Page 94 - Unit 731 Testimony

unsubstantiated, though, and seem closer to the category of gossip than
decisive proof.

Nonetheless, all the other, reliable evidence leads one to think that
there is still more to this story than has yet met the eye. And if a true
version of events ever is proven, it may well show up the official conclusion
in the Teigin Incident as nothing but a piece of fiction. Future investigation
may someday reveal that the post-World War II ghost of the Ishii unit
lurked somewhere nearby, after all.

Japanese Biological Warfare Data in the Korean War
In March 1951, about half a year after Red China's People's Liberation

Army entered into the Korean War, Beijing reported that United Nations
forces were resorting to biological warfare in the field. On May 8, 1951,
Park Hen Yen, foreign minister of the Democratic People's Republic of
Korea (North Korea), lodged an official protest with the United Nations.
U.S. forces, he claimed, had attacked Pyongyang with smallpox. This was
denied by the U.N. commander. In February of the following year, a new
accusation came from North Korea that, for the past month, Americans had

been systematically scattering large quantities of bacteria-carrying insects
by aircraft, targeting North Korean army positions. China's premier and
minister of foreign affairs, Zhou Enlai, lodged a separate and similar protest
against the U.S. on February 24; in doing so, he directly lent his country's
prestige to the North Korean accusation. He further asserted that the

Americans had first started using biological warfare even earlier than the
North Koreans had claimed, starting in December 1950. The protests were
picked up on by other Communist countries, which, as usual, saw an
opportunity for scoring propaganda points.
Naturally, North Korea's other major patron, the Soviet Union, got

involved, condemning America's alleged use of biological warfare
weaponry. America, the Soviets reminded the world, was the only member
of the Security Council which had not ratified the 1925 Geneva Protocol
outlawing biological and chemical weapons in war. America rejoined that
the protocol was obsolete and only a paper promise (after all, what good
had it done in restraining the Japanese, who were signatories?), and that the

U.S.S.R. was merely committed to a policy of "no first use," something that
they could get around at any time by claiming that the other side acted first.
Finally, the U.N. offered to have the International Red Cross investigate on