---
title: The Korean War germ-warfare charges:commissions, confessions and the 1953 recall
url: https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/korean-war-germ-warfare-allegations/
description: in 1952 China and North Korea, backed by the USSR, accused the United States of spreading disease from the air in Korea and northeast China, and carried…
section: Case studies
---

![Illustration: a Cold War intelligence collage of a non-aligned-movement conference and a map spanning Latin America, Africa and Asia.](https://propagandaarchive.org/static/generated/detail/hero-cold-war-global-south.jpg)

[Case studies](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/)

# The Korean War germ-warfare charges:commissions, confessions and the 1953 recall

At a glance

In 1952 China and North Korea, backed by the USSR, accused the United States of spreading disease from the air in Korea and northeast China, and carried the charge abroad through a peace council, a lawyers' association…

- **When:** 1952
- **Actor:** Governments of the People's Republic of China, North Korea and the USSR, with the World Peace…
- **Target:** International opinion, especially in Asia, Western Europe and the non-aligned states…
- **Source:** Unidentified Source blurred: contractors, cutouts, buried disclosure
- **Confidence:** **documented** Primary documents, court records, official disclosures
- **Techniques:** [Narrative laundering](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/narrative-laundering/) [Testimonial](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/testimonial/) [Card stacking](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/card-stacking/) [Transfer](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/transfer/)
- **Regime:** [People's Republic of China under Mao Zedong](https://propagandaarchive.org/regimes/peoples-republic-of-china-mao/)

Full details

- **Actor:** Governments of the People's Republic of China, North Korea and the USSR, with the World Peace Council, the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and the International Scientific Commission; the U.S. government in its counter-campaign
- **Target:** International opinion, especially in Asia, Western Europe and the non-aligned states; domestic audiences in China and North Korea; UN delegations

On this page

- [What happened](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/korean-war-germ-warfare-allegations/#what-happened)
- [How it works](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/korean-war-germ-warfare-allegations/#how-it-works)
- [Then and now](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/korean-war-germ-warfare-allegations/#then-and-now)
- [Positions on the record](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/korean-war-germ-warfare-allegations/#positions-on-the-record)
- [Same-method test](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/korean-war-germ-warfare-allegations/#same-method-test)
- [How to spot it](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/korean-war-germ-warfare-allegations/#how-to-spot-it)
- [Images](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/korean-war-germ-warfare-allegations/#images)
- [Sources](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/korean-war-germ-warfare-allegations/#sources)

On this page

**In one line:** in 1952 China and North Korea, backed by the USSR, accused the United States of spreading disease from the air in Korea and northeast China, and carried the charge abroad through a peace council, a lawyers' association, a scientific commission chaired by a Cambridge biochemist, and statements by captured U.S. airmen; in May 1953 the post-Stalin Soviet leadership told Beijing and Pyongyang in secret that the accusations were "fictitious".

![Diagram: the North Korean and Chinese accusation, evidence shown on the ground, verdicts from a peace council's lawyers and scientists, statements of captured airmen, and the May 1953 Soviet recall; a branch shows outside inspection refused and the U.S. counter-poster](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/korean-war-germ-warfare-allegations-diagram.svg)

## What happened

- **22 February 1952.** North Korean Foreign Minister Pak Hon-yong accuses U.S. aircraft of dropping infected insects, and says Unit 731's Shirō Ishii had been sent to Korea.
- **24 February and 8 March 1952.** Chinese Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai backs the charge, then extends it to China: "the American aggressors have, between February 29 and March 5, deployed 68 air maneuvers, totaling 448 sorties to invade the Chinese air space and dropped an enormous quantity of bacteria-carrying insects."
- **4 March 1952.** Secretary of State Dean Acheson denies it. The United States proposes an inquiry by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) or the World Health Organization. China declines both, and an Indian offer, saying its own and friendly investigations are under way.
- **March 1952.** The International Association of Democratic Lawyers publishes a *Report on U.S. Crimes in Korea*. On 29 March Guo Moruo takes the charge to the World Peace Council in Oslo, which invites scientists to investigate.
- **May 1952.** Chinese radio broadcasts statements by captured U.S. Air Force lieutenants Kenneth Enoch and John Quinn describing germ-bomb missions. A U.S. government poster, "The Communists caught in the act of lying", is issued in nine languages for Asia (below).
- **3 and 9 July 1952.** The USSR vetoes a U.S. Security Council draft asking the ICRC to investigate, then a second condemning the charges.
- **23 June to 31 August 1952.** The International Scientific Commission (ISC), chaired by Joseph Needham, with members from Britain, Sweden, France, Italy, Brazil and the USSR, works in China and North Korea from 23 June and signs its report in Peking on 31 August. The Soviet member, N. N. Zhukov-Verezhnikov, had been chief medical expert at the 1949 Khabarovsk trial of Unit 731 officers. Quinn is brought before it on 2 August. Its report of over 600 pages, published in September, finds the charges true. Its members did not see any drop and worked from material supplied by Chinese and North Korean investigators.
- **22–23 February 1953.** China broadcasts a statement by Marine Colonel Frank Schwable. UN commander General Mark Clark replies: "Whether these statements ever passed the lips of these unfortunate men is doubtful. If they did, however, too familiar are the mind-annihilating methods of these Communists in extorting whatever words they want."
- **23 April 1953.** The UN General Assembly adopts Resolution 706 (VII), calling for an impartial investigation.
- **2 May 1953.** The Presidium of the USSR Council of Ministers resolves: "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 fictitious." It orders publication stopped and Soviet officials who helped fabricate the "proof" punished. A memo by Soviet advisers Glukhov and Smirnov describes false "areas of infection" prepared for foreign visitors, including the infection of prisoners under sentence of death.
- **Autumn 1953.** Repatriated, Schwable, Enoch, Quinn and others retract their statements as coerced. On 26 October Henry Cabot Lodge shows the General Assembly filmed retractions by five airmen.
- **27 April 1954.** A Marine Corps court of inquiry closes Schwable's case without a court-martial; the Commandant calls him "an instrument, however unwilling, of causing damage to his country".
- **January 1998.** *Sankei Shimbun* publishes twelve Soviet documents (one from 1952, eleven from 1953), hand-copied in the Moscow Presidential Archive. Kathryn Weathersby and Milton Leitenberg publish translations and analysis in the Cold War International History Project *Bulletin* 11.

![Colonel Frank H. Schwable, U.S. Marine Corps, undated official portrait](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/korean-war-germ-warfare-schwable-portrait.jpg)

*Col. Frank H. Schwable, USMC, undated official portrait. Public domain (U.S. government work). He retracted his 1953 statement after release.*

## How it works

- [Narrative laundering](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/narrative-laundering/): a charge made by two governments at war with the United States came back as the finding of the Soviet-backed World Peace Council's lawyers and invited scientists, with the evidence reaching them through their hosts. Per the 1953 Soviet documents, some of it had been prepared for foreign visitors to find.
- [Testimonial](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/testimonial/): two kinds of named witness carried the charge: senior scientists led by a Fellow of the Royal Society, whose standing stood in for independent sampling, and U.S. officers describing their own missions, whose rank and nationality made the words hard to dismiss. Outside checking of either was refused.
- [Card stacking](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/card-stacking/): the evidence was assembled by one party to the conflict, shown to observers it selected, and kept from the ICRC and WHO, so the public got a thick dossier with no independent check behind it. The U.S. side, which asked for ICRC and WHO inquiries, answered in print as well; its counter-poster (below) selects its own photographs, but it points to an inspection offer rather than replacing one.
- [Transfer](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/transfer/): the U.S. poster borrowed the United Nations emblem and the Red Cross's "universally recognised" neutrality, and placed photographs of UN medics treating prisoners under the claim that the free world stood "for health and truth". The photos did not address whether germ weapons had been used.

## Then and now

![Mobile Production Facilities for Biological Agents, UN Security Council slide (2003)](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/images/powell-un-mobile-labs-2003.jpg)

*[Mobile Production Facilities for Biological Agents (UN Security Council slide)](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/powell-un-mobile-labs-2003/), U.S. Department of State, 5 February 2003. Public domain.*

Fifty-one years later, a U.S. Secretary of State showed the UN Security Council drawings of Iraqi mobile biological-weapons laboratories. The claim rested mainly on one defector the audience could not question, and the doubts about him were not on the slide. The shared method is a biological-weapons charge put to an international forum on evidence the audience cannot check. The differences are large. The 1952 charge accused an enemy of *using* germ weapons in a war already under way; per the 1953 Soviet documents some of its evidence was deliberately prepared, and the Soviet-backed World Peace Council and allied bodies kept it alive for over a year. The 2003 charge concerned a weapons *programme* and argued for a war not yet begun; the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee (2004) and the presidential Robb-Silberman commission (2005) placed its failure in intelligence assessment rather than deliberate fabrication by the presenter, a finding critics of the war dispute. The same charge against the United States recurred in the Soviet AIDS campaign of the 1980s and in 2020 claims about Fort Detrick and COVID-19, covered separately.

## Positions on the record

![Les communistes pris en flagrant délit de mensonge, U.S. poster (1952)](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/images/communists-caught-lying-1952.jpg)

*[Les communistes pris en flagrant délit de mensonge (The Communists Caught in the Act of Lying)](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/communists-caught-lying-1952/), U.S. Department of State information program, 8 May 1952, French-language version of a poster issued in nine languages across Asia. Public domain (U.S. government work).*

- **China and North Korea (1952 to now):** U.S. forces used biological weapons in Korea and northeast China in 1952. The ISC report and the airmen's statements are the evidence. Neither government has withdrawn the charge. Chinese state media repeated it in 2022.
- **United States (1952 to now):** the charge is false. The United States asked for ICRC and WHO investigation, which the communist side refused. The airmen's statements were extracted under duress and retracted on release. The poster above calls the charge a lie, reads the refusal as fear of "the truth", and blames the epidemics on the communist side being unable to look after its people's health, sourcing neither claim.
- **The 1953 Soviet documents (published 1998):** the Soviet leadership concluded in May 1953 that the charges were "fictitious" and the evidence manufactured, and ended its part in the campaign. Weathersby argues that the documents are too detailed and interlocking to have been forged. In 2013 *Yanhuang Chunqiu* published a 1997 memoir by Wu Zhili, health chief of the Chinese People's Volunteers in Korea, found after his death; it calls the 1952 germ war "a false alarm". Leitenberg (*Asian Perspective*, 2016) treats it as a Chinese admission.
- **The dissent:** Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, in *The United States and Biological Warfare* (Indiana University Press, 1998), argue from U.S., Canadian, British and Chinese archives that the United States did experiment with and deploy biological weapons in Korea. In 1999 (on H-Diplo; a shorter version in *Asian Perspective*, 2001) they replied that the twelve documents are unsealed hand copies from Beria's power struggle with security minister Semyon Ignatiev, and prove less than claimed. A 2010 Al Jazeera documentary cites a September 1951 Joint Chiefs of Staff order for "large scale field tests … to determine the effectiveness of specific BW agents under operational conditions".
- **Documented context:** the United States ran an offensive biological-weapons programme at Camp (later Fort) Detrick in this period. In 1947–48 U.S. officials shielded Unit 731 researchers from war-crimes prosecution in exchange for their human-experiment data. These facts are documented. They do not show use in Korea, and this page does not assert it.
- **What is not shown:** no independent body inspected any alleged site in 1952–53; no released U.S. record shows biological weapons used in Korea; no Chinese archive has released the 1952 field evidence for testing. This page scores how each side's material worked, not whether germ weapons were used.

## Same-method test

If a U.S.-backed "international lawyers' guild" and a commission of friendly scientists had toured sites prepared by U.S. allies, endorsed a charge of Soviet germ warfare on the hosts' word, and put captured Soviet pilots on film, this page would score it the same way. It does score the U.S. poster that way: borrowed UN and Red Cross prestige and unrelated medical photographs are card-stacking and transfer whichever flag prints them.

## How to spot it

- Ask who invited the investigators, who chose the sites, and who handled the samples before the investigators arrived. "International" in a commission's name says nothing about who controls the evidence.
- Treat a captive's statement as evidence of what the captor wanted said until it can be tested away from the captor.
- Notice when one side refuses outside inspection. Check whether each side's poster points to evidence an outsider can inspect.

## Images

| Image | Source | Licence |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Mechanism diagram (above) | Drawn for FRAME from the sources below (`make_diagrams.py`) | CC BY 4.0, FRAME |
| Col. Frank H. Schwable, official portrait | [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Frank_H._Schwable.jpg), USMC History Division | Public domain (U.S. government work) |
| *Les communistes pris en flagrant délit de mensonge* (1952) | FRAME gallery, from [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Germ_Warfare_-_NARA_-_5729954.jpg) / U.S. National Archives, RG 306 | Public domain (U.S. government work) |
| Powell UN slide (2003) | FRAME gallery | Public domain (U.S. government work) |

### Image gaps

- **Chinese campaign posters**, such as the National Library of Medicine's *Even germs cannot save the fate of the American bandits* (c. 1952). Commons tags it public domain, but its U.S. copyright status as a 1952 Chinese work is unclear. Dropped.
- **Photographs from the ISC report and from *China Pictorial* (1952)** of insects, containers and "germ bomb" casings. Commons tags them public domain, but their U.S. status as 1952 publications from Beijing is unclear. Dropped.
- **Chinese newsreel footage of the airmen's statements.** Unclear U.S. status. Dropped.
- **U.S. military film of the airmen's retractions and photographs of Lodge's 26 October 1953 presentation.** Probably public domain as U.S. government works, but no copy could be reached from the build environment. **This gap can be filled** from the National Archives.
- **The 1953 Soviet documents themselves.** No facsimile exists: the texts were copied by hand in the Moscow archive.

## Sources

- [Wilson Center Digital Archive: Resolution of the Presidium of the USSR Council of Ministers, 2 May 1953](https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/resolution-presidium-ussr-council-ministers-about-letters-ambassador-ussr-prc-vv-kuznetsov), and the [Korean War biological warfare allegations collection](https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/topics/korean-war-biological-warfare-allegations)
- [Cold War International History Project *Bulletin* 11 (1998), "New Evidence on the Korean War" (PDF)](https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/publication/CWIHPBulletin11_p4.pdf)
- [Milton Leitenberg, "New Russian Evidence on the Korean War Biological Warfare Allegations: Background and Analysis", CWIHP *Bulletin* 11 (1998)](https://cissm.umd.edu/research-impact/publications/new-russian-evidence-korean-war-biological-warfare-allegations)
- [Milton Leitenberg, "China's False Allegations of the Use of Biological Weapons by the United States during the Korean War", CWIHP Working Paper 78 (2016)](https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/chinas-false-allegations-the-use-biological-weapons-the-united-states-during-the-korean)
- [Wu Zhili, "The Bacteriological War of 1952 is a False Alarm", *Yanhuang Chunqiu* no. 11 (2013), trans. Drew Casey](https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/wu-zhili-bacteriological-war-1952-false-alarm)
- [Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, *The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea* (Indiana University Press, 1998)](https://iupress.org/9780253334725/the-united-states-and-biological-warfare/)
- [Endicott and Hagerman, "Twelve Newly Released Soviet-Era 'Documents' and Allegations of U.S. Germ Warfare during the Korean War", H-Diplo, 5 July 1999; shorter version in *Asian Perspective* 25, no. 1 (2001): 249-257](https://muse.jhu.edu/article/784903)
- [Tom Buchanan, "The Courage of Galileo: Joseph Needham and the 'Germ Warfare' Allegations in the Korean War", *History* 86 (2001)](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-229X.00203)
- [*Report of the International Scientific Commission for the Investigation of the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in Korea and China* (Peking, 1952), full text](https://archive.org/details/isc-full-report)
- [Zhou Enlai, statement of 8 March 1952, English text published by MR Online (2024)](https://mronline.org/2024/03/07/updated-another-lost-cold-war-document/)
- [UN Security Council resolutions and vetoes, 1952 (Dag Hammarskjöld Library)](https://research.un.org/en/docs/sc/quick/meetings/1952) and [UN General Assembly 7th session resolutions, including 706 (VII)](https://research.un.org/en/docs/ga/quick/regular/7)
- [*TIME*, "Armed Forces: The Marines Decide" (1954), on the Schwable court of inquiry](https://time.com/archive/6884512/armed-forces-the-marines-decide/)
- [Al Jazeera, *People & Power*, "Dirty Little Secrets" (2010)](https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/peopleandpower/2010/03/201031761541794128.html)
- [*China Daily*, "After cover-ups, truth out on US germ warfare" (12 May 2022)](https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202205/12/WS627c4a05a310fd2b29e5c15a.html)
- Milton Leitenberg, "A Chinese Admission of False Korean War Allegations of Biological Weapon Use by the United States", *Asian Perspective* 40, no. 1 (2016): 131-146.
- [Christopher Reed, "The United States and the Japanese Mengele: Payoffs and Amnesty for Unit 731", *Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus*](https://apjjf.org/christopher-reed/2177/article)