A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret History of Gas and Germ Warfare

SIX New Enemies

AT THE END of the war British sailors loaded twenty elderly merchant vessels with captured German gas shells, and sailed them into the Baltic. Off the coast of Norway they donned gas masks, placed explosive charges aboard, and then watched as, one by one, the ships exploded, taking tens of thousands of tons of gas to the seabed. From bases in Scotland, one hundred thousand tons of British gas weapons were taken out to sea and sunk. In the Far East American sailors sank captured Japanese weapons in the Pacific. Mustard gas stocks which had fallen to the advancing Russian armies were tossed into the Baltic in wooden crates while machine gunners opened fire and sent them to the bottom of the sea.¹

But despite these well publicized attempts to renounce gas – a weapon which had, after all not been used during the Second World War – the allies were already beginning to argue among themselves over who should possess the secrets of the Nazi nerve agents. It was inevitable that the advancing allied armies would come across nerve gas arsenals, and, in due course, upon the very factories where the stuff was produced.

The British were in no doubt about what should be done with the stocks of German chemical weapons which fell to their forces. Most would be destroyed, but some supplies of mustard gas and nerve agent would be ‘retained for possible use in the Far East’. ‘On grounds of security it would have been desirable’, a report to the Chiefs of Staff noted drily, ‘to prevent such stocks falling into the hands of the Russian and the French’² (authors’ emphasis). In the event it proved easier to keep the supposedly ideologically reliable French from the nerve gas: over Russian acquisition of nerve agent the British had no control.

Among all the other problems facing Hitler and his General Staff as the noose tightened around Germany was the question of how to dispose of more than 1,200 tons of still secret nerve agent. As early as August 1944 the Nazi chemists had begun destroying the documents which described the research and manufacture of tabun and sarin. By early 1945 the factory at Dyhrenfurth was itself due to be abandoned as part of the general German retreat. On 23 January Wilhelm Kleinhans finally left the factory which had been his home for the previous three and a half years. Inside the buildings a frantic search was continuing for any last evidence of the manufacture of nerve gas. All the bombs and shells had been removed from the underground filling plant, and tons of liquid nerve agent had been poured straight into the River Oder. As the sound of the advancing Russian army grew steadily nearer, demolition experts laid explosive charges beneath all the vital factory buildings. But before they could be detonated, the Russians had surrounded the factory. In a last desperate attempt to prevent the secrets of tabun and sarin falling into Soviet hands, the Luftwaffe was ordered to bomb the place. For reasons still unexplained, the German air force failed. As an American intelligence report put it later: ‘It is believed that the full scale GA plant and the pilot scale GB plant at Dyhrenfurth near Breslau fell virtually intact into the hands of the Soviet army, as it swept across Germany.’³ The Russians captured even more than this intelligence assessment suggests: they also took the nearly-completed factory at Falkenhagen, where the Nazis had been planning to turn out no less than 500 tons of sarin every month.

There were even more serious implications. In addition to the two factories where the Nazis were producing tabun and sarin, the Russians also discovered the secrets of an even more poisonous nerve agent which the German scientists had refined but not manufactured in quantity. The chemists had first produced the substance they called soman, later known as GD, in the spring of 1944. Tests had shown the new nerve agent to be even more toxic than the two substances the Germans had already adopted for use as weapons.

One can only guess at the reaction of allied scientific intelligence on discovering that the Germans had discovered an even more potent nerve agent. But there was worse to come. During interrogation of one of the German war chemists, Professor Richard Kuhn, in April 1946, British scientific intelligence discovered that all documents relating to work on soman had been taken away on the orders of the German High Command, and buried in a disused mine-shaft ten miles east of Berlin. Professor Kuhn told his questioners that he understood the documents had been removed from the mine-shaft by Professor Colonel Kargin of the Red Army, who had taken them to the Karpov Institute in Moscow.⁴

The British, American and Canadian specialists examining the samples sent back from Germany were, therefore, working under some considerable pressure. While they were still analysing the nerve gases, and attempting to isolate the specific mechanisms within the nervous system which were affected by them, the Russians possessed entire factories which could be rendered operational in a matter of months. While the Western scientists worked to discover what, if anything, could be done to counteract the terrifying effects of the nerve agents, the Russians were dismantling the factory taken during the liberation of Poland. Intelligence reports suggested that by 1946 it had been reassembled on the banks of the Volga, and was back in production.

The Western allies were able to take some consolation from the fact that in the over-all balance they had done marginally better than the Russians when it came to personnel: more of the senior German chemists finished the war in British or American zones than in Russian occupied areas. Since the factories already built in Germany represented the ‘state of the art’ some time previously: in the longer term, with the benefit of the opinions of the German scientists, the west considered itself better placed. But in the short term there was an obvious imbalance. Western discomfort was made more acute when it was announced in June 1947 that a Stalin Prize, First Class, had been awarded to Academician Alexander Arbusov for ‘investigations in the sphere of phosphorous – organic combinations’, the active ingredients of nerve agents.⁵

Although the sources of information about the Soviet capacity for gas warfare were limited, (in the end one relied upon the evidence of refugees, captured German and Japanese intelligence assessments of the Russian capacity, and scientific deduction), at war’s end the Americans concluded that the Soviet Union possessed a wide range of different gases. There were they thought, probably thirteen or fourteen in all, and including First World War gases such as hydrogen cyanide, phosgene and mustard gas, in addition to the nerve agents. The belief that the Russians possessed this large chemical armoury was sufficient to ensure the survival of the wartime chemical defence establishments in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada. But disturbing though the chemical imbalance between west and east might have appeared, Western generals were more immediately concerned about biological weapons.

It might have seemed that the primacy of biological weaponry, with its huge capacity for destruction, had ended when the mushroom cloud rose over Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. Since the Western allies now enjoyed immense atomic superiority, there were many who argued that the distasteful business of waging war with disease could be forgotten. Yet the very imbalance caused biological warfare research to receive its greatest impetus: as the Soviet Union at that time had no atomic weapons, it was thought that they might regard biological weapons as a temporary substitute. In the cold war atmosphere of mistrust and suspicion, biological research and propaganda allegations grew steadily.

On Christmas Eve 1949, Moscow Radio announced that twelve Japanese prisoners of war were to be charged with waging biological warfare in China. The Russians claimed that the Japanese had been producing vast quantities of bacteria, and had planned to wage biological warfare against the Allies. The allegations became more specific the next week. Three days later Moscow Radio claimed that Detachment 731 of the Kwantung Army had used prisoners of war for horrific biological warfare experiments, and then, the following day, that one of the prisoners had confessed to his interrogators that the unit had been established on the orders of the Emperor himself. On 29 December Pravda came to the point. The United States was protecting other Japanese war criminals, and engaging in biological warfare research herself.

According to an account of the trial published in Moscow the following year, all the Japanese prisoners were sentenced to terms of imprisonment ranging from two to twenty-five years. They were said to have admitted to carrying out gruesome experiments. The evidence of Major Karasaw Tomio was explicit:

A second Japanese officer was said to have testified that he had watched a fellow officer in Detachment 731 ‘infecting ten Chinese war prisoners with gas gangrene. The ten Chinese prisoners were tied to stakes from ten to twenty meters apart, and a bomb was then exploded by electricity. All ten were injured by shrapnel contaminated with gas gangrene germs, and within a week they all died in severe torment’.⁷

The Khabarovsk War Crimes Trial, as it was known, was more than mere anti-American and anti-Japanese propaganda. New evidence, discussed in Chapter Seven, shows that the United States was indeed shielding Japanese bacteriologists from war crime charges in return for data on human experimentation. But the ringing Soviet denunciations of the barbarity of germ weapons were themselves hollow. Behind the smokescreen of Khabarovsk, the Russians were also preparing for biological war.

At the end of the Second World War a number of Wehrmacht intelligence files fell into allied hands. Among those of most interest were the documents dealing with what the Germans had believed to be the Soviet capacity for germ warfare. It was clear from these papers that the Russians had begun work on biological defence during the 1930s. According to Russian prisoners and defectors interrogated by the Germans, early research had been conducted by the People’s Health Commissariat, and was later transferred to the Red Army Biochemical Institute. Experiments in the production of bacteria had been carried out at a field station on the Volga in the summer of 1935, to be followed up by ‘especially dangerous work’ in a new field testing station on an island in the Seliger Lake, near the town of Ostahkov, north-east of Moscow.⁸ In 1940 a German spy reported the existence of another germ warfare base deep in the southern Soviet Republic of Turkmenistan, some several hundred miles north of the border with Iran.⁹ The agent reported that a group of Kulaks who had been banished by Stalin to Vozrozhdeniya Island in the Aral Sea were ordered off at six hours’ notice in 1936. The following summer several hundred strangers arrived, and a boat belonging to the Biotechnical Institute appeared on the lake. Unauthorized civilians were instructed to keep at least eighty kilometres away. Little was known of the work carried out on the island, although according to a second source the personnel sent there included physicians, microbiologists, chemists and construction engineers. There were reports of thousands of squirrels being delivered to the island, of a variety whose fleas were capable of transmitting plague. Other experiments were thought to have involved testing tularemia, leprosy, cholera, dysentery, typhoid, paratyphoid and tetanus.

The most sensational allegation to surface in the German reports was the testimony of a Russian deserter by the name of Von Apen.¹⁰ He was an Air Force captain, of part-German extraction who smuggled his wife aboard his aircraft and landed at a forward German airbase. Von Apen claimed to have been a member of a group specially trained for work in germ warfare. He alleged that the Russians had decided to experiment with germ warfare on the borderland between the Soviet Union and Mongolia. Three diseases were chosen: plague, anthrax, and cholera, under the general codename Golden Triangle. Von Apen claimed to have taken part in experiments in which plague germs had been sprayed from beneath aircraft. In other tests, a specially bred and highly aggressive strain of grey rat had been dropped in parachute cages containing glass phials of bacteria. Upon impact the container would smash, covering the rats, which would then be automatically released from their cages to spread the disease throughout the target area. Other devices he claimed to have seen were glass bombs filled with bacteria broth and artillery shells filled with germs.

Von Apen also alleged that Soviet scientists had carried out human experiments in Mongolia. He claimed that in 1941 tests had been conducted with plague, anthrax and glanders. The victims had been political prisoners, although Japanese prisoners of war were also thought to have been used. Von Apen described how prisoners in chains would be brought to a tent, on the floor of which were pens filled with plague-infested rats. Prisoners would be made to stay inside the tent with the rats until they had been attacked by the rats’ plague-carrying fleas. During the summer of 1941 a prisoner who had been subjected to this grotesque experiment escaped from his captors. A minor plague epidemic began, according to the defector, which the Soviet authorities could check only by calling in the Air Force. Between three and five thousand Mongols died in the attempt to stop the spread of the disease. Their corpses were burned with large quantities of petrol.

In the early days after the Second World War it was extremely difficult for the British or Americans to check many of the astonishing claims they came upon in the captured German files. They concluded, however, that there was more than adequate evidence that the Soviet Union had been, and was still, engaged in some form of biological warfare research. Although little was known of the nature of contemporary work, it was thought that the Russians maintained some six sites for biological warfare research, most of them in the Urals.

The British and Americans recognized that their intelligence was inadequate. But the evidence was judged more than sufficient to justify continuing similar work in the west. When they came to assess the vulnerability of the United Kingdom to a potential germ attack they discovered that London, containing over 12 per cent of the population, was only 500 miles from airbases in Soviet occupied eastern Germany. When the Joint Technical Warfare committee assessed how easy a retaliatory strike with biological weapons might be, they realized that the civilian targets against which bacterial devices would be most effective were dispersed across the huge expanse of the Soviet Union. Even using British Empire airbases in Nicosia (Cyprus) and Peshawar (India), there was only one Soviet city of more than 100,000 population within 500 miles range, and only thirty-five such centres of population within 1,000 miles range.¹¹ Clearly, at the very least, there should be a major research programme aimed at developing some defence. Intelligence, it was freely admitted, was inadequate. But no such reticence found its way into the stories which began appearing in the press.

This sensational story appeared in the San Francisco Examiner from an apparently unimpeachable source, the former deputy chief of US Naval Intelligence.

But despite the tone of certainty which informed this and many other reports, Western intelligence on Soviet biological warfare preparations has been woefully inadequate. Much of the information on Soviet plans came from clues picked up in Soviet scientific literature. By watching the award of academic honours, and by noticing obvious gaps in series of published papers, Western scientific intelligence could judge what fields of chemical or biological research Soviet military scientists had entered. The picture was slowly and painstakingly built up to the point where testimony from defectors or agents could provide the final ray of light. The information was inevitably patchy, sometimes contradictory and always inadequate. Even after twenty years of intelligence on the subject the most that could be said was that ‘the Soviet potential for biological operations is believed to be strong, and could be developed into a major threat’¹³ (authors’ emphasis).

There seems little doubt that the Soviet Union did conduct extensive research into germ warfare in the late 1930s and early 1940s. It was felt legitimate to conclude that such research was unlikely to have stopped at some arbitrary point after the Second World War. But firm intelligence to suggest the nature of the work was notably lacking.

For most of the post-war years military microbiologists developed ‘retaliatory’ germ weapons against threats they did not know to exist, and then attempted to develop defences not against the weapons of a potential future enemy, but against the diseases they themselves had refined.

The Soviet Union said virtually nothing about their preparations for chemical and biological warfare. Indeed the only official statement that the country possessed even chemical weapons was made before the Second World War began, when a Soviet General was quoted as saying:

After this statement, in 1938, the Soviet Union maintained an absolute silence on its capacity for chemical and biological warfare.

To those who doubted whether the Russians were seriously interested in chemical or biological warfare, the specialists would point to the Soviet Army Chemical Troops, established in the 1920s, consolidated in the 1930s, and reorganized during the 1940s.

A former Red Army Colonel who defected to the West claimed that the main reason the Russians had not used gas in the Second World War was that the Soviet High Command had been afraid of German retaliation. He claimed that since the end of the war the importance of chemical warfare training had increased enormously. The Army of Occupation in Germany was equipped with Chemical Units. Training had been intensified. In 1953, for example, the 290th Guards Infantry Regiment was receiving two training sessions of four hours every week. ‘Usually’, he said, ‘one day a week a chemical alarm sounded, and then all instruction – marching, running, driving of motors cars, etc, had to be carried out while wearing a gas mask’.¹⁵ To many Western hawks, this was enough. Why should the Soviet Army be training its troops in how to withstand a gas attack, unless the Soviet Army planned such attacks itself?

Certainly during the 1950s, the Russians were expecting chemical and biological weapons to be used against them by the West. In 1956 Marshal Zhukov told the Twentieth Party Congress: ‘Future war, if they unleash it, will be characterised by the massive use of airforces, various rocket weapons, and various means of mass destruction, such as atomic, thermonuclear, chemical and bacteriological weapons.’¹⁶ Zhukov did not say that the Soviet Union planned to use these weapons herself. By 1960 the head of US Army Research was telling a Congressional inquiry: ‘We know that the Soviets are putting a high priority on the development of lethal and non-lethal weapons, and that this weapons stockpile consists of about one sixth chemical munitions.’¹⁷ If it was true that one sixth of the total amount of weapons available to the Soviet Union was made up of chemical shells and bombs, it represented an alarming threat to the United States and her NATO allies. Some years after this estimate had been accepted by Congress, however, the American investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh, claimed to have discovered the basis on which the figure of ‘one sixth’ had been arrived at.

The American Army had been keen to ship chemical weapons of their own to forward bases in West Germany, said Hersh. They knew the request would be politically sensitive, and so presented evidence to justify its necessity. The proof consisted of analyses made from aerial spy photographs of large storage sheds in the Soviet Union. The sheds looked similar to those at American Army gas weapon bases, and the Chemical Corps then made some calculations. ‘The Army computed the roof size of the Russian sheds, figured out how many gallons of nerve gas could be stored in a comparably sized shed in Utah’, said Hersh’s ‘normally reliable’ source, ‘added a twenty per cent “fudge” factor, and came up with the estimate’.¹⁸

In the looking glass world of Cold War intelligence gathering, judgements had to be based on whatever information could be gained, from whatever source. If the assessments made from spy photographs were inaccurate, there was more disturbing information from other sources.

On 11 May 1963 a middle-aged Soviet Army officer named Oleg Penkovsky was sentenced to be shot for treason. His trial had been open to observers for only four days, but during that time they had heard a breathtaking catalogue of his alleged crimes. The State Prosecutor told the court that Penkovsky had passed to British and American intelligence some 5,000 separate photographs of secret political, military and economic documents. Even from the few details given, it was clear that Penkovsky was one of the most spectacularly successful agents to have worked for the West.

Although a colonel in military intelligence, Penkovsky had little in common with many of the convinced Party members who made up his colleagues. To begin with, he was the son of an officer in the White Army who had died during the Civil War in 1919 at the hands of the Bolsheviks. Penkovsky had overcome this flaw in his pedigree to rise through the ranks of Military Intelligence, becoming a Colonel by the age of thirty-three. A good looking, open-faced man with a weakness for good food and wine and a solitary cast of mind, Penkovsky looked set to serve out the rest of his military career as a loyal, hardworking officer.

But in 1960 President Khrushchev ordered a review of Soviet military strategy. Penkovsky decided that the Kremlin had concluded that in any future war the Soviet Union would strike first and ask questions afterwards. It was, he felt, a terrifying decision to have reached, and he determined to become a spy.

Penkovsky was instructed to look after a British businessman then in Moscow to arrange for a forthcoming Trade Delegation. The British ‘businessman’, Greville Wynne, was in fact a spy. He met Penkovsky in his room at the National Hotel, Moscow, where the Russian hinted that he wished to pass on information. When, in April 1961, Penkovsky arrived in London with a Soviet Trade Mission, Wynne arranged a meeting at the Mount Royal Hotel. Here the Soviet officer was introduced to two British intelligence officers who gave the names of Grille and Miles, and two Americans, who called themselves Alexander and Oslap. Penkovsky told the four agents he would continue to work for Soviet Intelligence and to spy for the West at the same time. He had become a double agent. During the next fifteen months he passed on an enormous volume of intelligence material, much of it about plans for chemical warfare.

Penkovsky believed the Soviet Union was prepared to wage both biological and chemical warfare against the West. Exactly what he told his spymasters about Soviet plans for such warfare is not known, even today. During the mid-sixties the CIA sponsored a book entitled The Penkovsky Papers, purporting to be made up of extracts from the spy’s diary and personal notebooks. According to this account of his intelligence activities, Penkovsky told his M16 and CIA contacts that there was a ‘Special Seventh Directorate of the General Staff which is involved in working out methods of chemical and bacteriological warfare.’¹⁹ He described a testing ground near Moscow where a new type of gas was under development. It was, he said, odourless, colourless, and extremely toxic. The scientists there called it ‘American’: why, Penkovsky could only guess.

What the ‘authorised version’ of Penkovsky’s intelligence reports did not mention was that the United States, by the time of the book’s publication the possessor of the greatest gas arsenal in the world, also intended to ignore the general restriction on ‘no first use’ of gas. For at the very time that Penkovsky was said to be expressing his horror at Soviet plans which contemplated possible first strikes with chemical or biological weapons, the United States had also taken the decision that she could no longer restrict herself to using the weapons in retaliation only. The new United States policy, which will be explored further in Chapter Seven, allowed American forces to attack first, subject only to the approval of the President.

Penkovsky’s information was soon pressed into service in the propaganda war. He himself was executed on the afternoon of 16 May 1963. A Soviet general told Izvestiya:

Doubtless Penkovsky’s information represented only a small part of the over-all volume of intelligence on Soviet plans for chemical and biological war. Its value lay in the fact that it came direct from a Soviet source. Unlike the nuclear armouries of the superpowers, details of which are relatively freely available, the exact size of the chemical or biological arsenals were secret from the moment the Cold War began. In a prevailing atmosphere of secrecy it was inevitable that suspicion should grow.

Many Western authorities believed that the Soviet Union invested heavily in chemical weapons during the 1950s as a cheap alternative to the tactical nuclear weapons which the United States had developed and the Russians could not match. Even by the 1960s there had been little evidence to suggest that the tons of mustard and other gases produced during the Second World War had been destroyed. It was also known that the Russians had the means and the expertise to produce nerve gases: while they began with tabun, soon they were believed to be mass-producing soman, or GD, the agent the Nazis had refined but never managed to get into production. Soman was soon thought to be the favoured Soviet nerve agent, far and away the most powerful of the G-agents, and able to break through the blood/brain barrier with ease. By the late 1960s the Russian array of chemical weapons was thought to range from Lewisite and mustard gas-filled land-mines to shells and bombs charged with blood agents like hydrogen cyanide, and rockets armed with nerve gas warheads.²¹

In response to this perceived threat the West developed a range of weapons which must, to Moscow, have looked equally awesome.