Secrets that Sicken

There is no certainty regarding the first military brainiac who thought that disease might be turned into a killer weapon. Some Teutonic knight of the Middle Ages perhaps. This genius might have been the man-at-arms who got the bright idea when he noticed his foes dropping from plague and pestilence while besieging a castle, causing that genius knight to order his men-at-arms to catapult corpses over those imposing castle walls with decimating results. Of course, defending men-at-arms fell, but so do noncombatant men, women, and children. No matter. The fewer ones foes, the easier the plunder after breaching the castle walls.

Swift, silent, deadly. Shortsighted, but enemies would flee the besieged castle. Disperse, riddled with disease, throughout Europe. Consider which German surmised that anthrax might do quite nicely in cutting down Europe's WWI cattle supply. No matter because bio warfare got it big putsch from exactly an effort to quash it: the Geneva Convention of 1925. During June 17, 1925, most of the global powers at the convention affixed seals to a protocol banning the use of biological weapons.

Two abstentions draw scrutiny. The United States did not sign, despite not having an interest in creating germ weapons. Japan was the other no show. Japan was an entirely different story. An inspiring young doctor, Shiro Ishii, caused military and scientific-minded Japanese luminaries to become obsessed with the possibilities of infecting enemies with bacillus. Ten years later Japan took Manchuria, occupied the region, and Dr. Ishii commanded his very own bio war, imperial seal approved, sphere of influence.

Pingfan was home to this wide-ranging operation and known by the officious, bureaucratic tag Anti-Epidemic Water Supply Unit, Unit 731, or simply, the Ishii Corps. Unit 731 used suspect research methods and sloppy science and ethics. Unit 731 used human test subjects: Koreans, Chinese, and Russians at first. Then, after Japan went to war with the Western powers, American, British, and Australian POW's. These POW's found themselves marched, shipped, and hauled to a camp near the Manchurian city of Mukden. The prisoners were met by a masked welcoming committee of medical staff who greeted them by spraying some undetermined liquid in their faces, ramming glass probes in their buttholes, and injecting them with a mysterious serum. No surprise. Some of these POW's died. Their bodies were not disposed of according to orthodox disease control methods. The creepy Japanese medicos came back and bisected the corpses.

This was Unit 731's routine whose "research methods" are believed to have worked throughout most of eastern Asia. The Pingfan lab held germ factories that bred eight tons of toxins per month. Unit 731 contained an impressive flea farm useful in manufacturing Ishii's favorite disease, bubonic plague. Ishii had his unit bombard several Chinese cities with "flea bombs," setting off outbreaks of plague.

Unit 731 infected thousands of human beings with plague, tetanus, anthrax, botulism, meningitis, tuberculosis, and numerous noxious extractions. This medical science was macabre: Ishii's team of medical experts charted their subjects' illnesses from infection to death. POW's who complained of crippling diarrhea were "tested" by being compelled to run laps around the camp until they dropped from exhaustion. Some were made to stand naked in 40 degree below 0 weather until their limbs froze, in order to study the effects of disease in cold climates.

Details were not all that important until the US War Department and General of the Army Douglas MacArthur entered the mix. Ishii and his files contained a mother lode of data that the US could never develop on its own due to--as two American bio warfare researchers eloquently put it upon returning from interviews with Ishii and his underlings in Tokyo--"scruples attached to human experimentation."

General MacArthur took a cavalier approach to supporting American troops, sailors, and marines: MacArthur suggested a deal that would allow Ishii and the rest of Unit 731's mad scientists immunity from prosecution for war crimes if they would merely share their test results with American researchers, an arrangement that suited Ishii just fine. The US State Department objected loudly. The state department believed that news of this deal would "seriously embarrass" the US government.

Dr. Ishii went off into retirement, devoted to his daughter, to religious study--though rumors ran rampant that he made repeated visits to Korea helping the US mount a bio warfare campaign there. Dr. Murray Saunders, a military doctor blew the whistle on the secret deal, believed that Dr. Ishii gave lectures at Ft. Detrick, Maryland, were American scientists immersed themselves in a super secret germ weapons project after the war.

Many of Ishii's associates went on to lucrative careers with Japanese universities, corporations, and government. For example, the doctor who oversaw the cold-weather experiments struck deals with commercial fisheries as a "freezing specialist."

Japan has all but expunged this episode from the official record in that country's histories. The US has not been much better with openness, at least in so far as bio warfare is concerned. A book written by Peter Williams and David Wallace Unit 731: The Japanese Army's Secret of Secrets had a chapter omitted from the American edition. That chapter was included in the English, Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand versions of their book.

What possible chapter content could lead to shudders within the corridors of the military-industrial complex of Foggy Bottom, to the point that censorship was employed to keep Mr. and Mrs. Middle America in blissful ignorance. That chapter was styled "Korean War" and it explored the still controversial evidence that the US military employed Dr. Ishii's techniques against Chinese and North Korean forces. Williams and Wallace base their narrative on the findings of the International Scientific Commission for the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in China and Korea, hereafter ISC, the one source "generally accepted today as being of high quality," a scientific body with sterling members and credentials.

The ISC discovered that many Chinese and Korean areas had undergone unexplained outbreaks of plague and diseases that coincided with the appearance of non-native insect species or out of season ones in those areas. A Chinese plague expert who analyzed the Korean outbreaks reported to the ISC that his results "explain the reasons why Americans deliberately protected the Japanese bacteriological war criminals." The US used the Ishii flea bombs to spread the plague outbreaks, ISC evidence indicated.

More conventional delivery systems had been employed as well by the American bio war engineers. One April night in 1952, an F-82 fighter was observed flying over a Chinese village near the Inner Mongolian border. At dawn the residents were confronted with an infestation of 700 plus voles. Of the surviving voles "many were sluggish of had fractured legs." A lab test on one vole determined that it was infected with plague. The ISC was originally stumped with how the voles had been air-dropped. Williams and Wallace answered, "Unit 731 had devised such methods."

The ISC learned of a weird clam bombing in North Korea. The ISC determined that this had been an attempt to contaminate the local water supply. American planes, loaded with cholera infected clams, dropped the shellfish on a hillside near a water purification plant. "Japanese research had shown that marine lamelli mollusks were a well-suited medium for the growth of cholera," Williams and Wallace report.

These were the rewards of Gen. MacArthur's secret deal. Several Mukden survivors, later suffered from unexplained illnesses and fevers, tried to gain the truth from their own governments without success. As late as 1987, American and British Mukden veterans were told "no evidence existed that Allied prisoners were victimized by Ishii's corps of scientific inquiry." The reality was that this evidence had existed for some 40 years and was known to MacArthur and his staff when he struck the deal with Ishii.

This secret pact and the on-going conspiracy to keep it within the British and American governments caused Dr. Shiro Ishii to become the father of modern biological weapons. The US bio warfare program was a laid-back affair until 1942, when Chang Kaishek wrote to Prime Minister Winston Churchill to inform him of Ishii's machinations. The British had a minor program running and the US joined it. In 1943 the US set up their own project at Ft. Detrick, Maryland.

The search for the "biological bomb," nearly a grail quest, was run under an air of paranoia and self-importance like the atomic research program. The Manhattan Project had drawn leading physicists, but the bio warfare program repulsed America's top biologists who recoiled at the purpose of the research.

Yet, the US government announced the bio warfare project in 1946. The public was outraged which prompted Army Chief of Staff , General of the Army, Dwight David (Ike) Eisenhower, to impose a 3-year gag order on the program--broken by Defense Secretary James Forrestal's 1949 debunking of public concerns as "unduly spectacular." Meanwhile, Ft. Detrick had become a mostly CIA operation. The fort's researchers kept digging away at "unspectacular" endeavors such as toxins that could disguise assassinations as natural deaths and other spooky spycraft that made sense on paper and in the lab and, well, failed field testing miserably. US researchers tested toxins on humans, volunteers of course. Prison inmates was a logical source of human test subjects as were Seventh Day Adventists. Both groups received shots of psittacosis, equine encephalitis, and tularemia.

A problem arises in deploying bio weapons: Namely, having germs blow back in your own troops' faces. The researchers needed to checkout the drift of germ clouds under actual weather conditions. The military response was to douse American cities with bacteria.

American military types would never do such a thing you say. Then, for your consideration, try reconciling this: A 1950 test on San Francisco. A navy minesweeper sprayed rare serratia bacteria all over the city which sent 11 people to the hospital. One person died as a result. Those researchers also unleashed toxins into the Pentagon air conditioning system and the New York City subway system. One time operations you say. Consider the following: The San Francisco victim's family filed a lawsuit against the government. Discovery uncovered 300 "open air" germ tests between 1950 and 1969. In 1972 the US government officially renounced the development and deployment of bio weapons.

One would think that would be the end of this macabre research. Cooler heads and commonsense prevail at last. A fair and logical, forward looking conclusion, but terribly off the mark. Consider: Clandestine bio war tests continue under the cover of college and university studies and private research institutes. Current experiments are concerned with genetic engineering and testing. In 1986 the Wistar Institute, a Philadelphia facility, infected Argentinian cattle with an genetically altered rabies virus, alarming cattle ranchers in that country. The University of Oregon ran a similar experiment in New Zealand.

Though banned in 1972, the military found bio war business not so easily forgotten. The US Defense Department cloned a Shiga toxin gene. This toxin causes dysentery. The military asserted that it merely sought a vaccine against this contagious and deadly disease. The epitaph to this research is AIDS. The thesis is that this epidemic rose from bio warfare gene experiments is the story making the rounds. There is nothing on the record to confirm this; however, there is nothing on the record to confirm that American and British POW's were the subjects of Dr. Ishii's human experiments either.

Sources:

Harris, Robert, and Jeremy Paxman. A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret Story of Chemical and Biological Warfare. NY: Hill & Wang, 1982.

Piller, Charles, and Keith Yamamoto. Gene Wars: Military Control Over the New Genetic Technologies. NY: Beech Tree Books, 1988.

Williams, Peter, and David Wallace. Unit 731: The Japanese Army's Secret of Secrets. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1989.