A true propagandist

Last year Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett's extended autobiography Memoirs of a Rebel Journalist was released receiving generally favourable reviews from writer Ross Fitzgerald in The Australian and academic historian Stuart Mcintyre in the on-line magazine New Matilda.

I have been interested in Burchett for some time and decided to do some research recently, while on a Fulbright fellowship in the US, into the most controversial aspect of his career, the role he played in spreading the claim that the United States had dropped biological weapons - infected insects - on North Korea and China in 1951 and 1952 during the Korean War. It is a claim the Chinese uphold to this day.

This accusation was a controversy during the early Cold War and goes to the heart of a long-running dispute in Australian intellectual life about the late Burchett's credibility. His supporters claim he was a rebel journalist reporting from the “other side”: his denouncers see him as a propagandist hack working for the Communist bloc.

Evidence that emerged from the Soviet archives well after the fall of communism in Russia - first translated by the Japanese newspaper Sankei Shimbun and subsequently reviewed and published in a number of well regarded academic journals - may well close the case. It strongly suggests the claim that the Americans engaged in germ warfare during the Korean War was a well orchestrated hoax, co-ordinated by Mao Zedong and Kim Il Sung, the Chinese and North Korean dictators, to embarrass the Americans and turn global opinion against them.

The evidence is 12 documents from the Soviet archives, including high-level memos between senior officials as well as a memo to Mao. The correspondence to Mao from the Soviet government states that the “accusations against the Americans were fictitious” and recommends that Mao cease “accusing the Americans of using bacteriological weapons in Korean and China”.

Other memos between Soviet officials discuss Chinese and North Korean attempts to fabricate evidence of germ warfare, which was to be shown to sympathetic scientists, lawyers and journalists from the West. More neutral observers from international organisations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross or the World Health Organisation were refused entry to China or North Korea to investigate the claims.

Further evidence of the fraudulent nature of the accusations is presented in Jung Chang's and Jon Halliday's recent biography Mao: The Unknown Story. They draw on interviews with Soviet officers who were in North Korea at the time and who claim there was no evidence the Americans carried out germ warfare during the Korean War. So what we seem to have is a Chinese and North Korean conspiracy, not a US conspiracy as Burchett often claimed.

During the early 1950s the germ warfare accusations were a fairly effective propaganda tool used to discredit the US not just in the Soviet Union and China where it received more attention than any other aspect of the Korean War, but also across Europe where it was used by Paris protesters in 1952 to lambast the visiting American military commander Matthew Ridgway as the “bacterial general”.

It is often cited that Burchett's extensive reporting of this accusation in the West was central to its expansion. Like the reports of Western scientists and lawyers who were shown fabricated evidence, Burchett's writings supposedly added credibility to the claims that the US had dropped germs on Korea and China.

Spreading claims that a nation has used, in today's parlance, “weapons of mass destruction” is a very serious undertaking, and, if falsely asserted, should surely vastly diminish one's credibility. So was Burchett merely caught up in this hoax or is his guilt more serious?

Burchett not only repeated in shrill tones the claims of the Chinese and North Koreans that germs had been dropped by the Americans using carriers such as insects, he also told the reader in his various writings that he had investigated the case himself and concluded it as true after talking to eye witnesses who had seen strange insects in northern Korea.

He also claimed at one point to have personally sighted strange bugs supposedly alien to Korea. Burchett writes, “One [bug] was an inch [2.5cm] long with a trailing abdomen and pincer like jaws, the other was smaller, like a very slim house-fly.” Elsewhere Burchett recalls the story of an American prisoner of war who ate a fly to prove that there were no germs dropped on North Korea and supposedly died the next day after suffering terrible fevers.

The most generous readers of Burchett's work in Korea could perhaps read these claims as coming from someone who was himself a victim rather than a voice of Chinese propaganda.

However, the case against Burchett tightens once one examines the role he played in the centrepiece of the Chinese strategy to build their propaganda case: the use of confessions by captured American pilots that they had dropped germs on their enemy. Burchett here seems to have talked to some of the confessors and helped translate and edit their “confessions”.

Here the story takes its sorriest turn regarding Burchett. If the supposed germ warfare was clearly a hoax as the evidence bears out, how were American airmen forced to confess to crimes they did not commit? Torture seems reasonable to presume.

Although he worked in the POW camps of North Korea, Burchett makes no mention of the killing and torture of US and South Korean soldiers, facts well documented in a number of studies. Instead when describing the North Korean POW camps he writes: “This camp looks like a holiday resort in Switzerland. The atmosphere is also nearer that of a luxury holiday resort than a POW camp.”

Elsewhere he claims, “The overwhelming consensus was that no group of POWs had been so well treated in modern history”.

Australian academic Robert Manne in his short book on Burchett contends these camps were as bad as any during the 20th century, a claim substantiated by Rudolph Rummel's research. Rummel, a professor at the University of Hawaii, estimates that the “North Koreans killed from 5,000 to 12,000 ROK [South Korean] POWs” and were responsible for the “murder of 5,000 to 6,000 American POWs”.

Burchett's writings ignored the poor treatment of POWs by the North Koreans and Chinese. Instead he chose to emphasise the bravery of the American pilots in confessing to their crimes, although their forced confessions were filled with stock phrases from communist propaganda such as “Wall Street warmonger”, making them less than credible even at the time. The fact that we now know that they did not even commit these crimes points to a deplorable distortion of the truth by Burchett.

It is a shame that chroniclers of Burchett and his career have ignored this archival evidence, available now for a number of years. It seems those who have held him up as a brave hero have a vested interest in not examining evidence to the contrary. However for me there has always been ample reason to doubt Burchett's version of events.

He was a strong advocate of both Mao and Josef Stalin; the depth of evil these two men were capable of is recounted in recent biographies such as Chang's and Halliday's book and Simon Montefiore's Stalin.

Chang's and Halliday's book also has interesting new information on why Mao was keen to fight the Americans in Korea. It was a war in which Mao was prepared to lose hundreds of thousands of Chinese lives (preferably ex-nationalist troops) to kill a few thousand Americans, apparently because he believed, like Osama bin Laden, that Americans had no real stomach for war and would soon capitulate.

During wars, reporting from the other side is often crucial in assessing the just nature of how a war is conducted. The Korean War was the first and most potentially combustible conflict of the Cold War. Sandwiched as it was between World War II and the Vietnam War, it is also often referred to as the unknown war. Historical writing on the conflict is often patchy and not particularly good at telling the human side of this encounter.

Particularly lacking is an account of the toll it took on northern Koreans, with no reliable figures on how many civilians died in northern Korea during the war (a figure of up to three million people is mentioned by leading historians). In the early years of the war, there was serious debate within the American government and military over how to avoid civilian casualties and the inappropriateness of fire-bombing cities (a tactic used with devastating effect in the latter part of the war against Japan), but eventually most cities in northern Korea were levelled by US-led bombing campaigns. The fate of the peoples of these cities is the forgotten history of the Korean War.

Burchett was one of the few journalists in the right place to cover this story from the other side. However, his over-enthusiasm for the North Korean and Chinese regimes saw him squander this opportunity. After examining Burchett's career in detail and adding in this latest evidence, he emerges not as the true rebel journalist his followers claim him to be but rather a true propagandist, and a huge disappointment to both journalists and historians alike.