All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, hey, check it out.
It's our old friend Jeffrey Kay.
Welcome back to the show.
Jeff, how you doing?
Hey, Scott.
Doing great.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Andy Worthington says hi.
Oh, great.
Hi.
Back again.
That's what he relies on, you know, that's how that goes.
So listen, you wrote this thing, A Real Flood of Bacteria and Germs.
That's in quotes.
Communications, intelligence, and charges of US germ warfare during the Korean War.
The Korean War?
Why, I forgot all about that one.
The forgotten war.
Was that important, Jeffrey Kay?
Oh, you know, really, you know, while people often say, you know, the modern world came out of World War II, and that's very, that was very true.
The order, the world order, if you will, that came after the incredible devastation of World War II.
But in many ways, at least today, the Korean War, you could say, is equally as determinative as how our political order came out.
You know, it was during the Korean War that was the height of the McCarthy period.
It was during the Korean War, which was really, after World War II, well, in fact, the biggest war since World War II in the United States.
The United States lost about 50,000 people, but it also presaged the atrocities everyone knows about Vietnam and the apocalypse now and all of it.
You know, and the napalm, I love the smell of napalm in the morning.
Well, it was napalm that, you know, devastated North Korea.
They dropped, you know, there's tons and tons and tons of napalm, so much that even General MacArthur, who wanted to nuke China, thought that it was too much and disgusting.
You know, basically the majority of North Korea was living underground or in caves.
Every city was devastated.
Dams, you know, other war crimes such as dams that were bombed, flooded fields, you know, they tried to starve the North Koreans.
I mean, they did everything they could think of.
And by the way, your readers may not know, North Korea, or rather, China, with the North Koreans, you know, dealt the United States its most devastating military defeat, maybe in its history, when, you know, the Chinese invaded, you know, what happened was, you know, Korea was, your readers probably don't even know, it's forgotten, it's not taught in schools, it's not important.
These were gooks.
I mean, it's a racist thing to go in and kill three million people in another country and then not teach your people you even did it.
I mean, that's what Nazis did, would do, you would expect after World War II, if they had won.
Yeah.
That's like America and Yemen right now.
Anyway, go ahead.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
So, the United States government had suffered tremendous defeats in the early stages of the Korean War.
You know, they were supporting South Korea, the Soviet Union was supporting North Korea.
And the North Koreans were not, as even sometimes portrayed to this day, the puppets of the Soviet Union or the puppets of the Chinese.
They were their own people.
They were led by hardened guerrilla leaders who had fought the Japanese, who had fought Chiang Kai-shek's troops by helping Mao's communist guerrillas in China during the Civil War there.
They were battle-tested and hardened, and they swept aside the Republic of Korea military and took a tremendous intervention by the United States and its allies in Korea to even bring the war back to a standstill.
Their dream, though, of the right wing was to take it into China, and ultimately they kind of did.
Well, not kind of.
They did, at least not with an invasion, but by bombing China because the Chinese had entered the war in October, November of 1950, and they swept, almost swept the U.S. totally off the peninsula.
And they were warned, weren't they, right, that, listen, we kicked the North out of the South.
We should leave it at that.
If we push all the way to China, then the Chinese are going to come into the war.
And then they ignored that, and they pushed all the way to the Yalu River border there, and then the Chinese so-called volunteers, in other words, the infantry, came rushing across the border.
Right.
It's a total self-defeat, an obvious, you know, predictable and actually predicted effect of pushing their luck.
Right.
And that, however you want to think about that episode in U.S. military history, the documents that my article are based on are grounded right in that question, even though from my standpoint, it's a tangential, although essential question as to what was going on militarily on the ground, because that affected the decision to use biological warfare by the Americans.
And the other strain that I have to now weave in here, there's a couple of different tributaries, if you will, to this river of information that I'm about to put out here, is that in China, it too had been occupied in its northern regions, in Manchuria in particular, by the Japanese.
Well, not just northern, some in the coastal regions as well.
And there was a vicious war that began before Pearl Harbor, began before the Nazis invaded Poland, that began, I think, around 1936 in China by the Chiang Kai-shek nationalists and the communist guerrillas against the Japanese army.
And it was a vicious, also racist war in the sense that the Japanese saw themselves as superior people and the Chinese were to be wiped out.
And they had, Japan had in secrecy, of course, implemented a gigantic biological warfare program, which today we understand and know as Unit 731.
But there were a number of different units, Units 100, something like, I don't know, I can't remember, 2355, whatever.
There were a number of different units and regiments dedicated to researching different kinds of biological warfare.
And they did this on human, they did it on animals, they did it on plants, because plants are also for agriculture, because you're attacking the country's agriculture, also a target of biological warfare.
And they did it on human beings.
Those human beings they experimented upon were prisoners or opponents to the Japanese regime, or just, you know, poor people who got swept up, common criminals in some cases, and were experimented upon with different types of biological organisms and other experiments that the Japanese were doing, such as on how to deal with frostbite and malaria, things like this, and venereal diseases.
Women were raped so they could be inoculated with venereal diseases and then dissected alive, as most of these prisoners were, because to the Japanese scientists, you know, if you were going to be rigorous and rule out all sorts of different variable, confounding variables, like, you know, the chemicals they put into a corpse to preserve it or to stop it from decaying and smelling everything up, you know, you couldn't have that, because that would be a confounding variable to understanding how the body was reacting, let's say, to stages of anthrax or stages of syphilis or stages of glanders, or whatever disease.
Plague.
Plague, yeah.
Yeah, they were big on bubonic plague.
Yeah, hey, that doesn't just get a parentheses.
The plague.
OK, sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, one of the greatest black death mankind had ever faced.
That's right.
And here they were stewing it up in huge vats, breeding millions of fleas, inoculating them with plague and then various different types of and then the experiments were out.
That was easy to do.
That was easy.
And then they're dropping them over Nanking, right?
This is part of the Rape of Nanking, famous atrocities of World War Two.
To my knowledge, it wasn't in Nanking, but it was in Manchuria, a number of different places, places whose names are not familiar.
I'm thinking of some old documentary, I don't know.
Go ahead.
It might, you know, it might have been.
I mean, there were charges.
It's possible.
But, you know, for, you know, we don't even people my age, you know, I'm way too young for World War Two.
This is 25 years before I was born in this country.
But at least I was raised on the mythology, which is correct.
I don't mean to dismiss it as a mythology, but just the important, essentially the legend of the cruelty of the Japanese empire in their occupations and the way they treated the Americans on the Bataan Death March, all their Canadian prisoners of war as well.
But what they did to the Chinese, these are scarlet war crimes equivalent to any in history, equivalent to the same things that the Nazis were doing on the other front at the same time.
Absolutely.
So it's all the more important to understand that after the war, there were war crimes trials, as there were at Nuremberg in Europe, there were war crimes trials set up by the allies in Tokyo for the various crimes, the crimes of starting war, just as they did against Hitler and many other kinds of war crimes, some of which you've just mentioned.
But the United States, in secret, exempted the crimes of biological warfare.
By the way, the best estimates coming out of China is almost a million people, some hundreds of thousands anyway, died as a result of these biological warfare attacks in China.
To this day, plague is a problem in Manchuria in a way that it never was before.
And but of course, they did more than plague.
So the United States secretly amnestied Shiro Ishii, General Shiro Ishii, who was the head of Unit 731, his top scientists and other people with expertise.
And the latter, their part of the agreement was that they would turn over to the Americans all the data they had gathered.
And in fact, they passed thousands of slides and slides smeared with the sampling from the murderous experiments they had used.
And when the prisoners were done, they stuck them in crematory and burned them, thousands of them.
I mean, it's just it's so macabre, it's so dark, you know, that it's but that's not why it was kept from the American people, because this was kept secret and only finally came into American consciousness.
It leaked out in little ways.
But finally, in the mid 80s, when journalist John W.
Powell, who was prosecuted by the United States government for reporting on bioelectrical warfare in Korea for sedition, talk about Julian Assange, decades before Julian Assange, journalist John W.
Powell and his wife who was assisting him as an editor and another colleague from their magazine, China Monthly, were prosecuted for sedition.
And, you know, their professional lives were destroyed.
There should be a medal and there should be an award in his name, you know, brave, because what he did is he still didn't give up.
And he used the new FOIA tool introduced in the 1960s.
And he spent years and years and he tracked down a good deal of the aspects of this of this deal that the U.S. government, who secretly denied it, they denied that biological warfare ever took place.
They denied anyone had ever even tried such a thing.
Right.
Even while they themselves, the United States government since 1941, 42, had a mega program of development of biological warfare going on.
Yeah.
How do you like that, everybody?
Welcome to American Revisionist History 101 here, where America pardoned the very worst war criminals as long as they could employ them to develop biological weapons to use on who?
The Koreans, the people that the Japanese had been occupying.
And on whose side?
The very quislings that had been working for the Japanese during the Japanese occupation turned right around and just became them.
It's all we did.
It's just like Sumner said about Spain, the conquest of the United States by Spain in World War Two, the conquest of the United States by Japan.
Well, we turn into the very worst of their imperialist mass murderers.
Yeah, yeah.
That's what happened.
America really lost its soul.
You know, they hired a bunch of Nazis to Reinhard Galen and that whole organization, of course, in Europe.
And they hired they also got the people who were involved in the Nazi biological warfare program, Dr.
Schreiber and Kurt Blum.
And in a question of torture by Alfred McCoy talks about how they had imported all of the torture techniques and all that, you know, Wernher von Braun gets all of the, you know, spotlight that, oh, they helped us with our rockets.
But yeah, that makes that's like spin.
That's that amounts to a justification.
Sure, we brought some Nazis over, but they helped us get to space.
But not all this stuff about the worst war criminals in the world.
Right.
So was what was what happened was this, the United States government in headlong flight from the invading Chinese People's Volunteer Army that was cascading down the Korean Peninsula with the North Korean military as well, had cornered the U.S. Army into a little enclave in an area known as Pusan at the tip of the Korean Peninsula.
And there they were able to mount a defense in part because they had broken the communication codes of the North Korean and Chinese militaries.
And so they were able to intercept messages and they could tell where the North Koreans and the Chinese were moving their, you know, their men and material around where they would attack.
And so they, you know, with that intelligence in hand and intelligently used by the commanders the U.S. had at that place, they were able to maintain a very stout defense of this tiny enclave.
Intelligence, the type of intelligence, by the way, as you pointed out, they ignored just less than a year earlier that led to, you know, the original invasion of the North Koreans into what was already a massive civil conflict happening in South Korea at the time.
And then later ignored when the Chinese entered the war.
So but now they were using it to defend themselves militarily and the generals involved, they knew what to do with it.
They weren't the, you know, and they used it.
That's called signals intelligence or communication intelligence, COMINT, C-O-M-I-N-T, all caps.
People might see it who read spy books and books about military history.
And that's what I came to look at myself, because it turned out that the CIA, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the start of the Korean War, decided to declassify hundreds of these communications intelligence daily reports and, you know, for historians to look at.
And they did this in 2010, and then they posted them in 2013 on their website, you know, called in a release which they labeled Baptism by Fire.
And there they sat.
And of course, you know, with all the stuff on the left in particular about that, but even the right wing about getting FOIAing and getting documents and we need documents.
Here were documents that carried the smoking gun on one of the greatest war crimes the United States had ever been involved in.
And they just sat there on the servers of the CIA, open to anyone to see.
No, I'm so glad you got into that, because I was going to bring this up that I know that in the past it's been said that, oh, come on, all this stuff about the U.S.
I guess even back then, they said, and maybe all the way through to this day, they say that all this stuff about the U.S. using germ weapons in Korea, that's all KGB propaganda.
And so you are a useful idiot of the Kremlin.
And this is all fake.
But then you're saying, yeah, no, these are fake documents.
I got them from the CIA.
Right, right.
Exactly.
This has been a war of words ever since the charges of biological warfare began in a big way in February of 1952.
But even a year prior to that, there were charges of the U.S., the North Koreans and Chinese, had charged that the U.S. was spreading disease, in particular smallpox, in areas that they were retreating from under their headlong retreat that I was just talking about.
One thing they were accused of doing was poisoning wells and somehow infecting people with smallpox.
Now, whether they did or not, I don't know.
I've never been able to get documentation about that.
And I've given subsequent information on the later, even much more massive germ warfare.
It seems very plausible that the U.S., in fact, did do this.
But I don't have hard data on it, as I do on the 1952 germ warfare attacks, which began in roughly January of 1952.
And, you know, but it was very interesting to those who were suffering such attacks because they understood them immediately, because this is what Unit 731 did.
It was the tactics, a lot of the kinds of things that Fort Detroit was researching.
It was, you know, which were anthrax pancake bombs and, you know, glanders and plant certain kind of brucellosis.
This was a, they were people, they were using insects.
They were dropping massive amount of insects.
This was something that at Fort Detroit, apparently they were beginning to look at, but they didn't have much expertise.
Who had literally decades of expertise in it were the Japanese, who was working with the Americans, the Japanese and the communists in Korea and Japan.
You know, they had their own spies, you know, contacts, you know, working in the American government, in the Japanese government.
And they, you know, they were leaking things to the press and the press was reporting how Shiro Ishii was popping up in Korea.
Shiro Ishii disappears for, you know, a period of some months.
Where is he?
It's 1952.
You know, I'd love to have the documentation that absolutely showed, you know, a picture of Shiro Ishii, you know, at Fort Detroit, where he's rumored to have given lectures at one point.
But whether they, we have the hard data, we certainly have some powerful circumstantial case that the unit's 731 personnel were behind much of the German warfare campaign, because nobody had ever in the U.S. at Fort Detroit, we know of anyway, unless it was really kept super secret, were using in such a massive way insects to spread plague, cholera, anthrax, and not just insects, but feathers and pieces of paper and, you know, contaminated leaflets.
You know, they just you just throw a ton of contaminated material out and you hope to to spark chaos.
And if not just chaos, mass death and sickness and pestilence, which will break, cause confusion in the rear of the armies, you know, cause fear.
Look what's happened with COVID-19.
Look at the chaos of not just American society, but a number of us, particularly Western societies of how they respond when a massive outbreak of infection starts taking place in that population.
So imagine that you just let some people to believe that COVID-19 was some kind of military weapon that was released.
But I, to be honest with you, as someone who has studied how epidemics occur, at least from a biological warfare standpoint, you know, can agree with one thing with General Shiroishi said is quoted in Nicholson Baker's recent book about some of this topic.
You know, he was heard, he said, well, you know, epidemics are really hard to cause, at least artificially.
He knows because he tried.
It was a tremendous failure.
And, you know, they tried to implement biological warfare against the Soviets when the Japanese were fighting them at the border, the Soviet border in the late 30s, 1930s.
And it just didn't work.
In fact, it backfired on them and their own troops were the ones who mostly got sick.
And Shiroishi was demoted for a while for that failure.
You know, as far as the COVID thing, I think the best argument there was that the Chinese decided, well, hell, if we're going to get hit with this thing, let's make sure that we're not the only ones who are or at least, you know, in the Woodward book, it says that that was the presumption on the American side from the beginning, which there could have been something to that.
I don't know.
Oh, really?
In the Woodward book, it says they presume from the beginning that China had spread this or just that they were they were delaying, really fighting it the best they could and and warning everyone else everything they needed to know, because, yeah, they figured, go ahead, let everybody come in for the New Year and leave again and then clamp down, you know.
Well, you know, which is what they did, they let, you know, millions of people come to China and then leave again for the New Year celebration right after, you know, the local officials involved in much of this.
Others have been punished in China.
They made, you know, there's accountability in China for making mistakes.
Well, although it's kind of laughable because the United States has spent months and months and months not doing what needed to be done to stem.
Oh, yeah.
No, I mean, there's a new movie.
Well, Pot and Kettle Black and all of that kind of thing.
But I thought that was plausible, at least as far as worst case scenario there.
I didn't want to take us too far off on that path because I'm not big into demonizing China anyway.
But after your listeners hear this, I mean, no one has more experience of being attacked militarily by and know the horror of it, about biological weapons than the Chinese.
They were attacked by Shiro Ishii.
They were occupied by the Japanese.
You know, their own citizens were stolen off the streets and used for human experiments on biological warfare.
I just don't believe it's in the Chinese, almost political DNA, if you will, to use biological weapons in this form.
Also, the covid coronaviruses do not make, from my standpoint, as far as I can see, a very good biological weapons.
They've never really been used a lot or been looked at seriously as biological weapons.
In this case, there's no real target.
You can't control exactly how things spread.
And that's particularly true with a virus like Corona, this coronavirus.
Anyway, I won't go into it, but it just I just don't see it.
Yeah.
No, I mean, I agree.
So that's another reason why people said, well, the you know, so the as the reports began to come in from China and North Korea that the US was using biological weapons that they were dropping infected insects and other materials in various fashions on civilian population and also military, and that this was all made up, that this was a fantasy.
This was propaganda.
This was a hate America campaign, as they put it in their internal documents to each other.
And I think they said it to the press.
It wasn't a secret.
This was the thing.
They're just on a hate America campaign.
Why don't we, they said, if this is really happening, let's have an investigation by the United Nations.
I can just see all the kind of liberals, human rights people say, yeah, yeah, that's right.
Let's have the United Nations go in and investigate.
The only problem with that was it was the United Nations that was burning North Korea down to the ground.
Right.
That was a U.N. war.
It was a war under the auspices of the U.N.
It was the first big U.N. war.
Yeah.
Who's going to let the enemy come in to this?
To date, it is the biggest U.N. war.
Who's going to let the enemy come in and do an investigation supposedly of war crimes that the enemy is accused of conducting?
It's insane.
So they also.
They wanted the international, the ICRC, the International Committee of the Red Cross to come in.
Of course, they were not really neutral either.
And the communists were well aware of how the ICRC had covered for Nazi crimes at the concentration camps only a few years before.
Remember, this is very, very, very recent and hot in people's memory.
And so they didn't want them.
And then I and scholars, Stephen Endicott and Edward Agerman, they came before me and I followed a different trail and came to the same end, discovered that behind the scenes, the United States had no intention of doing any investigations.
In fact, that's part of the circumstantial case against, or rather for, the use of biological weapons.
Because here we see the United States saying one thing publicly, but behind the scenes ordering people not to cooperate with any investigation, saying behind the scenes, we don't want any, whatever we do, don't make this a reality because we don't want people to know what we're really doing there.
So they didn't want any investigations.
That's a canard.
If you ever hear anyone say that, I mean, that should be enough to shoot them down right there.
But unfortunately, these people, you know, the cold warriors who still reign in America's political house, you know, they have the authority, authoritative voice, the authoritative organs, supposedly, and the ear of the New York Times and everything else to keep the narrative that was established by these murderers, American military and CIA during the Korean War.
And it remains to this day.
And they've found or manufactured evidence that they claim is authoritative and any other evidence is bogus and stupid.
You know, it's just sort of like, this is it.
And you know what?
Americans, historians, they say, OK, we're not going to look into this further.
We're not going to say as a result, it's very difficult to find material on this massive war crime that took place because, again, as the war was grinding into a stalemate, the mighty American military was stalemated in Korea, roughly where it is today, the 38th parallel.
And there was a powerful lobby that wanted to use atomic weapons.
Including MacArthur in Korea and China and put an end to it that way, you know, but they were afraid of the Soviets' atomic weapons.
They were afraid of what that might mean, or they were afraid that the Soviets would use the opportunity to totally invade Europe, where they were very powerful, still following World War II, very powerful communist political parties that were very favorable to the Soviet Union, would have welcomed or collaborated with an invasion.
It's hard to believe today, perhaps, for your listeners, but that's how it was.
And that was because the only people who really fought the communists in any any substantive fashion in World War II on the continent itself from the peoples were led by communist partisan guerrillas.
Well, the Japanese, you meant to say, but I get you.
Oh, no.
Well, this was in Europe.
But in Japan, the same thing was the same thing.
Although I will say that, you know, the nationalists, they did only a so-so job, but they did under Chiang Kai-shek, they fought the Japanese, too.
Oh, that's right.
Many, many able people were killed and atrocities committed, you know, to the nationalist China government.
And so.
The United States.
Not in Korea, though, I mean, it really was Kim Il-sung and the communists that had led the entire rebellion against the Japanese occupation.
Right.
Yeah.
There were some Korean nationalists, but they were a small component.
It really was the Americans needed somebody to pick to run the South and be right wing.
They really didn't have anyone to choose from except Japan's former quizzlings.
Yeah.
And, you know, in their own puppets that they would put in place and they destroyed an indigenous prior to establishment of the North Korean government, an indigenous people's government that had sprung up in committees after Japan left the American.
Most people don't even know this, but the United States militarily ruled the ruler of South Korea in 19, you know, from late 1945 to 1947 was the United States government, military government was a military regime led by, you know, run by the United States in South Korea before they could install their puppet government.
Yeah.
Hey, guys, Scott Horton here for Mike Swanson's great book, The War State.
It's about the rise of the military industrial complex and the power elite after World War Two during the administrations of Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and Jack Kennedy.
It's a very enlightening take on this definitive era on America's road to world empire.
The War State by Mike Swanson.
Find it in the right hand margin at Scott Horton dot org.
Hey, y'all, Mike Swanson is a successful Wall Street trader with an Austrian school understanding of the markets, and therefore he has great advice to share with you.
Check out Mike's work and sign up for his list at WallStreetWindow.com, and that's what you'll get a window into all of Mike's trades.
He'll explain what he's buying and selling and expecting and why.
I know you'll learn and earn a lot.
WallStreetWindow.com.
That's WallStreetWindow.com.
But I wanted to bring up this one thing as like a touchstone for people to connect with this story, something that they already know about is there's essentially the now we find out.
It's a myth.
But the story of Frank Olson, the CIA officer who committed suicide while tripping on LSD.
We came to find out there's this documentary and I'm going to ruin it for everyone.
Spoiler alert.
Finish this interview in a couple of hours when you're done watching, if you want.
It's Wormwood on Netflix and it's the story of his son who, you know, you hear a story like that.
Oh, yeah, the guy died.
And you don't think that, oh, this ruined his son's life.
And his son dedicated his entire life, sacrificed everything else in his life to solving the mystery of his father's murder.
And it turns out that MKUltra LSD experiments was the modified limited hangout.
And that what really happened was he found out about this and that was why they murdered him.
Well, he was involved in it.
He was part of the Special Operations Division.
In fact, leading it at one point, I believe, at Fort Detrick.
And they, you know, they worked on suits.
You know, we know that he worked on materials for U.S. personnel to wear to protect themselves while conducting biological warfare.
And God knows what else he did.
He also was apparently involved in some kind of drug terminal experiments in Germany or witnessed them.
Anyway, for whatever reason, yes, it's a fascinating story is the Frank Olson story.
And I deliberately did not include it in my article because the focus of the article was what I call smoking gun revelations that, in fact, no matter what subsequent propaganda was put out there, what the entire force of America's narrative is from their historians through the press to the military spokespeople and the CIA, which is that this the charges of germ warfare and dropping insects with disease was a hoax or a false alarm.
Or as one researcher put it, a grand piece of political theater.
It wasn't, in fact, real.
But the case against it has always been circumstantial until now.
You know, circumstantial cases such as what I used to try and show that people were murdered at Guantanamo are powerful.
A good circumstantial case can win you in court because the preponderance of the evidence shows that this whatever is being charged is true.
And there was tons of evidence to show that the United States had lied about what it was doing in biological warfare, that they were interested, they were doing things in terms of research.
You know, the cover up around Unit 731 and the similarity between the techniques in 731 it pioneered and what was then happening in Korea.
It was all of this, but it was still where's the you know, where's the money, where's the evidence, where's the piece of paper that says, hi, my name is Douglas MacArthur and I hereby authorize biological warfare in Korea.
There was no, you know, they didn't do it was a covert program.
You know, if people think such a massive program could happen and be secret, one only has to reflect back to the U.S. secret bombing of Cambodia, where a massive entire bombing campaign destroying, you know, a significant region of a sovereign other nation, in this case, Cambodia, took place.
And it was it was kept secret for years that this happened.
When it came out, it was it was almost an article of impeachment against Nixon.
But that's a story totally off tangent.
I won't go there.
However, secret programs are not impossible.
And this was a secret program.
It was, in fact, a true conspiracy, which is what secret programs are.
Conspiracy to conduct some kind of awful thing, crime, that they don't want people to know about and be able to disclaim it, have plausible denial, as they titled it, that such a thing ever took place.
Truman could say, maybe plausibly, I never ordered such an event.
Well, maybe he never did.
He never actually issued a paper order.
But what was said over the telephone, go ahead with it, boys, or whatever, is probably what happened.
But that again, that's circumstantial.
So suddenly the CIA releases.
Now we come perhaps to the point your listeners are wanting to hear that the CIA released documents.
And in these documents are the communicate are, you know, the predecessor to the National Security Organization, you know, the the AFSA, the American Armed Forces Security Agency or whatever, which was, you know, had the people out there listening and cryptologists to decode and the linguists to translate, you know, what was being said, you know, would then distribute the information to its clients, the US military hierarchy, and the CIA and other elements of the executive branch, like the State Department, you know, it's kind of a stingy way.
Part of my article recounts some of the chaos that went on in the signals intelligence or communication intelligence branches of the military and the CIA at that time, just to give the context of what was happening in the war.
But what these daily reports were showing was over and over and over again.
And I reprint 28 of them.
And in my article, you can download and read them yourself.
These were highly top secret documents above top secret within the realms of the intelligence community.
They were called secret intelligence and they had special code words.
If you didn't know the code word, you hadn't been read into that program.
You couldn't get that information.
And so but now, you know, 70 years later, we can read them.
And what they document are this or that military unit, North Korean military unit or Chinese military unit radioing, you know, what was happening from one place to another way.
We're under attack by insects, infected insects.
How do they know they're infected?
Because you get the insects.
People are getting sick.
Other people have gotten sick.
They're collected, they're destroyed.
Some samples are taken to a laboratory.
The laboratory does its work and sees if there's anything there.
And they were finding things.
And in the past, they said, well, who can believe that these are communist scientists?
These are communist propaganda.
Of course, they're going to say that it was all made up.
It was sent in there.
But but now we we know that it really happened.
So, for instance, the first incident was that we have now the CIA didn't release everything.
They released the sampling.
But the sampling is enough for our purposes.
It would be good to have everything so we could understand the full parameters of the attack.
But right now, we do know that the first the battalion of the 7th Railroad Security Regiment of North Korea in the coastal area of Wonsan, you know, radios to its superiors that they're suffering.
You know, there's the area where they are militarily occupying.
There's poison drinking water.
Somebody's dropped contaminated paper or tissues.
And if you put them to your nose, it kills you or something like that.
You know, a few days later, a North Korean coastal security unit, you know, remarks that we've been attacked by bacteriological agents.
Now, you know, there's not a lot of description or further, you know, by these.
These are very brief, you know, radio sent or telegram or whatever sent communications from one military unit to another.
The brief is succinct, you know, and they say, you know, send DDT, right?
Bacteria and insects dropped from planes, says a Chinese unit in Korea late February.
You know, these are from CIA documents, right?
So if this was a fake hoax, we're supposedly, according to the documents released by researchers at the Wilson Center, right, being think tank partially funded by the U.S. government, but everyone accepts their documentation as proven fact, you know, said, oh, yeah, a couple of fake sites were put up for investigators were coming from Europe.
Investigators were being sent by the World Peace Council.
And, you know, and we're going to set up, we're going to fake the germ warfare campaign really happen.
We're going to set up some fake sites.
We're going to inoculate a few people, you know, prisoners already will kill them with plague and it will show them to these scientists and they'll think that the germ warfare attack occurred.
Everyone goes, yeah, it was a fake.
It was a grand piece of political theater.
Well, here's the CIA document.
So that's how things pretty much rested till today.
People built powerful cases against that to show, you know, some, you know, eyewitness accounts.
In some cases, the most controversial is the fight that's taken place over the confessions of a couple of dozen United States Air Force, in some case, a few cases, Marine flyers who testified to the Chinese who told the Chinese that we did do this and they gave them information about, you know, how they were trained, where they got the training, how the program developed from their own personal standpoint.
And even though that seems like pretty good evidence, what the United States said is that these confessions to using biological weapons were produced via torture.
This is how I got into this whole issue, by the way, Scott, because I was working on anti-torture issues and over and over in the press, I would read these techniques being used against Guantanamo and the CIA.
Black sites were honed originally by Chinese communists to produce false confessions during the Korean War and those false, what false confessions?
Well, false confessions of use of biological warfare.
And they were brainwashed.
I mean, the whole idea of brainwashing comes up in the Korean War and becoming a Manchurian candidate.
That somehow some secret, amazing way to control other people, make them say things that are totally false had happened.
And we have to fight that.
And that takes us down another road to the road of MK, ultra and torture programs.
And I'll indicate to your listeners there is that road, but I'm not going to go down there.
I'm going to stick to the attacks, biological warfare attacks, because that's the massive war crime we're looking at now that wasn't brainwashing.
The flyers were telling whether under coercion or not, they were, you know, that's in that sense for this case, for the war crime, it is a secondary, although important, question as to whether or not the information was tortured out of them.
But we now have other information.
These come from super top secret documents, communications, intelligence cables that were coming from the military to the CIA, who then would produce a daily report about what these reports meant, what was said to their superiors, again, for the consumers of their intelligence product.
And I have at least, you know, a couple of dozen of those cases.
If it was just one, OK, well, that would be that would be very interesting.
That would be if it was just two or two or three, that would be very beguiling.
Right.
No, but I've got already a couple of dozen of them.
I lay them out in tabular form in my article, and I talk about them in the context of this report that I released at Medium.com.
And what's already in this report also happens to falsify help and falsifying claims made in other documents.
These documents put out by the Wilson Center that there was fakery used by the North Koreans, the Chinese and the Soviets, because the material that was produced by the Wilson Center is falsified by what is actually said.
We have now a documentary format contemporaneously from the military units, in essence, and CIA reports testifying to us from the past about what really happened.
You know, we really were attacked.
Oh, so say say the reports of the Cold War academia.
Yeah, no, this was a fake.
And by there was a dispute on it in the Soviet Union so that by January of 1953, there will be the Soviets stop talking about this because they knew it was fake.
The Chinese stop talking about it, they claim, because they knew it was fake.
The North Koreans were fed up with the whole thing.
And after also by spring of 1953, they weren't going to say anything more about it.
The whole thing just dropped from history.
If you can believe these fake or doctored or whatever they are, documents put out by the Wilson Center and assumed by the totality, understand the totality of American historians.
And most people don't think too much about historians and what they do, but they're setting the narrative, the accepted narrative that is then picked up by the press.
But, you know, reporters at The New York Times, et cetera, because they have the authority.
Right.
These are authoritative statements.
This was a hoax.
This was a hoax.
And how do we know it's a hoax?
Because we have this set of documents over here produced by the Wilson Center and its scholars like Milton Leittenberg.
Let's say it was a hoax, it lays it all out for you.
Forget it.
Jeff Kaye and all these other people, they're just conspiracy theorists.
But actually, the real conspiracy theorist is them.
They claim that a conspiracy between these countries was used to set up a false, fake war crime.
But the story is now we know for a fact we don't have to fight it with circumstantial evidence anymore.
And I think it's kind of take a while for this to sink in.
And I think right now they're going to do their best to try and ignore what I've written.
I'm a I'm a fringe figure in the world of American politics.
And I mean, there are groups of of historians that are really interested in this.
Do you have access to those email lists at all?
I've tried my best to communicate this information to a number of historians who are involved, who have been involved in these issues.
But I'm not I'm not an academic and I don't have access to many of these lists.
I know there's interest.
I know I'm beginning to get some kickback from the more extreme right wing elements of the kind of anti-North Korea elements in particular.
If I'm a crazy, I'm a wackadoodle, you know, these documents that I'm talking about are akin to the protocols of the elders of Zion.
I mean, they're just totally falsified.
Unfortunately for these people, and I don't think that's the narrative that the American government is going to stick with, because these these things come from impeccable documents.
The documents that are produced and say it's a hoax are very dubious.
They're discovered by by right wing elements that, you know, in the case of these Soviet documents that were discovered, you know, you couldn't be no one has access to them.
Someone saw them.
They copied down what they saw on pen and pencil and they brought it back.
And then it was later translated by these right wing group.
You know, it was given to this right wing Japanese newspaper that leaked them.
And it's all very murky.
Right.
And but what I have isn't murky at all.
Here's the documents.
I can I can download them.
I did.
I can reproduce them online.
I have, you know, I can tabulate what they read through them and tabulate, you know, what the date when something happened, what unit was reporting it, the location of where the attack was taking place, the kind of attack that was being reported and how many people became sick or died.
Now, the latter one, you know, oftentimes isn't spoken about.
And in fact, it's a matter of military, high military intelligence, how many people die in a war and from what.
That's one reason it's so difficult to get casualty figures for most wars.
And the Korean War is no exception at all.
It's a military and strategic, if you will, and certainly tactical value to know how many people how people are affected by the type of attack you do.
All right.
I mean, this is taken back.
They have their after intelligence meetings or reports after what's it called?
After action report.
I was never in the military either.
So that's hampered me a little bit because I've had to learn how the military acts and what they do.
Bottom line here is that we have impeccable evidence that the United States, you know, from reports that were taken in secret in real time was raining down insects and other types of biological attacks on North Korean and Chinese military units in this case, you know, with the intent, presumed intent anyway, to destabilize them, to, you know, to mire them down, to stop their mobility, whatever they were trying to do.
And so death and chaos.
And this is a massive war crime.
And that's one reason the U.S. has fought so hard for decades now to keep this from coming out.
I know that the world is inundated in some respects with stories and conspiracies about crimes that have taken place.
But the difference here is this, we almost came to a nuclear war a couple of years ago between North Korea and the United States, which would have drawn in probably another nuclear power, China and possibly Russia, and therefore World War III.
Every one of your listeners I'm sure will not disagree with me in the slightest to say that Korea is one of the major, if not the major, tripwire for World War III in the world today.
Whether Trump or Biden wins this upcoming election, I say put wins in quotes, who knows what all this means anymore?
But whoever is president, whatever goes on, their attitude remains to trying to economically and socially strangle North Korea so that the people they hope will rise up and overthrow their regime.
North Korea will be absorbed into capitalist South Korea, much as East Germany was absorbed into capitalist West Germany, into one capitalist Germany, and one day we will have one full peninsula capitalist Republic of Korea.
That's their dream.
That's their hope.
How many people die in making this dream take place?
Who knows?
Probably millions again.
But now the Kim regime, to protect itself, have nuclear weapons.
But now the Kim regime, to protect itself, have nuclear weapons, and they intend to use them if attacked, if attacked.
Maybe even as an ultimate bargaining chip, although the US would have to show tremendous change and good faith.
But I'll tell you this, if the United States government were to admit to China and the North Koreans and the world and say, yeah, mea culpa, we did terrible things and we committed war crimes and we did, in fact, drop biological weapons on you and we are so sorry and we're going to pay reclamations to you as we would to other countries, as Germany did to the nations that it conducted war crimes on, then we might consider denuclearization because now things have truly changed.
But if they don't truly change, we are looking at potential for World War III pretty much every day over there.
And so I believe that getting this information out is about the most important thing that we could do right now in the world, because this is the most dangerous strip wire in the world.
The lies that have been told and the crimes that have been hidden around this are still alive today, politically.
That's why this is politically relevant today.
That's why the Korean War is alive today.
It never ended, as you know.
There was an armistice, but there was no peace treaty.
There was no official peace.
There was just an agreement to stand down where you were in place at the moment, exchange some prisoners, and that was it.
The state of war never ended.
And we need to end that state of war.
The United States needs to recognize diplomatically the government of North Korea after 70 years and to own up to its crimes.
If the North Korean government wants to own up to whatever crimes it committed as well, that's fine, and the Republic of Korea, and get everything out there.
But it's very important.
And I'm just one guy, and I don't have the connections, sad to say, although I have some in the press.
But I'll tell you, I'm getting shut out on this more than anything I've ever done, with the exception of the suicides at Guantanamo.
Now, I have to thank you, Scott, and some other people on the independent media, whatever you want to call it, that are out there talking to people and getting out aspects of the news and what's going on in our world that you just don't get in the mainstream media at all.
So that's vital.
And I'm truly appreciative for the opportunity to talk about this and to spread this information.
But what I've given here, and I've worked on this, to be honest, I've worked on it really for a period of years.
I had to go through many, many, many documents.
I had to go through periods of illness and severe illness and then come back and do it again.
So I could put this material out here to go through it, sift through it, analyze it, put it in the historical context, read, understand, before I'm ready to just—before I was ready to, I believe, present a comprehensible, synthetic, comprehensive account of what took place.
That's why my article is so long to read.
I mean, it's well over 10,000 words, and it's heavily footnoted.
And the footnotes are there so that anybody, every single claim I make is backed up by a reference to—most of them in reference to an actual document.
You should publish this as a monograph, man.
Yeah, I've definitely thought of doing that.
I probably would combine it with—we talked about it a couple of years ago when I put out the Joseph Needham report, the International Scientific Commission report, which forms the other major piece of the puzzle, looking at the evidence that had been gathered by North Korean and Chinese and, in some cases, European scientists and medical officials under the blows of this biological warfare campaign and presented to the world in a fashion which, behind the scenes—you know, again, this was all a hoax.
This was crazy.
It was communist-inspired, this International Scientific Commission report headed by British scientist Joseph Needham, who was one of the foremost embryologists and biochemists in the world, a true genius and a historian to boot, one of the most respected scientists of the world, but that was still a hoax.
He was a dupe.
They were all dupes.
We're dupes.
And, you know, that material—so I might put that together as a monograph or a small book so that—and other people that I have been approached, to be honest, by a few individuals who want me to collaborate with them on a book on this.
Other people have worked on this material as well, particularly people who've gone and interviewed survivors of the biological warfare attack.
And there have been articles, not in the U.S. press but in the British press, that, you know, made it through the mainstream media embargo on information about what the crimes that took place around the biological warfare attack.
I mean, these are weapons of mass destruction, right?
We hear all the time that, you know, we've got to watch out.
The Russians have a biological warfare program.
The Chinese, the North Koreans, you know, and they scare people with the boogeyman.
But actually, you know, it's the United States and its ally, Japan, are the only countries we know of that militarily have attacked another nation.
And that really has a—you know, in a way, it's a BS term to try to lump in mustard gas with hydrogen bombs and that kind of thing.
But on the other hand, like, no, there is a real reason to understand them in that way, and that is that they can't—well, I guess mustard gas could conceivably be used on a battlefield, but for the most part, they are meant to kill civilians, or at least they can only—they're interpreted that they can only be used in a way where innocent people are necessarily caught up in it, right?
You can't have an atom bomb war without killing innocent people, and you can't unleash the plague on somebody's country without innocent people dying.
And that's what makes it a weapon of mass destruction, as opposed to even, you know, a 500-pound bomb or a 1,000-pound bomb that Americans drop on somebody's house somewhere.
As destructive as that is, and even as many civilians as it kills, it's not the same thing as unleashing a disease or obliterating an entire city in one shot, you know?
Well, like atomic weapons, the legacy of the attack lasts long after the attack took place in terms of radioactive contamination.
In terms of biological weapons, oftentimes—and this is documented in China from Unit 731—I don't know what happened in Korea because everything is so secretive around it.
Hey, I was lucky to get this after 10 years of looking.
But in China, we do know, from Unit 731, where the remnants of plague in areas become contaminated.
It goes on for decades, right?
It's not so easy once a biological organism, a bacteria or a virus, is released in an area that's successfully able to propagate.
Does that virus or bacteria suddenly be obliterated from that area?
It takes tremendous—so plague, which is still endemic in the area, a big problem in the area around where 731 had its headquarters, because at the end of World War II, when Soviets invaded Manchuria and sent the Japanese scurrying, the members of Unit 731 headquarters, which was covered in hundreds of acres of different laboratories and crematoria, did their best to destroy it.
All the animals and fleas and other things they had, they just set them loose.
They just set them loose into the countryside, where they spread in that area more plague, more disease.
So the legacy of the attacks lasts for generations.
Chemical warfare is the same thing.
In China, thousands of people die still every year from unexploded and discovered chemical ordnance left in the hundreds of thousands when the Japanese fled from China overall at the end of World War II, because Japan, along with biological weapons, used chemical weapons.
And that was never brought to war crime trials either, even though they were violating the Hague Convention and post-World War I agreements that we should not use chemical weapons.
It was so horrific in World War I that most countries—the only signatories, the only people who refused to sign such international protocols really were the United States and Japan.
Interestingly, more circumstantial evidence of possible use of biological weapons.
But again, the days of circumstantial evidence are over.
They are now corroborating evidence, or they are supporting evidence of concrete, real, documented reports of the use of biological weapons, which we know because we were sneakily—when I say sneakily, I mean, it's not military exigency.
Every major country tries to do this, but was secretly listening in to the reports of other military units and hearing what they were going through, right?
That's part of military intelligence.
And, you know, they broke the codes and they listened in and then they made reports.
That's what you're supposed to do.
And now, you know, literally generations later, we're able to talk about it.
But the Korean War is still a hotspot generations later.
This is not a story that, you know, I don't know.
I've dropped a bomb in some way, a truth bomb, if you will, on the entire American political establishment, who have accepted that North Korea is the boogeyman.
And now, increasingly, China is their boogeyman partner, big brother partner.
And, you know, they spread disease.
They are against the West.
They made up these fantastical tales, these hate America tales with the Soviets who were swept aside in the dustbin of history, thank God.
And, you know, the CIA is who we should be trusting.
You know, I don't think the CIA meant to release this material in such a fashion.
That's why they didn't release that much of it.
Again, out of the roughly 1,300 or so, whatever it is, documents that they released in this baptism by fire release, only I found, sifting through them, only about a little more than about two and a half dozen of them mentioned biological warfare and the charges at all.
But when they did, again, each time they allowed that through, and there's still plenty in these documents, by the way, that's redacted, you know, whole paragraphs, whole pages.
But what they was released was enough in this case.
It was enough.
It was like our foot in the door of history to see into one of the most secretive and massive war crimes ever produced.
We don't know.
I think most people who look at this believe, by the way, that the US biological warfare attack in Korea was a failure from a military standpoint.
And I tend to agree with them.
And the reason being that China and North Korea mounted a tremendous public health response that was very effective and very harsh in many cases.
I don't mean harsh against people's freedoms, like you can't wear a mask, which is the crazy stuff here, but harsh in the sense that, you know, when an area was under biological attack and they'd seen the fleas, for instance, these are human fleas, by the way, different kinds of fleas, the fleas that there's a particular species that goes after humans.
Pulex irritans, I believe is the Latin name.
And forgive my pronunciation out there, any of you scientists and entomologists.
And anyway, but fleas and other fleas can carry plague and fleas on rats, fleas on dogs and cats.
So they would hunt down and kill all the rats.
And then sad to say, they would kill all the dogs and cats, too.
They just weren't going to take any chances.
That's a harsh regime that does this.
And, you know, and people would go out into the, formed into volunteer brigades and go out into the countryside and find where these insect drops have taken place and destroy the insects, gather them up and burn them.
You know, and they were told to wear protective things and be careful.
If you read the International Scientific Commission report, the committee report on all of this, you know, you'll find that some of those who died were people, sad to say, who didn't take the proper precautions.
Didn't listen to it.
Kind of like Trump, I'm not going to wear a mask.
Now he has COVID, you know, been infected by the coronavirus.
Sad to say in the, you know, somebody's a school teacher goes out and she's, you know, very lovable and they like her.
I wrote a whole story about some of the plague attacks in Korea a couple of years ago.
That's also on my medium.com account.
And, you know, they just didn't listen.
They just got sloppy.
They went out and they didn't wear their protective material and handled infected insects and got plagued and died.
What I can say now is what I couldn't say last time I talked to you.
You know, last time I talked to you and some years, in fact, years ago, I believed all that.
I believed false confessions.
I believed the whole narrative that was laid down.
The only thing that turned me around was really the evidence of a cover-up.
The evidence of a cover-up started out when I realized that the United States had, there were two things.
One, when I became personally aware that about, you know, it's 731 and the cover-up of it.
Even though this was revealed in the United States in the 1980s, it still is on the fringe of American history, you know, as it's taught in schools and colleges or World War II documentaries or whatever you want to say.
You wouldn't even know.
You know, and the United States government officials and other people out of ignorance or for whatever reason would say, no, there's never been an actual case in which biological weapons were used in a major war.
Lie, total lie, made out of ignorance or, again, to confuse people and cover up secrets and embarrassing secrets like, yes, we committed terrible war crimes.
But, you know, it's why you can't find a volume.
You know, the Chinese tried to notify the world of what was going on.
And there was a, after, you know, after the fact, there was an attempt to not just deny it, but to, you know, to go after people.
Like I mentioned the John W. Paul case, where the American reporter in China reported, American journalist in China reported what was going on.
And when he came back, the United States was in prison for sedition.
And the seditious charges were precisely about this.
You know how he, why he didn't end up spending the rest of his life in prison, John W. Paul, what got out to ultimately expose the unit 731 cover up was that they used a kind of what we would call today a gray male.
I think it's called defense.
They said, all right, well, you're going to go ahead and prosecute on this.
And the ACLU was helping them.
And then we are going, as part of discovery, we want to see all these different documents.
We want to see all this stuff.
And the US, they didn't want to do it.
Just like the US said, made a big show that we want an independent investigation of these charges by the Chinese and North Koreans.
And behind the scenes said, there's never going to be an investigation.
Don't worry about it.
We'll stop it if it happens.
That they said, well, you know what, we can't charge you with seditioning.
We're going to have to drop the charges.
You know, they were, they were still under various sets of charges all the way into the Kennedy years.
And finally, Robert Kennedy is attorney general during the JFK administration.
Ultimately, they kind of quietly dropped the charges against the Powell's, John W.
Powell and his wife.
And, and then the, and they hoped that the whole episode would just slip into total you know, the memory hole.
So I've climbed, I, John Powell climbed out of the memory hole.
I want to bring America out of the memory hole and tell them what really happened.
You know, I maybe naively thought that presenting actually smoking gun evidence, people say, where's the smoking gun?
It's not that common.
As you probably know, reporting yourself, Scott, are things that smoking guns of age old crimes just don't appear every day.
And when they do you know, it takes a while for that to be absorbed into the consciousness of a society like as big and as complex as the United States.
So that's what I'm trying to do.
Yeah.
Well, and here it is.
It's you know, I'm glad that I'm really glad that you did this.
And I do hope that you publish it as a book and that, you know, this gets disseminated out wider.
Yeah.
A Real Flood of Bacteria and Germs, Communications, Intelligence and Charges of U.S.
Germ Warfare During the Korean War.
It's at medium.com.
And of course, linked in the show notes of this interview as well.
And I'm sorry to cut you short, so to speak.
They're relatively comparatively to what you have to say.
But I got to go because I'm late.
No, that's fine.
I have to go too.
But thank you so much, Jeff.
Great work here.
Thank you.
Really appreciate your time on the show.
I really appreciate you having me on, Scott.
Take care.
Yep.
Talk soon.
