SIX
On the Early Chinese Use of Biological Agents in Bombs
For this bomb you take tung oil, urine, sal ammoniac, faeces and scallion juice, and heat them so as to coat a lot of iron pellets and bits of broken porcelain. Then fill in (with a gunpowder core) to a casing of cast iron, making a fragmentation bomb. When it bursts it breaks into pieces which wound the skin and break the bones (of enemy soldiers) and blind their eyes. Even birds flying in the air cannot escape the effects of the explosion.
—DESCRIPTION OF THE “BONE-BURNING AND BRUISING FIRE-OIL MAGIC BOMB” FROM THE FIRE-DRAKE MANUAL BY JIAO YU, MID-FOURTEENTH CENTURY
From Science and Civilisation in China, Volume V, Part 7
Did the American armed forces use biological weapons during the Korean War? That question—which more than half a century later has still not been satisfactorily answered—very nearly proved the undoing of Joseph Needham, and his reputation remains haunted by the furor it provoked.
This allegation against the American military first arose in 1951, just a year after tanks of the North Korean army had crossed the thirty-eighth parallel and the communist leadership in Pyongyang declared war on the Republic of South Korea, which was backed by the United States. By the summer of that year—when the Chinese army had become fully involved on the side of the North—the war had become utterly bogged down in the stalemate which was its principal, bleak characteristic. Enormous numbers of troops—1 million on the communist side and very nearly as many among the twelve armies fighting under the flag of the United Nations—were sweeping back and forth along the mountainous, often bitterly cold, pitiless terrain, gaining territory, losing territory, demolishing cities to deny their use by an onrushing enemy, blowing up bridges, bombing railways, and in all manner of cruel ways wrecking the lives of millions, and for decades to come.
While the two sides were locked in this desperate and unwinnable struggle, reports began to surface suggesting that something sinister might be afoot. Newspapers in Moscow reported that American agents had poisoned North Korean water wells with cholera bacteria; that anthrax had been used to infect cattle on farms in the far north of the country; and, most bizarre of all, that lepers had been parachuted or otherwise infiltrated into areas held by the communists, where they were left to infect as best they could the enemy around them. The reports caused anxiety and commentary in left-wing newspapers around the world, but otherwise, because of their suspect provenance, they were roundly ignored. For a while things calmed down.
But early in 1952 fresh reports—similar but rather more dramatic—surfaced again, this time in the Chinese press. It was said that mysterious diseases were breaking out in Korea and Manchuria, and that they were inconsistent with either the region or the season. Cholera, a hot-weather ailment, was found in a Korean village in January, and doctors were baffled. Infected insects were found lying on top of patches of snow—and they were always found, it seemed, just after the United States made nighttime air raids.
One instance remains a contemporary Chinese legend. In the early spring of 1952, villagers in a Chinese county close to the North Korean frontier reported that during the night hundreds of small vole-like rodents fell from the skies, landing on their roofs, scattered into their haystacks, and even wriggling onto the kangs, the platforms on which women and children were still sleeping.
By the time the day had fully broken, the men of this village’s local communist leadership knew exactly how to react. They acted quickly—skeptics would later say too quickly. They assumed these were alien and probably disease-ridden animals that had been dropped by American planes coming across the Yalu River from their bases in Korea. They had been warned that this might happen, and so, as they had been fully trained to do, they organized a hurried collect-and-destroy campaign. According to North Korean accounts, by the end of the day every single vile American vole had been tossed onto a pyre, and all traces of possible infection that the dastardly American generals had tried to inflict on the villagers had been purged.
By coincidence—or by supposed coincidence—China was at that moment in the middle of a state-directed public health offensive, the Patriotic Hygiene Campaign, run with all the manic energy for which the Chinese Communists were becoming known. It took just a single exhortation from the country’s Great Helmsman to get things started. “Let us get mobilized,” Mao Zedong wrote the week before in a memorial presented to the National Health Conference in Beijing. “Let us attend to hygiene, reduce the incidence of disease, raise the standards of health, and crush the enemy’s germ warfare.”
His words were immediately echoed by Zhou Enlai, China’s premier and foreign minister—who by now was a good friend of Needham’s from their sojourns in Chongqing nine years before.42 That Zhou agreed wholly convinced Needham of Mao’s plan: China’s hygiene campaign, he said later, was just the kind of first-rate national effort of will that was so hugely impressive in the early idealistic days of the Chinese Communists. Needham truly believed—though many said he was naive to do so—that a properly compassionate nation could and should marshall its efforts just like this, selflessly and for the common good. A capitalist system, he thought, would simply never be up to the task, since the need for profit would always mask and distort the mission’s ultimate goal.
So he was more than a little surprised to read that Zhou had taken his theme somewhat farther than the idealistic goals behind the plan. The premier told his audience that he supported an accusation just made by the North Korean foreign minister, saying that the Americans, in dropping sickly voles on Chinese villages, were clearly up to no good. He was quite specific: “I charge the United States government before the people of the whole world, with the heinous crime of employing bacteriological weapons.” He called on “the world’s peace-loving peoples” to “take steps to put an end to the frenzied, criminal acts of the American Government.”
The world had to take notice. Zhou’s evidence was at best slender, and largely circumstantial. There were said to have been outbreaks of plague, respiratory anthrax, and encephalitis in northern Korea and southern Manchuria, and local people reported that germ-carrying insects and animals, such as rats, mice, and voles, had been found on the ground in the affected areas, scattered randomly as if dropped from on high. Teams of Chinese scientists concluded that America, desperate to tip the strategic balance on the Korean peninsula, had been waging a particularly cruel secret war that involved the dissemination of lethal bacteria and viral agents.
Evidence or not, this was certainly within the bounds of credibility. It was known to a limited degree at the time to the intelligence agencies—and is known more widely today—that America had for some years after World War II been developing biological weapons. After the capture of the Japanese army’s notorious Unit 731 “Water Purification Camp” at Pingfan, near Harbin in Manchuria—where an elite Japanese team conducted unimaginably terrible biological experiments on living human prisoners (the same was done at a similar camp in the center of Nanjing)—a deal was struck, whereby American military researchers gained access to all the Japanese data in exchange for freedom, or very light prison sentences, for many of the principal experimenters.
Much of America’s subsequent research—using animals and a very small number of human volunteers—was then conducted by the U.S. Army at its chemical warfare research center at Fort Detrick in Maryland.43 The success of this work then led to an enthusiastic memorandum, approved by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff in February 1952, declaring that henceforth the United States should be ready to deploy biological weapons “whenever it is militarily advantageous.”
While these developments were taking place in America, Mao’s government announced a number of sweeping public policy campaigns—such as those involving public health, with the people being regularly mobilized by party cadres to find and destroy outbreaks of disease (and to catch houseflies). That the efforts of this campaign turned up so much illness in 1952 may be regarded as a testament to its success—or its results may simply have been engineered to provide the government with some very useful propaganda. Whatever the motives or the effects, the coincidence was stark: the American military now had an admitted ability to wage germ warfare, and the Chinese hygiene campaign was turning up inexplicable outbreaks of illness caused by germs. Two and two could easily be added together to produce—at least from the propagandists’ point of view—a highly desirable result.
Two months after Zhou Enlai’s intelligence staff told him of America’s memorandum about biological warfare, he made the connection, and then gave his hostile and highly tendentious speech. And following that, Communist China’s new spin machine was cranked up and presented to the world at large the full extent of the atrocities the Americans were now charged with committing.
This was the point at which Joseph Needham became involved. About six weeks after Zhou made his charges, he sent Guo Moruo, who was the head of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and an old colleague of Needham’s, to Oslo for a meeting of the World Peace Council, a body set up three years before, and largely funded by the Soviet Union, to promote nuclear disarmament and, as its name suggested, world peace. At this meeting Guo swiftly turned up the temperature by issuing a formal request for an International Science Commission to investigate the charges. The International Red Cross had first been suggested, but the Chinese and North Koreans said that a report issued by this body, which was based in Geneva, would probably be biased in favor of the West, and dismissed the idea out of hand.
Guo told the conference that what China and North Korea wanted was a group of six or seven “impartial and independent scientists…known for their devotion to humanitarian causes.” This last phrase was unfortunate, since it was a code that in those years of the cold war suggested to critics an ominous hint of fellow travelers, and automatically placed the validity of any work they might do under suspicion in the West. Guo was a Chinese Communist; the Peace Council was “left-leaning”; “humanitarian causes” meant, in apparatchik-speak, “our cause.” From its inception, then, the International Commission had problems with credibility.
Nonetheless, seven scientists were quickly found, and only one of them, a professor of biology named Zhukov from the Soviet Academy of Medicine, was from an overtly communist background. Others were more obviously neutral. There were reasonably well-respected biologists from the universities in Rome, Bologna, and São Paulo. There was the director of the main clinical laboratory of the hospitals in Stockholm, and also the head of a well-known French animal physiology department.
But then came a coup de théâtre, which startled the academic world. Guo still remembered Needham from their wartime meetings in China, and he was able to telephone from Norway to Cambridge to ask if, for old times’ sake, Needham might consider joining the group. Guo piled on the flattery, as he had been instructed. All Needham’s friends in China were longing to see him, Guo said. The newly liberated China was a sight well worth seeing. It was the socialist dream made real—and all of Needham’s travel expenses would be paid, all his quarters would be comfortable, all his companions agreeable. Needham withered under the pitch. He apparently needed little persuasion, and that same evening agreed readily to go and see for himself if the charges against the American forces were true or false.
And so on the following morning the news was formally announced: the International Commission would be led by Joseph Needham, a Cambridge biochemist of towering reputation, a man who had spent four years in China during the Japanese war and who was—of crucial importance for the commission’s study of documents and interviews with witnesses—fluent both in written and spoken Chinese. There should be no doubt, said Guo, that the commission and its work would eventually be taken seriously, since its conclusions would be underwritten by men of the greatest integrity and a commitment to unbiased scientific inquiry.
It was to turn out very differently.
The team arrived in China in June, on a mission designed to last two months. Needham, a man given to moments of intellectual vanity, promptly decided that the colleagues with whom he had been saddled were of rather lower caliber than he had hoped. In letters home he fretted that the participation of such “undistinguished” scientists might well tarnish the legitimacy of the commission’s work.44 So to compensate for this, he threw himself into his allotted tasks with typical vigor, traveling to the sites of the alleged vole attacks, interviewing villagers, translating and writing reports, and compiling vast quantities of notes.
The others in his team may have slipped on their white coats and gone to laboratories to conduct experiments on the material that had been collected as evidence. But Needham, delighted to be back in China for the first time since 1946, eager to see his old friends, and thrilled beyond words to be able to offer some support to the party that now held power in the People’s Republic, stayed either in Beijing or the south Manchurian city of Shenyang, or went to the various sites where bombs and canisters of animals had allegedly been dropped. He pointedly did no scientific investigations. His only regret was that neither he nor anyone on the team had the “good fortune” to see anything being dropped from the air—though they met a great many Chinese people whom they named in the eventual report, and who had said, apparently credibly, that they had seen such things.
On his germ-hunting tours of north China Needham was very much the same man he had been six years before. He reveled in the parties and soirees that his handlers staged for him. He commented on a “v. pretty” female tractor driver who performed Manchu and Mongol folk dances for him at one site of the alleged vole attack. He was happy to be photographed beside the containers in which, it was alleged, noxious bacteria-rich concoctions had been dropped from American bombers. And if he had any suspicion that the displays and the reminiscences of the villagers who supposedly saw the bacteria-laden insects, birds, or rats infest their fields were to any degree staged, then he supposed it was merely part of the all too familiar Chinese theatrical approach to welcome and hospitality, and so was entirely innocent.
Needham did become a little skeptical, however, when he visited Gannan county on the Korean border, where the first reported dropping of voles occurred. He was invited to sit back and watch as a technician in full protective gear of mask and rubber gloves went through the elaborate motions of examining microscope slides in a mobile bacteriology laboratory which had been set up on a day of quite blinding Manchurian summer heat. “I have the feeling,” he wrote the next day to Dorothy in Cambridge, “that this may have been a mise-en-scène for one person.” He was blithely unaware of just how true that would turn out to be.
He was staggered—and reading between the lines of his notes, initially just a little depressed—by the changes he saw. There was a drab colorlessness to everything in China now. People were dressed in gray and blue, or else in military uniforms, and the only other clothing he glimpsed was in a few rather threadbare theatrical performances, when minority tribes wore their traditional dress. There were portraits of Mao and Zhou posted on buildings, and exhortations in enormous red characters, telling people to produce more, to be honest, to trust the party. No Christian churches seemed to be functioning. The telephone service was patchy, and people whose numbers had worked during the 1940s had apparently now been disconnected, or perhaps had moved away.
There also seemed to be less food in the shops, fewer cars on the streets, more broken windows and broken-down trucks. He sensed listlessness—but at the same time, he wrote more cheerily, there was also a very evident lack of excess, little evidence of the old corruption, a far better hospital service, and what appeared to be many more public buses. But if he was more than a little disappointed at the changes, he said nothing in his journals to suggest this. He had long held the view that it would take many years for a true revolution to make itself felt in so huge a country as China. Patience was consequently essential, as well as an optimistic faith that Mao, Zhou, and all the other architects of the People’s Republic would hold on tight and await the realization of their dream.
And in any case most universities were still running, and they were back safe in their home cities. He entirely trusted, he wrote, the dozens of Chinese scientists he interviewed on behalf of the commission—all of them were first-rate bacteriologists, and many were men and women he had known personally in the 1940s and could vouch for.
In the end it was Needham’s blind trust in these Chinese scientists that led him to the conclusions he made—and to present the final report, which would bring him so much trouble and would briefly put his entire literary project in peril. He had total, uncritical faith in the honor and integrity of these men and women. He simply could not bring himself to believe that any scientist worth his salt—and certainly none that he knew and had chosen for this task—could change his or her powers of observation and analysis merely because the government’s ideology had changed. True, it had been an almost unimaginably profound change—from capitalism to communism, from Chiang Kai-shek to Mao Zedong—but it could surely not affect the conclusions of the kind of scientists with whom he had become and had remained such close friends. Surely not. It was just inconceivable.
He helped select some sixty of the local specialists who would carry out technical investigations for his report, and much was made of their foreign credentials. Twenty-three of them had PhDs from American universities (including Cornell, Berkeley, and Harvard), a dozen came from British schools, and nine had doctorates from the well-regarded Japanese colleges that had been set up in the old puppet state of Manchukuo. The presence of so many foreign-trained scientists would, it was hoped, bolster the credibility of the eventual report.
And credibility was very much needed when the 665-page report (most of it in the form of appendixes) was finally issued, initially in French, on September 15, 1952.
This document confirmed everything Mao and Zhou Enlai had claimed. The people of China and Korea, Needham stated at a formal government-sponsored gathering in Beijing on that Monday morning, had indeed been the hapless targets of American bacteriological weapons.
These have been employed by units of the U.S.A. armed forces, using a great variety of different methods for the purpose, some of which seem to be developments of those applied by the Japanese army during the Second World War. The Commission reached these conclusions, passing from one logical step to another. It did so reluctantly because its members have not been disposed to believe such an inhuman technique could have been put into execution in the face of its universal condemnation by the people of the nations.
When Needham arrived in London a week later, he was immediately and rudely exposed to the world of misery in which he would now have to live. His first clue should have been the two-hour grilling by a vehemently skeptical press. He stood on a podium at Hotel Russel in Bloomsbury, still wearing his army fatigues, looking like an overgrown Boy Scout, and, once the questioning became unexpectedly harsh, wincing with discomfort and embarrassment. He had never been subjected to an onslaught like this. One imagines that he began to stutter, to blink, to look uneasy, to seem suddenly quite out of his depth, and as if he didn’t have the slightest idea of just how little the western press wanted to hear the news he claimed to bring.
He managed to splutter weakly that he was “ninety-seven percent certain” that the Americans had used infected insects and small animals as vectors to spread diseases such as anthrax, smallpox, tularemia, typhus, and plague in China and Korea. He was not able to say why they had done this; nor could he be certain how successful the alleged biological warfare campaign had been, militarily—but that it had occurred he never had any doubt. No, never. Well, hardly ever. It would be too kind to say that at this moment Needham seemed just like the well-bred captain of the Pinafore. It was a great deal worse than that.
A photographic triptych showing Needham (third from left) sitting next to Mao Zedong and with Zhou Enlai (first from left). The picture was taken in the summer of 1952 when Needham was investigating alleged American atrocities in the Korean war.
Not a single question asked that day was friendly. The writer of the one in-depth interview he granted, for a paper he later described as “reactionary,” painted him as a traitor, a stooge, an Ishmael. He returned to Cambridge, chagrined and bewildered, and for the next several months had to endure a firestorm of criticism, first in his own country, then across the Atlantic.
The establishment turned its guns on him as only the British establishment can do. A hitherto unknown government organization, the Intelligence Research Department of the British Foreign Office, mounted a fierce campaign of character assassination against him, directed at friends within the press and malleable members of Parliament. Fury rained down on him from all quarters. He was ostracized in his college. He came under intense pressure to resign from his academic posts and as a fellow of Caius. An invitation to accept an honorary degree in Brussels was withdrawn, though only temporarily. He was condemned even by colleagues in the Royal Society, despite the Society’s motto Nullius in verbia, “On the words of no one,” which normally suggests that its members have a certain healthy skepticism toward authority. Two former presidents of the Royal Society wrote a letter to the Times officially distancing the society from the commission’s report; the master of Corpus Christi College in Cambridge sent a letter to the New Statesman saying that Needham’s involvement showed that “it is not always easy for even an experienced scientist to discard a favourite hypothesis when the evidence fails to support it”; and even one of Needham’s closest scientist colleagues, the left-wing Sinophile Bill Pirie, remarked that the commission’s report contained “a lot of nonsense.”
One prominent fellow of the Royal Society, the Nobel prize–winning physiologist A. V. Hill, widened the attack by writing a scathing letter to the New York Times, alerting Americans to the commission’s existence, to its report, and to its principal author—all the while telling them not to be too concerned, since no one of any standing in Britain had taken much notice. In a very similar letter to a London newspaper he suggested baldly that Needham had used “the prostitution of science for the purpose of propaganda,” but for his transatlantic readers he was rather more insidiously critical. “Our Americans friends can be reassured, “he said, because
the only British member of this “impartial and independent” party (invited, it is true, by Chinese agencies) was Dr. Joseph Needham; and British scientists appear to have applied spontaneously to him the advice which the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Fisher, gave earlier about the Dean of Canterbury—that any public importance he might seem to have in this connection would evaporate if no serious notice was taken of him.
The letter briefly fascinated Americans, revealing for the first time the existence of this clearly hostile Red in the fens of Cambridgeshire. This was, after all, the height of anticommunist fervor in the United States, and Senator Joe McCarthy, investigating the alleged infiltration of the U.S. government by communist agents and fellow travelers, was coming to the top of his game, intimidating, harassing, naming names, providing lists, shamelessly creating a mood of despair, and driving suspects to depression, self-loathing, and worse.
One good friend of Needham’s, the anthropologist Gene Weltfish, was abruptly dismissed by Columbia University at about this time, for no more serious a crime than publicly agreeing with Needham’s conclusions about the use of germ warfare by the United States. Twenty years later the university president who had fired the popular and accomplished Weltfish confessed that he was pressured to do so by the board of regents. He was directed to weed Dr. Weltfish out as undesirable, an agitator, and a Red. For the following nine years she was essentially unemployed, and when finally her good name was publicly restored she was ailing and thoroughly embittered by her experience.45
Others who spoke out in support of Needham were similarly censured: for example, a seventy-two-year-old market gardener in California, a Briton, was threatened with deportation for publicly accepting Needham’s verdict. Generally it was wise to keep quiet—and few in the American intellectual community dared utter anything severely critical of the American forces’ behavior in the Korean theater; nor did American intellectuals criticize too harshly the politicians’ decisions on how best to fight the war. To be branded in any way “un-American” was to risk ostracism of the harshest kind.
For playing his part on the International Commission Joseph Needham was banned from traveling to the United States, was declared persona non grata, and was put on a blacklist by the State Department. All this was more than just a slight to a senior British scientific figure, a former diplomat, and a fellow of the Royal Society: it was a tremendous inconvenience, since his academic life required him to make scores of visits to America to attend conferences and give speeches. He had spent three months in America only a short while before, speaking at Berkeley and Stanford, in Colorado, and in Texas, and to a fund-raiser in New York for Rewi Alley’s Gung Ho cooperatives in China. He went to the Ivy League schools with metronomic regularity. And he undertook frequent official missions across the Atlantic on behalf of UNESCO and the British government.
He pleaded, as did his many sponsors, but all came up against the fortress Senator McCarthy had constructed against incursions by the Reds. Needham remained on the blacklist until well into the 1970s, and even after it was withdrawn, and by the time he had become master of his Cambridge college, he still often faced trouble regarding his visa when traveling to the United States. And the matter is still a source of some sensitivity: his files at the Central Intelligence Agency remain off-limits, and requests under the Freedom of Information Act to have them declassified and released have been consistently denied, without anything other than pro forma explanations.
Some people have suggested that this refusal to release Needham’s files is an imputation of guilt by the American government. Recent information from Chinese, Japanese, and Soviet sources, however, suggests that the United States has very little to fear from revealing the entire truth about Korea, since it seems likely that no American germs ever did rain down on China or North Korea, and that Needham had simply been naive. He had been foolish, eccentric, out of touch, and, in the words of one very hostile obituarist, a “fathead.” Needham was intellectually in love with communism; and yet communist spymasters and agents, it turned out, had pitilessly duped him.
In 1998 a number of hitherto secret documents from the Soviet Union’s presidential archives relating to the Korean war were published in Japan, and academics studying those papers that related specifically to the work of the International Commission and its visit half a century before noticed something quite remarkable: that the sites to which Needham and his colleagues were taken during their investigations had all been created artificially by, or with the help of, intelligence agents from the Soviet Union.
The papers, which in due course were published in English in Washington by the Carnegie Institution’s Cold War International History Project, offer in fascinating detail a narrative of what may really have happened during the summer of 1952, at the time of the investigating party’s arrival. Much seems to have concerned vicious factional infighting in the Kremlin after the death of Joseph Stalin.
The first revelation came in an explanatory formal memorandum, sent by telegram in early April 1953, from a senior agent of the KGB named Glukhov to the minister for state security in Moscow, Semen Ignatiev, who was known to be a supporter of the ambitious Nikita Khrushchev. This memo was copied to the North Korean Public Security Ministry, to whom Glukhov was attached as an adviser. It began:
The Koreans stated that the Americans had supposedly repeatedly exposed several areas of their country to plague and cholera. To prove these facts, the North Koreans, with the assistance of our advisers, created false areas of exposure. In June–July 1952 a delegation of specialists in bacteriology from the World Peace Council arrived in North Korea. Two false areas of exposure were prepared. In connection with this the Koreans insisted on obtaining cholera bacteria from corpses which they would get from China. During the period of the work of the delegation, which included Comrade N. Zhukov, who was an agent for the Ministry of State Security, an unworkable situation was created for them, with the help of our advisers, in order to frighten them and force them to leave. In this connection, under the leadership of Lt. Petrov, adviser to the Engineering Department of the Korean People’s Army, explosions were set off near the place where the delegation was staying, and while they were in Pyongyang false air raid alarms were sounded.
Two weeks later, in Moscow, Lavrenty Beria—who had almost certainly been involved in Stalin’s murder the previous month, and was now jockeying (in vain) for power against the allies of Khrushchev—was informed by a senior official in the KGB that Soviet agents had helped spread false stories about American efforts to disseminate smallpox among the North Koreans. Moreover, all the allegations that had been made around the world about the use of bacteriological weapons in China and the north of Korea had been invented either in Beijing or Moscow—and invented so well that even Kim Il Sung, the North Korean leader, believed them and was reportedly afraid of falling victim to a germ attack even though “there are not and have not been instances of plague or cholera in the PRC and there are no examples of biological weapons.”
A week later Beria was reporting to Georgy Malenkov and the Presidium of the Soviet Union about the creation of the two false areas, adding some macabre details: in one of these areas “two Koreans who had been sentenced to death and were being held in a hut were infected. One of them was later poisoned.”
The political consequences then took a turn that was somewhat unexpected. The Presidium declared that the invention of these stories about the Americans’ use of germ weapons had in fact done the Soviet Union great diplomatic damage—clearly Moscow thought that few in the West actually believed the stories, and that Needham’s mission had in fact been either widely discredited, or ignored. This, of course, was entirely true: the British Foreign Office had very efficiently seen to that, and Needham had spent many solitary weeks in Cambridge, shunned by most of the noncommunist scientific community, his report gathering dust, largely unheeded.
In view of this, said the Kremlin, an ax had to fall—and in a memorandum dated just three days after Beria’s message to Malenkov it was recommended that for helping organize the subterfuge, the Soviet Union’s ambassador to Pyongyang be recalled, fired, and prosecuted; and that the minister of state security, Ignatiev, who had first authorized the plans after the ambassador told him about them, be demoted and stripped of his membership in the Central Committee.
This small and unnoticed bloodbath was one of many in Moscow during these frightening times. Beria was to be executed soon afterward, once Nikita Khrushchev had won power and had started to reverse many of Stalin’s policies and to purge their architects. But however mundane or bizarre, the episode had a certain sweet relevance to Needham’s later reputation.
The revealed telegrams showed that he had operated in China and Korea in perfectly good faith, and had been a victim of a very clever and adroitly organized campaign of disinformation. He was, in other words, much more of a fool than a knave—and in truth not too much of a fool, even then.
His worst crime was to have taken at face value the word of a great number of Chinese bacteriologists, men and women whom he trusted and in whom he firmly believed. In professional terms Needham was after all an exceptionally honorable man, a scientist given to following the scientists’ code—hypothesis, theory, experimentation, observation, discovery, and proof—which at every step demands a commitment to honesty and integrity, and which holds as a moral certainty the idea that results can never, ever be fudged, manipulated, or falsified.
Given his absolute adherence to this guiding principle Needham simply could not imagine that, even with so profound a change in the regime in Beijing, the minds of so many scientists, hitherto as honorable as he, could possibly become so perverted merely in support of a new political dogma. Today we would regard that as naiveté; in 1953 cynics could only really say that by agreeing to join the commission he had set out on what was no more than a fool’s errand. Those who were his fans would remark, wearily: even Homer nods.
There was to be a sad sequel to the story. In 1956 three American radicals then living in Shanghai—John and Sylvia Powell and Julian Schuman—were charged in a federal court with the grave crimes of treason and sedition. Their offense was that they had published, in their magazine China Monthly Review, two treacherous articles. The first exposed the secret details of the deal allegedly struck between the United States government and the Japanese commanders of the Unit 731 terror camp—data about human experimentation in exchange for amnesty. The second article offered generally sympathetic coverage of the findings of Needham’s commission. The Powells’ readers would expect no less: they all knew that germ warfare had been conducted in Korea, and the commission’s report simply confirmed it.
The defendants’ lawyer asked Needham to fly to America and testify on their behalf—his expenses would be paid, and the court would order a temporary American visa to be issued. But Needham refused. It was now four years after the commission had reported. By now, he said, his life was beginning to return to normal. The fellows of Caius had forgiven him, and he had been appointed to the college consilium. His work on Science and Civilisation in China was now occupying all of his life, and he did not wish to be subjected yet again to abuse and ostracism. So far as he was concerned, and sorry though he might have been for the “dreadful plight” of the three accused, the matter was now closed.
As it happened, the passage of time eventually closed the case for the accused as well. As the 1950s ended and the 1960s began, a mood of tolerance began to find its way back into the American body politic. Public opinion turned against the witch hunters, and in consequence, in 1959, toward the close of the Eisenhower administration, the charges of treason were abandoned after a judge dismissed the case for lack of evidence. Two years later the U.S. attorney general, Bobby Kennedy, dropped the sedition charges also, and the Powells returned to their native San Francisco to run an antiques business. At the time of this writing John Powell, who was born in 1919 in Shanghai, remains in California, a survivor of a curious period in American history.
As to whether the Americans ever did use bacteriological weapons in Korea or China, one has now to suppose they did not, but at the same time one suspects that the story has still not been fully told. It was the investigation itself that in the end, at least in academic circles, became the event most remembered from that time—and it was an event that took an inevitable toll on the stature and standing of the man who led it.
But then came the publication of the first volumes of his book, and his precipitous fall from grace was suddenly, and impressively, arrested. And as the long line of massive volumes began to thunder from the presses, Joseph Needham’s once formidable reputation, so unexpectedly battered and bruised, began to recover.