Secret Soviet Archives Detail Another Plot

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 14, 1998 | by John Elvin

Using documents spirited out of the still-secret Presidential Archive in Moscow, historians have uncovered the inside story on a major myth of the Korean War, a claim that U.S. warplanes induced a plague by dropping germ-carrying insects over the battlefields.

In 1952, China backed up the North Korean claim by charging that the U.S. had sent 448 aircraft on 68 missions to spread plague, anthrax, cholera, encephalitis and meningitis.

The researchers will publish details of their study in the Bulletin of the Cold War International History Project of the Woodrow Wilson Center showing that the charges were "contrived and fraudulent," said Milton Leitenberg, a biological-warfare specialist at the University of Maryland. The new evidence indicates that the communist North Koreans infected people facing execution with plague and forced 25 American prisoners of war to sign confessions regarding the raids. "It was a setup," Leitenberg told the Associated Press.

The charges were endorsed by Josef Stalin, Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai, with credibility added in a 668-page report by the "International Scientific Commission for the Investigation of the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in Korea and China."

When representatives of the commission went to North Korea to pursue the investigation, the North Koreans staged raids and sounded sirens, convincing them of danger. They fled back to Beijing and relied thereafter on testimony and evidence provided by perpetrators of the false charges.

The documents show that the Soviets quit backing the tale in 1953 and their ambassador to China informed Mao they believed they had been "misled."