Or so reports SBS, citing Al Jazeera.
SBS says that according to a document obtained from the US National Archive by the Arab broadcaster, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff ordered a subordinate unit to conduct large-scale field tests in North Korea to learn the effects of a certain pathogen in 1951.
Here’s what the al-Jazeera text (the video is different) says:
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.
Read the rest on your own. Feel free to watch the video, too, although I sort of droned out after learning from filmmaker Tim Tate that the US “unilaterally divided Korea” in 1946:
Anyway, the documents are posted on the al-Jazeera report. I’m not a military man, but the secret document supposedly ordering field tests in North Korea doesn’t appear to be doing that at all. What I’m seeing, rather, is a list of opinions by a group called the Joint Advanced Study Committee, which I’m guessing was an inter-service study team operating under the Joint Chiefs. Maybe GI Korea or USFK readers can help me out here.
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Tinyflowers will be along soon to assure you that Tim Tate is spot on the money – at least insofar as the above quote is concerned.
I’m actually a fan of Al Jazeera. Any news outlet whose reporters are consistently either banned from reporting by certain countries or bombed deserves paying attention to. Nothing put the lie to the Bush Administration’s absurd claim that it invaded Iraq to spread democracy throughout the Middle East more decisively than its ceaseless attacks on Al Jazeera. The fact that Iran has also banned them just goes to show that they’re equal-opportunity pests – always a good thing where reporting is concerned.
In saying all that, I would take the basic premise of this story – that the US was testing biological weapons in the DPRK – with a grain of salt. I heard this refrain regularly when I was in Pyongyang, right alongside claims that Kim Il Sung was descended from heaven.
I’ve also read about Australian POWs who used to construct little parachutes and attach mice to them, then put them in the middle of their prison yards to stir up the guards. It was a hoax then, it’s a hoax now, IMHO.
Without wishing to be too cynical, as soon as a North Korean is presented as a star witness, any pretense Tim might have had of presenting a balanced report goes the way of Lara Bingle’s engagement ring – i.e., straight down the toilet.
In a related story, the KCNA revealed yesterday that evidence was uncovered at the excavation site of an ancient church in Pyongyang which conclusively established that American Methodist missionaries routinely practiced cannibalism on North Korean children. Also uncovered during the dig was the shattered tombstone of a American minister, which when reassembled read: “I ground their bones to make my bread.”
The germ warfare claim has been a mainstay of North Korean propaganda for decades.
Robert,
As usual, your analysis is pretty much spot on. The “evidence” the al-Jazeera report uses shows up every now and again when people want to talk biological warfare. Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, (from Canada) spent 20 years researching this very claim. Their book, The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea, used this very memo as the part of the proof that the US military used of biological weapons in Korea. The rest of their proof was extensive CHICOM and nK documents consisting of POW interviews and pictures from the PLA and KPA.
When the Cold war archives of the former Soviet Union came available to researchers, the arguments that Endicott and Hagerman used proved to be circumstantial, at best:
As cited above, the last time this bio-warfare in Korea stuff came up was in 2003, when some were looking for evidence that the US was just as bad as
a former axis of evil memberSadaam’s regime for WMD use….Regards,
Charlie
Just to say, some of the documentary’s evidence are the testimonials of two elderly North Koreans, most probably retired soldiers. According to them, they found a bomb filled with bugs on a frozen lake. No explanation as to how they weren’t affected by the plague-like symptoms they describe since they found the bugs. Besides…Why in the hell would anyone send bugs in winter to spread disease? Bugs are cold blooded animals, you know.
Or rather, North Korea’s evidence…
Al Jazeera is quite liberal with its facts. They claimed that the U.S. Army used napalm in Iraq and only changed their story when I wrote them. Then they told me that the army was using white phosphorous which is worse than napalm, which the army did indeed use.
Anyone interested in how the Soviets felt about the false allegations of biological warfare by the US should read , from the Woodrow Wilson Center’s document archive project.
Well that link didn’t work out the way I planned. What I meant to say was, “Check out “New Evidence on the Korean War,” at http://www.wilsoncenter.org/topics/pubs/New_Ev_KoreanWar.pdf “
A few years ago I was fortunate enough to meet Tibor Meray, who was a Hungarian journalist during the Korean War, who initially supported the claims of the Chinese and North Koreans. When he later defected and moved to Paris, he spent time researching the claims and ended up debunking them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilfred_Burchett#Book_by_Tibor_M.C3.A9ray
Then there was Kathryn Weathersby and her team’s analysis of the Soviet documents.
I really believed this canard had been laid to rest. I will watch the “documentary” from Al Jazeera, but I doubt I will be blown away by new evidence.
Does anyone know where there is a larger scanned image of these documents? From what I can read of the documents of the Al Jazeera site I don’t see any evidence of the US dropping biological bombs in North Korea either from those documents.
My suspicions on this report are much like with the documents supposedly proving that the No Gun Ri massacre happened. Usually those documents were added to news reports but to small for viewers to actually read. However, when I was able to get my hands on scanned documents large enough to read none of them in fact supported the established No Gun Ri mythology.
I would like to read these biological warfare documents myself before drawing any firm conclusions, however the Al Jazeera report relying on North Korean witness testimony and a Pyongyang museum archives is hardly convincing.
Well I have seen the whole documentary now. No mention of Weathersby or Meray. I remain unconvinced.
My piece from a couple of years ago….alas
http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?article_class=2&no=332629&rel_no=1
Thanks, Mr. Neff, for sharing your article with us too.
I would urge anyone who has watched part or all of the Al Jazeera film above to also watch this clip from a longer documentary about the Korean War, in which are interviewed a number of people – Tibor Meray, Wilfred Burchett, a Mons. Roy (French poet who spoke candidly to Airman Enoch, interviewed in the above film) and so on. Only 10 minutes, and to my mind a much better piece than the Al Jazeera one.
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