Soviet evidence points to Australian war correspondent Wilfred Burchett's involvement in one of the biggest communist hoaxes
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 Macintyre in the online magazine New Matilda.
I have been interested in Burchett, who died in 1983, 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 US 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 controversial during the early Cold War and goes to the heart of a long-running dispute in Australian intellectual life about 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 several well-regarded academic journals – may close the case. It suggests that the claim 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 Korea 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 and North Korea to investigate the claims....
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I have been interested in Burchett, who died in 1983, 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 US 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 controversial during the early Cold War and goes to the heart of a long-running dispute in Australian intellectual life about 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 several well-regarded academic journals – may close the case. It suggests that the claim 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 Korea 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 and North Korea to investigate the claims....