Unit 731

On Ishii, Operation Paperclip and the Unhinging of American scientific morality.

• It’s hard not to conclude that the men who gravitated to the bioweapons field were often ethically unhinged.

• The exhilarating potential of killing millions of civilians seems to have unhinged these academics from moral restraints. They rhapsodized about sabotaging milk supplies with typhoid; polluting reservoirs with botulinum; releasing diphtheria into shelters, bus stations, movie theaters, factories, and stores; smearing microbes onto subway strap handles to murder commuters; and infesting cities with plague-contaminated rats. The prospect of mass murder had proven a surprising catalyst for their superior brains.

The Wuhan Cover-Up

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I wasn’t planning on reading Kennedy’s latest book The Wuhan Cover-Up.

That’s strange considering The Real Anthony Fauci was the most important book I had ever read.

I think it’s because I didn’t think of it as a sequel to TRAF, which it absolutely is, and mainly because I’ve concluded that the whole Wuhan thing is a limited hangout.

Then Toby Rogers said:

The Wuhan Cover-Up and the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race is the most important book in American history. If you want to understand what is happening, it is absolutely essential to read it.

Bloody hell, now I had to read it!

I’m grateful for Toby’s nudge; it’s a very significant and important book.

I’m about a third of the way through and have learned something valuable from every page. I’m curious what I will think by the end and if my limited hangout position will alter. I’ll let you know.

For now, I want to focus on this most important point of the book, which is that the US, post WW2, imported, via Operation Paperclip, not only the top German scientists but also the top Japanese scientists.

The US scientific establishment imported the crème de la crème of the German and Japanese psychopaths. Wholly integrated them into US institutions and leadership structures, and then, being the new Empire with hegemonic aspirations went on to export that intuitional psychopathy into the whole world.

If I get nothing else out of the book, the clarity with which Kennedy tells, and shows, that point, is ample reward for me for investing in the book.

Kennedy describes them, correctly, as “unhinged.”

It’s a beautifully accurate term.

These people went on to lead people and organizations that also became unhinged. That is what psychopaths do when they are able to influence and control systems. They make those systems sick, and they make all who work within those systems sick. Everyone within their system becomes their fractal.

Maybe these US intuitions were already unwell, but the pure-grade import of large volumes of mental disorder into the system certainly accelerated the diseasing of the institutions they touched.

I’m interested in the provenance of things.

When I observe something, I’m always curious about its history. How did it get here?

When I witnessed The Unhinged State of Australia, chasing me and why family with a poisoned needle, I became curious.

How did we get here?

Is this all organic?

Who is actually calling the shots, and why are they calling them this way?

Anyway, you get the picture.

The Wuhan Cover-Up is a vitally important book, as it answers, at least for me, many of these questions.

I’d heard of Unit 731, and I think I have the book by that title lost somewhere in my bookshelves. What I didn’t know is that Unit 731 and Operation Paperclip were connected (I thought that it was only German’s they imported) and I certainly had not made the connection that the wholesale importation of psychopathy back in the 1940s had an impact on me today.

With thanks to Robert Kennedy Jr. for writing another masterpiece and to Toby Rogers for convincing me to read it.

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The Wuhan Cover-Up by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Chapters 3-5

Japan’s Unit 731

Perhaps because of its limited access to the petroleum feedstocks upon which chemical warfare capacity relies, Japan was the first nation to industrialize production of weaponized pathogens. Japan, which was a signatory to the Geneva agreement but failed to ratify it, used both gas and biological weapons in its 1937–1945 war against China. The eight divisions of Detachment 731—the Biological Warfare Unit of the Kwantung Army—mass-produced deadly germs in sprawling laboratories across occupied Manchuria, and subjected the region’s captive population to ghoulish experiments in industrial warfare.

According to eyewitness accounts, at least three thousand human guinea pigs died hideously in Japanese germ warfare experiments during that period. After World War II, Russian officials indicted twelve Japanese Army officials from Detachment 731 for field-testing bubonic plague, cholera, typhoid, typhus, and anthrax. Japan’s deployment of these weapons against civilian targets, according to some estimates, killed as many as five hundred thousand civilians in Chinese and Manchurian cities.

US military and intelligence agents recruited the officers and scientists of Unit 731 and Hermann Göring’s Nazi bioweapons program after World War II, thereby imprinting the US biological warfare program—at its birth—with strategies, methodologies, and the ethical malleability that had sanctioned Japan’s campaign of depravity in its Manchurian charnel houses and Germany’s vile concentration camps and medical experimentation. The infectious ethical bankruptcy of the US bioweapons culture—which still pervades the military, intelligence, and public health agencies, and their partners in academia—is, arguably, the legacy of Japan’s bioweaponeers and the Nazi doctors whom the CIA recruited during Operation Paperclip. It’s therefore worth spending a moment considering the links between contemporary NIH-funded virology and the strategies adopted by its Japanese and German progenitors.

One of the most striking similarities between the modern US and the WWII-vintage Japanese and German bioweapons programs is the shocking symbiosis linking military bioweapons development to civilian academies, the mainstream medical establishment, and the scientific journals. In both war-torn Japan and Germany, as well as contemporary America, individual doctors and university medical schools saw their idealistic healing missions subverted by the ineluctable gravities of militarized medicine and the biosecurity rubric.

In Japan, it all began idealistically enough, with the noble mission of ending mass casualties of soldiers from infectious disease. Prior to the twentieth century, militaries across the globe suffered eighty percent of losses of deployed soldiers from disease—the so-called “silent war”—and fewer than twenty percent to combat. In both the US Civil War and the 1846–48 Mexican–American War, for example, three American soldiers died of sickness for every battlefield casualty. In World War I, the US did somewhat better, losing 63,114 soldiers to disease and 53,402 to combat.

Determined to tackle this strategic vulnerability, Japan’s military medical corps during the late nineteenth century implemented the most elegant and effective systems of water purification, nutrition, and bacteriological control ever employed by an army. These reforms virtually eliminated mortality from typhoid, typhus, cholera, and other mass killers among Japanese soldiers. During the Russo-Japanese war in 1905, Japan, the world’s undisputed leader in military medicine at the time, succeeded in miraculously reducing deaths from disease to less than one percent. The Japanese military suffered one-sixth the cases of typhoid and dysentery as the Russian troops.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the American military surgeon Louis Livingston Seaman declared that Japanese military medicine and wartime bacteriology were the best in the world. Unit 731 historian Hal Gold writes that “[t]heir standards . . . were far higher than those maintained by the United States and Great Britain, and medicine was treated by the Japanese as being equal in importance to guns and shells in contributing to military performance.” Moreover, observers testified that Japanese military doctors altogether exceeded other nations in their humanity and compassion, providing their superior treatment and healing techniques to enemy prisoners with the same ardor with which they treated Japanese soldiers.

In his definitive chronicle of Japan’s biowarfare program, Gold recounts how Japan’s charismatic surgeon general, Shirō Ishii, hijacked Japan’s blue-chip medical proficiencies, civilian physicians, medical journals, and universities, diverting them to serve the so-called “death sciences” of weapons development. Following the bioweapons culture’s affinity for innocuous euphemisms to disguise sinister purpose, Japan’s biowarfare division adopted the Orwellian title “Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department.” The more accurate description of Unit 731’s principal proficiencies were poisoning water and causing epidemics.

Unit 731’s diabolical Commander Ishii made himself Japan’s version of Germany’s “Angel of Death,” Dr. Josef Mengele, and transformed occupied Manchuria into a nightmarish bioweapons hellhole during the Sino-Japanese War.

Unit 731 operated 4,500 incubators in Manchuria for breeding plague-infected fleas on rats and mice to disseminate various contagions. Back on the home front, Ishii’s Unit recruited Japanese farmers, soldiers, and youth corps members across Japan to capture and breed rats, and elderly men to ranch fleas on their bodies. Detachment 731 researchers also used sick dogs to cultivate and spread cholera and ticks to spread hemorrhagic fever and poisoned wells with cholera.

Ishii field-tested bacteriological weapons by aerial dousings of civilian populations in occupied Chinese cities and towns. Ishii proved the efficacy of entomological weapons during highly successful plague attacks on Manchuria’s port city of Ningbo in October 1940. Unit 731 dropped ceramic barrels filled with plague-laden fleas. Within days, residents were dying in droves. The physicians of Unit 731 moved in with stretchers, pretending to offer treatment—but instead, removed the patients to field laboratories disguised as treatment centers and dissected them alive. Buoyed by the successful massacre at Ningbo, the Japanese dropped germ bombs carrying typhoid and cholera on over seventy Chinese communities—including eleven major cities—killing approximately five hundred thousand civilians. Dr. Friedrich Frischknecht, professor of Integrative Parasitology at Heidelberg University and the Department of Parasitology at the Institut Pasteur, observed that the casualties mounted after cessation of hostilities: “Some of the epidemics they caused persisted for years and continued to kill more than 30,000 people in 1947, long after the Japanese surrendered.”

The “Special Handling” unit of Japan’s feared elite intelligence agency, the Kenpeitai, functioned as Unit 731’s “Human Materials Procurement Unit.” At night, the Kenpeitai raided city streets and emptied jails across occupied Manchuria to conscript “volunteers” for bioweapons experiments. The recruiters bound these prisoners’ arms and hips, and shipped them in boxcars to a walled city of 150 buildings housing thousands of test subjects on a six-square-kilometer proving ground in a remote village, Pingfang, in the Harbin district. The compound included a camp for prisoners of war called the Zhongma Prison Camp. The involuntary subjects, according to Japanese sources, “were mostly Chinese prisoners, some Russians and, as one Japanese participant put it, some miscellaneous ‘half-breeds.’” After the war, Moscow reported that Unit 731 also used American war prisoners as guinea pigs. Eyewitnesses reported viewing the bodies of deceased American servicemen preserved in large pickle jars, beside soldiers and civilians of diverse nationalities, on display in the specimen room of Unit 731’s massive headquarters in Pingfang. The Japanese biowarfare units took special care to keep their trial subjects able-bodied and well-fed, since experiments sought to test efficacy of deadly germs on healthy populations.

Healthy Subjects

Nazi doctors also demanded healthy subjects for their experimentation. On November 15, 1943, for example, German virus expert and vaccine creator Dr. Eugen Haagen, a key developer in the covert Nazi bioweapons program, sent a scolding letter to a university administrator complaining that of the one hundred prisoners sent to his lab in a recent delivery, eighteen had died in transport and only twelve were “in a condition suitable for my experiments.” He requested “another 100 prisoners, between twenty and forty years of age, who are healthy and in a physical condition comparable to soldiers. Heil Hitler.”

In Japan, healthy, plump Chinese, Manchurian, and Russian guinea pigs—men, women, children, and infant civilians—awaited death in 1,000 cages from where they would, when ordered, extend their arms into adjacent corridors to receive inoculations from syringes filled with teeming pathogens administered by roving squads of physicians and scientists.

The injections included a long menu of infectious diseases with weapons potential: bubonic plague, anthrax, cholera, gangrene, typhoid, tuberculosis, syphilis, gonorrhea, dysentery, smallpox, and botulism. A few hours—or perhaps days—later, an extraction team would bind these subjects to surgery tables, stuff towels in their mouths to suppress screams, dissect them alive, and harvest their organs for further study. The pace of research kept three incinerators in operation to eliminate eviscerated bodies, with chemical baths waiting to destroy charred bone fragments. There were no survivors. The military liquidated every single patient utilized in research. Following Japan’s surrender, Shirō Ishii presided over the massacre of the few surviving prisoners and razed the facility to destroy evidence of the atrocities prior to the arrival of Russian forces. As many as ten thousand subjects died in the camps, with three thousand killed during experimentation and live vivisections.

The Japanese occupiers told local Chinese and ethnic Russian Manchurians that the vast industrial complex that suddenly appeared in rural Pingfang was a lumber factory. In a dark joke, the human subjects became “logs.” In controlled open-air experiments, physicians and their assistants tied Russian and Chinese men, children, and women—often with their infants—to stakes in open fields. Ishii’s men would then detonate flea-laden bug bombs. After waiting the four days needed for bubonic plague—or some other deadly contagion—to incubate in the bodies of these “logs,” the civilian physicians dissected their victims alive at various stages of infection to observe the living viscera before harvesting organs for shipment to medical schools and pharmaceutical companies.

In addition to injecting test subjects with lethal pathogens, Japanese researchers—mainly civilian physicians from Japan’s most prominent medical schools—killed “logs” with dehydration, poison, and starvation, or in sadistic amputation experiments similar to experiments Dr. Mengele and his henchmen were conducting in Germany. Some five thousand miles distant from each other, German and Japanese doctors froze men, women, and infants to death in ice water, or outdoors during the subzero Manchurian and Eastern European winters, to study frostbite. They froze the limbs of living “volunteers” in special freezers until their bones shattered and the flesh dropped off. Japanese doctors gassed prisoners with a wide variety of toxic vapors outdoors and in enclosures, and forced men infected with venereal diseases to rape female prisoners before performing living vivisections on both parties.

Physicians at Unit 731’s Harbin laboratory shipped the extracted body parts by plane to Ishii’s Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory in Tokyo for distribution to academic and research institutions and pharmaceutical companies throughout Japan. The arrangement allowed civilian physicians, researchers, and scholars to study hemorrhagic fever, bubonic plague, cholera, and other diseases that did not exist in Japan. The resultant research by thousands of Japan’s leading university physicians and professors kept Japan at the forefront of infectious disease expertise globally.

Ishii’s fleet of organ transport planes returned to Manchuria from Tokyo loaded with hundreds of thousands of rats for ranching the fleas that would fill the ceramic bug bombs with which Dr. Ishii delivered weaponized bubonic plague, hemorrhagic fever, and cholera.

To further embroil Japan’s major medical schools and academic research institutes, Ishii recruited thousands of professors and PhD students—“the brightest minds from Japan”—who flocked to Ishii’s Manchurian death camp to take advantage of unique research opportunities and for career advancement. Just as many Americans now revere Anthony Fauci, wartime Japanese lauded Ishii’s Epidemic Prevention Unit as the global apex of cutting-edge science and Ishii as a medical deity. Ishii’s rarified status made it easy to recruit the most promising medical students and preeminent Japanese medical and scientific authorities into the dark enterprise. Like Anthony Fauci, the government allowed Ishii to collect royalties on technologies that he developed while performing his duties. Ishii became wealthy from sales of his water purification device to private companies and the Japanese military.

Ishii explicitly exhorted Japan’s leading doctors to abandon the physicians’ traditional ethical codes:

Our God-given mission as doctors is to challenge all varieties of disease-causing micro-organisms; to block all roads of intrusion into the human body; to annihilate all foreign matter resident in our bodies; and to devise the most expeditious treatment possible. However, the research work upon which we are now about to embark is the complete opposite of these principles, and may cause us some anguish as doctors. Nevertheless, I beseech you to pursue this research, based on the dual thrill of

1) a scientist to exert efforts in probing for the truth in natural science and research into, and discovery of, the unknown world and

2) as a military person, to successfully build a powerful military weapon against the enemy.

Some twenty thousand physicians, researchers, and workers took part in Ishii’s bioweapons research project. Only a small percentage of Unit 731’s research staff were active military. Most were civilian physicians and researchers from academia.

In this way, Unit 731 co-opted the bulk of Japan’s medical community—civilian, military, and academic—away from healing and into weapons production and the death sciences, and implicated them in criminal atrocities, including human experimentation and bioweapons development.

Virtually all the Japanese doctors involved in Ishii’s research were aware of the savage brutality of Ishii’s human experimentation. Dr. Ishii and Japanese military instructed physicians and nurses, police and youth squad helpers to keep mum about their dirty work and to tell the world that they were developing vaccines. And they obeyed.

Gold notes that Ishii and the army of academic scientists used “aggressive salesmanship” to persuade the public and the world that they were engaged in defensive bioweapons and vaccine development—the same propaganda strategy that the American biosecurity cartel and its modern czar, Anthony Fauci, later adopted. But Gold points out that “it seems clear that there was nothing defensive about Unit 731. The only thing remotely defensive about it was [the] strident tone of the argument with which Ishii justified its existence.”

Academics also conspired with the leading Japanese medical journals to mask their scholarly papers under pretense of vaccine development, epidemic prevention, and defensive biowarfare. Japanese academies used the term “monkeys”—without a species designation—in their published scientific papers as a euphemism for human subjects who were sacrificed during the experiment. Professor Tsuneishi Keiichi explained this ruse:

Failure to identify the species of an animal in an experiment lowers the value of the paper reporting its results. Where monkeys were actually used, it was common practice to identify the type. Thus, it was an open secret that the simple and unscientific use of the term “monkey” by itself was a code which meant that the subjects were human. The medical community knew this. The journal knew this. The readiness with which [Lieutenant General Kitano Masaji] publicized this transparent sham—and its acceptance by Japan’s medical community at large—is a sad testament to the lack of conflict between the ethical standards of the medical world in Japan and those of Unit 731.

Every medical school, regulatory agency, medical bureaucracy, medical journal, and virtually every research physician in Japan became complicit in the atrocities. The omertà by the Japanese medical professionals was strikingly similar to the Third Reich’s human experimentation. In his book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William Shirer points out that virtually every physician in Germany complied with the program and there is no record of a single complaint by a physician or medical association.

Although the “experiments” were conducted by fewer than two-hundred murderous quacks—albeit some of them held eminent posts in the medical world—their criminal work was known to thousands of leading physicians of the Reich, not a single one of whom, so far as the record shows, ever uttered the slightest public protest.

Furthermore, Hitler’s government adopted policies to systematically eliminate physically handicapped and intellectually disabled subgroups—the so-called “useless eaters.” German law required doctors to identify all of their patients who were eligible for this program. Germany’s doctors complied, generally with enthusiasm. These programs implicated Germany’s leading physicians, medical institutes, and individual doctors as collaborators in Nazi atrocities.

As in Japan, the Reich’s bioweapons effort succeeded in recruiting the nation’s most illustrious and respected medical luminaries. Among those bioweaponeers who enjoyed international renown before Hitler’s rise to power were Germany’s Surgeon General Walter Schreiber, who supervised the Reich’s vaccine research; Deputy Surgeon General Dr. Kurt Blome, who directed bioweapons development; and Dr. Eugen Haagen, a key developer of Hitler’s biowarfare program. While working for the Rockefeller Foundation in New Jersey in 1932, Haagen helped develop the yellow fever vaccine, an accomplishment that made him a contender for the Nobel Prize in 1937. Five years later, he was conducting deadly vaccine experiments on humans under Heinrich Himmler.

Marveling at these doctors’ dramatic metamorphosis from healing to homicide, Annie Jacobsen, author of Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America, asks if “Nazi science . . . made monsters of these men?” The broad collapse of medical ethics among the entire generation of war-era Japanese and German physicians presaged parallel lapses among US and European doctors involved with bioweapons research and “defensive” vaccine research. The COVID pandemic exposed this troubling phenomenon to the public eye, raising disturbing questions about the tendency of bioweapons and associated vaccine research to turn moral medical professionals into sociopaths.

Outside this cataclysmic impact on the civilian centers, Shirō Ishii’s entomological attack had limited military applications. Using slow, low-flying aircraft and Ishii’s parasites, the Japanese military was able to produce deadly effects on civilian populations during field experiments over unarmed Chinese cities. However, in combat scenarios, Chinese anti-aircraft batteries easily dispatched Ishii’s bug-bearing bombers.

This remains the intractable strategic and ethical challenge endemic to bioweapons. Traditional bioweapons were practically useless in inducing the immediate mass fatalities of combat soldiers that produces “shock and awe” and advances military strategy. They were, however, devastating to citizen populations. In 2004, USAF Colonel Michael Ainscough wrote, “Yet, curiously, when biological weapons have been employed in battle, they have proven relatively ineffectual. They have been undependable and uncontrollable. Because they have been difficult to deploy reliably, their military value has been marginal.”

Incidentally, only providence prevented Ishii from deploying his bioweapons in attacks against the US military and the United States mainland. The chance sinking—by a US submarine—of a Japanese warship loaded with bacteriological weapons destined for Saipan derailed Ishii’s plan to infect the island with bubonic plague after its capture by US forces. Likewise, the delayed arrival of contaminated fleas derailed Ishii’s plans to attack Okinawa with bubonic plague after the US occupation of the southernmost of Japan’s large islands. Ishii strongly contemplated decimating both US soldiers and the Okinawan population, which the Japanese government regarded as distinct and genetically inferior to its other prefectures and, therefore, expendable. Ishii was also the mastermind of Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night—a planned nighttime suicide attack against America’s West Coast cities by Japanese submarines, seaplanes, and balloons equipped with sophisticated biological weaponry. Only the last-minute moral qualms of a Japanese general aborted the attacks.

Only two weeks before its implementation, General Umezu Yoshijiro, chief of the General Staff intervened and ordered the assault aborted, amidst fierce opposition from Ishii and the plan’s other powerful proponents. Yoshijiro argued that “if bacteriological warfare is conducted, it will grow from the dimension of war between America and Japan to an endless battle of humanity against bacteria. Japan will earn the derision of the world.” His warning was particularly poignant as General Yoshijiro died in a Sarajevo prison in 1949, sentenced to life by an Allied War Crimes Tribunal unaware of the atrocity that he had single-handedly averted.

Picking Up the Pieces: The Birth of a US Bioweapons Program

The Universities

While World War II still raged, and word of Japan’s successful deployment of bioweapons reached Allied governments, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the United States began committing significant resources to researching chemical and biological weaponry. As with their Japanese and German predecessors, US bioweaponeers cultivated a symbiotic alliance with medical universities.

In 1941, following the Japanese plague atrocities in China, US Secretary of War Henry Stimson convened, at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC, a group of prominent scientists to commission a literature search to determine the feasibility of bioweapons, dubbed the War Bureau of Consultants (WBC) Committee. The biologists came from universities that would maintain enduring—and immensely lucrative—partnerships with the bioweapons industry: Johns Hopkins, Yale, Harvard, Rockefeller Institute, University of Chicago, and University of Wisconsin.

Two months later, on February 17, 1942, the academics returned with an enthusiastic endorsement. The medical scholars, as Ed Regis points out in The Biology of Doom, had discovered that “the world of science was full of proposals for the intentional dissemination of noxious microbes as a means of killing or incapacitating the enemy.” Brushing off any ethical dilemma, the professors exuberantly endorsed this promising new line of weaponry from which their institutions would almost immediately begin profiting immensely. “Biological warfare is regarded as distinctly feasible,” they gushed. “We are of the opinion that steps should be taken to formulate offensive and defensive measures.” The committee added, a sophomorical incantation that would persistently pose as a pretext among death scientists, “In biological warfare, the best defense is offense and the threat of offense.” The exhilarating potential of killing millions of civilians seems to have unhinged these academics from moral restraints. They rhapsodized about sabotaging milk supplies with typhoid; polluting reservoirs with botulinum; releasing diphtheria into shelters, bus stations, movie theaters, factories, and stores; smearing microbes onto subway strap handles to murder commuters; and infesting cities with plague-contaminated rats. The prospect of mass murder had proven a surprising catalyst for their superior brains.

The War Department rewarded the universities for this optimistic assessment by paying their biologists to investigate various agents. The National Institutes of Health committed to studying cholera and typhus. Harvard Medical School agreed to investigate dysentery. Cornell worked on anthrax, and the University of Cincinnati adopted tularemia. Michigan State College took on brucellosis; Northwestern, mussel toxins; Notre Dame, rickettsiae; and so on. In a typical experiment, the US Navy and the University of California, Berkeley recruited fifty San Quentin convicts as guinea pigs in a bubonic plague experiment.

By the mid-1960s, following Ishii’s example, the Pentagon and CIA were contracting research in biological and chemical weapons to universities and pharmaceutical companies. Universities, thus, played a key role in bioweapons development from the outset. Their reliance on federal scientific research funding now accounts for some 60 percent of university research—far eclipsing their revenue from tuition. This reliance made them inevitable partners in the programs that helped develop the COVID-19 virus, in the coercive vaccination policies they forced upon their students, and in academic participation in the COVID origin cover-up.

As in fascist Germany and Japan, the gravities of money, power, and professional prestige associated with bioweapons development would draw academics from their ivory towers and cause them to shed the impediments of moral ballast with dismaying alacrity.

The pharmaceutical industry was another key partner in the enterprise. With the academics’ endorsement in hand, President Franklin Roosevelt appointed Pharma titan George W. Merck to direct a newly created civilian agency called the War Research Service (WRS) and moved him to a new office at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington. Merck simultaneously owned and ran the pharmaceutical company that still bears his name, inaugurating the long bioweapons partnership between Pharma and the Pentagon. In a January 3, 1945, report to the US Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, Merck acknowledges his reliance on the Japanese war criminals whose “energy and ingenuity” had “fostered offensive developments in this field from 1936 until as late as 1945.” At Fort Detrick, Merck built on Japanese discoveries to develop methodologies for culturing weapons-grade anthrax, brucellosis, botulism, and other deadly bioweapons.

Colonel William Kabrich recruited plant bacteriologist and chairman of the University of Wisconsin’s Bacteriology Department Dr. Ira L. Baldwin, then forty-seven, to serve as the leader of the scientific division of the biological warfare program during WWII. Baldwin, the grandson of a Methodist minister, readily enlisted in the effort to “produce microbes that could kill great numbers of human beings.” Afterward, he described the simple formula he invoked to overcome his brief struggles with the ethical dilemma: “[I]t only took me about 24 hours to think my way through it. After all, the immorality of war is war itself. You start out with the idea in war of killing people, and that to me is the immoral part of it. It doesn’t make much difference how you kill them.”

On December 21, 1942, “Baldwin arrived at his new assignment at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland.” Three months later, in March of 1943, under his direction, the US Army purchased the 154-acre site at Camp Detrick, a National Guard air strip near Frederick, Maryland, and transformed it into the US Army Biological Warfare Laboratories (USBWL).

Baldwin quickly equipped a 50,605-square-foot hangar on the Detrick airfield with “the two plants that made anthrax and botulinum toxins. The larger plant had a 10,000-gallon fermenter and two 3,700-gallon fermenters.”

In 1961 and 1962, Baldwin would further distinguish his peculiar place in history as the former scientific director at Fort Detrick by aiding Monsanto’s smear campaign against Rachel Carson with a negative review of her book Silent Spring, entitled “Chemicals and Pests.”

Downloading Ishii and His Henchmen: Japan’s Paperclip

In December 1949, Pravda reported that the United States was actively engaged in biological weapons development and had employed numerous Japanese war criminals—Unit 731 veterans—to develop biological weapons in US labs. After initially denying Russian accusations, the US government finally admitted in 1998 that the CIA did indeed provide positions to Unit 731 officers and medical researchers at labs in East Asia. “There they helped Americans conceive and carry out experiments on human subjects that could not be conducted legally in the United States.”

The US efforts to recruit Unit 731 doctors and researchers are still veiled in deep secrecy.

As the Russians moved to occupy Manchuria at the tail end of WWII in August 1945, Ishii fled back to Japan carrying thousands of tissue cultures and thousands of slides from autopsies, records of medical research, and biological analyses from human and animal experiments—all of which he stashed in caves, tombs, and temples of Japan on his journey south to Tokyo.

In September 1945, within a month after the Japanese surrender, the first of four successive investigating teams from Fort Detrick visited Japan to interview Detachment 731’s physicians and scientists and to collect their data—including autopsy reports, thousands of specimen slides, and other materials. The first to arrive in Japan was Murray Sanders, a Fort Detrick microbiologist who had taught at Columbia University. He quickly realized that Shirō Ishii was the “compelling force” behind Japanese biological warfare. His efforts to find and interview Ishii were fruitless.

By November 1945, Ishii had hightailed it to his childhood province, where—with the help of local officials, family and friends—he elaborately falsified his own death, including a fake funeral with paid mourners and newspaper obituaries, incense, prayers, and offerings in his home village of Chiyoda-Mura.

From its Tokyo headquarters, the US Army Counter Intelligence Corps nevertheless uncovered the fraud and a week later, in January 1946, located and detained Ishii for questioning. Robert McQuail, an Army intelligence agent involved in his capture, described Ishii as a “thoroughly frightened individual.” During the next four weeks of interrogation, Ishii and his interrogator, biological weapons specialist Lieutenant Colonel Arvo T. Thompson, developed a congenial relationship.

Still, Thompson reported that Ishii was holding back important information. Camp Detrick sent out a third expedition. By this point, the Russians were trying and executing Unit 731 participants, eventually holding more than two thousand separate judicial proceedings involving Japanese war criminals. The Soviets were in a frenzy to get Ishii in the dock.

Norbert H. Fell, a bacteriologist who was chief of the Plant-Engineering Division at Fort Detrick, arrived in Japan on April 15, 1947 to escalate Ishii’s questioning.¹³ Fell and McQuail promised Ishii that his disclosures would not be used against him in regard to war crimes. They assured him that they only wanted to talk to him “from a purely scientific standpoint”—a code phrase that Ishii took as a guarantee against prosecution or punishment.

Sensing the value of his research information to his American captors, Ishii asked for a job with the US as a bioweapons expert and diplomatic immunity for himself, his superiors, and subordinates. Lured by these promises, US authorities allowed Ishii to stay at his private property and to treat them with haughty imperiousness as they questioned—but never arrested—him. In return, Ishii disclosed his stash sites in Japan’s southern temples and mountains allowing Fort Detrick crews to recover and store more than fifteen thousand slides from more than five hundred of the 850 human corpses autopsied by Japanese scientists. They photo-micrographed the slides and compared and translated the autopsy reports, along with descriptions of the laboratory protocols and case histories.

In contrast to the Americans, the Soviets wanted to prosecute the Japanese Unit 731 leaders for their role in war crimes. But the American biological warfare scientists, in their rush to get scientific data, showed no evidence of any moral, legal, or other constraints. They coached Ishii on how to lie to the Russians, who were prosecuting Ishii’s scientists as war criminals in the Khabarovsk Trial that began in December 1949. Ishii’s final interrogator, MIT graduate Edwin V. Hill, MD, chief of Basic Sciences at Fort Detrick, said that Ishii’s bioweapons treasure trove represented data that had been obtained by Japanese scientists at the expenditure of many millions of dollars and years of work. Hill wrote in a memo, “It is hoped that the individuals who voluntarily contributed this information will be spared embarrassment because of it.”

Knowing the value of the information the Japanese army had collected, the United States played a key role in concealing information about biological warfare experiments. This resultant culture of secrecy would pervade the US bioweapons program for the next seventy years and lay the groundwork for future collaborations (such as those with the Chinese scientists of the Wuhan Institute of Virology) once the US occupation of Japan ended.

Ishii reportedly visited the United States in 1959 as part of an extended tour that included a series of lectures at Fort Detrick. Ishii’s cohorts were neither charged with war crimes nor put on trial in the United States. The US built its biological weapons program based on the data and files obtained from Shirō Ishii’s Japanese laboratory.

Japanese scientists and historians have attested that US guarantees of immunity, protection, and papers to Unit 731’s doctors and personnel were so widespread as to be nearly universal. A pharmacist, Meguro Masahiko, who had been attached to the laboratory at Dalian, China, described payments of “hush money” to Unit 731 members:

After the war, there were fantastic payments to former Unit 731 members. Some people got up to two million yen. That kind of money was unheard of in those days . . . almost without exception, anyone connected in any way at all with Unit 731 got something. That was the best-paying job there was. A lot of university professors were connected with Unit 731. Especially the upper-level people, like in the Ministry of Health and Welfare and those concerned with vaccines. They all had some connection with the Ishii unit in some way. They never said anything about it, but they all received pay for working there. Those are the people who built the foundation of today’s Japan.

In Unit 731 Cover-up: The Operation Paperclip of the East, historians Haddie Beckham and Merja Pyykkönen observe that

The researchers who worked at Unit 731, the biological and chemical warfare research and development unit, were given immunity in exchange for their research data. [I]t is unmistakable that the Japanese BW scientists were given significantly much more allowance than their Nazi counterparts.

In the 1980s, when the activities of Unit 731 finally came to light, Japanese citizens were shocked to discover that the most vicious and homicidal of the unit’s war criminals had resurrected themselves as the leading lights of the nation’s medical hierarchy.

Hal Gold provides a partial list of Unit 731 alumni who went on to occupy preeminent leadership positions across Japan’s medical establishment, including influential posts as deans of Japan’s most prestigious medical schools, colleges, and universities; the presidents of the nation’s leading hospital systems; emeritus professors of virology, immunology, and infectious diseases; revered vaccine developers; CEOs of Japan’s top pharmaceutical companies and its medical and scientific research laboratories; the presidents of its most esteemed and influential medical associations; and top-level bureaucrats and scientists at government health departments, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

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