Suppressing US War Crimes: The Cold War Denial Machine Lives On
BY
Thomas Powell Truthout
PUBLISHED
June 24, 2018
A shadowy chapter of US Cold War history involving germ warfare allegations in 1952 recently played out in the New York Review of Books: In February, Michael Ignatieff, former Canadian politician and international political scholar, wrote a movie review of Errol Morris’s recent six-part Netflix docudrama, “Wormwood.”
“Wormwood” investigates the mysterious 1953 death of a top US germ war scientist and CIA employee, Frank Olson. Olson was bludgeoned on the back of the head and “dropped” from the 13th floor window of his Manhattan hotel room under orders from his CIA bosses, according to his son, Eric Olson. The US government was at that time very actively engaged in an international denial effort to brand claims of widespread US biological warfare use during the Korean War as communist propaganda. As a top scientist at the Army Chemical Corp’s biological warfare lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland, Frank Olson was in the unique position to spill the beans on this cover-up. He did not fully grasp how dangerous his CIA associates were, how freely they operated outside the law, or his own immanent peril.
George Burchett’s review of “Wormwood” gives the back story not often heard of the larger Korean War germ warfare story. The American use of bioweapons in Korea is known and accepted as fact by most Cold War scholars outside the US, but domestically, biological warfare remains one of the deepest kept secrets of the Cold War. That secret, even today 66 years after the fact, still has professional gatekeepers. No sooner had Ignatieff’s review of “Wormwood” appeared in that flagship of American liberal letters than the chief US point man on germ war denial, Milton Leitenberg, issued a response letter titled, “No They Didn’t.” In this letter, Leitenberg claims, “Dulles, Helms, et al. absolutely did not order Frank Olson killed because ‘he knew too much about US biological warfare during the Korean War’ because there was no biological warfare carried out by any agency of the US government during the Korean War, or for that matter by anyone else.”
Denying Cold War Events
Leitenberg’s denial rings hollow. This is an old claim which he has been making for the past two decades with bounteous financial support from think tanks, especially the Woodrow Wilson Center. Leitenberg dismisses all the mountainous evidence of biological warfare war crimes, including eyewitness testimony, laboratory analysis and autopsy reports and the flight patterns of US airplanes — all described in detail in the 1952 report of the International Scientific Commission. There were also 19 pilots’ confessions, the most damning confession was that made by the highest-ranking officer shot down, Marine Corp Col. Frank Schwable.
More:
https://truthout.org/articles/suppressing-us-war-crimes-the-cold-war-denial-machine-lives-on/
