The Man Who Loved China

by Simon Winchester

  On his germ-hunting tours of north China Needham was very much the same man he had been six years before. He reveled in the parties and soirees that his handlers staged for him. He commented on a “v. pretty” female tractor driver who performed Manchu and Mongol folk dances for him at one site of the alleged vole attack. He was happy to be photographed beside the containers in which, it was alleged, noxious bacteria-rich concoctions had been dropped from American bombers. And if he had any suspicion that the displays and the reminiscences of the villagers who supposedly saw the bacteria-laden insects, birds, or rats infest their fields were to any degree staged, then he supposed it was merely part of the all too familiar Chinese theatrical approach to welcome and hospitality, and so was entirely innocent.

  Needham did become a little skeptical, however, when he visited Gannan county on the Korean border, where the first reported dropping of voles occurred. He was invited to sit back and watch as a technician in full protective gear of mask and rubber gloves went through the elaborate motions of examining microscope slides in a mobile bacteriology laboratory which had been set up on a day of quite blinding Manchurian summer heat. “I have the feeling,” he wrote the next day to Dorothy in Cambridge, “that this may have been a mise-en-scène for one person.” He was blithely unaware of just how true that would turn out to be.

  He was staggered—and reading between the lines of his notes, initially just a little depressed—by the changes he saw. There was a drab colorlessness to everything in China now. People were dressed in gray and blue, or else in military uniforms, and the only other clothing he glimpsed was in a few rather threadbare theatrical performances, when minority tribes wore their traditional dress. There were portraits of Mao and Zhou posted on buildings, and exhortations in enormous red characters, telling people to produce more, to be honest, to trust the party. No Christian churches seemed to be functioning. The telephone service was patchy, and people whose numbers had worked during the 1940s had apparently now been disconnected, or perhaps had moved away.

  There also seemed to be less food in the shops, fewer cars on the streets, more broken windows and broken-down trucks. He sensed listlessness—but at the same time, he wrote more cheerily, there was also a very evident lack of excess, little evidence of the old corruption, a far better hospital service, and what appeared to be many more public buses. But if he was more than a little disappointed at the changes, he said nothing in his journals to suggest this. He had long held the view that it would take many years for a true revolution to make itself felt in so huge a country as China. Patience was consequently essential, as well as an optimistic faith that Mao, Zhou, and all the other architects of the People’s Republic would hold on tight and await the realization of their dream.

  And in any case most universities were still running, and they were back safe in their home cities. He entirely trusted, he wrote, the dozens of Chinese scientists he interviewed on behalf of the commission—all of them were first-rate bacteriologists, and many were men and women he had known personally in the 1940s and could vouch for.

  In the end it was Needham’s blind trust in these Chinese scientists that led him to the conclusions he made—and to present the final report, which would bring him so much trouble and would briefly put his entire literary project in peril. He had total, uncritical faith in the honor and integrity of these men and women. He simply could not bring himself to believe that any scientist worth his salt—and certainly none that he knew and had chosen for this task—could change his or her powers of observation and analysis merely because the government’s ideology had changed. True, it had been an almost unimaginably profound change—from capitalism to communism, from Chiang Kai-shek to Mao Zedong—but it could surely not affect the conclusions of the kind of scientists with whom he had become and had remained such close friends. Surely not. It was just inconceivable.

  He helped select some sixty of the local specialists who would carry out technical investigations for his report, and much was made of their foreign credentials. Twenty-three of them had PhDs from American universities (including Cornell, Berkeley, and Harvard), a dozen came from British schools, and nine had doctorates from the well-regarded Japanese colleges that had been set up in the old puppet state of Manchukuo. The presence of so many foreign-trained scientists would, it was hoped, bolster the credibility of the eventual report.

  And credibility was very much needed when the 665-page report (most of it in the form of appendixes) was finally issued, initially in French, on September 15, 1952.

  This document confirmed everything Mao and Zhou Enlai had claimed. The people of China and Korea, Needham stated at a formal government-sponsored gathering in Beijing on that Monday morning, had indeed been the hapless targets of American bacteriological weapons.

  These have been employed by units of the U.S.A. armed forces, using a great variety of different methods for the purpose, some of which seem to be developments of those applied by the Japanese army during the Second World War. The Commission reached these conclusions, passing from one logical step to another. It did so reluctantly because its members have not been disposed to believe such an inhuman technique could have been put into execution in the face of its universal condemnation by the people of the nations.

  When Needham arrived in London a week later, he was immediately and rudely exposed to the world of misery in which he would now have to live. His first clue should have been the two-hour grilling by a vehemently skeptical press. He stood on a podium at Hotel Russel in Bloomsbury, still wearing his army fatigues, looking like an overgrown Boy Scout, and, once the questioning became unexpectedly harsh, wincing with discomfort and embarrassment. He had never been subjected to an onslaught like this. One imagines that he began to stutter, to blink, to look uneasy, to seem suddenly quite out of his depth, and as if he didn’t have the slightest idea of just how little the western press wanted to hear the news he claimed to bring.

  He managed to splutter weakly that he was “ninety-seven percent certain” that the Americans had used infected insects and small animals as vectors to spread diseases such as anthrax, smallpox, tularemia, typhus, and plague in China and Korea. He was not able to say why they had done this; nor could he be certain how successful the alleged biological warfare campaign had been, militarily—but that it had occurred he never had any doubt. No, never. Well, hardly ever. It would be too kind to say that at this moment Needham seemed just like the well-bred captain of the Pinafore. It was a great deal worse than that.

  A photographic triptych showing Needham (third from left) sitting next to Mao Zedong and with Zhou Enlai (first from left). The picture was taken in the summer of 1952 when Needham was investigating alleged American atrocities in the Korean war.

  Not a single question asked that day was friendly. The writer of the one in-depth interview he granted, for a paper he later described as “reactionary,” painted him as a traitor, a stooge, an Ishmael. He returned to Cambridge, chagrined and bewildered, and for the next several months had to endure a firestorm of criticism, first in his own country, then across the Atlantic.

  The establishment turned its guns on him as only the British establishment can do. A hitherto unknown government organization, the Intelligence Research Department of the British Foreign Office, mounted a fierce campaign of character assassination against him, directed at friends within the press and malleable members of Parliament. Fury rained down on him from all quarters. He was ostracized in his college. He came under intense pressure to resign from his academic posts and as a fellow of Caius. An invitation to accept an honorary degree in Brussels was withdrawn, though only temporarily. He was condemned even by colleagues in the Royal Society, despite the Society’s motto Nullius in verbia, “On the words of no one,” which normally suggests that its members have a certain healthy skepticism toward authority. Two former presidents of the Royal Society wrote a letter to the Times officially distancing the society from the commission’s report; the master of Corpus Christi Col
lege in Cambridge sent a letter to the New Statesman saying that Needham’s involvement showed that “it is not always easy for even an experienced scientist to discard a favourite hypothesis when the evidence fails to support it”; and even one of Needham’s closest scientist colleagues, the left-wing Sinophile Bill Pirie, remarked that the commission’s report contained “a lot of nonsense.”

  One prominent fellow of the Royal Society, the Nobel prize–winning physiologist A. V. Hill, widened the attack by writing a scathing letter to the New York Times, alerting Americans to the commission’s existence, to its report, and to its principal author—all the while telling them not to be too concerned, since no one of any standing in Britain had taken much notice. In a very similar letter to a London newspaper he suggested baldly that Needham had used “the prostitution of science for the purpose of propaganda,” but for his transatlantic readers he was rather more insidiously critical. “Our Americans friends can be reassured, “he said, because

  the only British member of this “impartial and independent” party (invited, it is true, by Chinese agencies) was Dr. Joseph Needham; and British scientists appear to have applied spontaneously to him the advice which the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Fisher, gave earlier about the Dean of Canterbury—that any public importance he might seem to have in this connection would evaporate if no serious notice was taken of him.

  The letter briefly fascinated Americans, revealing for the first time the existence of this clearly hostile Red in the fens of Cambridgeshire. This was, after all, the height of anticommunist fervor in the United States, and Senator Joe McCarthy, investigating the alleged infiltration of the U.S. government by communist agents and fellow travelers, was coming to the top of his game, intimidating, harassing, naming names, providing lists, shamelessly creating a mood of despair, and driving suspects to depression, self-loathing, and worse.

  One good friend of Needham’s, the anthropologist Gene Weltfish, was abruptly dismissed by Columbia University at about this time, for no more serious a crime than publicly agreeing with Needham’s conclusions about the use of germ warfare by the United States. Twenty years later the university president who had fired the popular and accomplished Weltfish confessed that he was pressured to do so by the board of regents. He was directed to weed Dr. Weltfish out as undesirable, an agitator, and a Red. For the following nine years she was essentially unemployed, and when finally her good name was publicly restored she was ailing and thoroughly embittered by her experience.45

  Others who spoke out in support of Needham were similarly censured: for example, a seventy-two-year-old market gardener in California, a Briton, was threatened with deportation for publicly accepting Needham’s verdict. Generally it was wise to keep quiet—and few in the American intellectual community dared utter anything severely critical of the American forces’ behavior in the Korean theater; nor did American intellectuals criticize too harshly the politicians’ decisions on how best to fight the war. To be branded in any way “un-American” was to risk ostracism of the harshest kind.

  For playing his part on the International Commission Joseph Needham was banned from traveling to the United States, was declared persona non grata, and was put on a blacklist by the State Department. All this was more than just a slight to a senior British scientific figure, a former diplomat, and a fellow of the Royal Society: it was a tremendous inconvenience, since his academic life required him to make scores of visits to America to attend conferences and give speeches. He had spent three months in America only a short while before, speaking at Berkeley and Stanford, in Colorado, and in Texas, and to a fund-raiser in New York for Rewi Alley’s Gung Ho cooperatives in China. He went to the Ivy League schools with metronomic regularity. And he undertook frequent official missions across the Atlantic on behalf of UNESCO and the British government.

  He pleaded, as did his many sponsors, but all came up against the fortress Senator McCarthy had constructed against incursions by the Reds. Needham remained on the blacklist until well into the 1970s, and even after it was withdrawn, and by the time he had become master of his Cambridge college, he still often faced trouble regarding his visa when traveling to the United States. And the matter is still a source of some sensitivity: his files at the Central Intelligence Agency remain off-limits, and requests under the Freedom of Information Act to have them declassified and released have been consistently denied, without anything other than pro forma explanations.

  Some people have suggested that this refusal to release Needham’s files is an imputation of guilt by the American government. Recent information from Chinese, Japanese, and Soviet sources, however, suggests that the United States has very little to fear from revealing the entire truth about Korea, since it seems likely that no American germs ever did rain down on China or North Korea, and that Needham had simply been naive. He had been foolish, eccentric, out of touch, and, in the words of one very hostile obituarist, a “fathead.” Needham was intellectually in love with communism; and yet communist spymasters and agents, it turned out, had pitilessly duped him.

  In 1998 a number of hitherto secret documents from the Soviet Union’s presidential archives relating to the Korean war were published in Japan, and academics studying those papers that related specifically to the work of the International Commission and its visit half a century before noticed something quite remarkable: that the sites to which Needham and his colleagues were taken during their investigations had all been created artificially by, or with the help of, intelligence agents from the Soviet Union.

  The papers, which in due course were published in English in Washington by the Carnegie Institution’s Cold War International History Project, offer in fascinating detail a narrative of what may really have happened during the summer of 1952, at the time of the investigating party’s arrival. Much seems to have concerned vicious factional infighting in the Kremlin after the death of Joseph Stalin.

  The first revelation came in an explanatory formal memorandum, sent by telegram in early April 1953, from a senior agent of the KGB named Glukhov to the minister for state security in Moscow, Semen Ignatiev, who was known to be a supporter of the ambitious Nikita Khrushchev. This memo was copied to the North Korean Public Security Ministry, to whom Glukhov was attached as an adviser. It began:

  The Koreans stated that the Americans had supposedly repeatedly exposed several areas of their country to plague and cholera. To prove these facts, the North Koreans, with the assistance of our advisers, created false areas of exposure. In June–July 1952 a delegation of specialists in bacteriology from the World Peace Council arrived in North Korea. Two false areas of exposure were prepared. In connection with this the Koreans insisted on obtaining cholera bacteria from corpses which they would get from China. During the period of the work of the delegation, which included Comrade N. Zhukov, who was an agent for the Ministry of State Security, an unworkable situation was created for them, with the help of our advisers, in order to frighten them and force them to leave. In this connection, under the leadership of Lt. Petrov, adviser to the Engineering Department of the Korean People’s Army, explosions were set off near the place where the delegation was staying, and while they were in Pyongyang false air raid alarms were sounded.

  Two weeks later, in Moscow, Lavrenty Beria—who had almost certainly been involved in Stalin’s murder the previous month, and was now jockeying (in vain) for power against the allies of Khrushchev—was informed by a senior official in the KGB that Soviet agents had helped spread false stories about American efforts to disseminate smallpox among the North Koreans. Moreover, all the allegations that had been made around the world about the use of bacteriological weapons in China and the north of Korea had been invented either in Beijing or Moscow—and invented so well that even Kim Il Sung, the North Korean leader, believed them and was reportedly afraid of falling victim to a germ attack even though “there are not and have not been instances of plague or cholera in the PRC and there are no examples of biological weapons.”
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  A week later Beria was reporting to Georgy Malenkov and the Presidium of the Soviet Union about the creation of the two false areas, adding some macabre details: in one of these areas “two Koreans who had been sentenced to death and were being held in a hut were infected. One of them was later poisoned.”

  The political consequences then took a turn that was somewhat unexpected. The Presidium declared that the invention of these stories about the Americans’ use of germ weapons had in fact done the Soviet Union great diplomatic damage—clearly Moscow thought that few in the West actually believed the stories, and that Needham’s mission had in fact been either widely discredited, or ignored. This, of course, was entirely true: the British Foreign Office had very efficiently seen to that, and Needham had spent many solitary weeks in Cambridge, shunned by most of the noncommunist scientific community, his report gathering dust, largely unheeded.

  In view of this, said the Kremlin, an ax had to fall—and in a memorandum dated just three days after Beria’s message to Malenkov it was recommended that for helping organize the subterfuge, the Soviet Union’s ambassador to Pyongyang be recalled, fired, and prosecuted; and that the minister of state security, Ignatiev, who had first authorized the plans after the ambassador told him about them, be demoted and stripped of his membership in the Central Committee.

  This small and unnoticed bloodbath was one of many in Moscow during these frightening times. Beria was to be executed soon afterward, once Nikita Khrushchev had won power and had started to reverse many of Stalin’s policies and to purge their architects. But however mundane or bizarre, the episode had a certain sweet relevance to Needham’s later reputation.