a) within a week to present a proposal regarding the future position of the Government of the Soviet Union on the question "On the use of bacteriological weapons by the American troops in Korea;"

b) to prepare the text of a report which will be handed, by workers of the USSR MID [Ministry of Foreign Affairs] who will be sent to Beijing and Pyongyang, to Comrades Kuznetsov and Suzdalev so that they can inform Comrades Mao Zedong and Kim Il Sung about this

matter.

4. To introduce for confirmation by the Plenum of the CPSU Central Committee the following proposal of the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee:

"In connection with the incorrect and dishonest conduct, revealed by the new circumstances, of the former minister of State Security of the USSR Comrade Ignatiev, of concealing from the government a number of important state documents, to remove S.D. Ignatiev from the membership of the CPSU Central Committee."

5. To commission the Party Control Commission of the CPSU Central Committee to review the question of the party responsibility of S.D. Ignatiev.

8. Resolution of the Presidium of the USSR Council of Ministers about letters to the Ambassador of the USSR in the PRC, V.V. Kuznetsov, and to the Charge d'Affaires of the USSR in the DPRK, S.P. Suzdalev, 2 May 1953

For Mao Zedong

"The Soviet Government and the Central Committee of the CPSU were misled. The spread in the press of information about the use by the Americans of bacteriological weapons in Korea was based on false information. The accusations against the Americans were ficticious."

To give recommendations:

To cease publication in the press of materials accusing the Americans of using bacteriological weapons in Korea and China.

To consider it desirable that the Government of the PRC (DPRK) declare in the UN that the resolution of the General Assembly of 23 April about investigating the facts of the use by the Americans of bacteriological weapons on the territory of China (Korea) cannot be legal, since it was made without the participation of representatives of the PRC (DPRK). Since there is no use of bacteriological weapons, there is no reason to conduct an investigation. In a tactical way to recommend that the question of bacteriological warfare in China (Korea) be removed. from discussion in international organizations and organs of the UN.

Soviet workers responsible for participation in the fabrication of the so-called "proof" of the use of bacteriological weapons will receive severe punishment.

In accordance with the resolution confirmed by the USSR Council of Ministers No. 1212 487 of 7 May 1953, the adviser of the embassy of the USSR to the PRC Vas'kov was sent to Beijing and Pyongyang with instructions from the Soviet government.

On 11 May 1953 at 24:00 Kuznetsov and Likhachev were received by Mao Zedong. Zhou Enlai was also present.

After listening to the recommendation of the Soviet government and the CPSU Central Committee about the desirability of curtailing the campaign for unmasking the Americans' use of bacteriological weapons in Korea and China, Mao Zedong said that the campaign was begun on the basis of reports from the command of Chinese volunteers in Korea and in Manchuria. It is difficult to establish now the authenticity of these reports. However, we have studied this question and will return to it once more. If falsification is discovered, then these reports from below should not be believed. In his turn, Mao said that in the struggle against counterrevolution, 650,000 persons were executed in the country, [and] it is true that one should not think that all those killed were guilty. Some number of innocent people apparently suffered.

In the course of the conversation some nervousness was noticed on the part of Mao Zedong, he smoked a lot, crushed cigarettes and drank a lot of tea. Towards the end of the conversation he laughed and joked, and calmed down. Zhou Enlai behaved with intent seriousness and some uneasiness.

Kuznetsov

10. Memorandum from the Chairman of the Party Control Commission of the CPSU CC Shkiriatov to G.M. Malenkov about the Results of the Party Investigation of the Actions of the Former Minister of State Security of the USSR S.D. Ignatiev, in Connection with the Report of Former Advisers to MOB and MVD [Ministry of Internal Affairs of the] DPRK, Comrades Glukhov and Smirnov, 17 May 1953

The note from Glukhov and Smirnov stayed with Ignatiev S.D. from 2 April until 3 November 1952. After this

time he passed it to Goglidze and told him that when the declarants [Glukhov and Smirnov] return from Korea he should tell them that they had not written notes on this question. Even after handing over the affair he did not say anything to anyone about it, and the note was discovered by L.P. Beria in the archival materials of the Ministry of State Security. A verification was conducted. In regard to this Ignatiev explained that he was under the impression of the published materials and did not attach any significance to the note. He did not believe in the authenticity of the information contained in it. He said that in July or in August 1952 he was called to Stalin on an official question and showed him this note. It is not possible to verify this. He must suffer political punishment.

Decision of the CPC of CC CPSU [Party Control Commission of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union]:

For violation of state discipline and dishonest conduct to exclude Ignatiev S.D. from membership in the CPSU.

In connection with the illness of Kim Il Sung, I was received by the Secretary of the Central Committee of the Labor Party of Korea, Pak Chang-ok. After listening to the recommendation of the Soviet government and the Central Committee of the CPSU for Kim Il Sung about the desirability of curtailing the campaign for unmasking the Americans' use of bacteriological weapons in Korea and China, Pak Chang-ok expressed great surprise at the actions and positions of [Soviet ambassador] V.N. Razuvaev. Pak Chang-ok stated the following: "We were convinced that everything was known in Moscow. We thought that setting off this campaign would give great assistance to the cause of the struggle against American imperialism." In his turn, Pak Chang-ok did not exclude the possibility that the bombs and containers were thrown from Chinese planes, and [that] there were no infections. At the end of the conversation, Pak Chang-ok expressed gratitude for the information presented and assured [me] that as soon as Kim Il Sung's health situation improves, he will inform him of the recommendation of the Soviet government and the Central Committee of the CPSU.

Suzdalev

12. Decision of the Party Control Commission of the CPSU CC regarding Comrade S.D. Ignatiev, 2 June 1953

Copies to: Molotov Khrushchev Beria

Ignatiev S.D., during his tenure as minister of State Security of the USSR, having received in April 1952 a document of special political importance, did not report it to the government, as a result of which the prestige of the Soviet Union, [and of] the camp of peace and democracy, suffered real political damage.

In elucidating this question, Ignatiev gave false explanations. Moreover, verification of investigative work in the former Ministry of State Security of the USSR established that Ignatiev, being under the thumb of the adventurist and secret enemy of the Soviet people, the former chief of the Investigative Section for specially important matters of the USSR MGB, Riumin, allowed gross violations of Soviet legality and the falsification of investigative materials. According to these materials Soviet citizens were subjected to groundless arrests and charged with false accusations of committing serious state crimes.

Perverted methods of investigation and measures of physical coercion were used against those arrested according to the materials fabricated in this way. Through the files fabricated in the former Ministry of State Security, Ignatiev presented to governing organs knowingly false information.

For deception of the party and government, gross violations of Soviet legality, state discipline and dishonest conduct to exclude S.D. Ignatiev from membership in the CPSU.

Molotov-for Khrushchev-for Beria-for

Dr. Kathryn Weathersby, an independent scholar based in Washington, D.C., has published widely on the history of the Korean War. She has edited and translated numerous Russian documents for past issues of the Bulletin. Her publications include "Stalin, Mao and the End of the War in Korea," in Brothers in Arms: The Rise and Fall of the Sino-Soviet Alliance, 1945-1963, ed. Odd Arne Westad (Cold War International History Project Book Series No. 1; Stanford UP/Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1998).

War, An International History (Princeton; Princeton University Press, 1995); Shu Guang Zhang Mao's Military Romanticism, China and the Korean War, 1950-1953 (University of Kansas Press, 1995) as well as files this author has read from the Foreign Ministry and Presidential Archive, some of which have been published in CWIHP Bulletin 6/7 (“New Russian Documents on the Korean War").

'As political officer of the Soviet embassy in Pyongyang, Tunkin played a key role in Moscow's Korea policy prior to the war.

Memorandum to A. Gromyko from G.I.Tunkin, V.Bazykin and A. Shugaev, 13 March 1952. AVPRF, Fond 0102, Opis 8, Delo 17, Papka 36, List 27.

*Memorandum from Vyshinsky to Stalin, with attached draft answers, 12 April 1952. AVPRF Fond 07, Opis 25, Delo 233, Papka 19, Listy 1-14.

'S.Golunsky and G.Tunkin to Vyshinsky, 26 April 1952. AVPRF, F. 07, Op. 27, D. 226, Pap. 46, L. 3-4.

"In November 1949 the DPRK's request that the Soviet Union temporarily transfer to a Korean port two steam shovels located in the Manchurian port of Dalny was handled by deputy foreign minister Gromyko. AVPRF, F. 0102, Op. 5, D. 39, Inv.

326, Pap. 13, L. 1-4, 6-7.

7Shu Guang Zhang, Mao's Military Romanticism, 181-187. In an interview on August 26 Zhang added to his published account the information that Soviet advisers had warned Chinese commanders to be prepared for US use of weapons of mass destruction.

Chen Jian, China's Road to the Korean War, The Making of the Sino-American Confrontation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

"Kathryn Weathersby, "Stalin, Mao and the End of the Korean War," in Odd Arne Westad, ed., Brothers in Arms: The Rise and Fall of the Sino-Soviet Alliance, 1945-1963 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 90-116.

10For the text of the decision of the Council of Ministers to reach a negotiated settlement in Korea, adopted 19 March 1953, see Issue No. 6/7 of the Bulletin, pp. 80-82.

"For a discussion of Beria's foreign policy initiatives after Stalin's death see Vojtech Mastny, The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity. The Stalin Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 171-190. 12Knight, Beria, p. 92.

"For Mao Zedong

By Milton Leitenberg

The major allegation of the use of biological

T

weapons one of the three categories of weapons of mass destruction, along with nuclear and chemical weapons-in the Cold War was made during the Korean War against the United States. In 1951 and again in 1952, the People's Republic of China (PRC), North Korea, and the Soviet Union charged that the United States had used a wide range of biological warfare (BW) agents, bacterial and viral pathogens and insect vectors of disease, against China and North Korea. They alleged the use of BW agents against humans, plants, and animals. The charges were organized into a worldwide campaign and pressed at the United Nations; it was scarcely a matter simply of "the spread of press information..." US government officials denied the charges, but it has never before been possible to establish definitively whether the charges were true or false.

In January 1998, however, a reporter for the Japanese newspaper Sankei Shimbun published findings from twelve documents from former Soviet archives that

provide explicit and detailed evidence that the charges were contrived and fraudulent.' One document (a fragment of it) is dated 21 February 1952, while the remaining eleven date from 13 April to 2 June 1953, in the four months following Stalin's death on 5 March 1953. While it is clear that the twelve documents are far from a complete history of the events, they nevertheless describe, at least in part, how the allegations were contrived by Chinese officials and Soviet advisors, and identify several of the individuals involved in the process. This paper provides a brief history of the allegations and a summary of the documents' major disclosures.

The Charges

On 25 June 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea. Chinese military forces-the "Chinese People's Volunteers" (CPV)—crossed the Yalu River and entered combat beginning in October 1950. In the spring of 1951, Chinese media repeatedly stated that the United States was using chemical weapons ("poison gas") against Chinese

forces. (Communist media had already claimed that the US had shipped mustard gas to Korea.) At the same time, China also carried on what can be considered a preparatory campaign to the major allegations that followed, charging that the United States was preparing to use biological weapons. (These two campaigns will both be discussed in more detail below.) The first charge filed of actual BW use came on 8 May 1951. The Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea) sent a cable to the President of the United Nations Security Council alleging the use of bacteriological weapons by US forces in Korea during the period of December 1950 to January 1951 and that the United States had spread smallpox. After several weeks, the issue then essentially lapsed until early 1952.

On 22 February 1952, Bak Hun Yung, North Korea's Foreign Minister, again issued an official statement addressed to the UN Secretariat alleging that Washington had conducted biological warfare. (It was apparently forwarded to the UN only on 29 March 1952.) It charged that the US had carried out air drops of infected insects of several kinds bearing plague, cholera and other diseases over North Korean territory on January 28 and 29, and February 11, 13, 15, 16, and 17. Two days later, on February 24, PRC Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai, publicly supported the North Korean charges. On March 8, Zhou Enlai enlarged the accusations against the United States by charging that the U.S. had sent 448 aircraft on no less than 68 occasions between February 29 and March 5 into Northeast China to airdrop germ-carrying insects. The human diseases alleged to have been spread included plague, anthrax, cholera, encephalitis and a form of meningitis. Zhou Enlai also alleged that Washington had spread animal and plant diseases-fowl septicemia, and eleven incidents involving four different plant diseases— using 18 different species of insects and arachnids (spiders and ticks), as well as some small rodents as the vectors. He identified infected clams, paper packets, cloth receptacles as well as various kinds of earthenware and metallic sectioned "leaflet bombs" as dispersion media.2 The Chinese and North Korean governments attempted to buttress their allegations through the use of two "international commissions" of their own selection which operated under highly constrained procedures. In September 1951, the International Association of Democratic Lawyers decided to send a commission to Korea to investigate various "violations of international law." The commission visited North Korea between 5 March and 19 March 1952, immediately after the main BW accusations were made, and then went to China for the following weeks. It issued two reports in Beijing on 31 March and 2 April 1952: Report on U.S. Crimes in Korea, which contained a major emphasis on allegations of chemical weapons use as well as bacterial weapons, and Report on the Use of Bacterial Weapons in Chinese Territory By the Armed Forces of the United States.3 These reports seem rather clearly intended as a formal war

2

crimes indictment. The second report charged violations of the Geneva Protocol of 1925 and the Genocide Convention of 1948, concluding:

We consider that the facts reported above constitute an act of aggression committed by the United States, an act of genocide, and a particularly odious crime against humanity. It indeed hangs over the whole world as an extremely grave menace, the limits and consequences of which cannot be foreseen.

On 7 April 1952, the Chinese government's own investigating commission issued a report with an even more explicit war crimes accusation:

The U.S. Government, in carrying out savage and vile aggression against the People's Republic of China, has committed not only the crime of aggression but also crimes against humanity and crimes in violation of international conventions and laws and the laws and customs of war.... We demand that those responsible in the U.S. Government and the U.S. Armed Forces and the degenerate elements in American scientific circles be branded as war criminals to be tried by the people throughout the world and severely punished.

That same Chinese government commission was reported as having begun its studies on 15 March 1952, and it was presumed to have been the group which gathered the "evidence," the materials and testimony displayed to the second international group convened by the Communist-oriented World Peace Council, the "International Scientific Commission for the Investigation of the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in Korea and China," referred to as the ISC. The Chinese representative to the World Peace Council

...declared that the governments of China and [North] Korea did not consider the International Red Cross Committee sufficiently free from political influence to be capable of instituting an unbiased enquiry in the field. This objection was later extended to the World Health Organization, as a specialized agency of the United Nations.

The ISC was chaired by Dr. Joseph Needham, a wellknown British biochemist who had headed the British Scientific Mission in China from 1942 to 1946. In that period, he had served as an advisor to the (Nationalist) Chinese Army Medical Administration, and had participated in an investigation of Japanese use of BW in China during World War II. Needham was also an avowed Marxist. After visiting North Korea and China from 23 June to 31 August 1952, the ISC also produced a Report of the International Scientific Commission for the Investigation of the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in Korea and China, published in Beijing in 1952. The massive volume contained 669 pages with extensive

background information on entomology, vectors,

pathogens, epidemiology, and so forth, little of which the Commission would have been likely to have been able to draw up themselves given their location and the amount of time available. The ISC report documents fewer incidents, and fewer types of incidents, than were reported by the jurists, which in turn were fewer than reported by Chinese media statements.

The "investigations" of both commissions were very similar. They did no field investigations or analyses of their own. They received testimony which they duly accepted and reported as fact. They had no independent corroboration of any of the artifacts and materials presented to them. These elements were explicitly brought out in some of the early discussions which followed the release of the Report of the ISC. The Swedish representative on the Commission

...told the press in September 1952, after returning from China: "The scientific foundation of the Commission's work consisted of the fact that the delegates implicitly believed the Chinese and North Korean accusations and evidence." Dr. Needham himself was asked at a press conference what proof he had that the samples of plague bacillus he was shown actually came, as the Chinese said, from an unusual swarm of voles, and he replied, as reported in the Daily Herald: "None. We accepted the word of the Chinese scientists. It is possible to maintain that the whole thing was a kind of patriotic conspiracy. I prefer to believe the Chinese were not acting parts..."5

During the Korean War, units of the CPV and the North Korean People's Army (KPA) routinely suffered from typhus, cholera, and dysentery. In addition, en route to North Korea, the CPV forces had transited Manchuria, an area with endemic plague at the time. United Nations forces, as well as Koreans and Chinese combatants, also suffered from Korean Hemorraghic Fever. In the late winter of 1950 and the early spring of 1951, smallpox and typhus were reported throughout Korea, north and south. The UN command responded with mass inoculations and heavy applications of DDT to individuals, and DDT aerial spraying to the countryside at large. In the north, thousands of Chinese health care workers were dispatched to the area behind the front lines, and Hungarian and East German volunteer hospital units were also sent to Korea. What subsequently became known as Korean Hemorraghic Fever had not been known in Korea before, but it was endemic in areas in Manchuria through which CPV forces had passed, and in which those North Korean contingents that had been parts of the PLA before 1949 and formed the shock troops of the North Korean invasion force had been stationed. It was precisely in a strip in central Korea in which these North Korean troops had been engaged in combat and which was subsequently reoccupied by UN forces that Korean Hemorraghic Fever then remained endemic.

On no occasion did the Chinese or North Korean governments claim to have shot down a US aircraft containing the means of delivery of biological agents or the agents themselves, despite an eventual Chinese claim of 955 sorties by 175 groups of US aircraft over Northeast China to drop BW between 29 February and 31 March 1952 alone. As for Korea, the Chinese claimed that the US had spread BW over "70 cities and counties of Korea...on 804 occasions, according to incomplete statistics." The Chinese did obtain the confessions of some 25 captured US pilots. Many of the confessions included voluminous detail about the alleged delivery of BW: the kinds of bombs and other containers dropped, the types of insects, the diseases they carried, and so forth. Interspersed with the enormous technical detail was a great deal of Communist rhetoric identical to that which appeared in the standard Chinese press reports at the time, with references to "imperialists" and "capitalistic Wall Street war monger[s]," etc., which led nearly all observers to doubt that any of the confessions had been written by those supposedly testifying to them. All the confessions were renounced when the US airmen returned to the United States. Prisoners who had been ground troops "admitted" to the ISC that they had delivered BW by artillery "epidemic germ shells❞—in Korea.

The Historical Context of the Chinese and North Korean BW Allegations

There are several important pieces of historical background that are highly relevant to the Korean War BW charges which must be recounted, as they form a chain leading up to the allegations. The first of these is that Japan carried out a substantial biological warfare program within China during World War II. It consisted of an extensive series of BW research facilities throughout occupied Chinese territory, as well as the operational use of BW in China. The most well-known portion of the Japanese program was Unit 731, based in Manchuria and commanded by Gen. Shiro Ishii. However, there were three additional BW organizations, Unit 100, Unit Ei 1644, and one more, each acting independently and each under its own commanding officers. Most of the senior military officers and officials of these units made their way back to Japan in the final days of the war in the Pacific. Their most senior officers were subsequently interrogated in Japan by US military intelligence, and a crucial and extremely unfortunate decision was made which may have done much to enhance the credibility of the subsequent Korean War BW allegations: The US government granted immunity to Gen. Ishii, all of his subordinates, and members of the other Japanese BW units in exchange for the technical information obtained by the Japanese in the course of their wartime BW R&D program. Even before the Korean War began, Chinese media carried stories recounting Japanese BW in World War II and accusing the US and Japan of preparing for biological warfare. These charges usually were included