The primary aim was often twofold: first, to produce material for domestic consumption that legitimized the government; second, to delegitimize the United States on the world stage and portray the Soviet bloc as the peaceful and just side of the Cold War.

I’ll focus on the confessions that appeared in the Korean War – put forth by the USSR, China, and North Korea – which charged that the US used biological weapons in Korea circa 1952. First, this was in a way an amplification of a Soviet bloc tactic. The USSR had already been charging the US government with testing chemical weapons on Native Americans. And other Soviet bloc countries, like East Germany, had charged that the US military was dropping a strain of beetles over their countries to destroy their crops. At the beginning of 1951, a member of the Soviet Central Committee declared a “hate America campaign” in a speech before the Soviet Politburo.

A couple months after that speech, North Korea and Chinese officials began listing very similar allegations: that the US military was dropping insects infected with different diseases (cholera, plague pathogens, etc) that were killing plants and livestock. The Soviet representatives at the UN then echoed these charges. Domestically, China, the USSR, and North Korea also trumpeted these charges to their publics.

To bolster the allegations, North Korean, Soviet, and Chinese interrogators used different techniques to elicit confessions from US pilots shot down over enemy lines. The techniques amounted to torture: water boarding, enforced standing, enclosure in small boxes, sleep deprivation, denial of food, and more. Wu Zhili, who was director of the Chinese army’s Health Division during the Korean War, later reminisced “I really admire the persuasion work of our personnel in the prisoner-of-war camps.” A total of thirty-six American pilots gave coerced confessions in those POW camps.

In response there were large numbers of protests both in the Soviet Bloc and in Western countries, where large crowds turned out to protest against the American use of biological warfare in Korea.

Afterwards, the Eisenhower administration moved to investigate the confessions and learned of the mistreatment of the airmen (who were potentially subject to court martial for their actions). With the consultation of doctors, including Charles Mayo, son of the Mayo Clinic founder, they analyzed the issue and concluded that the confessions were coerced. Those ‘brainwashing’ was the boogeyman of the day, Mayo called these prolonged forms of torture as ‘menticide’ in that they attacked the psyche of the individual. This was opposed to traditional torture, which was a direct assault on the body (beatings, etc). Mayo found this type of torture more cruel, and effective at obtaining a confession that interrogators wanted, regardless of the truth.

The Eisenhower administration was able to bring all of this testimony before the UN, and effectively ended the issue. As an aside, this was the impetus for the Eisenhower administration to create the SERE training program which prepares US pilots for torture overseas, so that they may be ready for that type of treatment.

However, the Soviet Bloc states continued to use it in their public and domestic propaganda. After the fall of the Soviet Union, documents appeared that showed the charges were invented. However, the governments of North Korea and China (to a lesser extent) still claim that the United States used biological weapons in the Korean War. So while the issue no longer has use in delegitimizing the international standing of the US, it does still have domestic use in those countries.