole remaining specimen? (See Document M-6 in the ISC report.) Why not just say you found plague and be done with it? Why not kill off some prisoners and pass them off as BW victims, as Milton Leitenberg claims was done, referring to Soviet and Chinese documents he attests are authentic?
If the germ warfare story was a "hoax," why is there no evidence of it to be found in the highly classified signals intelligence documents published several years ago by the CIA? It is a case of the dog who did not bark.
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