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World News See other World News Articles Title: “A real flood of bacteria and germs” — Communications Intelligence and Charges of U.S. Germ Warfare during the Korean War “Bacteria bombs,” poisoned water, planes dropping contaminated flies, fleas and other insects, two nations grappling to understand and adapt to an attack by an unseen enemy, in the context of an epic war with the United States and allied countries that would kill millions… this is the hitherto untold story of what germ warfare looked like to those who were attacked, from documents kept secret for over 60 years! In February 2013, the CIA posted over 1300 items online as part of their earlier “Baptism by Fire” document release commemorating the 60th anniversary of the start of the Korean War. The bulk of their accompanying narrative material concerned long-time controversies as to whether the CIA had failed to anticipate both the North Korean invasion of the Republic of Korea in June 1950, and the Chinese entry into the war later that year. In order to provide a documentary backdrop to a history of the war from an intelligence point-of-view, the CIA also released hundreds of declassified top-secret communications intelligence (COMINT) reports, as well as assorted formerly secret intelligence analyses, and open-source reports from the Agency’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS). The CIA likely did not set out to document the COMINT history of the North Korean and Chinese response to what appeared to be U.S. and/or U.N. attacks by biological, bacteriological, or ”germ” weapons, but that is in effect what happened. While the released documents do not represent a full opening of all archives related to Korean War communications intelligence, the sampling is unprecedented, and the contention of this essay is that the released files provide a valuable addition to our understanding of the events surrounding the alleged U.S. biological or germ warfare attack against North Korea and China from 1950–1953. This essay draws upon 28 COMINT documents, produced by communications intelligence units and labeled top secret, in addition to 11 other CIA analyst reports previously marked “secret,” one report marked “top secret,” two reports marked “confidential,” and one marked “restricted.” The COMINT documents were all labeled “Top Secret,” with additional compartmented code words, such as SUEDE or CANOE, for more restricted intelligence circulation. Among COMINT producers and customers, these documents were considered “Special Intelligence,” so secret and restricted even their code words were classified.[1] Most of these items were not declassified until about 60 years after the end of the Korean War. A table listing all biological weapons attacks documented in the SUEDE and CANOE COMINT documents is included prior to the Notes section below. In addition, a full set of the 28 COMINT documents, along with relevant sections from other CIA reports, is available for download in PDF format at the end of this article. No full analysis of these documents released by the CIA has ever been published. So far as I can determine, only one historian of the period has even referenced them.[2] It is important that they receive attention, as the question of the guilt or innocence of the U.S. when it comes to charges of the use of biological weapons of mass destruction during the Korean War has never been fully settled. These documents provide strong corroborating evidence that the germ warfare charged by the Communists, and by a number of outside observers, journalists and investigators, did in fact occur. The consilience of evidence includes the testimony of U.S. Air Force and Marine personnel captured by North Korea and China, though that evidence will only be examined here in the context of how it arises in the relevant CIA documents. Conversely, the evidence pertaining to other theories about the germ warfare charges, e.g., that it was a “hoax,” lack such convergent evidence. Image for post Image for post Screenshot from CIA release, “Baptism by Fire,” Daily Reports, file 1952–03–06a.pdf This essay sets out a history of the germ warfare campaign as experienced and reported by North Korean and Chinese military units, filtered primarily through daily COMINT reports of Communist communications contemporaneously gathered by U.S. military intelligence. Contemporary CIA-based open source information will also briefly be examined. This essay will first briefly look at the U.S. communications intelligence situation at the start of the Korean War. Then it will examine closely the COMINT and other recently released CIA declassified documents, concluding with some examples of their historical relevance in the light of the Korean War scholarship of Milton Leitenberg. Leitenberg, who has been quoted widely, has published documents that he purports show the charges of biological warfare (BW) made by the Soviets, North Koreans, and Chinese, were false, and that evidence was manufactured to perpetuate the supposed fraud.[3] For the purposes of this essay, most references to Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) include references to COMINT, as the latter is a subset of SIGINT. Practically speaking, COMINT refers to the interception of communications, often encrypted, between two individuals or organizations. SIGINT is more narrowly understood as the interception of electronic signals, such as telemetry, from the enemy. Image for post Image for post Untitled, from the CIA Baptism by Fire pamphlet, in public domain COMINT at the Start of the Korean War When the CIA posted the Baptism by Fire documents in 2013, they included historical articles they felt were relevant concerning the history of communications intelligence as it pertained to the CIA during the Korean War. The summary in this section draws upon those accounts, as well as other publicly available material, as noted in the endnotes.[4] By all accounts, along with a general drawdown of forces in Korea in the period 1948–1950, after the end of the U.S. occupation of South Korea and the start of the Korean War, communications intelligence resources in Korea were minimal. Even more, there was a good deal of bureaucratic infighting between the different branches of the military and between the military and the new CIA over who had access to the limited amount of material available. Once the war started, even after the initial problems appeared to be addressed, the problems of ill-coordination and poor infrastructure continued. For instance, Marine Corps units on the ground apparently never had access to signals intelligence (including COMINT) during the war. In addition, there was an ongoing dearth of linguists available to translate the materials obtained, necessitating a rather long delay for intelligence and military consumers. According to an NSA-published history, at the beginning of the Korean War the Armed Forces Security Agency [AFSA] (the predecessor to the National Security Agency), only “had the equivalent of two persons working North Korean analysis, two half-time cryptanalysts and one linguist.” There were 83 analysts working on data from the People’s Republic of China. Months later, in early 1951, AFSA had 49 personnel working on North Korean communications, and 156 on China. The same historical account states, “COMINT production was hampered by supply shortages, outmoded gear, a lack of linguists, difficulties in determining good intercept sites, and equipment ill-suited to frequent movement over rough terrain.” Most radio equipment used was of World War II vintage. In a retrospective essay, Thomas J. Patton recalled his days working for CIA’s General Division, which was the analyst unit within CIA that was to provide intelligence from raw COMINT intercepts: “We never had a clear concept of what proportion or what level of clandestine information we were given access to.” “We may have had access to some State Department traffic, but we could never be sure of receiving it, and we could not have used it directly in any event,” Patton wrote. “And our access to information from military sources was always uncertain….” “Physical handling of information was of necessity fairly primitive in those days. There were no copying machines. Most items that we received came in single copies, which we had to pass on and could not retain for our files.”[5] Despite all the difficulties, in the early days of the war, by mid-July 1950, AFSA had achieved some success in intercepting and decrypting North Korean messages. The new information was so good that, according to Thomas R. Johnson’s 2001 article, “American Cryptology During the Korean War,” during the famous summer 1950 defense of the Pusan perimeter, with US and UN troops backed into a corner by a successful North Korean offensive, “General Walker…. was able to hold the line largely due to knowing where the North Koreans were going to attack, information coming primarily from SIGINT reports.”[6] Despite the early successes, the signals and communication intelligence aspect of the war played out in a cat-and-mouse fashion. American successes were foiled by changes in Chinese and North Korean communications. The U.S. forces would catch up, and then lose their ear into enemy communications again. There were multiple communications intelligence efforts by different agencies during the war, and they weren’t always well coordinated. The Air Force Security Service ran its own separate operation for some time. The signals and communication intelligence assets in the Naval Security Group remained focused on the Soviet naval presence in East Asia, and not on North Korean or Chinese targets. Image for post Image for post Army Security Agency Direction Finding Unit in the Mountains of Korea (NSA photo, reproduced from CIA article in “Studies in Intelligence,” v. 45, no. 1) The general dissatisfaction with the U.S. SIGINT and COMINT work was captured in a communication from General James Van Fleet, commander of the U.S. Eighth Army: “It has become apparent, that during the between-wars interim we have lost, through neglect, disinterest and possibly jealousy, much of the effectiveness in intelligence work that we acquired so painfully in World War II. Today, our intelligence operations in Korea have not yet approached the standards that we reached in the final year of the last war. “Much of this dissatisfaction centered on AFSA. At the same time, the senior officials of the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency also felt AFSA was less responsive to their needs than it should have been.”[7] As CIA historian Johnson concluded, “What tactical successes there were, were gained only after long delay and prodigious effort. Unready for Korea, American cryptologists rose unsteadily to the challenge and were knocked down several times by enemy haymakers. Resources were inadequate. Organization was sometimes chaotic, and expertise had to be acquired laboriously. Still, SIGINT did make a difference on a number of occasions. It was not quite what had been achieved in World War II, but it did establish the outlines of a successful tactical SIGINT support system.” The problems with SIGINT and COMINT led to a significant effort by the Truman administration to reorganize resources and administrative authorities. By November 1952, this led to the establishment of the National Security Agency. It is against this history of both success and failure that we turn now to the extant COMINT cables released to the CIA, and the intelligence commentary that was subsequently produced by CIA analysts. The material in these cables and reports can then be compared to other existing histories with their own accompanying evidential foundations. The BW Timeline 1949 Khabarovsk The following material is described in a mostly chronological fashion, the better to understand the unfolding portrayal of both the Communist charges of BW and the CIA’s own contemporaneous characterization of them. By adhering to this approach, contemporaneous observations and conclusions regarding the purported germ warfare campaign are not contaminated by later retrospective findings or changes in agency or governmental policy. As a whole, the examination of the CIA material will be long and somewhat detailed, as one important aim of this article is to provide researchers with a comprehensive dataset for reference purposes. Since the CIA released very little that covered the first 18 months of the Korean War, the examination of the first period will be brief, and is mostly, though not entirely, limited to the new material released. It is not a comprehensive examination of that period, and presumes some knowledge of the history of the Korean War. The other historical incident of relevance predates the Korean War. The appropriate starting point for this history is the December 1949 Soviet war crimes trial of doctors, researchers and military personnel associated with Japan’s biological warfare program. The results of the trial, including lengthy portions of the transcripts, were published in English[8], although it appears, according to one scholar, “few people in the West, including journalists and professional historians, paid any serious attention to the trial and its published proceedings until the 1980s.”[9] Image for post Image for post Photograph of Shiro Ishii (masao takezawa / wikimedia commons) The trial established that Japan’s Unit 731 and other assorted bacteriological units, experimented upon plants and animals for the purpose of biological warfare, in addition to engaging in criminal human experimentation, including vivisection. At least 3,000 prisoners died in this fashion. Many thousands more died in BW campaigns waged by Japan’s Kwantung Army in China during World War II. The United States made an agreement with the leadership of Unit 731 not to prosecute their personnel at war crimes trials, and the U.S. thereby would receive the technical reports and testimony from personnel of the results of Japan’s BW campaigns. U.S. scientists from Ft. Detrick interviewed Unit 731 leader Shiro Ishii and others, and the information was closely held in “intelligence channels.”[10] Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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