Library:Atrocity Fabrication and Its Consequences

Atrocity Fabrication and Its Consequences
Author	A. B. Abrams
Written in	2023
ISBN	978-1-949762-70-9
Source	IA
PDF	pdf

Introduction

It is not a matter of what is true that counts, but a matter of what is perceived to be true.

– HENRY KISSINGER

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.

– JOSEPH GOEBBELS

Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities, has the power to make you commit injustices.

– VOLTAIRE

Atrocity fabrication – the reporting of an atrocity committed by an adversary without knowledge that it ever occurred – has a centuries-long history at the heart of propaganda and power politics in the Western world with profound influences on its political culture. Portraying an adversary as committing particularly egregious crimes, especially when one intends to initiate military action or other hostile measures against that adversary, has consistently provided an effective means of moving public and international opinion and justifying one’s actions. Applied effectively, atrocity fabrication can transform in the public eye a war of unprovoked aggression into a war of liberation of the oppressed, or turn a blockade to starve enemy civilians into a humane effort to pressure an abusive government. Claims of atrocities can also serve to delegitimise criticisms of one’s actions against an adversary, portraying such opposition as siding with injustice and facilitating egregious crimes. An assessment of how and to what ends atrocity fabrication has been used provides context vital to understanding international politics both historically and in the 21st century.

Significant consistencies in how atrocity fabrication has been used in the Western world can be observed throughout much of modern history. A notable example from the early 20th century was the British government’s response to the German occupation of Belgium in the initial months of the First World War by sponsoring a distinguished panel of lawyers and historians, the Bryce Committee, to document German atrocities. The committee sensationally described German public rapes and mutilation of Belgian women and girls and the bayonetting of a two-year-old child by eight German soldiers, among other crimes, allowing it to conclude that “murder, lust, and pillage prevailed over many parts of Belgium on a scale unparalleled in any war between civilised nations during the last three centuries.” Such conduct, while far from uncommon in European colonial wars from Australia to the Americas, was abnormal and considered unacceptable for an inter-European conflict where very different standards applied.

The Bryce Committee’s claims strongly influenced public opinion, and having been chaired by former British ambassador to the United States Viscount James Bryce it was found to have had an “overwhelming effect on the American mind and heart” which helped erode public opposition to entering the war on Britain’s side. Despite its persuasiveness, the report’s findings had little evidence to substantiate them, with a Belgian commission of inquiry formed in 1922 conducting investigations at the scenes of the alleged atrocities and failing to confirm even a single report of German excesses. Professor Phillip Knightly, a leading authority on journalism and war who lectured at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, the Australian Senate, and Australia’s National Press Club, observed regarding the allegations made: “The committee had not personally interviewed a single witness. The report was based on 1,200 depositions, mostly from Belgian refugees, taken by 22 barristers in Britain. None of the witnesses were placed on oath, their names were omitted, and hearsay evidence was accepted at full value.” This was far from an isolated case, and reflected broader trends in reporting on German military conduct. The Times, for example, quoted a source who claimed to have witnessed “with his own eyes German soldiery chop off the arms of a baby which clung to its mother’s skirts.” The French Propaganda Bureau subsequently provided a picture of a baby without hands, and French papers went on to depict German soldiers eating babies’ hands, although post-war investigations failed to find evidence of any cases of comparable conduct.

As was generally the case for atrocity fabrication efforts it mattered little how German personnel actually conducted themselves or whether allegations against them had any grounding in reality – only that the alleged atrocities would shape public opinion both domestically and overseas to align with British state interests. As Phillip Knightly concluded: “By the time the atrocity story was discredited it had served its role. It had not only rallied opinion on the home front and strengthened the resolution of Britain and France to prosecute the war to the finish, but had also achieved the important task of lowering resistance to the war in the United States.” The barbarism portrayed made almost any policy pursued to counter German power appear justified.

Thirty years after the Bryce Committee’s work the beginning of the Cold War united the Western world against the first peer level challenger to its power in centuries, the Soviet Union, and similarly saw organisations and networks established to dominate the information space and fabricate stories vilifying the adversary. To fight a new kind of conflict where winning hearts and minds was often more decisive than firepower, Western intelligence agencies led by the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) developed a particularly potent global information network to control political narratives. The CIA’s Operation Mockingbird was one of the more prominent related operations and saw American journalists recruited to publish articles dictated by the agency – articles which very often vilified the USSR and its allies with totally fabricated information. The agency also funded student and cultural organisations and magazines for similar purposes, and through its networks of editors and journalists it went to significant lengths to discredit sources of information that contradicted its narratives down to and including targeting individual columnists in the Philippines.

An investigation by the U.S. Congress in the early 1970s revealed that CIA operations extended to influence reporting not only in America, but almost worldwide in dozens of languages. Its report concluded: “The CIA currently maintains a network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda. These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers, and other foreign media outlets.” It further noted that undercover CIA agents held key management positions across major American media organisations to ensure that published content aligned with the CIA’s agendas. Former CIA employee William Bader supported the report’s conclusions, illustrating the agency’s operations as follows: “You don’t need to manipulate Time magazine, for example, because there are agency people at the management level.”

The CIA’s operations to shape the global information space were described by the Washington Post as “a fascinatingly byzantine effort to turn the world to the American way of thinking,” and alongside hundreds of news outlets the agency funded and heavily influenced popular media including hundreds of films and “at least a thousand books” for publication and distribution globally. Peacetime vilification of adversaries through both news and popular media was generally far more subtle than depicting ongoing mass slaughter as the Bryce Committee had, but predisposed populations to more easily believe claims of enemy atrocities when they were occasionally made. The adversary did not need to constantly be portrayed as committing slaughter, but rather as being the ‘kind of country/actor’ which was highly capable of doing so based on its portrayed history and intrinsic nature.

The New York Times noted in its own more extensive report that “in its persistent efforts to shape world opinion, the CIA has been able to call upon a separate and far more extensive network of newspapers, news services, magazines, publishing houses, broadcasting stations and other entities over which it has at various times had some control.” The Times referred to the CIA’s “communications Empire” as having “embraced more than 500 news and public information organisations and individuals. According to one CIA official, they ranged in importance ‘from Radio Free Europe to a third-string guy in Quito who could get something in the local paper’ … the network was known officially as the ‘Propaganda Assets Inventory.’” The Times also noted that the agency maintained extensive “financial ties to academic, cultural and publishing organisations” globally for much the same purpose. Millions of dollars in subsidies were paid to influence media in Cuba alone, with other large scale and long-term operations carried out worldwide from Kenya and India to Taiwan and South Vietnam.

The CIA was far from isolated in its extensive efforts to shape the global information space, with other American intelligence services as well as those of allied states creating parallel ‘communications empires’ of their own. A notable example was the British Information Research Department’s work specifically to foster anti-Soviet and anti-Chinese sentiments in the Muslim world, Africa and parts of Asia, which although long denied was confirmed by declassified documents in 2022. The decades long effort involved fabrications ranging from forging statements from Soviet institutions that would provoke anti-Soviet backlash, to creating media content from fictitious Islamic organisations portraying Moscow as an enemy of the Muslim world. Its publications often resorted to criticising and even calling for attacks on third parties, for example “the Jews,” to gain legitimacy among populations inclined towards such thinking and thus more effectively spread anti-Soviet and anti-Chinese messages. An example was the fabrication of claims by Islamic officials that only by turning against Moscow could the Arab nation gain victory over Israel – a theme which gained much traction in the Arab world while the department was operating.

The practice of government agencies establishing vast networks to influence various information spaces and promote fabricated stories was hardly relegated to the Cold War. A notable example was the formerly secret U.S. Defence Department Office of Strategic Influence which emerged in the early 2000s and was authorised to plant stories, including feeding false reports to journalists, to influence public opinion worldwide. Although the Pentagon was forced to disband the office after its existence became known, later comments by high level officials indicated that such operations continued under different bodies. This “black propaganda,” as it was referred to repeatedly by the BBC, provided a very potent means to shape international opinion towards American adversaries.

Providing details on Western intelligence agencies’ sustainment of extensive networks of journalists into the 21st century for the purpose of propagating favoured narratives, German journalist Udo Ulfkotte reported in 2016 regarding his own role in such networks:

I ended up publishing articles under my own name written by agents of the CIA and other intelligence services, especially the German secret service [Bundesnachrichtendienst – BND]…. One day the BND came to my office at the Frankfurter Allgemeine in Frankfurt. They wanted me to write an article about Libya and Colonel Muammar Gaddafi…. They gave me all this secret information and they just wanted me to sign the article with my name. That article was how Gaddafi tried to secretly build a poison gas factory. It was a story that was printed worldwide two days later.

Ulfkotte further detailed how intelligence agencies contacted journalists and used them to plant stories, the perks that came with working with them, and the risks of non-compliance. His example, the story about a Libyan poison gas factory, was one of many that contributed to influencing public opinion to perceive the targeted country as a malign and dangerous actor. False reports published in considerable quantities over several decades made Western economic sanctions on Libya, and eventually an intensive bombing campaign and the assassination of its leadership, much easier to justify publicly.

By the time of Ulfkotte’s work the information networks operated by Western intelligence agencies had expanded to incorporate large numbers of online assets, including both bots and human personnel, which operated to influence discourse and support Western-favoured narratives globally. This was vital as the internet and social media in particular played an increasingly central role in the global information space. These kinds of operations were revealed on multiple occasions, ranging from a network of bots spreading fabricated information that vilified Russia discovered in an Adelaide University study in September 2022, to a Stanford-Graphika joint study a month prior unveiling a network of false social media accounts created by U.S. and British agents to propagate vilifying disinformation about China, Russia and Iran across several Muslim-majority countries. Alongside intelligence agencies, the Pentagon also invested heavily in software to create vast networks of false social media accounts and influence foreign audiences in their own languages with a relatively small number of personnel, a notable example being Operation Earnest Voice in the 2010s, which was mirrored by parallel efforts by the British Armed Forces.

Often key to the success of atrocity fabrication has been the ability to construct portrayals of an adversary as part of a greater vilifying metanarrative – an overarching account or interpretation of events and circumstances that provides a pattern or structure for people’s beliefs and gives additional meaning to their experiences. Particularly for countries or actors with which consumers of media content have less firsthand contact, enough sources repeating similar narratives of atrocities and other misconduct can strongly influence ‘what kind of country/actor’ the target is considered to be. All future encounters with the target will then be interpreted through the context of this overarching narrative. A powerful metanarrative affects not only the public but also analysts, journalists and even policymakers who will be strongly inclined to interpret new information related to the country or actor in the context of the narrative.

An exploration of the formation of metanarratives in U.S. media published in the Yale Review of International Studies observed:

Journalists often fail to acknowledge the lens through which they perceive and interpret reality. The existence of overarching themes that define political press coverage, what the Pew Research Centre deems ‘metanarratives,’ is made possible by the enduring tradition of pack journalism…. Washington insiders and journalists tweet and re-tweet each other’s content, rapidly formulate an interpretive lens through which to understand major new developments. The resulting echo chamber, one populated by the elite pundits and reporters that convey political information to the rest of the country, builds consensus rather than dialogue. This ‘groupthink’ is how metanarratives form.

A metanarrative tends to be simple but totalising, colouring news coverage so that every new piece of information is interpreted against its backdrop. This is why crude characterisations of presidential candidates (ex. ‘Biden is a plagiariser’ and ‘Clinton is untrustworthy’) are difficult to dispel once they have been established. Reporters interpret news involving any given subject through the lens of the agreed-upon metanarrative, even if such interpretations result in factual distortions or blatant double standards. For example, the press framed Obama’s position change on same-sex marriage ahead of the 2012 election as an ‘evolution,’ whereas Romney’s changes in position were seen as ‘flip-flops,’ which fit more neatly into the dominant character narrative of Romney as an inauthentic politician.

Metanarratives built around fabricated atrocities have often profoundly influenced the fates of targeted countries, a notable example being the Gulf War where proponents of military action against Iraq in late 1990 fabricated a claim that Iraqi soldiers were slaughtering Kuwaiti premature babies in their incubators (as covered in detail in Chapter 4). This and a wide range of other fabricated Iraqi atrocities contributed to very quickly creating an overarching way of viewing the country that structured almost all interpretations and coverage. Claims of Iraqi atrocities provided a key example of “the self-reinforcing nature of the metanarrative,” with the press having “cultivated a social and political environment wherein the incubator story could appear plausible, even reasonable.”

Despite the incubator babies story being proven entirely false in 1992, the metanarrative of Iraq as a country capable of such acts retained a powerful influence. The Yale Review observed accordingly: “This dynamic continued to colour press coverage of [Iraqi President Saddam] Hussein after the Gulf War and before 9/11. In those years, the U.S. media no longer needed prompting by the government to propagate the ‘Fuhrer Saddam’ mythology, and the U.S. public no longer needed prompting to accept it.” Impressions of ‘what kind of country’ Iraq was had been formed largely on the basis of multiple fabricated Iraqi atrocities, which predisposed Americans in particular to suspect Baghdad’s involvement in the 9/11 attacks and to believe Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction to attack them. This in turn was key to facilitating another war against Iraq in 2003.

The slaughter of incubator babies was just one of many widely accepted but totally fabricated stories that vilified Iraq, while Iraq itself was far from an isolated example of a country that had its fate radically transformed by atrocity fabrication. The global reach of Western information networks ensured that even beyond the Western world perceptions of the West’s adversaries were very often shaped in much the same way, which facilitated and created public support for hostile policies ranging from economic sanctions to invasion and war. Furthermore, as with Iraq, once a metanarrative shaped opinion of ‘what kind of country’ the target was, it was extremely difficult to dispel no matter how thoroughly the accounts on which it was based were disproven or retracted.

Understanding atrocity fabrication not in terms of the debunking of a single incident or set of incidents, but rather as part of a much broader phenomenon, is vital to comprehending how challengers to Western power have and will continue to be assailed. This book explores eleven leading cases of targeted countries, and the strong consistencies in how and to what ends they were. Also covered are the consequences of atrocity fabrication and how, by providing pretext for actual aggression, it paves the way for very real atrocities against the populations of the falsely accused states, which often far exceed the depravity described in the fabricated narratives.

A Note on Humanitarian Military Intervention: Atrocity Fabrication’s Most Dangerous End

The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants.

– ALBERT CAMUS

For centuries the history, incentives for, and consequences of atrocity fabrication have been closely entwined with the concept of humanitarian military intervention – an idea deeply entrenched in Western political thought contending that offensive wars can be framed as altruistic if done to prevent abuses overseas. The idea that military action can be just and even noble when done to end enemy atrocities has historically provided one of the strongest motives to fabricate atrocities as a means to legitimise offensive actions.

The history of humanitarian military intervention as a central influence in Western political thought dates back to 16th century Europe and the Reformation, when the schism between the Protestant and Catholic faiths led states to frequently allege oppression of their co-religionists abroad as pretexts for offensive wars. Later historians would largely concur that European states’ entries into the religious wars of the period were motivated largely if not overwhelmingly by realpolitik, with concerns for religious minorities or appeasing deities being secondary factors if they were considered at all. Premised on protecting fellow believers abroad, successful military campaigns overseas consistently strengthened the positions of the aggressors while gaining widespread domestic support due to the altruistic causes cited for war. The military intervention of England in the religious wars of France during the 1560s, ’70s and ’80s, and in the Netherlands from 1585 to 1604, were notable examples of wars justified by humanitarian rationales, with offensives in France by the Holy Roman Empire and various German principalities relying on similar justifications. Spain, meanwhile, which had seen the English humanitarian-premised intervention in the Netherlands undermine its interests, claimed “the brutal and cruel yoke” of persecution imposed on the English Catholic minority as a pretext to attempt multiple invasions in the 1580s and 90s. This trend towards using humanitarian pretexts for military interventionism continued to profoundly shape European politics in the following centuries.

Early humanitarian intervention relied heavily on states portraying themselves as protectors of overseas minorities with whom they held something in common – usually co-religionists – with Catholic states claiming the oppression of Catholic minorities to attack Protestant states and vice versa. As European conquest came to be directed increasingly far afield, however, against countries which lacked minorities with whom an aggressor could claim any common religious or ethnic background, humanitarian intervention evolved and was increasingly applied universally. Western states portrayed themselves as acting in the interests of a common humanity, which meant that even if no one of their race or religion lived within the borders of the targeted state or nation, they could still legitimise military action on the basis that the population, or a segment of it, was suffering injustice.

Notable early examples of wars premised on protecting universal humanitarian values were the Spanish and Portuguese 16th century conquests of South and Central America, which were widely justified on the basis that the indigenous populations would be freed by European rule and cultural Europeanisation from their supposedly backward and savage cultural practices. The Native American way of life was portrayed as an atrocity in and of itself so ghastly and inferior that a European invasion would be a benevolent act – a narrative which relied heavily on emphasising, exaggerating, and at times outright fabricating aspects of native culture which were seen as distasteful to Europeans. The leading Spanish philosopher and scholar of international law at the time, Francisco Vitoria, was one of many to justify the campaigns on this basis. The resulting humanitarian-premised conquest of an entire continent quickly turned into one of the most depraved genocides in world history. Invasions which led to the particularly brutal genocides of the populations of three continents and their resettlement by ethnic Europeans – namely the Americas and Oceania – were notably all justified by allusions to altruistic humanitarian missions to free and uplift the targeted populations by westernising them. Since Australia and most of the Americas lacked centralised governance, aggressors resorted to portraying an oppressive culture rather than an oppressive government as the ill to which invasion and Europeanisation could be presented as the remedy.

Similar trends were observable across the European assaults on non-Western tribes and nations worldwide from the 16th century. The Netherlands’ most renowned legal scholar and philosopher Hugo Grotius, for example, strongly advocated for the conquest of the Dutch East Indies, which included perpetration of genocide, on the basis that it was a humanitarian mission to benefit the native population. As British historian of political thought Richard Tuck commented regarding Grotius’ position: “The idea that foreign rulers can punish tyrants, cannibals, pirates, those who kill settlers [which appears in the 1625 edition of Grotius’ work] … neatly legitimised a great deal of European action against native peoples around the world.”

The First Opium War against China in the mid-19th century was another notable early example. The British press reported at the time: “Thus it has been the destiny of England to break down a government fabric … to uncover to its own subjects its hollowness and its evils.” Other reports stated that the Chinese government’s “mysterious and exclusive barbarism” could only be dismantled, for the good of its own people, by “the force of active and intrusive Western Civilisation.” This purportedly humanitarian war to free the Chinese people was fought to ensure that the British Empire would maintain the rights to sell highly addictive narcotics to China, and the century that followed the British victories was the very darkest in China’s millennia-long history.

A further significant example of military intervention under a claimed universal humanitarian jurisdiction was the United States’ invasion of Cuba in 1898–99. As a European settler state the U.S. inherited many aspects of Europe’s political culture, and in its rapid imperial expansion in the Western Hemisphere it became a leading perpetrator of aggression using humanitarian pretexts. U.S. President William McKinley portrayed aggression against Spain as a project to liberate the Cuban people and thereby advance both “civilisation” and “the interest of humanity” – framing the attack as a “war for humanity.” The conflict saw the U.S. annex the Philippines and Puerto Rico, committing severe atrocities in the former and forcing the bulk of the population into concentration camps with death rates as high as 20 percent. In November 1901 the Manila correspondent of the Philadelphia Ledger wrote that the U.S. invasion force “killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of ten up, the idea prevailing that the Filipino as such was little better than a dog.” Some islands were purged entirely with “not one living native” left, killing an estimated 1.4 million Filipinos overall although some estimates were much higher. McKinley framed the invasion, a campaign considered by several historians to have been genocidal, as a humanitarian effort to “educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilise.”

Prominent British expert on the history of warfare Professor David Trim was among many to observe that particularly from the 19th century Western populations increasingly believed that their countries had the right to launch military offensives abroad for moral causes. He stated the following concerning what he referred to as the “humanitarian public”: “Keenly interested in the fate of oppressed people groups, albeit admittedly especially if they were Christian or Jewish, or ‘primitive’ peoples who could be converted to Christianity, it both consumed and helped to produce numerous printed reports, in books, pamphlets, magazines, and newspapers, of atrocities, mass murder, and brutality. The humanitarian public could be manipulated by propaganda and polemic.” With a strong interest in humanitarian wars which furthered their nation or religion’s interest, Western publics could be led to view offensive wars as altruistic or humanitarian. This allowed both governments and non-state actors with influence over information spaces to raise calls for military action by creating public moral outrage often through atrocity fabrication.

It was only with the end of the colonial era that a new post-1945 international order enshrined in the United Nations Charter gave UN member states equal rights and provided each country, including unprecedentedly those outside the Western world, with the right to non-interference in their internal affairs. This effectively illegalised Western humanitarian military interventions as crimes of aggression, with only a resolution by all five permanent members of the UN Security Council able to legitimise such action. Since two non-Western states, China and the Soviet Union, held permanent council seats with veto powers, there was no longer a legal means for the West to unilaterally launch unprovoked military assaults on non-Western countries. Following the end of the Cold War, however, as states outside the Western sphere of influence became a smaller minority in the world and were increasingly targeted, calls grew in the West to legitimise humanitarian intervention and move beyond a world order where the sovereignty guaranteed under the UN Charter was considered inviolable. NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana, for one, stated in 1999 when the alliance launched an illegal humanitarian-premised military campaign against Yugoslavia: “I think that we are moving into a system of international relations in which human rights, rights of minorities are much, much more important … more important even than sovereignty.” In his first month in office in January 2017 UN Secretary General of Portuguese origin Antonio Guterres criticised existing concepts of sovereignty and advocated a “whole new approach” to international relations under which international bodies could override it. This followed on from Guterres’ predecessor, Kofi Annan, who called for a new vision of sovereignty in the context of revising restrictions on humanitarian military intervention when UN Security Council authorisation was absent.

Another notable advocate was the president of the United States’ most influential policy think tank the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard N. Hass, who wrote in Foreign Affairs to much the same effect in a January 2017 article titled ‘World Order 2.0’: “The rules, policies and institutions that have guided the world since World War II, have run their course. Respect for sovereignty alone cannot uphold order.” Regarding the changes Hass was calling for, he stated: “A good start, though, would be to amend the concept of self-determination away from its inherent unilateralism on the part of the entity seeking a state of its own and replace it with the notion that statehood is something to be granted rather that asserted.” Under World Order 2.0, Hass advocated, states accused of humanitarian abuses could have their rights to see their borders and peace respected stripped from them and foreign military intervention legitimised. Indicating the kind of countries held in mind, the article was captioned by a picture of the North Korean leadership just months after an attack on the East Asian country had been seriously considered by the Obama administration. Hass stated:

Necessity may also lead to reducing or even eliminating sovereignty when a government, whether from a lack of capacity or conscious policy, is unable to provide for the basic needs of its citizens…. Our notion of sovereignty must therefore be conditional, even contractual, rather than absolute. If a state fails to live up to its side of the bargain … then it forfeits the normal benefits of sovereignty and opens itself up to attack, removal or occupation. The diplomatic challenge for this era is to gain widespread support for principles of state conduct and a procedure for determining remedies when these principles are violated.

An understanding of how fabricated claims of humanitarian abuses or atrocities abroad have furthered Western geopolitical interests is vital to comprehending the nature of ‘World Order 2.0’ referred to by Hass. The list of countries most often portrayed in the West as committing the most serious humanitarian abuses and atrocities matches almost perfectly with those which most strongly oppose Western hegemonic interests on the international stage. The worst alleged abusers are near synonymous with the small minority of countries which do not have Western military presences on their soil. A world where any state labelled a humanitarian abuser or perpetrator of atrocities could be open to unilateral attack by the Western world would thus represent an important step to quashing challenges or resistance to Western-led order, and effectively revert the world to the colonial era order when Western powers could freely use military force worldwide.

The idea that a Western public’s indignation at a state of affairs abroad grants their country the right to kill peoples, overthrow governments and occupy lands overseas has historically had calamitous consequences for populations across the non-Western world, with examples explored throughout this work. This aspect of the West’s political culture and worldview has consistently provided aggressors with a strong incentive to fabricate stories of serious humanitarian abuses by their targets, with this work’s assessment of the history of such practices highlighting the extreme dangers of humanitarian intervention.

Chapter One Cuba and Vietnam in the Early Cold War

Engineering Pretexts to Invade Cuba: From Exploding Space Rockets to Attacking Jamaica

After waging a long guerrilla war against the Western-aligned government in Havana, insurgents led by Fidel Castro and supported by mass protests seized power in Cuba in January 1959. This marked the beginning of decades of conflict with the Western world, with U.S. intelligence agencies going to considerable lengths to undermine the new Cuban government and seeking to reverse what some American analysts referred to as the “unforgivable revolution.” As Havana responded to Washington’s perceived hostility by forming defence ties with the Soviet Union, the American assault on Cuba came to involve any and all measures short of open war and focused heavily on targeting the economy and placing downward pressure on living standards. The new developmentalist government in Havana, which quickly improved the country’s development indicators ranging from life expectancy to literacy rates, was seen to threaten Washington’s interests through its potential to provide an example for other Latin American states of an alternative ideology and system of government. Overthrowing the state, and until then stifling its economy, were thus seen as vital to prevent a ‘Cuba model’ of political and economic development from potentially gaining wider traction.

U.S. combat aircraft began a bombing and firebombing campaign against Cuba from October 1959, and possibly earlier, aimed primarily at targets such as crop fields and sugar mills. At least three American pilots were lost and a further two captured during these offensives. Sea and air commando raids launched from the U.S. mainland, most often by exiles of Cuban origin and frequently with CIA supervisors, targeted oil refineries, chemical plants, bridges, crops, mills, warehouses, fishing boats, and merchant ships. After Havana responded by calling for Soviet military support, an assault on a Soviet camp wounded 12 Soviet soldiers and a hotel and theatre were shelled from sea to target Warsaw Pact personnel there. A total U.S. trade and credit embargo was paired with sabotage operations targeting both Cuban sugar exports, which were at times contaminated by the CIA at sea, as well as its imports. Damage done to foreign goods before delivery to Cuba ranged from adding chemicals to lubricating fluids to wear out diesel engines, to instructing a manufacturer in West Germany, to produce ball-bearings off-centre and another to do the same with balanced wheel gears. British busses sold to Cuba in 1964 were sabotaged by U.S. and British intelligence before arriving. The bulk of these operations were carried out under Operation Mongoose, and were approved by the State Department, the National Security Council, the White House staff, the Attorney General’s office and the Pentagon.

The next stage of escalation involved biological warfare. A Canadian agricultural technician reported in 1962 that while working as an advisor to the Cuban government he was paid $5000 by “an American military intelligence agent” to infect Cuban turkeys with a lethal virus which produced the Newcastle disease. 8000 turkeys died as a result. The Washington Post reported of the incident: “According to U.S. intelligence reports, the Cubans – and some Americans – believe the turkeys died as the result of espionage.” In 1971 the CIA gave Cuban exiles a virus which caused African swine fever for deployment against the country. Six weeks later the disease broke out in Cuba and forced the country to slaughter 500,000 pigs to prevent a nationwide epidemic. It was called the “most alarming event” of the year by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization. The U.S., Canada and Britain had previously invested heavily in developing such weapons to target livestock. In 1984 a Cuban exile on trial in New York testified that in late 1980 a ship travelled from Florida to Cuba with the purpose of introducing new germs as part of a biological warfare campaign. In a 2002 study of American biological weapons development, New York Times journalists Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William J. Broada reported that the CIA had prepared to use biological agents to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro, as well as Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba, although these plans were not put into motion.

In April 1961 the CIA attempted to deploy Cuban exiles residing in the U.S., many of them associated with the pre-revolutionary U.S.-aligned government, to launch an invasion. Despite CIA pilots flying extensive support missions, the Bay of Pigs invasion resulted in a total failure with four CIA pilots and 100 of the agency’s proxies on the ground killed and a further 1200 taken prisoner. Having exhausted the most obvious methods for attack the focus of the U.S. campaign against Cuba shifted to attempting to fabricate international crimes by the Cuban government – namely getting various U.S. government agencies to commit them and placing the blame on Havana – in order to provide pretext for further escalation in the form of a larger invasion.

In 1962 the U.S. Department of Defence and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) proposed an operation to turn public and world opinion against Cuba. This was intended to justify the further escalation of hostilities against the state, and eventually an American invasion to reinstall a Western-aligned government in power. The necessity of the operation was based on JCS assessments that Havana would not of its own accord undertake any provocations which could warrant U.S. intervention. Under the operation the CIA was tasked with staging terrorist attacks against American military and civilian targets. Proposed attacks included hijacking or shooting down airliners, orchestrating major terror attacks against U.S. cities, starting wars between Cuba and its neighbours, assassinating Cuban dissidents on American soil, and blaming possible failures in the U.S. space program on non-existent Cuban electronic attacks.

The proposal for Operation Northwoods was drafted and authorised by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, signed by its chairman Lyman Lemnitzer, and had the written approval of every member. It also had considerable support from the Pentagon and the CIA. Long-hidden secret JCS documents unearthed decades later emphasised: “World opinion, and the United Nations forum should be favourably affected by developing the international image of the Cuban government as rash and irresponsible, and as an alarming and unpredictable threat to the peace of the Western Hemisphere.” The proposal recommended: “The desired result from the execution of this plan would be to place the United States in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances from a rash and irresponsible government of Cuba and to develop an international image of a Cuban threat to peace in the Western Hemisphere.” The operation recommended developing a “Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington,” which involved the bombing of civilian targets. This was to be blamed on the “irresponsible” Cuban government and on Fidel Castro to mislead both world opinion and the American public.

Support for the idea of creating a pretext to move on Cuba was hardly relegated to the military and intelligence establishments, with President Dwight D. Eisenhower having previously told Lemnitzer and his other aides in his Cabinet Room that he would take action if only the Cuban government gave him pretext to do so. With scandal surrounding the May 1960 U-2 spy plane incident fresh in the minds of the world, which after multiple denials by Washington decisively confirmed longstanding Soviet allegations of U.S. surveillance flights deep into its airspace, Eisenhower for much of the rest of the year pushed hard for an invasion of Cuba. He then floated the idea on January 3, 1961, that if Cuba failed to provide “a really good excuse” for an American attack, the U.S. “could think of manufacturing something that would be generally acceptable” as a pretext for an invasion. Eisenhower’s successor John F. Kennedy would prove far less supportive, however, and quickly became an obstacle to such plans.

Foreign Policy magazine’s national security columnist, veteran journalist James Bamford, who was referred to by the New York Times as “the nation’s premier journalist on the subject of the National Security Agency,” observed regarding operations:

The attempts to provoke the Cuban public to revolt seemed dead and Castro, unfortunately, appeared to have no inclination to launch any attacks against Americans or their property. Lemnitzer and the other Chiefs knew there was only one option left that would ensure their war. They would have to trick the American public and world opinion into hating Cuba so much that they would not only go along, but would insist that he and his generals launch their war against Castro.

Bamford stressed that plans to engineer attacks on the U.S. which could be falsely blamed on Cuba as a pretext for an invasion “had the support of every single member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and even senior Pentagon official Paul Nitze argued in favour of provoking a phony war with Cuba. The fact that the most senior members of all the services and the Pentagon could be so out of touch with reality and the meaning of democracy would be hidden for four decades.” Bamford observed that “Operation Northwoods had called for nothing less than the launch of a secret campaign of terrorism within the United States in order to blame Castro and provoke a war with Cuba.” Regarding the U.S. military leadership, he stressed that “in the name of anticommunism, they proposed launching a secret and bloody war of terrorism against their own country in order to trick the American public into supporting an ill-conceived war they intended to launch against Cuba.” The plan, in his words:

called for innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving Lemnitzer and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch their war.

One proposal for a fabricated attack which could be blamed on Cuba involved the American space program at the height of the space race. On February 20, 1962, the first American to orbit the earth, John Glenn, lifted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida in a flight touted as carrying the banner of American truth, freedom, and democracy into space. Speaking to Lieutenant Colonel Edward G. Lansdale, who subsequently launched CIA clandestine operations against Cuba, the Joint Chiefs of Staff proposed that should there be any problem with the rocket which resulted in Glenn’s death, “the objective is to provide irrevocable proof that … the fault lies with the Communists et al Cuba.” This could be achieved, according to Lemnitzer, “by manufacturing various pieces of evidence which would prove electronic interference on the part of the Cubans.”

Had any problem with the launch occurred, Cuba was to be blamed to help strengthen the argument for an invasion. Unlike kinetic attacks, cyber or electronic attacks could be blamed on almost any party or even fabricated entirely – a fact not lost in subsequent decades as U.S. and Western planners sought to find new pretexts to attribute blame, vilify and enact various hostile policies against their targets (see Chapter 7). When John Glenn became the fifth man to go to space following an uneventful launch, the JCS quickly drafted new plans for false flag operations against Cuba which could be enacted “within the time frame of the next few months.”

Subsequent plans to frame Cuba for various atrocities grew more extreme. One stipulated “a series of well-coordinated incidents to take place in and around” the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, which included dressing “friendly” Cubans in military uniforms and having them “start riots near the main gate of the base. Others would pretend to be saboteurs inside the base. Ammunition would be blown up, fires started, aircraft sabotaged, mortars fired at the base with damage to installations.” This attack by America’s own assets on a U.S. naval facility at the command of the JCS would present Havana as an aggressor, and be used as a pretext for a military campaign to take over the country. Another JCS proposal similarly suggested: “We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba,” highlighting that “casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.”

Other JCS plans stipulated: “We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington…. The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States…. We could sink a boatload of Cubans en-route to Florida (real or simulated)…. We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicised.”

Other operations planned included:

• “Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government.”
• “Advantage can be taken of the sensitivity of the Dominican [Republic] Air Force to intrusions within their national air space. ‘Cuban’ B-26 or C-46 type aircraft could make cane-burning raids at night. Soviet Bloc incendiaries could be found. This could be coupled with ‘Cuban’ messages to the Communist underground in the Dominican Republic and ‘Cuban’ shipments of arms which would be found, or intercepted, on the beach. Use of MiG type aircraft by U.S. pilots could provide additional provocation.”
• “Hijacking attempts against civil air and surface craft could appear to continue as harassing measures condoned by the Government of Cuba.”
• “Create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner en-route from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or Venezuela. The destination would be chosen only to cause the flight plan route to cross Cuba. The passengers could be a group of college students off on a holiday or any grouping of persons with a common interest to support chartering a non-scheduled flight.”

The U.S. had notably managed to acquire modern Soviet-built fighter jets from across the third world, some of which were of the same classes that Cuba itself was thought to field. Another plan which could potentially capitalise on these assets would “make it appear that Communist Cuban MiGs have destroyed a USAF aircraft over international waters in an unprovoked attack.”

Elaborating on a separate plan to engineer an airline hijacking which could be blamed on Havana, the JCS reported:

An aircraft at Elgin AFB [Air Force Base, in western Florida] would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CIA proprietary organisation in the Miami area. At a designated time the duplicate would be substituted for the actual civil aircraft and would be loaded with the selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would be converted to a drone [a remotely controlled unmanned aircraft]. Take off times of the drone aircraft and the actual aircraft will be scheduled to allow a rendezvous south of Florida. From the rendezvous point the passenger-carrying aircraft will descend to minimum altitude and go directly into an auxiliary field at Elgin AFB where arrangements will have been made to evacuate the passengers and return the aircraft to its original status. The drone aircraft meanwhile will continue to fly the filed flight plan. When over Cuba the drone will be transmitting on the international distress frequency a ‘May Day’ message stating he is under attack by Cuban MiG aircraft. The transmission will be interrupted by destruction of the aircraft, which will be triggered by radio signal. This will allow ICAO [International Civil Aviation Organization] radio stations in the Western Hemisphere to tell the U.S. what has happened to the aircraft instead of the U.S. trying to ‘sell’ the incident.

On March 16, 1962, President John F. Kennedy ruled out the operations after meeting with Lemnitzer. This was one of several more radical operations the president would veto before his assassination, although any of the other occupants of the Oval Office during the Cold War may well have been more inclined to approved it. Lemnitzer’s term as JCS chairman ended on September 30, 1962, and he subsequently went on to serve as NATO’s as Supreme Allied Commander Europe. Kennedy’s death and a change in chairmanship did little to change the position of the JCS, however, with new plans made to start a war between Cuba and a neighbouring country either by engineering provocations against Havana by a U.S.-aligned third country in the region or through another false flag Cuban attack. Such a war would give the U.S. a pretext to launch a military intervention on the request of its ally, which in turn would facilitate the invasion of Cuba. The documents stated: “A contrived ‘Cuban’ attack on an OAS [Organization of American States] member could be set up, and the attacked state could be urged to take measures of self-defence and request assistance from the U.S. and OAS; the U.S. could almost certainly obtain the necessary two-thirds support among OAS members for collective action against Cuba.” Manufacturing a crisis would thereby provide a pretext for invasion. Another ambitious plan stipulated a U.S. attack against either Jamaica or Trinidad and Tobago, which were members of the British Commonwealth. The attack would be launched in such a way that it could be blamed on Havana, which would draw Britain into a war against Cuba.

In May 1963 Assistant Secretary of Defence Paul H. Nitze sent a proposal to the White House for “a possible scenario whereby an attack on a United States reconnaissance aircraft could be exploited toward the end of effecting the removal of the Castro regime.” The U.S. would continue to violate Cuban airspace with high flying U-2 spy planes, and if one were shot down then the Pentagon would send in further manned surveillance aircraft on very low-level reconnaissance missions which would make them far more vulnerable to taking further losses. Much as flying a U-2 over the USSR had resulted in escalated tensions when one was shot down in May the previous year, the new plan stipulated that “the U.S. could undertake various measures designed to stimulate the Cubans to provoke a new incident.” JCS plans involved sending fighters across the island on “harassing reconnaissance” and “show-off” missions “flaunting our freedom of action, hoping to stir the Cuban military to action.” “Thus, depending above all on whether the Cubans were or could be made to be trigger-happy, the development of the initial downing of a reconnaissance plane could lead at best to the elimination of Castro, perhaps to the removal of Soviet troops and the installation of ground inspection in Cuba, or at the least to our demonstration of firmness on reconnaissance.” Havana failed to take the bait, however, and responded to subsequent low-level flights only by launching formal protests.

A further plan stipulated bribing senior officers in Cuba’s armed forces to attack the United States Military: “The only area remaining for consideration then would be to bribe one of Castro’s subordinate commanders to initiate an attack on [the U.S. naval base at] Guantanamo.” Although paying foreign nationals to attack an American military facility was highly treasonous, normal rules of conduct were generally discarded when conducting false flag operations. Even major U.S. casualties, both military and civilian, were seen as acceptable to advance the country’s geopolitical interests and forcefully bring a strategically important territory back into Washington’s sphere of influence.

The major detriment to America’s image which exposure of Operation Northwoods risked causing, as well as the illegality of several parts of the plan, resulted in high levels of secrecy with all details remaining hidden for over forty years. Like many operations of its nature, several of the relevant documents were destroyed with further details remaining unknown. Chairman Lemnitzer, for example, had ordered the JCS’ chief of the Cuba project, Brigadier General David W. Gray, to destroy all notes concerning the period of the Bay of Pigs following its failure. The U.S. ultimately never attempted a further invasion of Cuba after the Bay of Pigs, due to a combination of factors including signs of considerable popular support for the government in Havana, Soviet protection, and conflict between the JCS and the presidency. Plans to fabricate a Cuban provocation or even pin the blame for a U.S.-organised attack on Cuba, however, were highly indicative of the lengths to which the superpower could go to vilify and provide pretext for hostile action against its adversaries.

Finding Justification for an Assault on Vietnam

Following the defeat of the Japanese Empire in 1945 Vietnam quicky emerged as one of multiple key theatres of conflict in East Asia where Western empires seeking to impose their hegemony were pitted against local nationalists striving for independence. The League for the Independence of Vietnam nationalist movement, better known as the Viet Minh, fought for 30 years against Western imperial designs first to resist a French colonial war effort and subsequently against a large U.S.-led coalition seeking to maintain Western influence in the south of the country. Having colonised Vietnam in “an orgy of killing and looting” in the late 19th century, France had intended to impose its rule indefinitely and “exclude any idea of self-government, any possibility of development outside the French Empire” for the country. Alongside cultural Europeanisation and fierce promotion of Roman Catholicism, the policy of colonial underdevelopment was central to Paris’ designs and saw Vietnamese literacy rates and living standards plummet. Access to even a basic primary education became restricted to well under 10 percent of children, among the very lowest in the region, and Vietnamese land was confiscated en masse – much of it granted to the Catholic Church making it the largest landowner in the country.

When France faced staunch resistance reoccupying Vietnam it responded by deploying 400,000 personnel, half of them French and half local auxiliaries. One of the first French offensives was an attack on Haiphong, the main port city of northern Vietnam, from 23–28 November 1946. It caused 6000 deaths at a very conservative estimate, levelling most of the city as aircraft strafed fleeing refugees, and was intended to “teach a severe lesson” to the Vietnamese. A declared policy of collective punishment against areas suspected of supporting the Viet Minh saw French forces widely pillage and rape, with conduct highly consistent with that in prior decades. “They raped women, sometimes until they died,” survivors would recall years later. Villages near sites of Viet Minh operations were systematically burned down, with civilians blown up in their houses by grenades while public displays of severed Vietnamese heads and public torture of suspected insurgents were intended to terrorise the population into submission. Beheadings had long been a common practice in French colonial wars, with some skulls sent back to Paris for display as trophies. In politically suspect villages French forces singled out pregnant Vietnamese women for rape, often resulting in death. The bayoneting of politically suspect pregnant women by colonial forces was also widely reported. Writing in the European Journal of Women’s Studies, scholar Helle Rydstrom noted after widely interviewing survivors that pregnant women were “the embodied symbol of an enemy capable of projecting strength into the future by producing children,” which was the French motive for targeting them to send “waves of shock through the community.”

The U.S. showed a growing inclination to support the French colonial war from 1949, after the Western-aligned Republic of China was decisively defeated in the Chinese Civil War (see Chapter 3), as preserving what remained of Western influence in the region appeared increasingly critical. This support increased significantly from mid-1950 as U.S. and allied Western forces in Korea faced wholly unexpected losses and were forced into a months’ long retreat by North Korea’s scantly armed and outnumbered army. Although the use of military force by the U.S. to support French goals in Vietnam was not authorised, and remained unconfirmed for over 50 years, CIA airline CAT flew support missions for French forces from 1950 and was involved in airlifting paratroopers, artillery, ammunition and other military materials. French forces in Vietnam were also provided with much-needed warships and combat aircraft, and in May 1954 U.S. President Eisenhower seriously considered launching nuclear strikes against Viet Minh forces to support a besieged French garrison at Dien Bien Phu. Washington dispatched two aircraft carriers armed with nuclear weapons into the Gulf of Tonkin at the time, although French commanders pointed out that the proximity in which their own units and the Viet Minh were fighting meant that nuclear strikes were not feasible. American support continued to escalate over the next four years, and by 1954 Washington was financing 78 percent of France’s colonial war effort.

The battle at Dien Bien Phu in the spring of 1954 was a major turning point in the colonial war and resulted in France’s withdrawal that year after having lost over 20,000 personnel and 55,000 local auxiliary fighters. The resultant signing of the 1954 Geneva Accords stipulated that colonial forces be removed and Vietnam be partitioned into northern and southern states with unifying elections scheduled for July 1956. The Viet Minh under the leadership of the leftist nationalist Ho Chi Minh controlled the north based in Hanoi, while the south was placed under the rule of the Francophone elite of the colonial era based in Saigon. With the Cold War escalating, however, what had been one country’s struggle for independence became a central part of a major regionwide U.S.-led effort to cement the Western sphere of influence and push back against challengers to Western power. With the pro-Western leadership in southern Vietnam expected to overwhelmingly lose unifying elections, the threat an independent Vietnam under the Viet Minh posed to the West’s already faltering regional hegemony led Washington to support cancellation of the elections in 1955. As U.S. President Eisenhower concluded based on the intelligence available: “had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, a possible 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader.” The CIA had predicted in their own report: “if scheduled national elections are held in July 1956 … the Viet Minh will almost certainly win.”

Under a Francophone elite headed overwhelmingly by members of the Catholic minority, the South Vietnamese government discriminated harshly against the Buddhist majority, strongly promoted the Catholic faith, and was vehemently pro-Western in its orientation mirroring the policies of the French colonial era. With the government having little support in either the north or the south, CIA psychological warfare experts led by Colonel Edward Lansdale were deployed to engineer a program to reshape public opinion. This targeted the Catholic minority in particular and proved even more successful than Lansdale’s stunning prior psyops successes in the Philippines. As CIA case officer Ralph McGehee, who deployed to Southeast Asia from the late 1950s into the 1970s, reported:

Lansdale’s men, operating in teams in North Vietnam, stimulated North Vietnamese Catholics and the Catholic armies deserted by the French to flee south. SMM teams promised Catholic Vietnamese assistance and new opportunities if they would emigrate. To help them make up their minds, the teams circulated leaflets falsely attributed to the Viet Minh telling what was expected of citizens under the new government. The day following distribution of the leaflets, refugee registration tripled. The teams spread horror stories of Chinese Communist regiments raping Vietnamese girls and taking reprisals against villages. This confirmed fears of Chinese occupation under the Viet Minh. The teams distributed other pamphlets showing the circumference of destruction around Hanoi and other North Vietnamese cities should the United States decide to use atomic weapons. To those it induced to flee over the 300-day period the CIA provided free transportation on its airline, Civil Air Transport, and on ships of the U.S. Navy…. It not only convinced the North Vietnamese Catholics to flee to the South, thereby providing [President Ngo Dinh] Diem with a source of reliable political and military cadres, but it also duped the American people into believing that the flight of the refugees was a condemnation of the Viet Minh by the majority of Vietnamese.

Lansdale’s team was far from isolated, another notable example being the atrocity fabrication efforts of Lieutenant Tom Dooley who operated with the U.S. Navy out of Haiphong. Dooley invented stories of the Viet Minh disembowelling 1,000 pregnant women, beating a naked priest on the testicles with a bamboo club, and jamming chopsticks in the ears of children to keep them from hearing Christian scripture. His ties to the CIA were uncovered in 1979. Once largely alienated from the population Catholics would be relied on to run the Western client government in the south. As McGehee observed: “The CIA had completed the imposition of a Catholic premier and the importation of a Catholic encoded army and police to rule a nation that was primarily Buddhist.”

Despite these successes, the southern client government remained overwhelmingly unpopular. As Ralph McGehee noted, U.S. intelligence appeared to be deluding itself that its adversaries did not have mass popular support. “U.S. policymakers had to sell the idea that the war in the South was being fought by a small minority of Communists opposed to the majority-supported democratic government…. The situation, however, was the opposite, as I was to understand later,” he stated. Washington was supporting a “tiny oligarchy against a population largely organised, committed, and dedicated to a communist victory.” The Viet Minh in South Vietnam became more active as an insurgency, and from the early summer of 1959 operated as the Viet Cong against the Western-aligned government and its foreign sponsors. The U.S. for its part, and President Lyndon Johnson (LBJ) in particular who assumed leadership from November 1963, showed growing signs of an eagerness to intervene to preserve South Vietnam as a separate Western client state.

Johnson had been a critic of American reluctance to intervene more in Vietnam during the French colonial war, and in 1954 he condemned the Eisenhower administration’s failure to preserve French rule. As president he exhorted his aides during 1964 to do more to defeat the insurgency within South Vietnam, and according to Defence Secretary Robert S. McNamara he “felt more certain than President Kennedy that the loss of South Vietnam had a higher cost than would the direct application of U.S. military force.” Support for drastic escalation was widespread among much of the military and civilian leadership, an example being Vice Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Claude Ricketts, who in February 1964 called for airstrikes on military and industrial targets across North Vietnam. The purpose was to impose unacceptable costs on Hanoi for its continued support for the Viet Cong insurgents in the south. Offensives by Hanoi-aligned Pathet Lao insurgents in neighbouring Laos from mid-May, 1964, only deepened the sense of urgency for more heavy-handed American military involvement as the possibility grew of Vietnam’s neighbour moving out of the Western sphere of influence. As the positions of American clients fast deteriorated, plans for escalated U.S. military intervention began to be laid awaiting a suitable incident to serve as pretext.

The Johnson administration gained the pretext it needed to escalate the war effort in Vietnam in the first week of August 1964. On August 2 the U.S. Navy destroyer USS Maddox was approached by three North Vietnamese patrol (PT) boats off the country’s coast and fired the first shots, with accounts varying on whether these were intended to kill or as warnings. The Vietnamese ships reportedly responded by firing torpedoes which missed their targets, but the ensuing exchange of fire saw two patrol boats seriously damaged while the destroyer was lightly damaged by machine gun fire. The Maddox subsequently withdrew. Its operations were described as “routine,” which as the New York Times noted left “no ready explanation why the PT boats would in effect attack the powerful Seventh Fleet” when “unprovoked.”

A little over 48 hours later on August 4 the Maddox returned to the North Vietnamese coast on personal orders from President Johnson and was accompanied by a second destroyer the USS Turner Joy. The two reportedly opened fire on Vietnamese patrol boats after allegedly detecting torpedo fire against them. They suffered no damage. The president took this as a pretext for an immediate escalation of the war effort, and within half an hour of the incident’s end he overruled the commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet to order major airstrikes on North Vietnam. The strike targeted naval bases and an oil storage facility using fighters based on nearby aircraft carriers, with the haste with which it was ordered reportedly intended to ensure that Johnson could announce it on television that night. This was despite his staff having yet to determine whether a Vietnamese attack had indeed occurred. Johnson framed the alleged attack on the American ships as “open aggression on the high seas against the United States of America,” and as a result the Tonkin Resolution was hastily passed in the Senate and the House of Representatives on August 7. This empowered the president “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.” Reports of the two incidents in the Gulf of Tonkin were not duly investigated in what was widely interpreted as an attempt to force Congress into signing the resolution. The president’s National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy described the push for a rushed congressional resolution as an attempt to “go for it on the basis of some snap event and a surge of feeling around the snap event” – something he advised against.

Classified transcripts released by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in July 2010 showed that serious questions had quickly emerged regarding whether Congress had been misled to approve escalation of the war effort. As committee member Senator Frank Church stated in 1968, reflecting a widespread sentiment at the time: “In a democracy you cannot expect the people, whose sons are being killed and who will be killed, to exercise their judgment if the truth is concealed from them.” Regarding the case at hand, he stressed: “we have a case that will discredit the military in the United States, and discredit and quite possibly destroy the president.” National Security Agency (NSA) historian Robert J. Hanyok noted regarding the committee’s discussions: “there were doubts, but nobody wanted to follow up on the doubts,” perhaps because “they felt they’d gone too far down the road.” He concluded that NSA officers had deliberately falsified intercepted communications in the incident to make it appear that the alleged August 4 North Vietnamese attack had occurred.

As a study by Robert J. Hanyok, published by the Washington D.C.-based U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command, observed in 2017 on the basis of evidence declassified 50 years after the incident and a comprehensive analysis of signals intelligence records from the night of the attacks:

Two startling findings emerged from the new research. First, it is not simply that there is a different story as to what happened; it is that no attack happened that night. Through a compound of analytic errors and an unwillingness to consider contrary evidence, American SIGINT [signals intelligence] elements in the region and at NSA HQs reported Hanoi’s plans to attack the two ships of the Desoto patrol. Further analytic errors and an obscuring of other information led to publication of more ‘evidence.’ In truth, Hanoi’s navy was engaged in nothing that night but the salvage of two of the boats damaged on 2 August…. In order to substantiate that claim, all of the relevant SIGINT could not be provided to the White House and the Defence and intelligence officials. The conclusion that would be drawn from a review of all SIGINT evidence would have been that the North Vietnamese not only did not attack, but were uncertain as to the location of the ships … the overwhelming portion of the SIGINT relevant to 4 August was kept out of the post-attack summary reports and the final report written in October 1964. The withheld information constituted nearly 90 percent of all available SIGINT. This information revealed the actual activities of the North Vietnamese on the night of 4 August that included salvage operations of the two torpedo boats damaged on 2 August, and coastal patrols by a small number of DRV [North Vietnamese] craft.

The command’s report stressed that “the overwhelming body of reports, if used, would have told the story that no attack occurred.” It stressed that NSA summary reports from the time which portrayed North Vietnamese aggression relied heavily on “fragments of legitimate intercept lifted out of its context and inserted into the summary reports to support the contention of a premeditated North Vietnamese attack on 4 August. The sources of these fragments were not even referenced in the summaries … SIGINT information was presented in such a manner as to preclude responsible decision makers in the Johnson Administration from having the complete and objective narrative of events of 04 August 1964.” A U.S. Naval Institute (USNI) paper noted to similar effect in 2008, citing “the release of the nearly 200 documents related to the Gulf of Tonkin incident and transcripts from the Johnson Library evidence recently made available,” that “these new documents and tapes reveal what historians could not prove: There was not a second attack on U.S. Navy ships in the Tonkin Gulf in early August 1964. Furthermore, the evidence suggests a disturbing and deliberate attempt by Secretary of Defence McNamara to distort the evidence and mislead Congress.”

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution served as a blanket endorsement of several rounds of escalation and the rapid expansion of the war effort, including the largest bombing campaign in world history targeting North Vietnam, the Viet Cong, and supply lines in neighbouring Cambodia and Laos. The resolution was vital to legitimizing such action under U.S. law – referred to by President Johnson as “like Grandma’s nightshirt. It covers everything.” Within one month of the Gulf of Tonkin incident 93 U.S. warplanes had been dispatched to South Vietnam and Thailand, and within a year 200,000 American personnel were in South Vietnam. This figure quickly grew to over 500,000, with the resolution justifying open-ended U.S. military operations across Southeast Asia. Despite the magnitude of the response White House tapes released in 2002 showed that even President Johnson, although benefitting from the pretext for escalation, was highly sceptical of claims that North Vietnam had launched an attack. The tapes, as well as evidence from the preceding 38 years, left little question that an attack had not occurred. North Vietnam’s innocence was “well established,” according to USNI’s Acting Director of Naval History and Senior Historian of the Navy Dr. Edward J. Marolda.

Following the August 4th incident President Johnson had given an address at midnight in which he made multiple tenuous claims including that the North Vietnamese had launched two days of attacks, that its actions were unprovoked, and that the administration did not intend to go to war in Vietnam. As former White House chief speechwriter Robert Lehrman, writing for The Hill, observed:

Was any of LBJ’s speech that night, true? To historians the verdict is clear. No. ‘Seek no wider war?’ That is exactly what he sought with a resolution written six months earlier, waiting for an event to justify it [Vietnamese aggression] ‘On the open seas,’ with its implication that the attack was unprovoked? The Maddox, cruising off the Vietnamese coast, was part of a covert and illegal intelligence-gathering mission, designed to provoke exactly the response it got. Two days of attacks? Even Johnson didn’t believe the second one occurred. Aggression? The Maddox fired first. More important, the North Vietnamese were off their own coast. They were home. U.S. sailors were about 8,000 miles from home. If anything, the aggressors were us. Moreover, LBJ didn’t limit himself to deceiving the public. He deceived the Senate.

While the USS Maddox’s operations were described as routine, further details of its activities off the North Vietnamese coast indicate that this was far from the case. The destroyer was tasked with simulating attacks on the North Vietnamese coast as part of the effort to “locate and identify all coastal radar transmitters,” and had been equipped with extensive signals intelligence equipment and embarked 17 associated specialists in Taiwan in July for this purpose. Such missions were vital to pave the way for an expanded military campaign to neutralize such equipment – which in August was seen as a considerable possibility. The growing weight of proposals that the U.S. should bomb North Vietnam, of which Hanoi was far from unaware, made such offensive operations by American warships particularly sensitive. The U.S. already had approximately 16,500 personnel in South Vietnam whom it claimed were military advisors, but who were already widely involved in military operations, and by June it had deployed air units to strike insurgents as well as communist-held areas of neighbouring Laos. CIA operations from 1961, which were transferred to the Pentagon from January 1964, saw commando teams inserted into North Vietnam for reconnaissance and sabotage operations. This campaign was described by the Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Command, Admiral Harry D. Felt, as targeting “power plants, railroads, bridges, VIP residences, and the like,” although these efforts were met with a string of failures and saw the attackers consistently take heavy losses to North Vietnamese defences.

Another major factor which made the Maddox’s mission particularly provocative, and led many to speculate that by sailing as it did and firing the first shots it was seeking to provoke a response, was that it coincided with major South Vietnamese escalations at sea. In July the commander of the U.S. Military Assistance Command Vietnam, Lieutenant General William C. Westmoreland, initiated an offensive campaign under Operational Plan 34A that focused on using South Vietnamese patrol boats to conduct shore bombardments using mortars, rockets and recoilless rifles. These offensives built on a previous campaign that focused more on commando raids to do damage to North Vietnam. On July 22 South Vietnamese Air Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky confirmed to reporters that his country had been sending sabotage missions to the north for three years; and from July 31 with American approval South Vietnamese naval forces had begun to attack northern coastal and island installations without provocation. The U.S. had been increasing its own special forces and air operations in Vietnam at the time among other steps to rapidly expand is involvement. It was at the same time pressing Saigon to escalate including by insertion of guerrilla warfare teams into North Vietnam. July 31 was also the day the USS Maddox began its patrol, in what looked very much like a coordinated hostile action. U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk conceded in a classified cable regarding clashes between the USS Maddox and North Vietnamese ships on August 2: “Maddox incident is directly related to [North Vietnam’s] efforts to resist these activities,” with the patrol boats likely to have been operating as they did in response to the ongoing attacks. The American destroyer had effectively been sailing with special electronic surveillance equipment through a battle zone and close to an enemy coast just after its ally had initiated offensives.

Defence Secretary Robert McNamara, when testifying before a joint session of the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees two days after the incident on August 6, notably evaded questioning regarding whether North Vietnam may have been provoked into taking military action. He instead answered: “our Navy played absolutely no part in, was not associated with, was not aware of, any South Vietnamese actions, if there were any.” He subsequently that day claimed at a Pentagon news conference that he had no knowledge of the South Vietnamese coastal attacks which provoked that – a statement which proved to be an outright lie. An audio tape from the Johnson Presidential Library declassified in December 2005 showed that on August 5, the morning after the attacks, McNamara admitted to the president:

On Friday night, as you probably know, we had four TP [sic] boats from [South] Vietnam, manned by [South] Vietnamese or other nationals, attack two islands, and we expended, oh, 1,000 rounds of ammunition of one kind or another against them. We probably shot up a radar station and a few other miscellaneous buildings. And following 24 hours after that with this destroyer in the same area undoubtedly led them to connect the two events.

Alongside a simultaneous U.S.-directed commando raid, South Vietnamese ships had launched a second round of larger assaults on August 3–4. The Maddox had been ordered to approach the North Vietnamese coast as part of a coordinated action with South Vietnamese attacks to draw the northern patrol boats away from the area where the attacks were being launched. The northern navy was thus acting defensively not only because the American destroyer approached its coast and fired first, but also because the ship was operating as part of an offensive operation which saw southern ships bombard northern targets without provocation. The fact that the Pentagon misinformed the Senate and the press about where clashes had occurred – more than doubling the distance away from the Vietnamese coast – further contributed to misrepresenting North Vietnamese actions as aggression. Much as had been done in Korea, where the Western aligned south was also responsible for the majority of offensives preceding the outbreak of the Korean War, relatively minor northern retaliation was portrayed out of context and in isolation to portray the non-westernized states as the aggressors and in turn provide pretext for hostile policies including large scale Western military interventions.

Not only was the framing of the clashes in the Tonkin Gulf as unprovoked northern aggression highly misleading, but the claim that North Vietnamese ships even fired torpedoes, or were involved in any capacity whatsoever, was itself highly questionable. A few hours before the second incident began USS Maddox’s sonar equipment and its Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) device broke down and were repaired. Numerous erroneous sonar reports of torpedoes were made by the Maddox that night mostly caused by the ship’s own violent movements, as the ship had been going unusually fast and zigzagging. The Maddox’s SPS-40 long-range air-search radar and the Turner Joy’s SPG-53 fire-control radar were both out of action, while thunderstorms and rain squalls significantly reduced visibility and created waves six feet high – factors which combined to significantly further reduce situational awareness.

On August 5 at 1:30am, around one hour after the second naval incident ended, the patrol commander Captain John Jerome Herrick reported to Pacific headquarters: “Review of action makes many reported contacts and torpedoes fired appear doubtful. Freak weather effects and over-eager sonarman may have accounted for many reports. No actual visual sightings by Maddox. Suggest complete evaluation before any further action taken.” At 8am he sent another message:

Maddox scored no known hits and never positively identified a boat as such…. Air support not successful in locating targets…. No known damage or personnel casualties to either ship…. Turner Joy claims sinking one boat and damaging another…. The first boat close to Maddox probably fired torpedo at Maddox which was heard but not seen. All subsequent Maddox torpedo reports were doubtful in that it is suppose that sonar man was nearing ship’s own propeller beat.”

Herrick later stated that he confirmed the firing of the first torpedo only because he assumed that the Maddox had been moving at a slower speed, since the sonar equipment only confused rudder noises with torpedoes when the ship moved at more over 25 knots. When shown that his notes and the ship’s log indicated that the Maddox had been traveling at 30 knots when it was allegedly attacked, Herrick conceded that it was probable that no torpedoes had been fired.

The Maddox’s own officers were suspicious of reports of how many torpedoes were being fired because North Vietnam’s entire navy was only thought to be able to fire 24 torpedoes from all its patrol boats. They began to suspect that no attack was actually in progress. As the ship’s physician Samuel E. Halpern recalled, upon realising that the attack was false: “Immediately after the attack, the officers came streaming into the wardroom and it was hysterical… just hysterical laughter. Everybody was laughing like mad, and then suddenly, I realized I was laughing too, the same way. And it was this tremendous release from pressure.” American fighters flying overhead notably also reported that they could not confirm the presence of any enemy ships, with one reporting seeing: “No boat wakes, no ricochets off boats, no boat gunfire, no torpedo wakes – nothing but black sea and American firepower.” Skipper of the Maddox, Commander Herbert L. Ogier, confirmed on the morning of August 5 from the ship’s command bridge that reports of an attack were wrong.

Award-winning journalist I. F. Stone suggested that the crisis involved “not just decision-making in a crisis, but … crisis-making to support a secretly pre-arranged decision,” indicating that the provocative actions of the American warships alongside South Vietnamese attacks were intended to draw fire and in turn provide pretext for expanding the war. This opinion was widely shared by analysts, with the wholly disproportionate nature of the U.S. response strongly indicating that very minor clashes at the Gulf of Tonkin, even if they had indeed occurred as Washington tenuously claimed, were blown very far out of proportion. The Tonkin incident thus served as a pretext for an already desired series of actions.

A preliminary congressional resolution had been drafted by the Johnson administration from February to June awaiting some kind of incident, no matter how small, which could trigger it to be tabled. Indeed, President Johnson informed Senator J. William Fulbright on July 26, a week before the first incident and nine days before the second, that he planned to go to Congress soon to request a resolution on Vietnam – meaning the incidents were optimally timed. As historian Andrew L. Johns, writing for the Journal of American-East Asian Relations, noted: “The outpouring of patriotism which ensured the overwhelming acceptance of the resolution provided Johnson with the best of all worlds – bipartisan support, domestic political protection (albeit temporary), and the means to augment the American involvement in Vietnam with congressional sanction.” “Clearly, the situation in Vietnam was growing progressively worse during the first half of 1964. Johnson and his advisers realized that the status quo on the ground in Vietnam would soon be hopeless without a major commitment of American troops – indeed, perhaps unwinnable in any case – and thus planning commenced for the eventual escalation of the conflict,” Johns observed, stressing that while plans to go to Congress with a Vietnam resolution had been long in the making, the Tonkin Gulf incident provided “the perfect pretext to submit a resolution to Congress and avoid divisive debate as a matter of patriotism and expediency.”

Leading British international relations expert Professor Adam Roberts observed regarding the seemingly excessive response to the Tonkin incident: “It is as if Tonkin Gulf had been mistaken for Pearl Harbour,” an opinion which he highlighted was shared by many of America’s allies. Director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies Alastair Buchan similarly referred to “President Johnson’s ludicrous over-reaction to an attack on two ships in the Gulf of Tonkin.” Not only was the escalation of the war grossly disproportionate to the incident in question, but whether the incident had ever occurred was in serious doubt even in the eyes of the president himself. As Under Secretary of State George Ball observed, President Johnson: “wasn’t convinced at all after the thing … but they had been waiting for a provocation for a hell of a long time…. I don’t think he was sure, I think he had grave doubts that this attack had occurred … but from the point of view of the President and those who were around him who were eager for a stronger American line to be taken, this served the purpose.”

As more information came to light over time, both on the events in the Gulf of Tonkin itself and on the more general conduct of the United States during that period, the Johnson administration’s narrative regarding the chain of events appeared increasingly tenuous. Former U.S. State Department analyst and historian William Blum noted in 1995: “Serious enough doubts were raised at the time about the reality of the attack, but over the years other information has come to light which has left the official story in tatters.” President Johnson himself told Secretary George Ball: “Hell, those dumb, stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish!” He later commented privately: “For all I know, our navy was shooting at whales out there.” Secretary McNamara also later expressed doubts that any attack had ever occurred.

Squadron Commander James Stockdale, a U.S. pilot who was flying overhead at low altitude for over 90 minutes during the August 4 incident, wrote in 1984 that he “had the best seat in the house to watch that event, and our destroyers were just shooting at phantom targets – there were no PT boats there…. There was nothing there but black water and American fire power.” He recalled that his superior officers instructed him to keep quiet on the matter. With officers on the USS Maddox also reportedly prevented from speaking out, Stockdale lamented: “I would never have guessed that commodores in charge on the scene of action are sometimes not allowed to blow the whistle on a screw-up or set records straight themselves.” As a result, he stressed, the Johnson administration had effectively moved “to launch a war under false pretences, in the face of the on-scene military commander’s advice to the contrary.” Naval officer John White was among many in the military who alleged that the pretext for war was far from honest, stating in 1967: “I maintain that President Johnson, Secretary McNamara and the Joint Chiefs of Staff gave false information to Congress in their report about U.S. destroyers being attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin.” Captain Herrick of the USS Maddox himself refuted reports of North Vietnamese provocation.

Foreign Policy magazine’s national security columnist, veteran journalist James Bamford, noted regarding the new perspective declassified documents on operations in Cuba gave the Gulf of Tonkin incident:

in light of the Operation Northwoods documents, it is clear that deceiving the public and trumping up wars for Americans to fight and die in was standard, approved policy at the highest levels of the Pentagon. In fact, the Gulf of Tonkin seems right out of the Operation Northwoods playbook: ‘We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba … casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of indignation.’ One need only replace ‘Guantanamo Bay’ with ‘Tonkin Gulf,’ and ‘Cuba’ with ‘North Vietnam.’ The Gulf of Tonkin incident may or may not have been stage- managed, but the senior Pentagon leadership at the time was clearly capable of such deceit.

As Rodney Carlisle’s Encyclopaedia of Intelligence and Counterintelligence similarly noted:

In addition to formal propaganda, disinformation was informally promulgated to journalists and the public as well. The 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident is perhaps the prime example. At the time, most journalists and the public accepted at face value the claims of President Lyndon B. Johnson. The president, and other officials, characterised the August incidents in the Gulf of Tonkin … as examples of clear, unprovoked North Vietnamese aggression. The second attack almost surely did not occur, though some officials at the time believed it had. Yet the highly secret Plan 34A, involving covert attacks jointly managed by the CIA and the U.S. Navy against North Vietnam was not revealed. Nor was the fact that a U.S. naval patrol had been sent to gather electronic intelligence in the Gulf of Tonkin. The North Vietnamese ‘aggression,’ widely reported in the news media, paved the way for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, providing the basis for the U.S. escalation of the war in Vietnam.

The U.S. war effort in Vietnam was broadly heavily reliant on fabrications both to justify escalation and to vilify and delegitimise resistance. Evidence of fabricated incidents engineered to justify U.S. intervention was considerable. Former CIA officer Philip Liechty stated in 1982 that in the early 1960s he saw written plans to load large quantities of Soviet-Bloc arms onto a Vietnamese boat, fake a battle in which the boat would be sunk in shallow water, and call in Western reporters to see the captured weapons as proof of aid by foreign communist powers to the Viet Cong. This occurred in 1965 exactly as Liechty had told it. A U.S. State Department white paper titled ‘Aggression From the North,’ which was published at the end of February 1965, reported that a “suspicious vessel” was “sunk in shallow water” off the coast of South Vietnam on 16 February 1965 and contained 100 tons of military supplies. These were “almost all of communist origin, largely from Communist China and Czechoslovakia as well as North Vietnam.” The paper noted that “representatives of the free press visited the sunken North Vietnamese ship and viewed its cargo.” While records show that U.S. analysts were under no illusion that the Viet Minh were agents of an international communist conspiracy by Moscow and Beijing, and not the popular nationalists that they were, it was seen as vital to misrepresent them as such to both delegitimise them internationally and to justify U.S. military action against them.

Liechty had also seen documents involving an elaborate operation to print large numbers of multicolour postage stamps showing a Vietnamese downing of a U.S. Army helicopter. He stressed that the high professionalism required to produce such stamps was meant to indicate that they were produced by North Vietnam, as the Viet Cong would not have been able to do so. According to the former officer, letters in Vietnamese were then written and mailed all over the world with this stamp on them “and the CIA made sure journalists would get hold of them,” which created an impression of Hanoi being highly complicit in the war effort. Life magazine’s issue published on February 26, 1965, featured a full colour blow-up of the stamp on its cover which it referred to as a “North Vietnam stamp.” This was just two days before the State Department’s white paper appeared. Reporting Liechty’s statements, the Washington Post noted: “Publication of the white paper turned out to be a key event in documenting the support of North Vietnam and other communist countries in the fighting in the South and in preparing American public opinion for what was to follow very soon: the large-scale commitment of U.S. forces to the fighting.”

Ohio Senator Stephen Young was quoted as saying that while he was in Vietnam, he was told by the CIA that the agency disguised people as Viet Cong to commit atrocities such as murder and rape in order to discredit them in the eyes of the population. Although not verified, this kind of atrocity fabrication would have been far from unusual. In the Philippines the CIA had used very similar tactics to counter the Hukabulahap (Huk) insurgency which opposed U.S. hegemonic designs in the country. U.S.-aligned government forces disguised as Huks were allowed to pillage villages and wreak havoc in order to undermine the insurgents’ public image. L. Fletcher Prouty, a retired U.S. Air Force officer, said this technique was “developed to a high art in the Philippines.” Soldiers were “set upon the unwary village in the grand manner of a Cecil B. DeMille production.” The head of the CIA clandestine paramilitary operations in the Philippines, Lieutenant Colonel Edward Lansdale, who had pioneered many clandestine operation techniques there, used many of the same methods in Vietnam.

The Gulf of Tonkin incident paved the way for one of the most brutal wars in modern history, second since 1945 only to the much shorter but more intense Korean War that preceded it. As Robert Lehrman noted in The Hill to mark 50 years since the incident regarding its direct consequences: “Three million deaths in a [total Vietnamese] population of 30 million! That’s a Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 shot down each day, seven days a week – for 30 years. Sixty Memorial walls the size of our one – not counting the 500,000 to a million victims of Agent Orange.” Unexploded mines from the war, he stressed, caused over 100,000 Vietnamese casualties, most of them civilians since the conflict ended. Aside from mines, of the 15 million tons of explosive ordinance dropped on Vietnam from the air the Pentagon estimated that around 10 percent did not explode. The U.S. bombing campaign subsequently initiated against neighbouring Laos and Cambodia to prevent supplies from reaching Vietnam saw the air force target the population indiscriminately using all assets at its disposal – described as “anything that flies on anything that moves.”

Beyond explosives, the war effort premised on a response to the Gulf of Tonkin incident saw toxic chemicals widely sprayed across Vietnamese farmland and forests. Former U.S. Army medic in Vietnam Mike Hastie, who subsequently studied the effects of their employment, commented:

The spraying of 70 million litres of [the chemical defoliant] Agent Orange on the Vietnamese people by the United States Government, is one of the worst war crimes ever committed in modern warfare. It is the war crime that is born again with every new generation. Children die from cancer, they are born without arms and legs, they are born with twisted bodies, mental illness, or no eyes, to name a few birth defects. Their parents and society have an enormous burden to try and make their lives as meaningful as possible.

Cancer, diabetes, brain cell degeneration, muscular dystrophy and mental problems among the Vietnamese population were all consequences of the lasting legacy of American chemical attacks, and were passed on by the victims to their children. According to the Vietnamese Red Cross 4.8 million Vietnamese were exposed to Agent Orange, with 3 million suffering illnesses as a result, as poisonous chemicals were found to have entered food chains and even the breast milk of Vietnamese women. American personnel accidentally exposed to Agent Orange suffered many of the same ailments – as did their families. According to scientists from the U.S. Air Force’s chemical weapons branch, the military was aware of the potential damage from dioxin contamination – and that dangers to human health were significantly greater from the cheaper mass-produced version used.

Extensive dehumanization of the local population was encouraged in the U.S. Military, the ‘Mere Gook Rule’ being the most notable example. This stipulated that mistreatment and killing of civilians was largely acceptable – they were the lives of “mere Gooks” which was a widely used derogatory term for East Asians. American soldiers were told when stationed in Vietnam: “The rule in Viet-Nam was the M.G.R – the ‘mere gook rule’: that it was no crime to kill or torture or rob or maim a Vietnamese because he was a mere gook.” Telford Taylor, a prominent American lawyer specializing in war crimes, commented on the prevailing American sentiments towards the Vietnamese which fuelled war crimes: “The trouble is no one sees the Vietnamese people. They’re not people. Therefore, it doesn’t matter what you do to them.” Serviceman Scott Camil testified regarding the psychology of personnel committing rapes and massacres against Vietnamese civilians: “It wasn’t like they were human…. They were a gook or a Commie and it was okay.” Veteran Joe Bangert similarly testified that “in regards to the women in Vietnam, first of all, you get this feeling sometimes when you’re over there that you don’t even think of their sex. This is really disgusting. You don’t even think of them as human beings, they’re ‘gooks.’ And they’re objects; they’re not human, they’re objects.” He described watching another serviceman, not a new recruit but a veteran with 20 years of service, disembowel and skin a Vietnamese woman.

The U.S. Military also encouraged personnel to gain the highest body counts possible, largely due to a lack of tangible objectives in the campaign, which led both servicemen and commanders to pass off civilian dead as enemy combatants. As the BBC reported:

Unable to deal with an enemy that dictated the time and place of combat, U.S. forces took to destroying whatever they could manage. If the Americans could kill more enemies – known as Viet Cong or VC – than the Vietnamese could replace, the thinking went, they would naturally give up the fight. To motivate troops to aim for a high body count, competitions were held between units to see who could kill the most. Rewards for the highest tally, displayed on ‘kill boards’ included days off or an extra case of beer. Their commanders meanwhile stood to win rapid promotion. Very quickly the phrase – ‘If it’s dead and Vietnamese, it’s VC’ – became a defining dictum of the war and civilian corpses were regularly tallied as slain enemies or Viet Cong. Civilians, including women and children, were killed for running from soldiers or helicopter gunships that had fired warning shots, or being in a village suspected of sheltering Viet Cong.”

The atrocities that resulted from both dehumanization and incentives to maximize kills were only worsened by the very widespread use of drugs among U.S. forces, with 28 percent of personnel in Vietnam being on hard drugs, namely heroin in 1971, and 70 percent using intoxicants by 1973. Amphetamines were among many stimulants given out ‘like candies’ by the military, and were blamed for the “unjustified violence against the civilian population.” A 1971 report by the U.S. House Select Committee revealed that from 1966 to 1969 the military had used 225 million tablets. Drugs were considered an effective means to help soldiers handle mounting pressure particularly when morale flagged after the Viet Cong’s Tet Offensive in 1968.

Personnel from the 23rd Infantry Division recalled that men raped Vietnamese women “on the average of once every third day,” while those from the 2nd Platoon said women would be raped whenever the company passed through a village. Infantryman Jamie Henry referred to rape as “SOP” – standard operating procedure. Vietnamese civilians widely recalled extremely frequent rapes by U.S. forces as well as the arbitrary rounding up of civilians for torture in areas suspected of supporting the Viet Cong. Officers and instructors widely condoned and at times promoted rape as a means of enhancing performance. As American researcher Elizabeth Anderson noted: “almost all of the men whose testimonies I have reviewed say that the leadership within their unit either directly encouraged sexual violence or passively allowed it to exist.” In part as a result “sexual violence was an indisputable part of the war, and undercurrents of gendered violence appear in almost every historical account of atrocities in Vietnam.” Some personnel reported that their commanders instructed units to kidnap women for ‘entertainment’ while on patrol, who would face hours of gang rape and then death. At times commanding officers saw that they had to outperform their subordinates in rapes to cement their positions of leadership.

Rape was considered a standard practice for U.S. personnel, many of whom recalled being told by instructors: “we could rape the women,” “spread them open” and “drive pointed sticks or bayonets into their vaginas.” As a squad leader in the 34d platoon attested: “That’s an everyday affair … you can nail just about everybody on that – at least once.” As well as recreationally, rape and threat of rape were also widely used strategically to enforce submission and obtain information from both prisoners and civilians. Elizabeth Anderson thus observed: “the unique breed of fear generated by the threat of sexual violence became a potent weapon against the civilian population and the North Vietnamese fighters thought to be hiding within it.” As one veteran testified regarding the use of rape to cow the population: “It makes a lasting impression on some guy – some ‘zip’ – that’s watching his daughter get worked over. So we have a better opportunity of keeping him in line.” Women were often raped using bottles and rifles.

Executions following rapes were highly common, with men who raped and then killed Vietnamese women widely referred to as “double veterans.” One veteran described such an incident as follows: “After we raped her, took her cherry [virginity] from her, after we shot her in the head … we literally start stomping her body. And everybody was laughing about it. It’s like seeing the lions around a just-killed zebra. You see them in these animal pictures, Wild Kingdom or something. The whole pride comes around and they start feasting on the body.” Another example was recalled by former GI John Ketwig who stated that when three young Vietnamese women were captured: “everybody circled around and they tortured these women with lit cigarettes … the one girl, they held her down and put the hose from the fire truck between her legs and turned on the water and exploded her. And the explosion of body fluids splashed across our faces.” He described it as a “revenge type of thing: hate against the Vietnamese, the ‘gooks’.”

Regarding life in the American client state, which was created and sustained by Washington largely using humanitarian pretexts, a World Health Organization study described South Vietnam as “a land of widespread malaria, bubonic plague, leprosy, tuberculosis, venereal disease and 300,000 prostitutes … one of the few places on earth where leprosy was spreading and bubonic plague was still taking lives.” The WHO reported there were half-million drug addicts, 80,000–160,000 leprosy cases and an estimated 5,000 cases of bubonic plague annually in South Vietnam alongside rampant epidemics of tuberculosis and venereal disease. North Vietnam, although its cities were far more intensely targeted by American bombings, was still far better off. This was aside from the state of terror intended to suppress dissent against Washington’s designs, a notable example being the Phoenix Program under which U.S. forces tracked and assassinated an estimated 100,000 dissidents in South Vietnam. It was common for civilian prisoners in South Vietnam to be slaughtered or tortured using fists, sticks, bats, water and electric shocks, with gang rapes of female political prisoners by U.S. personnel widely reported.

Deploying hundreds of thousands of personnel who were drugged, rapacious, incentivised to kill civilians, and taught to see the local population as sub-humans, inevitably led to disaster. The brief description above of the horrors suffered by the Vietnamese population as a result of U.S. military intervention in the county provides just a small indication of the depravity of the conflict. Other consequences ranged from emergence of a massive human trafficking industry in neighbouring Thailand to meet the sexual needs of American soldiers, to the systematic destruction of Vietnamese rural population centres under a policy of Forced Draft Urbanization leaving millions destitute and fuelling human trafficking The latter policy, as confirmed by the representative of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, was designed to force the rural population into concentrations in U.S.-controlled cities to deny the Viet Cong its support base, at tremendous cost to the southern economy and at the expense of leaving millions destitute. These events were all made possible by the fabricated narrative of an unprovoked North Vietnamese attack in the Gulf of Tonkin which, had it not been believed, could have spared millions of lives.

False Atrocity Claims After a Lost War

Although atrocity fabrication played many important roles throughout the American campaign in Vietnam, it took on a renewed importance as it became increasingly apparent that the objective of sustaining a separate South Vietnamese state was untenable and steps towards drawing down U.S. military involvement began to be taken. As the war became increasingly unpopular not only on the home front, but among troops on the ground, proponents of continued military involvement very widely propagated false atrocity stories to strengthen their cases. Attributing false atrocities to the Viet Minh provided a key basis to claim that terrible consequences were inevitable if a sufficiently hard line was not taken. A withdrawal of U.S. forces, it was claimed, would “almost certainly” be followed by “a slaughter in the South of all those who have fought against the Communists,” thus leaving Washington with a moral obligation to persist in the war effort.

A notable example was expert Patrick Honey, personal friend and adviser of President Diem, former Reuters correspondent, former Foreign Editor of the Economist, and leading commentator on Vietnamese affairs, who confidently predicted regarding possible reunification under the Viet Minh: “Calculated on the basis of past Communist deeds, and given the size of South Vietnam’s population, the minimum number of those to be butchered will exceed one million and could rise to several times that figure.”

Even after the withdrawal of U.S. forces, atrocity propaganda was used extensively as a means to bolster South Vietnamese resistance. While Southern forces had more than double the numbers and triple the firepower of the North, an unwillingness to fight and lack of popular support for the U.S. client government was widely seen to be the cause of their effective collapse. Propagating reports of impending mass slaughter by the North Vietnamese was thought to potentially help remedy this.

CIA analyst Frank Snepp observed that in the final days of the North Vietnamese advance the U. S. embassy in Saigon organized “a noisy press campaign around recent reports that the Communists were torturing and mutilating recalcitrant civilians in newly captured areas.” While this could have generated international sympathy for the South and helped vindicate prior American efforts to preserve a separate southern state, it had the unexpected effect of sparking “panic and chaos” among “the South Vietnamese population itself.” Snepp also cited in his notes:

atrocity stories … now imaginatively embroidered by Saigon radio, the local press and the Embassy. At the Ambassador’s orders, [the political counsellor] Joe Bennett is still zealously churning out his share of them, playing on thirdhand reports relayed out of Ban Me Thuot by a Buddhist monk. “They’re tearing out women’s fingernails up there and chopping up the town council,” one of Bennett’s younger staffers advised me gleefully this afternoon. “That should turn some heads in Congress.”

Regarding one series of atrocity stories from the embassy, Snepp highlighted that the ambassador and CIA chief “apparently consider the latest crop too useful to risk putting them to any test of veracity,” stressing their effectiveness in spreading terror. Although U.S. embassy and CIA atrocity stories were usually accepted without scepticism being voiced publicly, this was not absolute. The Christian Science Monitor, for one, noted that its reporter, Daniel Southerland, had cabled from Saigon that:

so far he has been unable to verify reports of executions of officials and others in occupied areas. Mr. Southerland does report cables from the U.S. embassy in Saigon to Washington reporting alleged executions, but says one monk supposed to be an eyewitness is nowhere to be found. Another alleged eyewitness in Da Nang told Mr. Southerland he had seen no such thing. The embassy’s cables have the apparent aim of persuading Congress to vote more aid, Mr. Southerland reports.

Even after Vietnam’s reunification on April 30, 1975, atrocity propaganda played a key role in both justifying continued U.S. economic warfare efforts against the country and in retrospectively justifying the American war effort. With a very small fraction of the atrocities U.S. forces had committed in Vietnam gaining publicity internationally, which alone was damaging enough to their reputation, depicting the Viet Minh as more depraved still if not genocidal provided a means of presenting the Americans as having still been the lesser evil in the war.

American scholars Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, who wrote extensively on U.S. relations with post-war Vietnam, observed that a key goal which the U.S. sought to attain largely through atrocity fabrication was “to reconstruct recent history so as to present their past role in a better light … to teach the lesson that exit from the Free World in the interest of national autonomy is the worst fate that a subject people can endure, and to provide a post hoc justification for U.S. intervention by showing the awful consequences of its defeat.” They referred to an “extensive effort to dispel what the Wall Street Journal calls the ‘simple-minded myth’ that Indochina’s suffering is somehow related to U.S. actions over the past thirty years,” which would be achieved by claiming that Vietnam under the Viet Minh was worse off than it would have been as a U.S. client state.

Aside from atrocity fabrication, another means by which this was pursued was misrepresenting the poor conditions in Vietnam, which were caused primarily by the devastating American air campaign and subsequent post-war sanctions, as instead being a result of the Viet Minh’s governance. Chomsky and Herman observed that “death and suffering from malnutrition and disease in societies brought to ruin by U.S. intervention are displayed as proof of the evil nature of Communism.”

The two scholars emphasized following their study of Western coverage of Vietnam, and Indochina more broadly, that it was “remarkable to see how susceptible intellectuals have been, over the years, to the machinations of the atrocity fabrication industry.” They highlighted regarding one notable technique used to vilify Vietnam and other adversaries:

As intelligence services have become more sophisticated – or at least, better funded – they have learned to play upon the willingness of the more thoughtful members of the community to believe the worst about official enemies of the state to which they are devoted. One technique is to arrange for ‘scholarly studies,’ such as the book by [prominent defector] Hoang Van Chi which had such remarkable success in establishing the mythology concerning the bloodbaths during the North Vietnamese land reform.

A favourite source cited in the American press to claim mass abuses after April 1975 was Andre Gelinas, a Canadian Jesuit who, among other often similarly absurd claims, reported that “15,000 to 20,000 Vietnamese have committed suicide rather than live under Communism.” The Jesuit dispelled criticisms from Western and other foreign eyewitnesses by dismissing them as parrots for Vietnamese government narratives, although in his congressional testimony in June 1977 he notably did not repeat the story of mass suicides. Gelinas told the Montreal Star: “People in South Vietnam today are praying for war … the way people in France were praying for it in 1942. They want to be invaded.” His refusal to name sources and inability to name key locations in his narrative sparked widespread scepticism, particularly among those who interviewed and discussed the allegations with Gelinas. Richard Hughes, head of the Shoeshine Boy Foundation which sheltered homeless children in Vietnam, concluded after a “probing, three-hour conversation with Father Gelinas” that his charges illustrated how “second-hand information fed rumour, and bitterness bias,” and stressed how harmful they had been to post-war recovery of ties. The dissemination of Gelinas’s charges by major media outlets, which took them very much at face value, were seen to have influenced several congressmen towards supporting a harder line. His allegations and those of defecting South Vietnamese allowed Western sources to claim that events in Vietnam had vindicated President Johnson’s predictions of mass suffering should the U.S. not intervene, and thus justified the American war effort, and ruined the credibility of those who had opposed it.

Gelinas offered no evidence for his charges, which were very widely contradicted by more credible sources on the ground that did much more to substantiate their own claims. Earl Martin, a Mennonite social worker who had done relief work in South Vietnam’s concentration camps and spent considerable time in the country after unification, was thus among many to conclude that “Andre Gelinas has seriously eroded any basis he might have had for serving as a credible witness.” Chomsky and Herman observed regarding the American press’ widespread propagation of Gelinas’ claims despite their highly tenuous nature: “nevertheless, it is Gelinas’s story that has remained ‘the truth’ for the Free Press … since Gelinas’ account is very critical of an official enemy, its truthfulness is irrelevant and no further analysis is required.” They further observed regarding his popularity in the Western press: “Imagine a man of the cloth who was able to live for 13 years in Vietnam through the worst barbarism of the U.S. war, never raising a peep of protest so far as is known, then inventing mass suicides and North Vietnamese coups to order for an admiring international audience.” The scholars highlighted that U.S. media outlets widely publicised the Jesuit’s reports to imply that the American war effort was entirely justified and delegitimise those who had opposed it.

Another notable source used was the French correspondent R. P. Paringaux from Le Monde, who wrote of severe repression and a very high portion of the population forced into concentration camps. His claims were widely propagated on American radio, television and in the written press, although like those of Gelinas they had little supporting evidence and were strongly contradicted by the large majority of foreign observers in Vietnam. John Fraser from the Toronto Globe and Mail, for example, who spent four weeks travelling through the country, concluded that the French journalist’s reports were vastly exaggerated. Although highly critical of the Vietnamese government, Fraser had been specifically interested in verifying the observations and conclusions of the French journalist and explained why through his extensive experience, including many discussions with Vietnamese critical of the government, Paringaux’s narrative appeared far removed from reality. Paringaux notably frequently cited a figure of 800,000 prisoners, which had been repeatedly stated by defectors from former South Vietnam residing in the West, although this number was reached by counting 750,000 city residents who returned to the countryside after the war as prisoners to falsely give the impression of mass repression.

Western portrayals of mass repression in post-war Vietnam were consistently strongly contradicted by the large majority of foreign observers on the ground. Indeed, while Western outlets such as the New York Times consistently widely claimed that Vietnam was totally off limits to Americans after the war, this was very far from true. It nevertheless provided valuable pretext for focusing on reports from defectors and activists rather than on anyone actually in the country. The Times had itself requested a report on a trip to Vietnam from the distinguished U.S. historian Gabriel Kolko, but refused to permit its printing as his findings strongly contradicted the prevailing Western narrative.

A Swedish delegation led by parliamentarians, which met with leading non-Communist opposition figures who strongly denied charges of widespread humanitarian abuses by the post-unification government, concluded that Washington had a “need to invent all kinds of stories to destroy trust.” An Italian missionary priest who had spent 15 months in post-unification Vietnam, where he lived in a small village in the suburbs of Saigon with other Christians, was highly critical of how increasingly extreme testimonies of defectors were propagated in the Western media to provide an impression of the country that was far out of touch with reality. He thus stressed that it was “terribly dishonest to make these refugees say, in the countries that have received them, those things that the welcoming countries strongly wish to hear.”

Another notable example was Wallace Collett, a businessman who headed a Quaker mission to Vietnam and specifically investigated Western allegations of repression. His delegation met well-known non-Communist political figures in the South who denied such reports, and concluded that the allegations were untrue. Ly Chanh Trung, who had been a leading spokesman for the non-Communist opposition, was among those to deny outright Western claims of humanitarian abuses, stating: “If a violation of human rights occurs, we ourselves will raise our voices. We will not wait for our friends from abroad to raise theirs.” He dismissed Western claims that re-education camps “have the purpose of revenging or killing [U.S. collaborators] gradually.” This was in reference to the widespread misportrayals of these facilities which was central to forming a narrative of mass repression. Regarding conditions in such camps Max Ediger of the Mennonite Central Committee reported he “met several old friends who, because they were officers in the old [South Vietnamese] army, spent nine months in re-education camps. They made no mention of torture and mistreatment” but “rather talked about learning how to work with their hands” and said that they had learned “about the new economic and social system they were living under. One young doctor, after completing his reeducation course, was made director of a drug rehabilitation centre near Saigon.” In Western coverage, however, the camps would continue to be likened to milder successors to Auschwitz or Birkenau where, much like the camps American POWs had been held in in Korea, two decades prior, all kinds of atrocities were imagined to portray them as something entirely different to what they were.

Chapter Two The Korean War

Massacres in Korea: Blaming Allied Atrocities on the Enemy

Waged for three years from June 1950, the Korean War in many respects remains the most consequential military confrontation since 1945, and pitted a U.S.-led United Nations coalition made up almost entirely of Western and South Korean forces against the East Asian Communist states of China and North Korea. The war left both a long legacy, which remains at the centre of tensions on the Korean Peninsula today, as well as several controversies ranging from whether the conduct of coalition forces towards Korean civilians was a genocide, to which parties bore what share of responsibility for its outbreak. Although atrocity fabrication was not a significant factor in starting the war, it profoundly shaped both the course of the conflict in its final 18 months as well as public perceptions of China and North Korea in much of the world.

Five years before the outbreak of the Korean War the United States had from September 1945 placed the southern half of the Korean Peninsula under American military rule, and in the process forcibly dismantled the fledgling local government the People’s Republic of Korea. The U.S.-installed replacement was headed by Syngman Rhee, who was personally selected by the Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Military’s Far East Command, General Douglas MacArthur, and flown in from Washington where he had resided for two decades. Having been impeached by the prior Provisional Government of Korea for misuse of power, Rhee had little standing in the country itself although his vision for its future closely aligned with Western interests.

Rhee’s security apparatus responded to considerable public opposition with a campaign of massacres across southern Korea, with American historian Bruce Cumings describing the conduct of its paramilitary youth groups in population centres suspected of improper loyalties as follows: “In Hagui village, for example, right-wing youths captured a pregnant twenty-one-year-old woman named Mun, whose husband was allegedly an insurgent, dragged her from her home, and stabbed her thirteen times with spears, causing her to abort. She was left to die with her baby half-delivered. Other women were serially raped, often in front of villagers, and then blown up with a grenade in the vagina.” Donald Nichols, a commander in the American Counter Intelligence Corps, was among those in the corps to describe its close work alongside these paramilitaries and the atrocities they committed in gruesome detail, noting that there were some he would “never be able to erase” from his memory due to their severity.

By 1950 two percent of South Korea’s population had been killed in such campaigns at a conservative estimate, with official investigations years later placing the death toll in the first five years between 600,000 and 1.2 million. Those suspected of improper loyalties and their families were targeted indiscriminately, with particularly brutal methods reserved for suspected sympathisers of the Korean Workers’ Party that ruled northern Korea. Rhee had made his intentions very clear should he see through plans to place the north under his rule, stating: “I can handle the Communists. The Reds can bury their guns and burn their uniforms, but we know how to find them. With bulldozers we will dig huge excavations and trenches, and fill them with Communists. Then cover them over. And they will be really underground.” This was far from empty rhetoric, with his forces burying politically suspect segments of the population, including children, in the tens of thousands in mass graves across southern Korea exactly as he described. These killings escalated immediately after the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950. As an indication of their scale, Reuters quoted the chief of National South Korean police Kim Tai Sun stating shortly after the war began: “Twelve hundred Communists and suspected Communists have been executed by South Korean police since the outbreak of the hostilities.”.

The mass graves created by Rhee’s forces for the politically suspect and their families across the country were widely reported on by both government and American sources, with U.S. Army Private Donald Lloyd recalling of one such incident witnessed by the 3rd Engineers Company: “We heard the machine-gun fire and saw them [South Korean personnel] burying them in this big pit. There were women in that pit holding babies. I’d say one hundred people.” In his book, Colonel Donald Nichols recalled observing the systematic slaughter of political prisoners near Suwon in the first week of July 1950 by similar means, writing: “I stood by helplessly, witnessing the entire affair. Two big bulldozers worked constantly. One made the ditch-type grave. Trucks loaded with the condemned arrived. Their hands were already tied behind them. They were hastily pushed into a big line along the edge of the newly opened grave. They were quickly shot in the head and pushed into the grave.”

The scenes of mass killings on a tremendous scale and of women holding babies in mass graves were terrible – but also an excellent opportunity for propagandists intent on delegitimising and vilifying the North Korean government. The massacres were thus intentionally falsely attributed to North Korean forces, with American observers collecting and publicising extensive footage of the remains but mislabelling it as evidence of enemy war crimes. Prominent American actor Humphrey Bogart narrated the Pentagon-sponsored film The Crime of Korea which falsely presented sites of the U.S.-installed Southern government’s atrocities as the results of North Korean killings. Widely circulated in U.S. media, it lent considerable moral imperative to the war effort in the public eye. If the North Koreans were slaughtering women and babies and dumping them in their thousands in mass graves, it was difficult to criticise military intervention to liberate the Korean people. Use of different forms of media ensured that the message circulated as widely as possible, and there was even a comic book titled ‘Atrocity Story’ which highlighted the terror of the mass graves across South Korea and falsely attributed them to northern forces. After a long list of misattributed war crimes, the comic asked the reader to imagine if these were happening in Nevada, Atlantic City, New Jersey, or Inglewood, California – at once both fuelling empathy with the victims and implying a possible North Korean or other communist threat to America. It went on to describe, for comparison, the crimes of Nazi Germany, portraying the North Koreans as the ‘new Nazis’ and their conduct as from “the dark ages of barbarism and savagery.”

Time magazine published a column titled ‘Barbarity’ describing the Taejon Massacre of 5000 to 7500 prisoners, with the victims referred to as “anti-Communists – soldiers, officials, business and professional men.” The U.S. Army report described it as follows “for murderous barbarism, the Taejon massacre will be recorded in the annals of history along with the rape of Nanking, the Warsaw Ghetto and other similar mass exterminations…. Those responsible … must be brought to judgement before the tribunal of civilised peoples.” South Korean government investigations decades later proved without doubt that Rhee government forces were the perpetrators, and that the victims of their killings among the country’s civilian population numbered in the hundreds of thousands in the weeks following the outbreak of the war. It was the perpetrator of these massacres which the U.S. was fighting not only to preserve in power, but also to impose on the people of North Korea as well which would guarantee further similar atrocities. Such slaughter was widely seen from October 1950 when much of North Korea was briefly placed under the Rhee government’s rule following U.S.-led offensives.

The American war effort, launched in the name of liberating South Koreans and later North Koreans as well, and increasingly reliant on fabricated atrocities for justification, would itself pave the way to actual atrocities by coalition forces against both populations. Orders were given for U.S. personnel across the country to massacre South Korean civilians, which was confirmed by the accounts of war correspondents, Korean survivors, American perpetrators and years later by Pentagon archives.

Professor Kim Dong Choon a leading member of the South Korean government’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee, a government body established in 1993 to investigate historical incidents, reported in 2004 that widespread atrocities committed by American personnel were a result of their “deep racial prejudices” towards the Korean people. Taking the massacre of the population of the village of No Gun Ri as an example he stated:

With total ignorance of Asia, young soldiers regarded Koreans and Chinese as ‘people without history.’ They usually called Koreans ‘gooks,’ a term used during World War II for Pacific Islanders. The fact that many Korean women in the villages were often raped in front of their husbands and parents has not been a secret among those who experienced the Korean War. It was known that several women were raped before being shot at No Gun Ri. Some eyewitnesses say that U.S. soldiers played with their lives like boys sadistically playing with flies.

Gil Insham from the U.S. Army 7th Infantry Division recalled his sergeant organised patrols into villages for the sole purpose of raping Korean women, and once watched him pistol-whip a village elder for not leading him to young women and then rape the old man’s wife in front of him. He recalled GIs tortured North Koreans in their power, poking the exposed brains of the wounded and laughing or tying them to trees and pulling them apart. “I don’t know why some of our people did things like that. Maybe they were just like that inside, sadistic,” he recalled. South Korean soldiers returned home to stories of their sisters and other family members being targeted for rapes by Western personnel, while Chinese soldiers recalled finding pictures of naked Korean rape victims in the helmets of dead American soldiers alongside pictures from home.

New York Times reporter George Barrett was among those to highlight the stark contrast between the Korean population’s perception of Chinese forces compared to those of Western nations as a result of their vast discrepancy in their conduct. He wrote that widespread rapes committed by U.S. and Canadian forces “have created a deep animosity among large sections of the Korean populace.” The Koreans stressed that Western soldiers committed crimes against civilians, including rapes and killings, with impunity and without reprimand by their superiors. By contrast, Barrett noted, the Chinese military “have impressed many Koreans with the discipline of their troops. Many residents of Seoul seem to go out of their way to tell about the good Chinese behaviour, and especially about executions of two rapists the Chinese are said to have held.”

The extent of American war crimes against the populations of both Koreas, which were carried out on a tremendous scale in a war fought under the pretext of liberating the peninsula, would require several volumes to fully elaborate (see: Abrams, A. B., Immovable Object: North Korea’s 70 Years At War with American Power, Atlanta, Clarity Press, 2020.) On the basis of these crimes international observers present at the time, and several scholars from both South Korea and the West have since concluded that U.S. conduct towards Koreans both north and south was consistent with the definition of genocide based on the Genocide Convention of 1948. While American and allied atrocities would not become widely known for some decades, however, misattributing South Korean mass graves to North Korean forces provided an effective means of disguising a campaign to impose the rule of the perpetrators of such acts as a just war to protect civilians from mass slaughter.

Fabricating a Massacre of American Prisoners

The escalation of years of frequent hostilities into full scale war between the two Koreas in June 1950 was capitalised on by the United States to reverse highly unfavourable Cold War power trajectories, with the conflict reviving the struggling American economy and winning much of the world over to the view that a harder line against Communist states was needed. Furthermore, in the eyes of some hardliners, the war provided an opening to expand hostilities to include China or even the Soviet Union, while placing tremendous strain on the Chinese economy supplementing ongoing American offensives on its other borders (see Chapter 3). By contrast for the economies of China and North Korea the war imposed unsustainable costs. American advances after three months of fighting North Korean forces led its soldiers to approach China’s borders in late September 1950, just one year after China’s own long civil war had ended, to which Beijing responded after multiple unheeded warnings with a full-scale military intervention. The Chinese Civil War had itself had been immediately preceded by an eight-year war with Japan, and before that by decades of internal conflict between warring factions, leaving China’s ruined economy and negligible industry in a poor position in 1950 to support conflict with a coalition of major industrial powers.

America’s position in the Cold War benefitted considerably not only from fully scale miliary intervention in what was essentially an escalation of a Korean civil war, but also from prolonging the conflict when opportunities emerged to end it. From October 1950, after multiple major military victories, Beijing and Pyongyang pushed hard for ceasefire talks and an end to hostilities, with these efforts threatening to win over much of the United Nations as most member states had much less to lose than Washington should the fighting end. Thus just as talks were getting underway the U.S. on November 8 relaxed bombing restrictions and firebombed the city of Sinuiju on the Sino-Korean border with 85,000 incendiaries, which was immediately followed by an escalation of the bombing to target “every means of communication, every installation, factory, city and village” across North Korea. Ordered by the coalition’s Supreme Commander General MacArthur, who was a strong proponent of expanding the war to Chinese soil and overthrowing the government there, the escalated bombings were widely interpreted as an effort to ensure the conflict continued. The forthcoming Japanese peace conference in August 1951, during which the Korean War would serve as a vital pretext for maintaining the U.S. military presence in the country after direct American military rule ended, added further impetus to the need to sustain hostilities.

As the conflict dragged on through 1951, the forthcoming session of the UN General Assembly in October was seen as a forum where world opinion could be turned against continuation of the war should the Chinese and North Koreans offer reasonable terms for concluding it. On October 4, speaking to a luncheon of the UN Correspondents Association in New York, the United States deputy representative on the UN Security Council Ernest A. Gross warned that a ceasefire in Korea would facilitate a “phony” peace offensive by the Soviet Union. The goal of Moscow’s supposedly malign peace plans would be to weaken “the sense of urgency that has developed in the free world as a result of Soviet actions.” This was based on the presumption that the Korean War was a Soviet conspiracy, despite U.S. military sources consistently concluding that North Koreans were not receiving Soviet material support. Such statements warning against sinister intentions behind every peace proposal, and by implication advocating the war’s continuation, were hardly unprecedented. Shortly before the war’s outbreak John Foster Dulles, author of the influential American containment policy analysis War and Peace and soon to be Secretary of State, dismissed what he termed Soviet “Peace Offensives” as “deceptive Cold War strategy” which seriously threatened the West. “As things are going now …we must develop better techniques…. They [the USSR] can win everything by the cold war they could win by a hot war,” Dulles warned, with the Soviet, Chinese and North Korean positions relative to the United States suffering from the war’s outbreak and continuation.

Before June 1950 global power trajectories including prestige and influence in the third world, economic growth and military modernisation, all favoured the USSR, with America’s formerly overwhelming advantages fast declining. As Secretary of State Dean Acheson noted regarding this in 1953, the Korean War “came along and saved us.” By mobilising the West for war the conflict had turned the tables, and there remained a strong incentive in 1951 to ensure that the fighting could be extended.

Representative Ernest A. Gross revealed in October 1951 that rather than ending the war Washington was considering expanding it, informing correspondents: “if the Korean talks fail … the Assembly would have to consider additional measures to employ against the foe there.” By the end of 1951, having previously penetrated deep into South Korea, Chinese and North Korean forces had been driven northward leaving battle lines little above the prewar inter-Korean dividing line the 38th parallel. It was expected that Beijing and Pyongyang would require a return to the parallel – status quo ante bellum – as a condition for armistice, which would provide the U.S. with an optimal opportunity to refuse. On this basis the U.S. Military’s Tokyo Headquarters, which oversaw the coalition war effort, was described at the time as “cheerfully pessimistic.” As it informed the New York Times on October 20 regarding the possibility of renewed peace talks: “Even if … full-dress sessions again began, few believed that an armistice would come much nearer.” Three days later the Times’ esteemed military editor Hanson Baldwin stressed that unless U.S.-led coalition forces were “willing to pull back to the 38th Parallel all along the front … there is not likely to be a cease-fire.”

It thus came as a shock to many in the U.S. when on October 26, the second day of truce talks, the Chinese and North Koreans expressed willingness to cease hostilities based on the current battle lines – a major concession that would make it far more difficult for hardliners in Washington and the military to provide a further pretext for continuing the war. As award winning journalist I. F. Stone observed, from the perspective of a U.S. leadership which sought to sustain hostilities:

Now the Reds were ready to yield on the 38th Parallel. It looked as if it would be difficult to keep peace from breaking out. By November 4 the Communists had ‘finally yielded to UN insistence that the armistice line should be generally based on the line of battle contact,’ had agreed on a neutral buffer strip one and a quarter miles wide, and were ‘largely in agreement’ on the location of the line itself. The situation looked desperate, but a stumbling block happily turned up.

U.S. negotiators responded by pushing for further concessions, namely by insisting on neither the status quo ante bellum nor on a ceasefire based on the current battle lines which advantaged Western forces. They instead required the Chinese and North Koreans to give up their territory south of the 38th parallel, namely the city of Kaesong, while the U.S.-led coalition would give up nothing. These highly unusual terms succeeded in preventing what appeared to have been an imminent breakthrough in the peace process and were widely interpreted as a move to prevent a swift end to hostilities. The New York Times reported on November 11 regarding this development: “In Washington – especially in diplomatic quarters – there was some mystification why Kaesong had taken on such importance when both sides had agreed on the principle that the battlefront should be the basis for the armistice line. It was pointed out that the battered town lay in a plain dominated by hills and hence had little military value.” According to the Times there was “a belief that after the Communists had made the big concession on the line,” and that the U.S. was “sticking at straws.” British press indicated that such conduct gave Beijing and Pyongyang grounds “to claim that the Allies [U.S.-led coalition] did not really want a truce.”

Rumours spread among American personnel in the field that their leaders were avoiding a peace settlement despite major enemy concessions, with the New York Times highlighting: “in many places along the Korean front the muttering guns fell silent. Ground fighting was almost at a standstill though air battles went on. The foxhole-to-foxhole grapevine on the UN lines was active with rumours. The GIs had hopes that an end to this fighting might not be far off – hopes which had been raised before and dashed before.” On November 11 China’s Radio Peking broadcast the statement that “if the Americans give up their demand for Kaesong a settlement can be reached in a matter of hours.”

The Chinese proposal for an immediate ceasefire was particularly concerning for those favouring continued hostilities. General James Van Fleet, Commander of the U.S. Eighth Army, addressed the troops to clarify that the war would be “business as usual” until “the Communist aggressors terminate their violation of human liberty.” Considering Western interpretations of how their East Asian adversaries “violated human liberty,” this purposefully vague objective meant that the war could continue indefinitely as long as the Chinese and North Korean states existed. A November 14 report from Tokyo Headquarters slammed the East Asian states’ calls for an immediate ceasefire, emphasising that “The Reds openly repudiated their long-standing agreement that hostilities would go on until a full armistice was signed.” As I. F. Stone noted ironically regarding such criticisms, “the blackguards were trying to bring the war to an end” – they were being vilified for attempting to end hostilities sooner.

American personnel on the frontlines appeared far from supportive of the positions taken by the military leadership. A New York Times dispatch on the central front in Korea published on November 12 emphasised that the same question was being raised by men across the front: “why don’t we have a cease-fire now?” Regarding “the troops who have to fight the war … the unadorned way that an apparently increasing number of them see the situation right now is that the Communists have made important concessions, while the United Nations Command, as they view it, continues to make more and more demands.” The Times’ frontline correspondent George Barrett emphasised: “the United Nations truce team has created the impression that it switches its stand whenever the Communists indicate they might go along with it,” while recent developments “have convinced some troops that their own commanders, for reasons unknown to the troops, are throwing up blocks against an agreement.”

I. F. Stone described the U.S. Military’s response to the issue at hand, facing decline in both faith in the leadership and in soldiers’ will to fight when peace was clearly being offered, as “atrocities to the rescue.” He observed:

Something had to be done and done quickly. Something was…. On November 14 in Pusan, Colonel James M. Hanley, Judge Advocate General of the Eighth Army, called in the local Korean ‘stringers’ who covered that out-of-the-way place for the big news agencies and gave out one of the biggest sensations of the war. ‘U.S. REVEALS REDS KILLED 5500 G.I. CAPTIVES IN KOREA,’ said the headlines next day. And on November 16, when the estimate was raised to 6270, the Associated Press sent out a gory compilation, ‘REDS BUTCHERED MORE AMERICANS THAN FELL IN ’76.’ … Troop dissatisfaction over the delay in the truce talks was to be countered with an injection of hate. The alleged atrocities also were used to explain the delay in arranging a cease-fire.

The explanations which followed this perfectly timed news of atrocities against American prisoners gave a strong indication of its purpose. The Associated Press reported that on November 16 Colonel James M. Hanley, the Judge Advocate General of the Eighth Army responsible for compiling and investigating all war crimes, said he “divulged the Reds’ ‘wanton murder’ of American prisoners because he thought American soldiers at the front ought to know what they are up against.” From the following day the Armed Forces Radio “broadcast the atrocity story … and repeated it at intervals.” It further reported: “A highly placed Allied officer said today the announcement that the Communists in Korea have murdered thousands of American prisoners has stripped the mystery from what has been holding up Korean armistice talks.” The officer stated: “The Communists don’t want to have to answer questions about what happened to their prisoners.” For the significant benefit this narrative provided, Supreme Commander General Matthew Ridgway likened the sudden report of atrocities and the way it quickly changed prevailing attitudes to a divine intervention, stating on November 17:

It may perhaps be well to note with deep reverence, that in his inscrutable way God chose to bring home to our people and to the conscience of the world the moral principles of the leaders of the forces against which we fight in Korea…. It may well be that in no other way could all lingering doubts be dispelled from the minds of our people as to the methods which the leaders of communism are willing to use, and actually do use, in their efforts to destroy free peoples and the principles for which they stand.

Reports that the Chinese and North Koreans had slaughtered prisoners in their custody built on multiple fabricated atrocities since the war began that characterised the adversary in a way that made such slaughter appear more believable, with the aforementioned misattribution of mass graves to North Korean massacres being but one example. British reports, however, indicated that Colonel Hanley’s claim of a mass slaughter of prisoners “seemed evidence of bungling propaganda or a deliberate effort to sabotage the negotiations.” The New York Times correspondent in London added that “a suspicion exists that the United States, for some inexplicable reason, wants to prolong the fighting.” New York Times diplomatic correspondent James Reston reported from Washington on November 15 that the circumstances appeared highly peculiar, stating:

Several days ago it appeared that a compromise finally had been arranged on the cease-fire line, at which time Secretary of State Dean Acheson, speaking in the United Nations meetings in Paris, attacked the Chinese Communists for conduct below the level of ‘barbarians.’ When this attack was followed during the critical moment of the armistice negotiations by the publication of Colonel Hanley’s atrocities report, even officials here conceded that it might look to the world as if the United States was purposely trying to avoid a cease-fire in Korea.

Successful atrocity fabrication quickly realigned popular opinion behind efforts to continue the war and punish the Chinese and North Koreans for what was portrayed as a wanton disregard for humanitarian norms. This allowed the U.S. to continue to stall negotiations while raising the possibility of escalation to a full-scale war with China. Atrocity fabrication was thus essential to more than doubling the war’s duration, extending it by 20 months, which exerted a far greater toll on the East Asian adversaries than it did on the Western powers since the former side had from the outset been in a much weaker position to sustain a war effort.

U.S. media outlets and politicians only further exaggerated claims of atrocities, with the chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Korean War Atrocities later stressing that the East Asian adversaries were guilty of “beast-like acts committed against civilised humanity.” As an example of the kinds of misconduct seen, he claimed: “a Red Chinese nurse cuts off the toes of a GI with a pair of garden shears, without benefit of anaesthesia, and wraps the wounds in a newspaper.” Other alleged atrocities included GIs “lined up in a ditch and shot in cold blood, with their hands wired behind their backs,” and others “put into small iron cages and starved to death like animals, with maggots coming out of their eye sockets.”

Claims of enemy brutalisation or massacre of Western prisoners were highly inconsistent not only with the testimonies of the prisoners themselves, which emerged once they were released, but also with one another. On November 14 Colonel Hanley claimed 5500 American and 290 other coalition prisoners of war had been slaughtered in their camps by the Chinese and North Koreans. Two days later he announced that the figures for prisoners killed actually stood at 6270 Americans, 7000 South Koreans, and 130 other coalition personnel – a total of 13,400. Ridgway’s formal statement the following day on November 17 confirmed Hanley’s claims but did not provide figures. Three days later on November 20 Ridgway said it was “possible” that 6000 American soldiers listed as missing in action may have been killed as prisoners, but that there was proof of only 365 such murders. He gave no indication of the status of prisoners from other coalition members.

Two days later on November 22 documents sent by air courier to the UN New York headquarters contained the text of Ridgway’s fortnightly report dated November 12 which covered the two weeks from August 16–31. The report alleged that 8000 American prisoners of war had been killed. Thus the claims for numbers of American prisoners killed included: Ridgway (November 12) 8000, Hanley (November 14) 5500, Hanley (November 16) 6270, and Ridgway (November 20) “possibly” 6000, “definitely known” 365. Addressing these discrepancies on November 29, Ridgway said the figures were subject to “constant re-evaluation,” but the 6000 figure “was the most up-to-date” and included all coalition personnel except for South Koreans. The 8000 figure, he said, was an earlier estimate. Thus between November 20 and November 29, Ridgway had amended his estimate from a “possible” 6000 American prisoners killed, to the 6000 figure including other coalition forces. Furthermore, on November 20 Ridgway did not cover up or account for his own 8000 figure of November 12 by saying that it was “possible” that 8000 were killed.

Regarding what he referred to as these “weird statistics” I. F. Stone observed:

It does not help prisoners in the hands of the enemy to make charges of mistreatment if these charges are false, nor does it help their families…. To excuse oneself later by saying that atrocity reports were subject to ‘constant re-evaluation’ and that the 6000 was the more ‘up-to-date’ figure was to admit that these reports and estimates were so unreliable that in one week this process of ‘constant re-evaluation’ cut Ridgway’s estimates by 25 percent, while Hanley’s figures rose by 14 percent. This is sheer statistical slapstick, understandable enough if the purpose was merely to stir up hate and upset peace talks, utterly inexcusable if intended as a serious accounting on the murder of American men by the enemy.

Stone noted that Hanley’s accounts sounded much more like “wartime rumour picked up from the local population which [Ridgway’s predecessor] MacArthur himself did not think reliable enough to include in any of his reports.” He highlighted a sharp contrast in the reports on treatment of prisoners before the need arose to fabricate atrocities, and afterwards. Editors across the American press nevertheless took the story of prisoners being massacred at face value, with headlines ranging from that of the editorial of the New York Herald Tribune which referred to “The Communist Brutes,” to that of the New York Times which referred to the enemy as having “butchered prisoners in cold blood.” The New York Post, while critical of Hanley, stressed: “Let no one minimise the gravity of Hanley’s charges. The Communists are ruthless enemies whose disregard for human life is notorious.” An exception was the Washington Times-Herald, which inserted an editor’s note in the middle of a Tokyo dispatch on the front page on November 17 citing a “top Pentagon authority” who “said flatly Army headquarters has no conclusive evidence of atrocities or other barbaric acts committed by Chinese Reds in the Korean War.”

Claims that Americans had been slaughtered or tortured in Chinese and Korean prison camps were ultimately disproven once prisoners started to be released in significant numbers. Coalition prisoners had a harsh experience in the war’s initial months as battle lines were constantly changing, supply lines were strained or non-existent and no prison camps could be established. Prisoners could only be kept with troops at the moving frontlines and food was scarce for both captives and soldiers, resulting in an estimated 90 percent of U.S. prisoner deaths occurring in the first year of the war. Many died alongside their captors in bombing raids and, as noted by British military historian Max Hastings, “the plight of the prisoners was often no worse than that of the northern soldiers and people.” An order by North Korea’s advanced headquarters strictly forbade “the unnecessary killing of enemy personnel when they could be taken prisoners of war…. Those who surrender will be taken as prisoners of war.” Prisoners were nevertheless often assailed by the local population or shot by men on the frontlines who could not afford the burden of taking them along in this semi-guerrilla stage of the war. The nature of the war changed considerably after the entry of Chinese forces in October 1950, with fighting soon localised around the 38th parallel and secure prison camps quickly established behind the frontlines. Conditions for American and coalition prisoners quickly improved, and their camps were opened to the press including Western reporters. By the time allegations of mass slaughter were made in the U.S. the harsh conditions of the war’s early stages had long since passed.

Reports of “communist atrocities” against prisoners strongly contradicted the press’ findings and the pictures of decently fed smiling prisoners who were allowed exercise – prisoners who had allegedly seen many of their number slaughtered. Britain’s former chief of defence staff, Field Marshal Lord Richard Carver, observed regarding conditions in camps: “The UN prisoners in Chinese hands, though subject to ‘re-education processes’ … were better off in every way than any held by the Americans.” Re-education involved lessons on the ‘evils of capitalism’ and the history of Western imperialism. Evidence of Chinese and Korean forces slaughtering prisoners at this time was non-existent, and reports from prisoners who returned painted a very different picture to the claims from the military regarding their treatment. American prisoners reported Chinese guards inviting them to their quarters “for drinking and talking” and playing music with them in joint “jam sessions.” One American prisoner of war, Shelton Foss, recalled regarding his treatment that he, alongside his North Korean captors, “played chess, sang American songs … and talked generally about the U.S. and Korea.”

As one U.S. prisoner recounted upon being freed, conditions in Chinese camps were as follows:

Prisoners rose at 7 a.m. and either took a short walk or performed light calisthenics. They washed their faces and hands, and at 8 a.m. representatives from each squad drew the appropriate number of rations from the kitchen. Food was cooked by the Chinese and the diet was essentially the same as that provided the Communist soldiers consisting of singular items such as sorghum seed, bean curd, soya bean flour, or cracked corn and on certain special occasions such as Christmas or Lunar New Year, the prisoners received small portions of rice, boiled fatty pork, candy and peanuts.

Others recalled being given access to an English language library of “more than a thousand books,” with those less literate Americans being given tuition to improve their literacy skills.

American prisoner Howard Adams reported not only the far better treatment of prisoners in Chinese and Korean custody relative to those held by Western forces, but also of the mishandling of peace talks and extensive coercion of Chinese and Korean prisoners by U.S. forces. He recalled in an interview: “the [American] prisoners’ hopes soared when the peace talks began. We thought we’d be free soon. The Chinese thought so too at one point and gave us a feast, but the talks dragged on and on as the U.S. side made ridiculous demands regarding prisoners and other issues.”

The Associated Press reported on April 12, 1953, as U.S. prisoners were first being released, that “American soldiers returning from communist prison camps told a story today of generally good treatment.” One former prisoner, Kenyon Wagner, had much praise for his medical treatment, saying he had been given “the whole works.” Another, Corporal Theodore Jackson, similarly praised the quality of the medical treatment he and his fellow prisoners had received. “To my idea” he said, “they did fair, about the best they could do with the medicines they had.” Former British prisoner Arthur Hunt said that there was a daily sick call and prisoners’ health was well taken care of, with inoculations given against various diseases. Albert Hawkins, another former British prisoner, said that he had reported his feet were feeling slightly numb and was carefully attended to and fed vitamin pills as a result. Former prisoner Private William R. Brock Jr. stated that conditions in prison camps were agreeable and he had never seen a prisoner ill-treated. He said that there was no barbed wire around the camps and that each man was issued with a quilt and blanket and their houses had floor heating. Upon examination when returning home, the U.S. Military was surprised by the excellent physical health and low number of fatalities among the prisoners – although it was concerned by what was termed the “Oriental brainwashing” of the servicemen. Statements from American prisoners indicated that interrogation rooms in Chinese and Korean camps were devoid of torture.

Marines interviewed by the Saturday Evening Post recalled that in six months of captivity the Chinese “never struck, beat, or in any way physically maltreated a prisoner,” and even protected them from mobs of North Korean civilians who tried to strike them while they were being marched to their camp. At camp they were told to regard themselves as “newly liberated friends.” The worst that happened to them was the obligation to sit through interminable Communist speeches and propaganda indoctrination sessions – hardly the kind of prison camp where one could expect thousands to be executed.

The return of significant numbers of American servicemen who made public statements contradicting prevailing portrayals of the Korean and Chinese adversaries, often strongly criticising the conduct of the U.S.-led coalition and alleging that serous war crimes were committed by their own side, itself required a creative propaganda approach to remedy. A narrative was thus constructed which stripped the servicemen of their agency and credibility, and portrayed any criticisms of U.S. conduct or policy as being involuntary as a result of some mysterious form of Asiatic mind control. The creation of the myth of “brainwashing,” a term first coined by the CIA for this purpose during the Korean War, was intended to delegitimise these American servicemen and their testimonies. Although seemingly ridiculous, racial sentiments against East Asians and widespread perceptions of an impending ‘yellow peril,’ combined with the narrative’s endorsement by respected figures in media and the intelligence community, led to its widespread acceptance. As New York University professor of history and prominent Korea expert Monica Kim noted: “‘Brainwashing’ became the perfect trope with which to render these American POW’s [prisoner of war’s] ‘desires’ – or politics, to be more exact – into a more familiar racialised narrative of the unwitting, innocent American being seduced by the mysterious ‘Oriental’.” ‘Brainwashing’ allowed the Western world to rest assured in the righteousness of their cause. It neutralised as contradictions to this narrative not only the statements of former servicemen, but also the actions of those who defected to or collaborated with the West’s adversaries, and even the Chinese and North Korean POWs who refused to defect to the ‘free world’ and chose to return home.

Professor Kim described a “process of fashioning the Korean Communist POW into an ideological figure – or more specifically, a ‘fanatic’ – a phrase used extensively by U.S. military personnel to describe the Communist POWs in both their statements for the case file and administrative memos passed from higher command to the camps.” These individuals, Western and allied populations were assured, were not acting of their own free will, and fantastical stories of communist Asiatic mind control were widely propagated to explain their actions. Thus those whose firsthand experience of the war led them to dispute the narrative of a Western good against an Asian communist evil were stripped of their voices – it was the Asian communist propagandists speaking through them, not the people themselves, be they freed American soldiers or East Asian prisoners.

The narrative of a massacre of prisoners did not need to be remotely true to be effective, and ultimately served not only to gain support for an extension of the war through abnormal demands at the armistice talks, but also to reinforce the metanarrative in the West vilifying countries at the forefront of opposing Western power and empire as malign and barbaric actors.

In sharp contrast to the treatment of Western prisoners in Chinese and Korean camps, sources consistently pointed to extreme brutalisation of East Asian prisoners held by U.S.-led coalition forces. Propaganda from Beijing and Pyongyang had no need to fabricate atrocities when covering the hardships their men endured, as the reality was already too extreme and gruesome for most media to fully cover. Journalists repeatedly found that American officers they interviewed admitted knowledge of or participation in massacres of Chinese and Korean prisoners. Robert William Burr of the U.S. Army second infantry division recalled one such incident in which his platoon sergeant shot a dozen prisoners personally. He stated regarding the prevailing attitude towards killing East Asian soldiers: “At the time I would have felt worse if I had run over someone’s dog with my car.” The ease with which East Asians could be slaughtered was similarly observed five years prior in the Pacific War, where surrendering Japanese soldiers frequently met with the same fate. Killing them was also frequently compared to killing animals in a way that killing ethnically European soldiers never could be. Multiple studies highlighted the considerable discrepancy in American treatment of surrendering ethnically European adversaries compared to East Asians as a result of the extent to which the latter were dehumanised.

As resistance to Western occupation in Korea involved all parts of society, it was not unheard of to see three generations of the same family held in the same prisoner of war camps with many children also imprisoned. The fatality rate among prisoners was high with many not adequately fed and dying due to malnutrition and more intentionally killed by soldiers after their capture. Prisoners were shot by soldiers for insulting their guards, hunger striking, and even for singing. An example of one such incident saw around fifty women gathered in the common area of their compound begin to sing folk and political songs, which quickly spread to other compounds. They were met with gunfire by the guards causing 29 casualties. A more extreme case saw protesting prisoners, who had not even a rifle among them, suppressed by American paratroopers, battle tanks and flamethrowers. Brigadier General Haydon Boatner recalled regarding the killing: “What a gruesome sight it was! … A battlefield in every respect. Entrenchments, wounded, dead, burning buildings and tests [tents] with a few human hands, legs or feet here and there.”

After being repeatedly interrogated, severely beaten, half-starved, and kept in solitary confinement, North Koran officer Pak Sang Hyong was kept in a six-by-three-foot cage with only strands of barbed wire for walls. He was given one blanket and no shoes and left outdoors for three winter months. He recalled after his release: “I lived like an animal.” Korean female prisoners were particularly singled out for abuse, with Pulitzer Prize–winning American historian John Toland, the war’s contemporary, describing one example as follows:

One girl, Kim Kyung Suk, told how they had forced a group of women prisoners into a large room. Here they were stripped. Then nude male North Korean prisoners were shoved in. ‘We heard you Communists like to dance,’ an American shouted. ‘Go on! Dance!’ They pointed bayonets and revolvers at the prisoners, who began to dance, while drunken, cigar smoking, guffawing American officers stubbed out cigars on the girls’ breasts and committed indecencies.

With conduct strongly influenced by racial prejudice, a British officer noted that U.S. forces treated prisoners “as cattle.” Chinese and Korean prisoners were provided with extremely poor sanitary conditions, lacking access to clean water or toilets, and in a period of just 10 months from October 1950 over 4,000 prisoners in one camp died mostly due to dysentery. Prisoners were also used for medical experiments, in violation of Articles 13 and 19 of the Geneva Conventions, with the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene reporting that the primary concern towards sick prisoners was often experimentation rather that treatment. In one epidemic at a prison camp on Koje Island treatments varied greatly, and some 1,600 cases of the same disease followed 18 different treatment and dosage schedules. The Journal noted: “the Korean outbreak demonstrated again that an epidemic situation provides the opportunity to accumulate valuable scientific data very rapidly,” which was prioritised over the wellbeing of the POWs. The epidemic resulted in 19,320 hospitalisations and a very high 9 percent fatality rate – 1,729 deaths. It was referred to as “150 epidemics in one.”

British and Australian journalists Alan Winnington and Wilfred Burchett documented a number of accounts of experimentation on prisoners after interviewing North Korean doctors who were held in the camps. Their 68 examples included providing prisoners with experimental doses of sulfadiazine tablets, ranging from eight to 48, “to test the effects of very high sulfa intake and many patients died of sulfa poisoning.” POWs at the U.S. 14th Field Hospital near the Pusan prison camp and the U.S. 64th Field Hospital at Koje were at times operated on either to give young surgeons practice or for experimentation. Prominent journalist and Harvard graduate Hugh Deane noted regarding experimentation: “The American doctors, if they had qualms, could always remind themselves that the purpose was to add to medical knowledge, making possible saving of more lives, and that the victims were inferior beings, gooks to many, near animals to others.”

Excessive amputations were also widely reported, with limbs stiff from lack of exercise or from having just been released from plaster casts being cut off. Prisoners were housed in compounds at four times the legal density of U.S. federal prisons, itself far from a high standard at the time, in conditions “considered appropriate to Asian peasants.” Max Hastings noted that “Western treatment of the Koreans and the Chinese was dictated by a deeply rooted conviction that these were not people like themselves, but near-animals.” Prisoners held on Koje Island by U.S. forces described the state of their captivity in a letter they signed in 1952: “Koje Island is a living hell. The shores of this island are no longer washed by sea water, but by our tears and blood. There is no breath of fresh air here, the pungent stench of blood fills our nostrils in every corner of the island.”

Observing the prisoners’ eventual return Winnington and Burchett emphasised the stark contrast to the well treated Western prisoners coming out of Chinese and Korean camps, describing prisoners released from Western camps as follows:

Haggard, with faces dank and moist like corpses, bearing the hideous mutilations of experimental surgery, some vacant eyed, girls driven mad by attempted rapes…. Half of the prisoners in many ambulances were lacking legs, often both legs. Even men missing two legs and without artificial ones were not treated by the Americans as stretcher cases, so plentiful were amputees. In a single hour it was possible to see six people delivered who lacked all four limbs – hacked back to mere torsos.

If Chinese or North Korean media had had anything near the influence of that of the West, it is likely that treatment of their prisoners in the custody of the U.S. and its allies would have been recorded in history as one of the great atrocities of the 20th century. As it was the two East Asian states were too isolated and vilified and lacked the media clout needed to propagate their narratives or make their grievances known. While the U.S. had a much more formidable media establishment, however, its own claims of atrocities against its prisoners were seriously undermined by a lack of evidence and by the accounts of the prisoners themselves after their release – leaving them deeply discredited after the war ended.

The ‘Free World’ and its War Prisoners

In parallel to the battles on land and in the air the contest for world opinion was a major arena of conflict in the Korean War, with the U.S. and its allies seeking to delegitimise their adversaries and portray themselves not only as representing their own countries’ national interests, but also as representing universal values and the interests of all humanity. As it became increasingly clear from the spring of 1952 that a decisive routing of Chinese and North Korean forces was unachievable, the United States began to focus on leveraging one of its major assets, the large numbers of prisoners of war it was holding, to construct a narrative of a moral and psychological victory. This centred around claiming that Chinese and North Korean prisoners did not want to return to their homelands outside the Western sphere of influence, and that when given free choice would defect en-masse to live in Western-aligned Taiwan and South Korea. Washington sought to have the world believe that the conditions the Beijing and Pyongyang governments created for their populations were an atrocity in and of itself, and engineering prisoner defections thus quickly gained a central place in furthering American and allied strategic interests.

American negotiators first mentioned the entirely unheard-of concept of voluntary repatriation in January 1952, which if implemented would mean that prisoners of war choosing to remain elsewhere would not be returned to their home countries. This directly contradicted the 1949 Geneva Conventions on the Treatment of Prisoners of War, which stipulated the mandatory return of all prisoners, and was described by the U.S. delegate to the armistice talks Admiral Ruthven Libby with phrases such as “principle of freedom of choice” and “the right of individual self-determination,” and “a bill of rights” for the prisoner of war. While British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden was among those to concede that “our legal grounds were so poor” for pursuing such action, the coalition’s policy was effectively settled in Washington by February 27 on an insistence on voluntary repatriation. The wholly unexpected and illegal terms served to delay an armistice agreement by over a year.

Beyond providing a propaganda victory, engineering mass defections was vital to facilitating Western powers’ efforts to recast themselves as altruistic rather than imperial powers. As rhetoric from the Western world increasingly placed a new emphasis on claims of moral universalism to frame the rationale for its interventionism abroad in a new light, such defections would be particularly valuable. While a world order based on the dominance of Western military might ever-present across the globe remained as it had in the colonial era, the pretext for this order and for Western interventionism changed. The West’s wars were now “humanity’s wars” fought on behalf of mankind, and those such as the Chinese and North Koreans who resisted were accordingly portrayed as acting not only against Western interests – but against the interests of humanity, the international community and even their own people. The will of the “free world” and the “international community” and Western geopolitical designs were to be indistinguishable. Intended to justify the sustainment of Western-dominated global order and the quashing by Western armies of those that resisted it, the first major use of this rhetoric came in Korea.

Portraying the order it presided over as one with universal appeal to all peoples was key to the Western Bloc’s claim to represent the interests of humanity, legitimising its military interventions and delegitimising opposition to its hegemony. With China and North Korea both being decolonising states at the forefront of the conflict against the Western-led order at the time, engineering defections from them provided an extremely valuable and vital contribution to these designs. Monica Kim observed to this effect:

The choice of the Korean War POW would be further evidence of the fundamental appeal of U.S. mandated projects of democracy on the global stage…. The notion of defending humanity came to the fore as the moral impetus for war. Sovereign recognition, decolonising imperatives, or state interests – including those of the United States – none of these elements were placed on the table regarding how the American public should imagine the U.S. military intervention abroad.

She concluded: “Desire on the part of the decolonised Korean POW and the Chinese POW would enable the critical disavowal of imperial ambitions on which the United States insisted – if others demonstrated their wish to belong to the U.S.-defined liberal order, then the United States was not imposing an imperial design on the globe. Desire, however, was not a predictable variable in the interrogation room.” Ensuring that prisoners from the East Asian countries which resisted Western dominance would act in a way the Western narrative and ‘free world’ ideology would presuppose was thus essential.

Rather than fabricating an atrocity, the U.S. and its allies would create the image of both a universal appeal of the West and universal unattractiveness of life in decolonising and non-westernised East Asian states, which was achieved by employing extreme methods of coercion on the prisoners in their power. The effects of this were highly complementary to atrocity fabrication efforts, which similarly portrayed those countries outside the Western sphere of influence as lacking in basic humanity and thus showed the Western-led order as representing a more humane and benevolent future for the world.

Playing a central role in the manipulation of the prisoner of war issue, the U.S. Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) established in 1951 recognised that the figure of the POW could be emblematic of a new way of fighting for world opinion – one in which President Harry Truman took a strong personal interest and which would persist long after the cessation of hostilities in Korea. While undermining the image of unchallenged Western military might through their successes on the battlefield had provided the Chinese and North Koreans with considerable prestige, the PSB’s work had the potential to bolster the Western Bloc’s standing considerably in the eyes of the world while reversing its adversaries’ gains.

The PSB was responsible for efforts to shape international public perceptions of the war effort as one fought in the name of universal values rather than Western interests, which effectively placed the world in a total struggle between the Western-led order and those such as North Korea and China which remained outside it. Examples included recommendations that the language of “containment” of enemy states be abandoned in favour of references to the “liberation” of their populations, and replacing “made in America” labels in aid programs with tags stating: “Peace Partnership of Free Humanity.” Prominent political theorist and former jurist Carl Schmitt observed regarding the construction of this universal moralism at the time that it “would bring into existence – in fact allow only the existence of – wars on behalf of humanity, wars in which enemies would enjoy no protection, wars that would necessarily be total.” Where in the early 1950s, the prisoner repatriation issue lay at the crux of these efforts, the legacy of what PSB started in Korea would remain prominent in Western rhetoric into the 21st century particularly regarding how military interventions were justified.

When in early April 1952 American negotiators had offered to return 70,000 prisoners, which was a 40 percent reduction from a prior offer of approximately 116,000, Chinese and North Korean negotiators were stunned as the Americans had predicted. Hugh Deane reported on the U.S. strategy which necessitated a high number of enemy defections:

Reduced estimates reflected the results of savage coercion in the compounds. President Truman and an increasing number of others in the leadership had come to envisage a substitute for the victory the U.S. had failed to win on the battlefield – a propaganda triumph in line with the rollback doctrine that was prevailing over mere containment. An impressive number of prisoners were to refuse adamantly and publicly to go home to the communist evils awaiting them. To do the brunt of the dirty work in selected compounds (there were 32 of them on Koje, all overcrowded) the U.S. secured some 75 persuaders from Taiwan, mostly from [President] Chiang Kaishek’s equivalent of the Gestapo, and a larger number of members of terrorist youth groups sent in by the Syngman Rhee government. Some wore neat American uniforms, others were posing as prisoners…. Their continuing task was to locate prisoners who wished repatriation and to do whatever was necessary to dissuade them. Control of the food supplies was a powerful means, and that, threats, beatings, slashings and the killing of the most stubborn, led to a gratifying number who muttered ‘Taiwan, Taiwan, Taiwan’ when asked the key question…. Thus many Chinese who didn’t want to go to Taiwan found themselves there. Of the Chinese prisoners 6,670 were repatriated to China, 14,235 were sent to Taiwan.

The Anti-Communist Youth League, a far-right South Korean militia which had played a key role in quashing dissent against U.S. military rule there, maintained a strong presence in the prison camps. They were often given jurisdiction over meal distributions, disciplinary beatings, surveillance and interrogations, and reserved the right to execute or otherwise punish prisoners. Comparisons of prison camps where Chinese and North Koreans were held to Nazi concentration camps were common in internal U.S. reports. U.S. Ambassador to the South Korea John Muccio alleged that the Taiwanese representatives involved in repatriation were “members of Chiang Kai-shek’s Gestapo.” He passed on reports that Chinese prisoners were being forced under severe threats to sign petitions in blood and undergo tattooing to prove they were anti-communists and wanted to go to Taiwan. One report from a prisoner stated, regarding the enforcement of this policy:

In early 1952, the brigade leader, Li Da’an, wanted to tattoo every prisoner in Compound 72 with an anti-Communist slogan…. He ordered the prison guards to beat those who refused the tattoo in front of the five thousand prisoners. Some of those who couldn’t stand the beatings gave up and agreed to the tattoo. One prisoner, however, Lin Xuepu, continued to refuse the tattoo. Li Da’an finally dragged Lin up to the stage, and in a loud voice asked Lin: ‘Do you want it or not?’ Bleeding and barely able to stand up, Lin, a nineteen-year-old college freshman, replied with a loud ‘No!’ Li Da’an responded by cutting off one of Lin’s arms with his big dagger. Lin screamed but still shook his head when Li repeated the question. Humiliated and angry, Li followed by stabbing Lin with his dagger…. Li yelled to all the prisoners in the field: ‘whoever dares to refuse the tattoo will be like him.’

The true meaning of ‘voluntary repatriation’ and defection to the ‘free world’ were well known to the State Department, with Ambassador Muccio reporting to State Secretary Acheson as early as May 1952 that Taiwanese overseers in the compounds “dominated proceedings through violent systematic terrorism and physical punishment of those choosing against going to Taiwan throughout both orientation and screening phases. Severe beatings, torture, some killings.” He had reported four months prior in January to Secretary Acheson’s aide, Ural Alexis Johnson, that “beatings, torture and threats of punishment are frequently utilised to intimidate the majority of Chinese POWs” as part of “an attempt at forced coerced removal to Formosa [Taiwan] in direct contradiction of the UNC [United Nations Commission] stand at Panmunjom on voluntary repatriation of internees.” He later again emphasised in a report to Secretary Acheson the use of “physical terror including organised murders, beatings, threats, before and even during the polling process” to ensure an outcome on the repatriation issue favourable to Western interests. His findings were confirmed by others in the State Department. Muccio later referred to news on the treatment and coercion of Chinese and Korean prisoners as “very disturbing reports of horrors being perpetuated in the prisoners’ camps,” for which he said the United States was responsible.

A report from the Department Office of Intelligence research similarly observed that the U.S., with Taipei’s support, had created “a police-state type of rule over the main Chinese POW compounds, which provided the foundation and means for powerfully influencing the screening against repatriation.” This included “enforced tattooing of the POWs” and “violent and terroristic coercion of the POWs by the KMT [Taiwanese] trusties during the screening.” The report concluded that this seriously inflated the numbers of prisoners who ‘chose’ to defect.

U.S. State Department officers A. Sabin Chase and Philip Mansard were sent to Korea to ascertain why large numbers of prisoners defected, and concluded in their report that the main reason was “violent tactics of the PW [POW] trustees before and during the screening process.” They reported a “police state type of rule” over the prisoner compounds and that prisoners were not only subjected to an “information blockade,” but also that physical terror with organised threats, beatings and murders before and during the polling process were all widespread. While the investigators found substantial evidence of coercion, they did not find any significant lack of support for the Chinese government or the military among Chinese prisoners. North Korean doctor Rhee Tok Ki, who was held in prison camps, concurrently reported that ill patients were harassed to the detriment of their recovery to ensure that they would refuse repatriation. He stated: “TB patients especially need rest, but they were hounded day and night as a sort of specially refined torture to get them to renounce repatriation.”

Internal U.S. reports were corroborated by the Red Cross which reported finding “some very grave incidents” regarding the treatment of Chinese and North Korean prisoners particularly relating to coercion over the repatriation issue. Although reporters were not allowed near prison camps, one from the Toronto Star managed to enter with a British delegation. His report affirmed that the prisoners chose not to be repatriated due to “physical threats, often carried out.” In some cases prisoners were instead given the option either to remain imprisoned indefinitely or to go to Taiwan, and so elected to go to Taiwan based on false information. The final report by the Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission reached the same conclusion, emphasising that “any prisoner who desired repatriation had to do so clandestinely and in fear for his life.”

With reports being almost unanimous that use of violence and intimidation tremendously inflated the number of ‘defections,’ American officers reported to chief negotiator Admiral Charles Turner Joy that the screening process was not indicative of real choice by the prisoners. The admiral himself wrote of the Taiwanese controlled compounds that “the results of the screening were by no means indicative of the POWs’ real choice,” and that, should Taiwanese overseers be removed the numbers wishing to be repatriated would rise “from 15% to 85%.” He further noted reports that “a mock screening which had taken place in compound 92 prior to the regular screening. The [Taiwanese] leaders had asked those who wished to return to step forward. Those doing so were either beaten black & blue or killed.” Regarding his Army interpreters who witnessed the repatriation process, Joy reported they had “said their experience watching Chinese POWs at the polls convinced them that the majority of the POWs were too terrified to frankly express their real choice. All they could say in answer to the questions was ‘Taiwan’ repeated over & over again.” Thus although referred to in most Western histories of the Korean War as a key affirmation of the superiority of Western values and the Western-led order, the prisoner repatriation issue instead revealed highly depraved conduct by the U.S.-led alliance that put its claims to represent a ‘free world’ to serious question.

What the U.S. and its partners had fabricated was not an atrocity, but rather a reinforcement of the metanarrative which portrayed the alternative to Western hegemony – life in those countries outside the Western sphere of influence – as terrible enough that even their own soldiers would abandon their homes and families to defect to Western-aligned states. The construction of this narrative relied heavily on vilifying Western adversaries using fabricated atrocity propaganda. CIA Director Allen Dulles was not overstating the importance of the issue when he referred to alleged mass defections as “one of the greatest psychological victories so far achieved by the free world against communism” – with the communist world at the time representing the primary challenger to Western-led order.

The Korean War saw atrocity fabrication to vilify Western adversaries, as well as the fabricated narrative of prisoner defections, both play very major roles in furthering Western Bloc objectives. As a result economically developed Western countries which brutalised and killed their prisoners were successfully portrayed as humanitarians standing for universal values, while their East Asian adversaries which treated prisoners as well as they did their own soldiers were cast as brutalising both the POWs under their power as well as their own people – the latter whom the Western narrative claimed were defecting in droves as a result. Although perpetuated highly successfully through Western media, the narratives created in Korea appeared to those from both sides familiar with the state of affairs of the ground to be entirely at odds with reality.

Chapter Three Beijing 1989 and Tiananmen Square

Background: Subversion and the Sino-U.S. Cold War

The coming to power of the Communist Party of China and declaration of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in October 1949 marked the beginning of new phase in Sino-U.S. relations, with the new state almost immediately labelled a leading adversary to Western interests alongside the Soviet Union and targeted accordingly. Washington’s hostility towards China’s communist movement had long predated 1949, and the United States had actively intervened in China’s civil war in the preceding four years against communist forces and on the side of the staunchly pro-Western Guomindang government. From August 1945 American air and naval assets were used to facilitate a massive and rapid redeployment of 400,000–500,000 Guomindang personnel and of U.S. Marines to prevent the communist People’s Liberation Army (PLA) from taking key positions across the country. Among their targets were Beijing, Shanghai, and important railway lines, coal mines, ports and bridges. By 1946 100,000 American military personnel, including 50,000 Marines, were deployed to China, with PLA reports indicating that they actively took to the offensive against communist-held areas. Regular reconnaissance flights by U.S. aircraft provided vital intelligence to the Guomindang, with multiple reports indicating that American aircraft strafed and bombed PLA positions and massacred the populations of communist-held towns. As communist forces enjoyed widespread support particularly from rural communities, entire population centres were often perceived as adversaries and targeted indiscriminately. One U.S. Marine recalled to this effect that his unit had “unmercifully” blasted a Chinese village without knowing “how many innocent people were slaughtered.”

To fight alongside Guomindang forces and their own Marine Corps the U.S. had before the end of 1945 already begun rearming surrendered Imperial Japanese personnel in China – what President Truman referred to as “using the Japanese to hold off the communists.” From 1947 the CIA’s first ever air unit the Flying Tigers deployed to China to help counter communist forces, and by 1949 the U.S. had provided almost $2 billion in funds and a further $1 billion worth of military hardware as aid to the Guomindang and trained a full 39 of its divisions. The lengths to which the U.S. went to defeat China’s communist movement reflected the importance it attached to ensuring the country remained in the Western sphere of influence, and ensured that America and the new People’s Republic were effectively at war from the moment the latter came into existence when the Guomindang lost the civil war.

Regarding the reasons for the defeat of the Guomindang and their leader Chiang Kaishek former State Department employee William Blum observed that the key lay in “the hostility of the Chinese people at large to his [Chiang’s] tyranny, his wanton cruelty, and the extraordinary corruption and decadence of his entire bureaucratic and social system.” The head of the U.S. Military Mission in China General David Barr assessed that the Guomindang were under “the world’s worst leadership,” highlighting “widespread corruption and dishonesty throughout the armed forces.” There was a broad consensus among U.S. analysts at the time supporting Barr’s views, but while the nature of Guomindang leadership was well known the U.S. still went to great lengths to impose it on China. In contrast reports on the communists by a U.S. Army delegation sent in 1944 were immensely positive, with the delegation’s leader John Service observing: “[party chairman] Mao and the other leaders are universally spoken of with respect … these men are approachable and subservience toward them is completely lacking…. To the casual eye there are no police in [the communist capital of] Yenan…. Morale is very high … there is no defeatism but rather confidence.” He contrasted this sharply with the Guomindang’s low morale, high corruption and militarist police state.

Following the communist victory British journalist and China scholar Felix Greene noted: “Americans simply could not bring themselves to believe that the Chinese, however rotten their leadership, could have preferred a communist government.” Largely as a result Washington’s position towards China was unremittingly hostile, with a very wide range of measures pursued to isolate and destabilise it with the goal of restoring a Western client government to power. Although Chinese Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai made repeated overtures to Washington seeking improved relations after 1949, these were flatly rejected and the U.S. instead made several attempts to assassinate him.

Following the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, as the American military leadership continued to pledge to ‘roll back’ Chinese communism, U.S. forces came within firing distance of Chinese territory and its vital border infrastructure and attacked Chinese forces which had been deployed to form a buffer inside Korea. Reports of the Chinese deployment, which were known to have begun over a week before hostilities broke out, were notably censored from American media so that when U.S. forces engaged them on October 25, 1950, it was made to appear that the Chinese had initiated hostilities. The result was an overwhelming defeat for U.S. and allied forces. Further assaults on Chinese positions led Beijing to eventually commit to a full scale military intervention in December, with China and the U.S. fighting a limited war confined to the Korean Peninsula. Many in the U.S. military leadership proposed expanding the war effort to the Chinese mainland with strategic firebombing or even nuclear strikes, a blockade and mining of Chinese ports, and eventually a full scale invasion supported by Guomindang remnants which had fled to Taiwan. The presence of Soviet forces in China, and risk of war with the USSR, were the primary deterrents to such action.

The U.S. waged war on China on multiple fronts, and beyond the battlefields of Korea it pursued extensive economic warfare measures, pressed for Beijing’s isolation internationally, provided protection and offensive weapons to Guomindang remnants, and supported Guomindang assaults on the mainland from Taiwan. The CIA further provided arms, training, logistical support, and its own advisors and engineers to Guomindang remnants in Myanmar, which repeatedly launched incursions into Chinese territory sabotaging infrastructure and forcing Beijing to divert resources towards defence on a third front. Although they were consistently defeated and several CIA advisors were killed, these operations continued until the PLA and Myanmar’s own armed forces launched a joint operation to expel the CIA presence and its militias. CIA use of Taiwan as a base for operations to destabilise the mainland included airdropping paramilitary units for “promoting domestic anti-government guerrilla operations. This was to be accomplished by small teams of Chinese agents, generally inserted through airdrops, who were to link up with local guerrilla forces, collect intelligence and possibly engage in sabotage and psychological warfare, and report back by radio” – according to the agency’s reports. While Washington repeatedly claimed that Beijing was paranoid and dismissed all charges when confronted over these actions, declassified documents later proved Chinese claims entirely correct – as did the shooting down and capture of CIA pilots.

A fourth front for destabilisation of China was opened by the CIA in the southwestern province of Tibet. Although Washington had refused requests from Tibetan separatist groups for assistance in obtaining independence under Guomindang rule, and made clear that it recognised Chinese sovereignty over the territory, this quickly changed after the foundation of the PRC in October 1949, after which separatist groups were leveraged as assets for destabilisation. On November 1 President Truman called for “modern weapons and sufficient advisors” to be sent to separatist forces, and in June 1950 Secretary of State Dean Acheson stated that London and Washington were jointly exploring means to “encourage Tibetan resistance to Commie control.” Efforts escalated from the mid-1950s, and a four-day conference between U.S. intelligence and the Tibetan separatist leadership in 1955 saw a ten-year joint plan laid out to balkanise China and establish Tibet as a separate state aligned with Western interests. The CIA invested heavily in training and arming separatist guerrillas from 1956, which were tasked with sabotaging infrastructure, mining roads, cutting communications lines and ambushing PLA forces.

Both the Chinese state and its Tibetan minority suffered as a result of U.S. intervention, with the fourteenth Dalai Lama being among those to highlight that separatist cooperation with the CIA to undermine China “only resulted in more suffering for the people of Tibet.” According to him, Western support was provided “not because they cared about Tibetan independence, but as part of their worldwide efforts to destabilise all communist governments.” With the Korean War having ruled out prospects for an invasion of China, U.S. policy for the next quarter century was effectively summarised by Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs Walter Robinson as follows: “our hope of solving the problem of the mainland of China was not through attack on the mainland but rather by actions which would promote disintegration from within.”

The U.S. was moved to pursue détente and normalisation of diplomatic relations with China in the mid-1970s, largely due to setbacks in the Vietnam War, economic stagnation at home, and a perceived rise in Soviet power. With Beijing itself perceiving the USSR as an imminent threat to its security following the Sino-Soviet split of 1960, China’s rapprochement with the U.S. ended its political isolation and facilitated an expansion of economic ties with the Western world. This compensated for the decline in ties with the Soviet Bloc which had previously been key to bolstering its war-ravaged economy. Détente would be short lived, however, and just a decade later the end of the Cold War, a relative decline in Soviet power, and improving Sino-Soviet ties meant China was no longer seen in the U.S. as a vital asset to Western goals of containing Moscow. The result was a resumption of efforts to target China for destabilisation, which first materialised in the summer of 1989.

Unrest in June 1989: The West Claims Mass Slaughter in Beijing

By 1989 China’s position to withstand subversion from abroad was in many ways much weaker than it had been in the 1950s and 1960s. Economic reforms pursued under the administration of Deng Xiaoping had fuelled economic growth, but also inequality and increasingly conspicuous at times obscene signs of corruption. This contrasted sharply with both the communist ideals with which two generations had by then been raised, and the Mao-era zero tolerance towards corrupt practices. The result was growing dissatisfaction particularly among the urban youth who felt that their parents’ sacrifices to build a new China were being exploited by a new class of corrupt officials leading the country astray.

The recent relaxation of price controls had greatly improved the wellbeing of China’s rural population and increased crop yields and productivity, but this came at a cost to the urban population who faced rising prices for staple foods. Inflation shocks throughout the 1980s worsened the situation, with rates averaging almost 19 percent in 1988 and 1989. Former Chinese Premier and General Secretary of the Communist Party of China Zhao Ziyang was seen as a symbol of the new corruption in government and had proposed reforms which directly fuelled inflation. Zhao was the initial target of the public’s ire, with handbills passed out in 1989 asking: “How much does Zhao Ziyang pay to play golf?” Hailed in the West as a ‘Chinese Gorbachev,’ Zhao was alluded to in the following decade as ‘China’s Yeltsin’ after the Russian president of the time both for his strongly pro-Western inclinations and his commitment to a westernisation of China’s political and economic systems. In May 1988 Zhao pushed hard for accelerated price reforms leading to widespread complaints and calls for a return to greater centralisation of economic controls. This precipitated a debate that lasted well into 1989.

In April 1989 Chinese university students flooded the capital’s main square, Tiananmen, for a sit-in protest against government corruption and deviation from the ideals of the 1949 revolution. A former student protestor from Beijing interviewed by the writer in 2019, who worked as a teacher at the time, recalled regarding the movement (writer’s translation):

From the Deng Xiaoping era we all saw that China was becoming very different from the country our parents had aspired to build. Under Chairman Mao even slight corruption was never tolerated, everyone lived more or less equally, and we built the country together. But Deng Xiaoping’s era saw a new class of parasites, those who didn’t necessarily follow the rules and who weren’t particularly honest or hard working, take most of the benefits from the country’s growth which the people had worked to build. As a result we went to protest – to tell the government we were not satisfied. All the later talk in Western press about how we were asking for Western democracy is absurd, we were loyal to the revolution of 1949 and were protesting against moves towards the Western capitalist system – not asking for more of it. But China’s enemies misrepresented the peaceful protests to portray us as counterrevolutionaries calling for a reversal of the revolution. It is really sad, really absurd, that this is what people in the West think of us [former student protesters].

Hijacking any form of public discontent to portray it as a call for political westernisation was a common practice in the West particularly after the Cold War. Whether Egyptian protestors calling for “bread, freedom and administrative correctness” in 2011 or those in neighbouring Sudan in 2019 demonstrating against the rise in prices, protests over living conditions or government misconduct were very consistently spun to be portrayed as calling for Western-style liberal democracy. Western-trained professional activists would often then move in to seize leadership positions and divert public discontent in this direction – presenting political and economic westernisation as both a solution and a historical inevitability. Such portrayals were consistent with the post-Cold War Western worldview of an ‘end of history,’ which presented the West’s systems of governance as an ultimate truth and the inevitable outcome of political development across the world. The Western narrative of a Chinese protest which “drew upon Western-inspired ideals” and was led by “pro-democracy dissidents” had little real grounding in reality, however, and while there were minority elements in Tiananmen Square in 1989 who did aspire for westernisation, they did not reflect the purpose of the movement. The deeply rooted Western perceptions of its own political and economic systems as ones universally aspired to, however, made it very easy for Western populations to believe that any discontent was a result of lack of westernising ‘pro-democracy’ reforms. Award winning Hong Kong journalist of Sri-Lankan origin Nury Vittachi was one of many to observe regarding how student protests were presented in the West:

Don’t say that the student demonstrations were a call for freedom. You see that written everywhere, but scholars agree that the students were complaining about the widespread corruption that they saw as preventing the achievement of what they wanted: a fair and just communist society. The students were fiercely patriotic and proud of China and its socialist stance…. Don’t say that the protests were a call for democracy. In truth, they were calling for reform within communism. It was only when students noticed that international reporters would race to photograph placards with English words such as ‘liberty’ that democracy was elevated to a major theme.

Although a leading critic of Beijing, the London-based Guardian conceded that events at Tiananmen more generally “have been distorted – continually and wildly – by the Western human rights lobby,” slamming “the selective remembering of influential reporters and human rights activists…. They have abused the memory of June 1989, turning it into a weapon to be used as part of their human rights agenda for China.”

Following the clearing out of Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, a Western narrative quickly emerged portraying authorities as having responded to the sit-in by dispatching soldiers to open fire into crowds and massacre peacefully protesting students without provocation. This was presented as a reflection of the party and military’s lack of respect for the lives of their people, and quickly became the overarching theme in Western portrayals of both the event and of China more broadly that would influence the meta-narrative surrounding the country for decades. NBC’s Washington bureau chief Tim Russert was one of many who referred to “tens of thousands” of deaths in Tiananmen Square. CBS correspondent Richard Roth’s story of being arrested and removed from the scene referred to “powerful bursts of automatic weapons, raging gunfire for a minute and a half that lasts as long as a nightmare.” Australian journalist Adrian Brown, who later became Al Jazeera’s most senior China correspondent, described: “A tank treading on two flattened bodies, a burned-out army personnel carrier and the charred corpse of a soldier inside.” He claimed decades later that the continued presence of police on China’s streets was meant to deter and intimidate its people with the threat of a similar outcome. The Wall Street Journal referred to “violent suppression of pro-democracy protests in China’s Tiananmen Square – an event that shocked TV audiences around the world, [and] made global pariahs of the country’s top leaders.” As Vittachi summarised the Western version of events: “your government gunned down all these poor students who were in Tiananmen Square pleading for freedom and democracy; the young people were so brave, one guy stood in front of a tank, but tens of thousands were massacred.” Essentially, the West pushed a narrative of good against evil – the former being the Chinese youth calling for westernisation of their country’s political system who were suppressed by the ‘brutal’ and ‘totalitarian’ government holding China back. While this narrative is the most spectacular and memorable for a Western public relations effort, available evidence very strongly contradicts it.

What Happened in Beijing in June 1989

While protests in Beijing reflected real concerns with the direction of Chinese politics, such unrest presented external adversaries with multiple valuable opportunities to further their interests at the expense of the Chinese state and its people. The fabricated narrative of a mass slaughter played a vital role in vilifying China as part of an at the time fast-shrinking minority of states outside the Western sphere of influence, while misrepresenting protesters’ dissatisfaction served to strengthen the narrative of a global desire for political westernisation. The unrest also provided an opportunity to pursue China’s destabilisation, with Western intelligence agencies deeply involved in shaping the protest movement and supporting elements that were amenable to Western interests. As the Vancouver Sun was among the publications to report in 1992, citing officials, for several months preceding the clearing of Tiananmen Square on June 4: “the CIA had been helping student activists form the anti-government movement, providing typewriters, facsimile machines and other equipment to help them spread their message.” The involvement of Western intelligence agencies had been widely suspected, with the speed at which they were able to later locate and extract key pro-Western protest leaders further indicating that contacts had been established for some time.

Despite the complete absence of footage indicating protestors may have been killed in Tiananmen Square, as Western sources nearly unanimously claimed they had been, the incident came to be symbolised in Western reporting by images of a column of PLA tanks halting as a single civilian stood in its path. Considered “the most famous, enduring image of the massacre,” this was widely portrayed in the West as a symbol of the ‘pro-democracy westernisation’ movement standing in the way of ‘repressive authoritarianism.’ Like many aspects of the Western portrayals of the events of that day, this proved to be far from well founded. Although only a short extract was shown by Western sources, the full footage revealed that the armoured column was leaving Tiananmen Square on June 5. It showed that the man not only moved to prevent the tanks from driving around him, but was even allowed to climb onto one of them. This was hardly an image Western interests would benefit from conveying, and as a result a small cut of the footage was consistently shown out of context.

Cables from the U.S. embassy in Beijing published by Wikileaks in 2016 provided some of the most valuable insights into the events in Tiananmen Square. Written for government officials as a report of the events that happened, the cables contrasted sharply with the sensationalised reports in Western media written for public consumption. According to the embassy a Chilean diplomat and his wife were present when Chinese soldiers moved into Tiananmen Square to disperse protestors. They were able to enter and leave many times, and faced no harassment. Citing the diplomat, the embassy reported: “He watched the military enter the square and did not observe any mass firing of weapons into the crowds, although sporadic gunfire was heard. He said that most of the troops which entered the square were actually armed only with anti-riot gear – truncheons and wooden clubs; they were backed up by armed soldiers.” Crucially, and entirely contrary to Western claims, the diplomat witnessed “no mass firing into the crowd of students at the monument.” The students then agreed to leave the square, and there were no incidences of lethal force being used by authorities. “Once [an] agreement was reached for the students to withdraw, linking hands to form a column, the students left the square through the southeast corner,” it concluded, adding in reference to prevailing Western portrayals at the time that “there was no such slaughter.” Chile was politically closely aligned with the U.S. at the time, and its diplomats’ accounts were considered reliable.

Former Beijing bureau chief for the Washington Post, Jay Mathews, similarly conceded in 1998 that: “all verified eyewitness accounts say that the students who remained in the square when troops arrived were allowed to leave peacefully.” He referred to the ‘Tiananmen Square Massacre’ as a myth, stressing that it was “hard to find a journalist who has not contributed to the misimpression.” Regarding the questionable reliability of the sources used to claim a massacre had occurred, Mathews recalled:

The resilient tale of an early morning Tiananmen massacre stems from several false eyewitness accounts…. Probably the most widely disseminated account appeared first in the Hong Kong press: a Qinghua University student described machine guns mowing down students in front of the Monument to the People’s Heroes in the middle of the square. The New York Times gave this version prominent display on June 12, just a week after the event, but no evidence was ever found to confirm the account or verify the existence of the alleged witness…. Student leader Wu’er Kaixi said he had seen 200 students cut down by gunfire, but it was later proven that he left the square several hours before the events he described allegedly occurred…. A BBC reporter watching from a high floor of the Beijing Hotel said he saw soldiers shooting at students at the monument in the centre of the square. But as the many journalists who tried to watch the action from that relatively safe vantage point can attest, the middle of the square is not visible from the hotel.

“As far as can be determined from the available evidence, no one died that night in Tiananmen Square,” Mathews concluded, with his statement highlighting the prevailing tendency for figures such as Kaixi and the BBC reporter to fabricate claims of a massacre and falsely pass themselves off as eyewitnesses.

New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof, who was in Beijing at that time, observed that claims of a massacre were questionable on several “major points.” He effectively debunked and highlighted major inconsistencies in the sensational article attributed to the anonymous Qinghua student that was circulated in Hong Kong press and widely cited by British sources, which was the source most key to promoting the narrative of a massacre. “State television has even shown film of students marching peacefully away from the square shortly after dawn as proof that they were not slaughtered,” Kristof stressed in conclusion.

As sources claiming a massacre were over time discredited, a growing number of eyewitnesses attested to the fact that no massacre had ever taken place. One of the most notable was the Taiwan-born writer Hou Dejian, who had been on hunger strike in Tiananmen Square to show solidarity with the students. He recalled: “Some people said that 200 died in the Square and others claimed that as many as 2,000 died. There were also stories of tanks running over students who were trying to leave. I have to say that I did not see any of that. I myself was in the Square until 6:30 in the morning.”

Reuters correspondent Graham Earnshaw, who spent the night of June 3–4 at the centre of Tiananmen Square and interviewed many students, watched the military arrive in the early dawn and “saw the clearing of the square from the square itself.” Earnshaw confirmed that most of the students had already left peacefully by this time, and that the remaining few hundred were persuaded to do the same. There was no violence, let alone a massacre.

Even the BBC’s Beijing correspondent at the time, James Miles, who had for years criticised Chinese government actions and accounts of the incident, conceded 20 years later: “I was one of the foreign journalists who witnessed the events that night…. There was no massacre on Tiananmen Square.” Western reporting had “conveyed the wrong impression,” and “protestors who were still in the square when the army reached it were allowed to leave after negotiations,” he concluded.

Spanish ambassador in Beijing at the time, Eugenio Bregolat, noted in his own book which covered the subject that Spain’s TVE state media outlet had a television crew in the Tiananmen Square on June 4, and that if there had been a massacre, they would have been the first to record it. He stressed that most of the reports claiming a massacre were made by Western journalists in the Beijing Hotel some distance from the square and out of sight.

With the narrative of a massacre having originated in the British colony of Hong Kong, and gaining particularly strong support from British media, former Australian diplomat and Tokyo bureau chief for The Australian Gregory Clark was one of many to attribute the narrative to a British black information operation. He observed in the title of a prominent article for the International Business Times on the incident’s 25th anniversary: “Tiananmen Square Massacre is a Myth, All We’re ‘Remembering’ are British Lies,” referring to it as

one of the more spectacular UK black information operations – almost on a par with the mythical Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The original story of Chinese troops on the night of 3 and 4 June, 1989 machine-gunning hundreds of innocent student protesters in Beijing’s iconic Tiananmen Square has since been thoroughly discredited by the many witnesses there at the time – among them a Spanish TVE television crew, a Reuters correspondent and protesters themselves, who say that nothing happened other than a military unit entering and asking several hundred of those remaining to leave the Square late that night. Yet none of this has stopped the massacre from being revived constantly, and believed.

While available evidence strongly points to there having been no ‘Tiananmen Square Massacre,’ despite how potent such a narrative quickly became as a symbol of ‘authoritarian Chinese government evil’ against ‘pro-democracy pro-Western good,’ unrest elsewhere in Beijing in June 1989 did result in lives being lost. Contrasting to Western claims of tens of thousands of innocent students killed in Tiananmen, street battles far from the square between soldiers and anti-government insurgents saw hundreds killed. Unlike the fabricated massacre of students which had no photographic evidence to support it, footage fully confirmed reports of attacks by unknown militants on PLA personnel and that many were burned alive and tortured in the streets. Coverage and publication of related images were conspicuous by their almost total absence from Western reporting, however.

Gregory Clark alleged that soldiers were victims of attacks by petrol bombs, and that many were trapped in busses, strung up and burned. He questioned the suspicious circumstances under which radical anti-government elements had managed to gain access to such weapons and learned to use them. By contrast the PLA personnel in Beijing, according to U.S. State Department reports, had carried no firearms when facing civilians up to June 3 which limited their ability to respond to armed attacks. Regarding the photographic evidence of the mutilated and burned bodies of soldiers, Clark wrote: “Let’s go back to those photos of the burning buses. The popular view is that they were torched by angry protesters after the shooting began. In fact they were torched before. The evidence? Reports of charred corpses being strung up beneath overpasses (one photographed by Reuters remains unpublished), and photos of badly burned soldiers seeking shelter in nearby houses.” These details were almost totally absent from Western coverage and would have undermined Western sources’ black and white portrayals of anti-government elements as purely moderate and peaceful.

Scholar and freelance writer Philip J. Cunningham witnessed the emergence of violent youth groups who were well organised, armed and very distinct in both conduct and appearance from the students in Tiananmen Square. He stated:

The [peaceful] May Fourth spirit was gone, replaced by something murky and malevolent. There was a new element I hadn’t noticed much of before, young punks decidedly less than student-like in appearance. In the place of headbands and signed shirts with university pins they wore cheap, ill-fitting polyester clothes and loose windbreakers. Under our lights, their eyes gleaming with mischief, they brazenly revealed hidden Molotov cocktails…. Who were these punks in shorts and sandals, carrying petrol bombs? Gasoline is tightly rationed, so they could not have come up with these things spontaneously. Who taught them to make bottle bombs and for whom were the incendiary devices intended?

Another account detailed how soldiers were massacred on June 3 by several armed and seemingly radical militants who were calling for blood. The burning of a military personnel carrier and targeting of a soldier trapped inside was recounted by Cunningham as follows: “After throwing rocks at the armored vehicle, rioters stopped it…. Why did so many people choose to pursue the APC once it had safely passed? … The camouflaged vehicle was attacked on all sides … someone tossed a Molotov cocktail, setting the APC on fire. Flames spread quickly over the top of the vehicle and spilled onto the pavement.” Accompanying Cunningham was a student from the Central Academy of Drama, a former hunger striking peaceful protestor named Meng, who was himself shocked at the extreme violence of the rioters. Cunningham recalled Meng shouted:

“Let the man out,” he cried. “Help the soldier, help him get out!” The agitated congregation was in no mood for mercy. Angry, blood-curdling voices ricocheted around us. “Kill the mother f*cker!” one said. Then another voice, even more chilling than the first screamed, “He is not human, he is a thing.” “Kill it, kill it!” shouted bystanders, bloody enthusiasm now whipped up to a high pitch. “Stop! Don’t hurt him!” Meng pleaded, leaving me behind as he tried to reason with the vigilantes. “Stop, he is just a soldier!” “He is not human, kill him, kill him!” said a voice…. At least one surrendering soldier was safely evacuated to a waiting ambulance, but the ambulance itself was attacked, the back door almost ripped off…. The blood thirst made me nauseous.

Cunningham stressed the difference between the minority militants and the majority of peaceful protestors, with the former “deliberately instigating violence, putting them at odds with conscientious demonstrators who had no intention of hurting anyone.” The goal of the violent minority appeared to be to provoke a military response against both themselves, but also against the peaceful majority, which in turn would provide grounds to vilify the government and swell the ranks of radical anti-government factions. Militants mingling among peaceful protestors and launching attacks from within their ranks, as alluded to by Cunningham and other observers, may have been what Deng Xiaoping referred to when he lamented on June 9: “because bad people mingled with the good, which made it difficult to take the drastic measures we should take.”

Pictures of dead, burned and mutilated Chinese soldiers provide important evidence of the actions of the armed militants. A photograph of one was published in Granta, but never appeared elsewhere in the British press and made few appearances elsewhere in the West. “Perhaps because it challenges the myth of a peaceful student protest inside Tiananmen Square,” one analyst speculated regarding why these images of actual killings were scarcely shown or even known of, while misrepresentations of the ‘tank man’ image were propagated widely. Gregory Clark, for one, noted as an example of what he claimed was an intentional effort led by Britain to distort public perceptions of the events: “Reuters, the British new agency, refused to publish a photo of a charred [soldier’s] corpse strung up under an overpass – a photo that would have done much to explain what had happened.”

The Washington Post was a notable exception, and did provide some coverage of these attacks, stating in a June 12 article that “on one avenue in western Beijing, demonstrators torched an entire military convoy of more than 100 trucks and armoured vehicles. Aerial pictures of conflagration and columns of smoke have powerfully bolstered the [Chinese] government’s arguments that the troops were victims, not executioners. Other scenes show soldiers’ corpses and demonstrators stripping automatic rifles off unresisting soldiers.” The Wall Street Journal also briefly referred to the presence of “radicalised protesters, some now armed with guns and vehicles commandeered in clashes with the military.” “As columns of tanks and tens of thousands of soldiers approached Tiananmen many troops were set on by angry mobs…. [D]ozens of soldiers were pulled from trucks, severely beaten and left for dead. At an intersection west of the square, the body of a young soldier, who had been beaten to death, was stripped naked and hung from the side of a bus. Another soldier’s corpse was strung at an intersection east of the square,” it observed on June 5. These reports were notably published very early on before a narrative surrounding the unrest had fully been established. The violence by rioters was conspicuous for its almost total absence in subsequent Western coverage of the incident over the following three decades. The Guardian would belatedly mention the attacks in 2008, but notably referred to the lynching of soldiers in radical terms as a “people’s execution” of “oppressors,” and as “understandable, even admirable.” It noted that “in one suburb, two soldiers were hanged from a burnt-out bus.”

In light of the U.S.’ long aforementioned history of infiltrating guerilla fighters and saboteurs into China for attacks on both military personnel and civilian infrastructure, it was speculated that these well-prepared insurgents, who appeared to come out of nowhere and attack soldiers without provocation, may have been infiltrated from Taiwan or elsewhere. This would explain their evident hatred for the PLA and their familiarity with producing makeshift weapons. Had these plain clothed but armed provocateurs succeeded in inciting soldiers to attack civilian protestors, it could have seriously undermined the prestige and legitimacy of both the military and the government. Ideally, as far as Western interests were concerned, this would eventually lead to the Chinese state’s collapse, and perhaps its balkanisation, as pro-Western elements were restored to power much as was being achieved across the Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union itself at the time.

While some soldiers did respond to attacks with live fire, this occurred far from Tiananmen Square and was defensive. As the U.S. embassy cables themselves noted regarding the reason why soldiers used firearms: “some of the soldiers were forced into firing for self-defence or to protect the lives of their fellow soldiers.” Gregory Clark addressed this in the Japan Times as follows:

[w]e do not have to look much beyond those widely publicised photos of military buses in rows being set on fire by those protesting crowds. To date the world seems to have assumed that those buses were fired by the crowds AFTER the soldiers had started shooting. In fact it was the reverse – the crowds attacked the buses as they entered Beijing, incinerating dozens of soldiers inside, and only then did the shooting begin. Here too we do need not go far to find the evidence – in the not publicised photos of soldiers with horrible burns seeking shelter in nearby houses, and reports of charred corpses being strung from overpasses.

Considering the nature of the attacks on and killings of the soldiers, their responses and those of their commanders were far more proportional and restrained than one would expect of most militaries. This could be attributed to the PLA’s emphasis on political education, and perhaps to commanders’ awareness that the biggest danger militants could pose would be to provoke a disproportionate response. Indeed, the ‘tank man’ video showing a single protestor being allowed to block a tank column could easily have been interpreted as a sign of this restraint. By contrast police and military vehicles in other countries – including on many occasions in the West – were known to drive at high speed into protestors who attempted to block their passage. Clark himself compared the more restrained responses of PLA personnel to attacks with the responses of U.S. forces in Fallujah, Iraq, where despite fewer American personnel being killed the population was forced to endure extremely brutal reprisals.

Regarding the intention to provoke soldiers to target civilian protestors, the most extreme of the protest leaders the 23-year-old Chai Ling, who considered herself the “chief commander” of the radical wing, stated six years later in 1995: “what we are actually hoping for is bloodshed, for the moment when the government has no choice but to brazenly butcher the people. Only when the Square is awash with blood will the people of China open their eyes. Only then will they really be united. But how can I explain any of this to my fellow students?” She referred to those who opposed provoking the government into carrying out such a massacre as “selfish.” The fact that the Chinese population had failed to respond to political events as she had hoped led her to lament: “you, the Chinese, you are not worth my struggle. You are not worth my sacrifice.” Ling attested to the fact that there was a harsh competition for leadership of the protest movement, with the majority calling for better workers’ rights and reduced corruption while a militant minority led by herself called for the government’s overthrow. She was particularly critical of the moderate Beijing Students’ Autonomous Union which represented the more mainstream aspirations of the protest movement.

Ling and other leaders of the protests’ radical wing reportedly worked very closely with Gene Sharp, who was considered America’s leading expert on the exploiting of internal dissent in countries outside the Western sphere of influence to achieve their destabilisation. Sharp arrived in Beijing in May 1989, and the tactics of protestors notably closely mirrored those recommended in his own writings on the subject. This was documented in detail by French scholar Dr. Bertrand M. Roehner, who authored the book Driving Forces in Physical, Biological and Socio-economic Phenomena. Multiple sources, including several foreign governments, indicated that Sharp worked very closely with the CIA and the CIA-linked and U.S. government funded National Endowment for Democracy, and played an important role in similar destabilisation efforts in the Warsaw Pact and European regions of the Soviet Union at the time. He subsequently played important roles in similar efforts targeting Soviet successor states, the Arab world from 2011, and Myanmar and Venezuela later that decade.

Leaders of the protests’ radical wing consistently expressed strongly Western-supremacist sentiments and the strong belief that westernisation was the only way for China to progress. The most notable was Liu Xiaobo, who was much lauded in the West and awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 2010. He praised “100 years of colonialism” in Hong Kong for allegedly improving the territory, and claimed that China needed at least 300 years of Western colonialism imposed on it to be able to advance. His strongly Western supremacist position was hardly new, and as early as 1988 he had stated: “To choose Westernisation is to choose to be human,” while China’s own supposedly inferior culture left the population “wimpy, spineless, and f**ked up.” Liu similarly expressed strong belief in the idea of a Western ‘civilising and democratising mission,’ for example stating regarding the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq:

my support for the invasion of Iraq will not waver. Just as, from the beginning, I believed that the military intervention of Britain and the United States would be victorious, I am still full of belief in the final victory of the Freedom Alliance and the democratic future of Iraq, and even if the armed forces of Britain and the United States should encounter some obstacles such as those that they are currently facing, this belief of mine will not change … a free, democratic and peaceful Iraq will emerge.

The Western war efforts in Korea and Vietnam, the former which was described as genocide against the Korean population by several Western and South Korean scholars, were both strongly praised by Liu. Liu’s stances later won him both substantial funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, as well as considerable support from across the Western world. His statements were hardly isolated, with many of the leadership of the protest’s radical wing expressing similar sentiments. The ideal outcome of the Tiananmen incident, as far as Western interests were concerned, would have been to place China under a new leadership ascribing to such a Western supremacist school of thought. For his statements and his pro-Western activism Liu was widely hailed in the Western world as the “Chinese Nelson Mandela,” ironic as it was since Mandela fought for decades against Western supremacist ideas and systems while Liu was strongly guided by them and advocated for their imposition.

Western involvement in the unrest in China in 1989 extended to information warfare operations targeting the government, the military and the general public. Voice of America (VOA) targeted the People’s Liberation Army by broadcasting to its satellites, and falsely reported several times that military units were turning on each other and the country was collapsing into civil war. The goal appeared to be to sow confusion and panic in the military and government. Shortly after attacks on soldiers began in Beijing, VOA reported that Prime Minister Li Peng had been shot and Deng Xiaoping was nearing death. It increased Chinese language broadcasts to 11 hours daily. VOA’s focus on events in Tiananmen Square were extreme, growing from 20 percent of airtime between May 4 and May 15 to over 80 percent after June 4. Such tactics were hardly unique to operations against China. Two years later during Operation Desert Storm, for example, the U.S. accessed Iraqi military communications to transmit contradictory orders and excessively ludicrous propaganda statements pretending to be the Iraqi leadership in order to disrupt and demoralise the country’s armed forces. Later that year when the USSR disintegrated the U.S. was able to access Soviet military communications to ensure that any attempt to stop pro-Western elements from seizing power could be pre-empted.

Western intelligence operations in China continued after protests disbanded on June 4, the most notable being Operation Yellowbird which was carried out by the CIA and by British agencies. The operation sought to extract the Western assets who had led the radical wing of the protests from China. The close connections many of these figures already had to Western intelligence played an important role in facilitating their extraction, with 15 of the 21 most important assets successfully retrieved and taken to the British colony of Hong Kong.

Yellowbird saw Western intelligence agencies work closely with criminal gangs, the support of which was key to its success, most notably the Sun Yee On triad, which was involved in human trafficking, prostitution, smuggling, extortion, counterfeiting, gambling and narcotics. The criminal organisation was provided with sophisticated equipment and weapons for the operation by the CIA. Known gang members in Hong Kong were also heavily involved in financing Operation Yellowbird. Such organisations across East Asia had long partnered with Western interests as far back as the Opium Wars, and did so increasingly during the Cold War, in part due to fears that communist rule and a much harder line on crime and trafficking would bring an end to their ability to operate.

Extraction teams were sent into the Chinese mainland, reportedly from Hong Kong, equipped night-vision goggles, infrared signallers, encryption devices and makeup to help disguise the assets. Once out of China, the protest leaders were quickly relocated to the West primarily to the U.S. and France. Newsweek described them as the “media darlings of Tiananmen Square,” and their continued operations against the Chinese government from the cities of the countries that had first supported their operations represented a significant Western propaganda coup.

Hailed in the West as ‘Chinese Joan of Arc’ Chai Ling, who had stated her intention to provoke a government massacre of protestors, was among those extracted. For her activities and her prestige as a fighter for westernisation she received two Nobel Peace Prize nominations and an invitation to attend Princeton University, where she studied international relations at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Ling became a fundamentalist Christian, which was publicised in 2009, and she subsequently hosted fundraisers for far-right politicians in the U.S. while her American husband Robert Maginn served as the Chairman of the Massachusetts Republican Party from 2011 to 2013. She testified eight times at the U.S. Congress against the Chinese state. Regarding her vision for a politically westernised China and an end to party rule, Ling stated: “China will definitely have democracy in the future but it will be better than democracy, it will be like heaven. All our tears will be dried. There will be no death or unhappiness.” Her work, she said, was “at all times was motivated and guided by the teachings of Jesus Christ.”

China and the West After Tiananmen Square

With PLA units launching only modest reprisals in response to the militants attacking them from among the protestors, and the military avoiding a fall into disorder, Western intervention to destabilise China fell far short of success. As a result, the country would continue its path towards economic growth, and the ruling party would eventually crack down harder on corruption while raising living standards considerably. China emerged as the world’s largest economy in 2014, and by the end of 2020 had a GDP one sixth larger than that of the United States. Its industries by then were poised to gain dominance in many key areas of high tech ranging from artificial intelligence to 5G. In contrast the Soviet Union, which in 1989 had been several decades ahead of China in its high tech and economic development, was successfully destabilised two years later leading to its balkanisation, a 45 percent contraction in the post-Soviet Russian economy, the loss of much its industrial base, a crash in life expectancy and skyrocketing poverty rates. The result was millions of deaths and the trafficking of hundreds of thousands of women into slavery in Western Europe and the U.S. during the 1990s. In the Cold War’s immediate aftermath, the possibility of a balkanisation of China into smaller states was being openly discussed in the West as such a process was underway in the Soviet Union. In the USSR’s case this led to Soviet successor states devoting much of their energies over the next three decades to fighting one another after having formerly been united as a single superpower, which left Western hegemony unchallenged.

The unrest of 1989 thus marked a decisive turning point in China’s history in which the country avoided a very dark fate, and resulted in the deposition of Zhao Ziyang who was accused of having openly sided with pro-Western elements in the protest movement. Some analysts, such as international relations scholar Hal Brands, interpreted June 1989 as the beginning of a new phase in China’s relations with the West – a Cold War which would intensify with time as Western rhetoric towards Beijing changed drastically. Brands claimed in 2019 that 1989 highlighted “fundamental political differences at the heart of today’s U.S.-China competition,” and served as an “early notice” that China was not going to westernise its political system as Soviet Bloc communist states had. Indeed, three decades later when China had comfortably surpassed the U.S. in GDP, in spending on military acquisitions, and in scientific publications, among several other key metrics, hardliners in Washington such as former CIA Director Mike Pompeo lamented Western complacency in 1989. Using the fabricated Tiananmen massacre as a pretext, many contended the West should have taken much more aggressive actions to snuff China out as a challenger to Western power when it was much weaker.

The Tiananmen incident closely coincided with multiple Western interventions across the communist world targeting states in the Warsaw Pact and Yugoslavia, which in most cases relied not on military action but rather on new information warfare capabilities and on cultivation and support for pro-Western paramilitary units. When China remained stable, however, the West managed to salvage a public relations victory by referring to a purported one-sided massacre of student protestors which never happened to vilify Beijing – an atrocity fabrication for propaganda purposes. The alleged massacre would continue to be used as a pretext to pursue limited hostile policies against China including economic sanctions, arms embargoes, the suspension of World Bank and Asian Development Bank loans, and cancellation of many investment projects. Beijing was nevertheless able to leverage Western private sector interests, which in contrast to Western nations’ geopolitical interests were leading major firms to push for a normalisation of ties, to quickly resume trade and have most sanctions lifted. The ludicrous potential of access to Chinese markets and to its workforce provided this leverage. Canada, which took the hardest line on the issue, maintained sanctions for four years but was eventually forced to relax them as it remained an outlier even among Western countries. Chinese sources also perceived that Britain used claims of a massacre in Tiananmen Square as a pretext to renege on bilateral understandings relating to the return of the colony of Hong Kong to Beijing.

Memorial services were held across the Western world commemorating those who had supposedly been slaughtered fighting for westernisation in Tiananmen Square – a self-congratulatory narrative which both vilified the East Asian enemy and placed Western values and the Western political system on a pedestal. Much like the forced defections of Korean War prisoners to Western-aligned states (see Chapter 2), this was repeatedly reemphasised in the West to convey the narrative of a Chinese government at odds with the best interests of its population – and a Western world which stood with the Chinese people and represented their future hopes and aspirations. Regular references to the clashes of June 1989 cast an aura of notoriety on the most central location in Beijing, subtly reminding the world ‘what kind of country’ China was with the incident widely referred to in Western media on June 4 every year. Propagation of the myth of a massacre was key to shaping Western and global public perceptions of the post-Cold War world order and casting China, and those others which failed to westernise their political systems, firmly as the villains. The alleged Tiananmen Square massacre thus formed the core of a new metanarrative surrounding China for a new era of post-Cold War relations.

For well over a decade the alleged Tiananmen massacre provided a key reference point for discussions surrounding China whenever the country made headlines. Before and during U.S. President Bill Clinton’s trip to Beijing in 1998, for example, the New York Post referred to the square as “the site of the student slaughter.” USA Today and the Wall Street Journal referred to Tiananmen the following day as the place “where pro-democracy demonstrators were gunned down,” and to the “Tiananmen Square massacre” where armed troops killed “hundreds or more.” A Baltimore Sun front page headline referred to “Tiananmen, where Chinese students died.” During the 2008 Beijing summer Olympics, when international media was in China’s capital, Tiananmen Square was referred to by Western reporters as China’s “blackened heart” – supposedly a symbol of Chinese malice which Western voices widely claimed overshadowed an almost perfectly executed Olympic games.

As observed in the Japan Times in July 2008:

With the Beijing Olympics looming we see more attempts to remind the world about the alleged June 4, 1989, massacre of democracy-seeking students in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. The New York Times, which did so much to spread the original story of troops shooting student protesters there with abandon, has recently published several more articles condemning the alleged massacre, including one suggesting there should be an Olympic walkout. Other media, including Britain’s usually impartial Guardian and Independent, and Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald, have chimed in. None are interested in publishing rebuttals. This effort is impressive, especially considering the overwhelming evidence that there was no Tiananmen Square massacre…. Damage from the Tiananmen myth continues.

Such efforts by Western news outlets to keep the story alive and evoke it to shape perceptions of China would only increase in the 2010s as the Barak Obama administration’s Pivot to Asia initiative fuelled greater tensions with Beijing and made countering China a primary foreign policy priority. Time, for example, framed the incident on its 40th anniversary in 2019 as: “Beijing’s bloody showdown with democracy” – directly contradicting information declassified since by stating “the massacre at Tiananmen killed hundreds, possibly thousands.” This was highly representative of the predominant trend in Western coverage. By the early 2020s, as Sino-U.S. relations reached lows not seen since the 1960s, art commemorating Tiananmen Square became increasingly common in the West. Examples from New York City alone ranged from the gay romance Tiananmen Requiem which opened in March 2022 to Broadway’s Tiananmen: A New Musical which premiered the following year.

The alleged slaughter in Tiananmen Square has for decades been characterised in the West as a manifestation of the nature of the Chinese government, and as showing an almost unique level of depravity in the country. This characterisation bore a very strong contrast to the way clashes between authorities and protestors or rioters were covered when they occurred in countries more closely aligned with Western interests. A notable example was the deployment of the U.S. Military during the 1960s to suppress peaceful student protesters, at times killing them. American students had not lynched soldiers, thrown firebombs at military vehicles or torched public property, and no soldiers were killed or harmed – the violence was totally one-sided. While the alleged massacre in Tiananmen Square was consistently closely associated with the intrinsic nature of the Chinese state, no remotely similar associations were made with the very real student killings in America.

Another notable example was the South Korean government’s well documented military action to suppress the Gwangju student uprising in May 1980, in which the U.S. Military was heavily complicit and which saw a death toll estimated at between 1000 and 2000. While there had been no serious attacks on police or security forces to provoke the use of deadly force, Western media and political leaders largely turned a blind eye. In Venezuela nine days of protests beginning on February 27, 1989, saw hundreds and by some estimates several thousand protestors killed, although with a Western-aligned government having been responsible the incident was scarcely mentioned in Western press. In India the police’s mishandling of riots in Bihar in 1989 caused an estimated 1000 deaths, which also received little coverage in the West. This trend towards Western sources strongly downplaying massacres in friendly states went back decades, a notable example being in 1961 when French police fired on and killed an estimated 300 peaceful protestors without provocation in Paris. The Paris police chief who ordered it was subsequently promoted and awarded the Légion d’Honneur, while police archives were sealed to anyone looking to investigate until the 1990s. In sharp contrast to Tiananmen, Western media outlets such as Time and the Washington Post strongly downplayed the massacre as it was perpetrated by a Western country.

Had there been unrest in Beijing just five years prior when China was a valued partner against the Soviet Union, Western actors would have been far less likely to capitalise on it to promote destabilisation and vilify the Chinese state. Even a massacre, had one occurred just a few years earlier, would have likely received minimal coverage much like clashes in Gwangju, Paris or Caracas. It was only due to the Cold War’s end that destabilising China and fabricating narratives that vilified the country again aligned with Western interests.

Chapter Four The Gulf War

Iraq as the New Adversary

On August 2, 1990, the Ba’athist Republic of Iraq launched a full-scale invasion of its southern neighbour the State of Kuwait in what proved to be one of the most consequential military actions in modern Middle Eastern history. Multiple factors influenced Baghdad’s decision, with the country under the presidency of Saddam Hussein from 1979 having spent eight of the past eleven years at war with its neighbour to the east, the Islamic Republic of Iran, after invading in 1980. The war had exhausted Iraq’s substantial foreign reserves of almost $100 billion, and by 1990 its economy was in dire straits with a combination of crashing oil prices and Iranian strikes on its infrastructure having lowered annual oil revenues from $26 billion to just $10 billon. Thus when Kuwait repeatedly far exceeded OPEC oil production quotas despite repeated Iraqi warnings and requests, with the effect of driving prices down, the resulting Iraqi losses seriously impeded post-war recovery and were annually equivalent to the entire budget deficit of Iraq’s oil-reliant economy. While Baghdad repeatedly alleged this was part of a Kuwaiti-American economic conspiracy against it, it also accused Kuwait of horizontal drilling to steal its oil, and of blocking access to the sea by holding Iraqi-claimed islands. Kuwait’s inflexibility over its oil policies and territorial disputes, despite repeated warnings, was seen by King Fahd of Saudi Arabia among other regional leaders to have brought the invasion on itself, with Riyadh having urged its neighbour to be more accommodating.

Kuwait had the Middle East’s fourth largest oil reserves at an estimated 94 billion barrels, and Iraq initially planned to use its invasion to install a friendly client government in power much as the U.S. had done recently in Grenada in 1983 and in Panama just eight months prior in December 1989. With the invasions of Kuwait, Grenada and Panama being almost identical in the kind of international crimes they represented, it was argued by some analysts that by its illegal and unprovoked actions the U.S. had diminished the post-Second World War taboo against crimes of aggression against one’s smaller neighbours and set an international precedent on which Iraq then acted. Much as installing a U.S. client state in Panama was seen in Washington to be necessary to ensure favourable access to the strategically vital Panama Canal, Iraq planned to install a client government in Kuwait which would presumably reduce oil production to within OPEC quotas and invest more of its revenues in Iraq. Kuwait was also expected to agree to a resolution of territorial disputes over the strategically located Bubiyan and Warba islands that was favourable to Baghdad.

With Soviet influence in the Middle East having been in decline for over a decade Iraq remained the only major power in the region outside the Western sphere of influence. Its close security ties with the USSR and China, highly tense relations with Western-aligned Israel, and unpredictable leadership, led it to be seen as a potential challenger to Western interests. With the Cold War over and Iran successfully contained, crushing Iraq’s military and economy would mark a key turning point in regional order, returning it to the pre-Cold War status quo of near unchallenged Western hegemony. Following the USSR’s effective withdrawal from its prior role of containing Western power, demonstrating America and its allies’ ability to project force on a tremendous scale into the territories of countries across the world would also send a message of unchallenged strength with the potential to transform global order.

According to U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff General Michael J. Dugan, President George H. W. Bush intended to go to war with Iraq almost as soon as he heard Kuwait had been invaded, and quickly announced plans for an air campaign which would concentrate on targeting Iraqi population centres. Dugan was dismissed from his post a few days after his revelations. Thus while Iraq initially announced plans on August 5 that it had begun its withdrawal from Kuwait, the announcement on August 8 that the U.S. was deploying its own forces near Iraq’s borders, including unprecedentedly to neighbouring Saudi Arabia, led Baghdad to reverse its plans. Kuwait was instead formally annexed into Iraq on August 28, with the territory expected to be used as leverage to gain Western security guarantees, or to otherwise serve as a buffer zone between Iraq and the Western military contingent in the Gulf in the face of possible attacks.

Opportunities for a mediated settlement over Kuwait were notably consistently rejected by Washington on the basis that they would legitimise the Iraqi government, despite Baghdad repeatedly indicating a willingness withdraw and restore Kuwaiti sovereignty. Iraq’s key condition for withdrawing was that it would be guaranteed that it would not come under Western attack afterwards. As President Hussein informed former British Prime Minister Edward Heath when asked to withdraw Iraqi forces from Kuwait: “But what guarantee will you give me that if I pull out of Kuwait, the Americans and the British won’t come in with forces and be in a better position to bomb me and my country than they are at the moment; to attack us from Kuwait instead of Saudi Arabia?”

An offer on August 7 proposed that in return for security guarantees Iraq would fully withdraw, reinstate the Kuwaiti monarchy, reach an agreement with Washington for all matters pertaining to oil, and later even to sign a non-aggression pact with Kuwait. Washington’s response indicated it saw there was little to discuss. In part as a result it was widely assessed that the U.S. sought to have Iraq remain in Kuwait so as to provide a pretext for military action. As noted in a publication by the U.S. National Security Archive regarding efforts by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to mediate a peace deal: “the United States saw Gorbachev’s efforts to work out a peaceful solution as a problem and a nuisance. At that moment Washington was concerned that Saddam might actually comply with U.N. resolutions, which would undermine the grounds for [the military operation] Desert Storm.” A peaceful resolution was not seen to be in Washington’s interest. The U.S. instead quickly took an uncompromising position and called for the removal of Saddam Hussein as Iraqi president and the disbanding of the Iraqi Military as preconditions for a peaceful settlement. Baghdad expressed a strong willingness to enter negotiations with the assistance of the Arab League, the USSR and even America’s ally France, but having alienated its neighbours over the previous decade it was isolated on the international stage. The Cold War’s end and Soviet Union’s effective capitulation to the West enabled the U.S. and its allies to take an unprecedentedly hard line, guaranteeing much greater freedom to launch military strikes in the Middle East than at any time since the colonial era.

While Baghdad persisted that it needed security guarantees if it was to withdraw from Kuwait, the U.S. was expected to press for Iraq’s full disarmament of strategic military assets even if Iraqi forces withdrew. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who played a key role in lobbying Washington to take military action, insisted that it was vital to destroy Iraq’s military and likely all of its industrial potential. “No one should interfere with that objective,” she declared to Soviet KGB Director Yevgeni Primakov. When asked: “so you see no other option but war?,” she replied with a definite “no.” Former State Secretary Henry Kissinger informed the Senate Armed Services Committee on November 28 that “any solution to the crisis must provide for a reduction of Iraq‘s offensive capability…. Without addressing this fundamental imbalance, a solution will only postpone, and probably exacerbate, and eventual resolution of Gulf instability.” His views were seen as a guide to American thinking, although they were less hardline and those of President Bush and his Secretary of State James Baker. President Bush similarly alluded to ensuring the Iraqi leader could not “keep his military power” as a key objective, as neutralising the country increasingly became a goal in and of itself regardless of the status of Kuwait.

There was little doubt anywhere in the world that Iraq’s invasion and annexation of another UN member state was illegal, and that Kuwait’s population was worse off under occupation than it had been beforehand. This was far from sufficient, however, to gain support globally or even among Western populations for a military campaign against Iraq – particularly considering that Baghdad was offering to withdraw its forces with very limited conditions. A country invading its neighbour halfway across the world was hardly enough to sufficiently vilify it in the U.S. – particularly considering that America had launched full scale invasions of its own neighbours twice in the past decade including one just months before.

Media in the West had for decades focused on vilification of Communism, of Soviet peoples as an ‘Asiatic Menace’ and ‘Red Terror,’ and at times on Chinese, Vietnamese and North Koreans as an ‘Asiatic Horde’ that threatened the Western world. Preceding this Japan had been the target for demonisation – ranging from papers in leading scientific journals examining alleged Japanese ethnic inferiority to posters depicting its population as insects and rats, in the context of portrayals of the war as a racial and civilisational clash between East and West. The Arab world, by contrast, had seen little attention in Western media as an ‘enemy’ figure. Arab jihadists employing terrorist tactics were largely aligned with Western interests and received considerable Western support in their campaign against the Soviet-aligned Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, and subsequently against the Soviet Union. By the 1980s a large majority of Arab governments were aligned with Western interests, with Libya being the only state to receive significant negative coverage in Western media. Few in the U.S. had heard of Iraq before 1990, and those who had knew of it politically mainly as on the ‘good side’ working with the ‘free world’ to contain the ‘evil’ Iranian revolutionary government. Indeed, under Saddam Hussein’s leadership which began in 1979 Iraq’s relations with the West had improved significantly as Baghdad distanced itself the USSR and Soviet-backed Syria.

For war against Iraq efforts were made not only to portray the country as a significant threat, but also to vilify both the Iraqi government and the general population by presenting Iraqi forces as committing a wave of extreme atrocities. Western efforts to cast Iraq as both an imminent threat and a uniquely depraved actor relied very heavily on fabricated claims that had little basis in the reality of the situation on the ground. The Bush administration and its partners made the case that if Kuwait was allowed to fall permanently, Iraq would subsequently launch invasions across the Middle East. Resembling a key argument for the Vietnam War, this was essentially a Middle Eastern iteration of the ‘domino theory.’ As noted in the Christian Science Monitor in 2002, a key part of the first Bush administration’s case “was that an Iraqi juggernaut was also threatening to roll into Saudi Arabia. Citing top-secret satellite images, Pentagon officials estimated in mid-September that up to 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks stood on the border, threatening the key U.S. oil supplier.” Nothing less than a quarter of a million Iraqi troops, battle hardened from an invasion of Iran and with heavy armour supporting them, amassed on the border of the world’s largest oil exporter, appeared very menacing. Like many aspects of the propaganda campaign, however, it turned out to have no basis in reality.

Claims of Iraqi forces massed on Saudi Arabia’s borders provided the pretext for the first major deployments of U.S. ground units to the Gulf region – which in turn influenced Baghdad to keep its forces in Kuwait where it had previously stated that it would withdraw after a new pro-Iraqi client government was installed. Reporter Jean Heller from the Florida-based St. Petersburg Times obtained commercial satellite images of the Saudi-Kuwaiti border at the exact same time and location that Washington claimed American intelligence had found the large Iraqi force. The images showed nothing but empty desert, which substantiated Saddam Hussein’s personal claim that Iraqi forces were all deployed far from the Saudi border to prevent any misunderstandings and as a guarantee of the kingdom’s security. Heller contacted the office of Defence Secretary Dick Cheney “for evidence refuting the Times’ photos or analysis offering to hold the story if proven wrong,” but received none. As noted in the Christian Science Monitor, the Iraqi build-up on Saudi Arabia’s borders “was the whole justification for Bush sending troops in there, and it just didn’t exist.” The Saudi leadership was itself sceptical of U.S. claims, with its armed forces detecting no Iraqi presence near its border.

It mattered not where hundreds of thousands of Iraqi personnel really were, but where Washington and major Western media outlets said they were, with this seemingly imminent threat providing sufficient pretext to quickly involve the U.S. and a growing coalition of its security partners in the Gulf. Iraqi control of Saudi and Kuwaiti oil, it was said, would allow it to deny the West the supplies it needed and would place Baghdad in a position to sway global oil prices. Thus much as Imperial Japan 50 years prior had seen a Western oil embargo as a reason to go to war, the United States now portrayed itself as being at risk of a similar crisis if it did not act quickly. According to President Bush, guarding the safe supply of oil was a major cause for the initial U.S. deployments to the Gulf, with Trade Representative Carla Hills subsequently stating that the following campaign to restore the Kuwaiti monarchy was necessary “to guarantee the right to import oil.” The claim of a threat to oil supplies, however, was itself based on the lie that Iraqi deployments reflected an intent to invade Saudi Arabia.

Complementing the portrayal of an Iraqi threat, and playing a much more significant role in swaying Western and global opinion, an intensive months-long propaganda campaign by Western media outlets, officials and various non-government organisations made allegations of gruesome Iraqi atrocities. The Washington Post, for example, reported that Iraqi soldiers were “attacking Kuwaiti civilians with axes, raping women and hanging mutilated body parts of slain victims in the streets of Kuwait City.” Only after the war’s end did it become apparent that these kinds of reports, lacking corroboration and often citing sources with obvious incentives to exaggerate or outright fabricate claims, were far removed from reality. Such reports nevertheless successfully recast Iraq’s overseas image within a very short period. Western coverage and discourse in many ways resembled that of 1942 against Japan, that of 1950 against North Korea and China, and that of the early 1980s against Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. The most prominent atrocities circulated by Western media and verified by Western officials, which served to foster significant anti-Iraqi sentiments, turned out to be fabrications.

From British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Clairborne Pell, Saddam Hussein was very widely likened to a new Adolf Hitler in the West. President Bush claimed he was “even worse than Hitler.” U.S. print media notably likened Hussein to Hitler 1,035 separate times. This almost cliché description for any serious Western adversary continued to be used from the 1950s well into the 21st century, from Egypt’s President Nasser and Iran’s Supreme Leaders Khomeini and Khamenei to North Korean President Kim Jong Un and Chinese President Xi Jinping among over a dozen other examples. Invading Kuwait alone, however, was far from sufficient to vilify Hussein to the ‘Hitler level’ in the eyes of Western publics, which would require several months of concerted reports portraying mass atrocities against the Kuwaiti population. Pressing such a narrative to demonise the country had very significant implications for the Iraqi population. Every Iraqi soldier became a “Saddam Hussein soldier,” Iraqi industries became “Saddam’s factories,” and the Iraqi Army became “Saddam’s Army.” This served not only to dehumanise Iraqis, but also to facilitate much harsher measures against their country, with such extreme personification of a country in the figure of a vilified leader becoming increasingly common in Western propaganda in the decades following the Gulf War.

The Story of Slaughtered Incubator Babies Paves the Way to War

Among the multiple narratives vilifying Iraq, the one which had the strongest impact and gained especially strong endorsement from prominent political figures was the claim that Iraqi military personnel had taken babies out of incubators at Kuwaiti hospitals and left them to die on the floors. The claim was most famously made as part of a highly emotional testimony before the U.S. Congressional Human Rights Caucus on October 10, 1990, by a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl who identified only as Nayirah. Her family name was not revealed on the basis that it could invite reprisals against relatives still in Kuwait. Nayirah was in fact the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, Saud al-Sabah, as the Senators who sponsored her hearings well knew, and she had not been in Kuwait since the Iraqi invasion. The entire story, it emerged after the Gulf War was over, was false.

Nayirah’s allegations were backed and strongly endorsed by Western media outlets, human rights organisations and political figures. The story was described as President Bush’s “favoured symbol of Iraqi vileness” which he referred to repeatedly both leading up to and during war – a reminder for both Western publics and the wider world of who the ‘good side’ and ‘bad side’ were and why extreme measures against Iraq were justified. The testimony, echoed in multiple reports across Western media and in strong rhetoric from key political figures, played a particularly central role in building consensus both in the Western world and globally for decisive military action against Iraq.

The Nayirah testimony was far from isolated, with Western news outlets citing a wide range of sources which made the very same claims long before the Kuwaiti girl spoke on Capitol Hill. On September 5, 35 days before the testimony was given, the London-based Daily Telegraph reported citing Kuwaiti sources: “babies in the premature unit of one hospital had been removed from their incubators so that these, too, could be carried off” – taken to Iraq as war loot. On September 7 the same story from Reuters, which was also based in London, was re-reported by the Los Angeles Times, which marked the first time it reached the U.S. It cited Americans who had escaped stating that Iraqis were: “taking hospital equipment, babies out of incubators. Life-support systems are turned off…. They are even removing traffic lights … the Iraqis are beating Kuwaitis, torturing them, knifing them, beating them, cutting their ears off if they are caught resisting or are with the [Kuwaiti] army or police.” They described people stranded in Kuwait as “begging” for U.S. forces to launch a military intervention to save them. The fact that Reuters and the Times allowed sources to remain anonymous and give testimony with a total lack of evidence was seen by some as highly suspicious, and was described by one analyst as “a serious breach of one of the few ironclad rules of journalism.” While the origin of the incubator babies atrocity fabrication appeared to be Britain, it was subsequently expanded on considerably in the U.S. to form the heart of the public understanding of what kind of country Iraq was.

Reports by a number of news outlets were themselves far from enough to sufficiently reshape perceptions of Iraq, and it was thus necessary as part of the next stage in escalation of the narrative that Nayirah spoke at Congressional Human Rights Caucus. The caucus provided the ideal setting, and since it was not officially a committee of the U.S. Congress the legal accoutrements that would usually deter a witness from knowingly providing false testimony were not in place. While lying under oath was a very serious crime in front of a congressional committee, in front of the less formal human rights caucus the testifying party could not be held accountable.

The leading orchestrator of the Nayirah testimony was the Washington D.C. based public relations committee the Citizens for a Free Kuwait (CFK), which was heavily funded by the exiled Kuwaiti government. CFK worked closely with the public relations firm Hill+Knowlton to influence world opinion against Iraq, and more specifically to gain support for U.S. military action against the country. Public relations efforts included producing propaganda videos depicting life under Iraqi occupation, organising a ‘Kuwait Information Day’ on college campuses, having churches observe a national day of prayer for Kuwait, and even having September 24th declared ‘Free Kuwait Day’ in thirteen American states.

Hill+Knowlton was the largest and widely considered the most influential public relations firm in Washington at the time, and conducted a $1 million study with the goal of ascertaining how best to shape public opinion in favour of supporting action against Iraq. The study was based on focus groups and was conducted by Withington Groups – a leading provider of such services. It found that a strong emphasis on atrocities in particular would be most effective, giving specific details on the kind of story which would have the most powerful impact on public opinion. The public relations campaign conducted by Hill+Knowlton was later found to have cost approximately $12 million – over $24 million if valued in 2022 dollars. The firm coached Nayirah on how to give her testimony and wrote the script which she recited in the address to the Human Rights Caucus.

The testimony given two months after the Iraqi invasion read as follows:

Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee, my name is Nayirah and I just came out of Kuwait. My mother and I were in Kuwait on August 2nd for a peaceful summer holiday. My older sister had a baby on July 29th and we wanted to spend some time in Kuwait with her.

I only pray that none of my 10th grade classmates had a summer vacation like I did. I may have wished sometimes that I can be an adult, that I could grow up quickly. What I saw happening to the children of Kuwait and to my country has changed my life forever, has changed the life of all Kuwaitis, young and old, mere children or more.

My sister with my five-day-old nephew travelled across the desert to safety. There is no milk available for the baby in Kuwait. They barely escaped when their car was stuck in the desert sand and help came from Saudi Arabia.

I stayed behind and wanted to do something for my country. The second week after invasion, I volunteered at the Al Dar Hospital with 12 other women who wanted to help as well. I was the youngest volunteer. The ‘other’ women were from 20 to 30 years old.

While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators and left the children to die on the cold floor. It was horrifying. I could not help but think of my nephew who was born premature and might have died that day as well. After I left the hospital, some of my friends and I distributed flyers condemning the Iraqi invasion until we were warned we might be killed if the Iraqis saw us.

The Iraqis have destroyed everything in Kuwait. They stripped the supermarkets of food, the pharmacies of medicine, the factories of medical supplies, ransacked their houses and tortured neighbours and friends.

I saw and talked to a friend of mine after his torture and release by the Iraqis. He is 22 but he looked as though he could have been an old man. The Iraqis dunked his head into a swimming pool until he almost drowned. They pulled out his fingernails and then played electric shocks to sensitive private parts of his body. He was lucky to survive.

If an Iraqi soldier is found dead in the neighbourhood, they burn to the ground all the houses in the general vicinity and would not let firefighters come until the only ash and rubble was left.

The Iraqis were making fun of President Bush and verbally and physically abusing my family and me on our way out of Kuwait. We only did so because life in Kuwait became unbearable. They have forced us to hide, burn or destroy everything identifying our country and our government.

I want to emphasise that Kuwait is our mother and the Emir our father. We repeated this on the roofs of our houses in Kuwait until the Iraqis began shooting at us, and we shall repeat it again. I am glad I am 15, old enough to remember Kuwait before Saddam Hussein destroyed it and young enough to rebuild it

Thank you.

Hill+Knowlton was highly effective in ensuring that the hearing received maximum coverage. The firm sent its own crew to film the testimony and sent out a video news release to MediaLink which served 700 television stations across the U.S., with portions of the testimony on ABC News alone reaching an estimated 35–53 million Americans that night. The Congressional Panel to which it was given notably did not demand any kind of proof, with the emotional account widely accepted both in the United States and overseas. Nayirah’s testimony proved to have a pivotal effect on public opinion, with co-chairman of the Human Rights Caucus Representative John Porter stating that in his eight years of service on the Caucus he had never heard of such “brutality and inhumanity and sadism” as that which the Iraqis were allegedly committing.

Complementing atrocity fabrication efforts Hill+Knowlton also made considerable efforts to present the Kuwaiti political system to members of Congress as one with commonalities with those of the West, and thereby invoke ideological support for its deposed semi-constitutional monarchy and for a war to restore it to power. Congressmen Tom Lantos and John E. Porter notably had close ties to Hill+Knowlton and received $50,000 from CFK as donations to the private group, the Congressional Human Rights Foundation, which they had themselves founded, as well as free office space at Hill+Knowlton’s Washington headquarters. Such donations in exchange for political favours were hardly an unheard of practice, with multiple political figures receiving generous contributions to various charitable or human rights foundations associated with them in exchange for actions that advantaged the donors. These practices became more widely known two decades later under the Barack Obama administration due to the relationship between State Secretary Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation.

The New York Times would note in 1992 regarding how special interest groups could influence specific parts of the U.S. Congress, citing the Nayirah case with Congressmen Lantos and Porter as an example:

dubious financial dealings of the House caucus system. Unlike Congressional committees, which act on legislation, the caucuses bring together like-minded members to highlight issues like human rights abuses, the environment and minority concerns. Current rules prohibit the caucuses from accepting private donations or government grants. But the caucuses often have close ties to companion nonprofit ‘foundations’ or ‘institutes’ that attract funds from special interests. Caucus leaders often play a central role in these foundations.

The Times further drew attention to some of the material benefits which senators could gain from accepting the funds being offered by various interest groups which were seeking favours in return. Other officials were similarly targeted, with a separate case seeing officials including former U.S. ambassador to Bahrain, Sam H. Zakhem, found to have taken $7.7 million in Kuwaiti money to help build public support in America for military action against Iraq. Zakhem and others ran front businesses from August 1990 to influence public opinion, although further details on how they did so were not given.

Congressmen Lantos and Porter not only helped to conceal the identity of Nayirah when she testified, but also sponsored the congressional hearings on Iraqi atrocities. These in turn formed the heart of a public relations campaign against Iraq under the guise of concern over human rights abuses. Had these hearings not been sponsored, or had the nature of Nayirah’s testimony not been concealed from the outset, public and world opinion toward Iraq would have almost certainly been very different. Manipulation of public opinion in such a way, in turn, was key to facilitating moves to sanction and later to make war on Iraq. As award winning former Wall Street Journal reporter and president of Harper’s Magazine John R. MacArthur observed: “it was all part of a campaign to turn Saddam Hussein, at least in the public consciousness, into Adolf Hitler. And the feeling was that they couldn’t sell the Gulf War without this. In other words, they had to cheat to win … if he’s a baby killer then, reasonable people can disagree about how to enforce international law, how to prevent countries from invading other countries, but we have to draw the line at baby killing.”

Executive director of Middle East Watch Andrew Whitley, who participated in an investigation in post-war Kuwait that visited multiple hospitals, stated regarding the effect that the narrative of Iraqis slaughtering incubator babies had:

I think the impact was enormous. I think it was a story which had been treated as one [in] which Iraq was capable of any depravity. Most of the incubators which had apparently been stolen had been stored away. When we went to the maternity hospital we saw that there was an entire wing which had been stripped and they had been put away into a storeroom … it was a major lie. I don’t believe there was any truth in fact as to Iraqis having deliberately systematically removed babies from incubators in order to steal them. And I think it made a major impact on public opinion in this country.

The centrality of the incubator story, as one of many alleged Iraqi atrocities which were being continually reported and re-reported by Western media sources, NGOs and political figures, was attested to on 60 Minutes as follows: “There was plenty of evidence of Iraqi brutality, but the incubator story became almost a rallying cry. It has Presidential confirmation and the confirmation of Amnesty International, which published a report after Nayirah testified, quoting her and claiming 312 babies were killed when Iraqi troops pulled them from their incubators.” This extreme claim was reportedly more than the actual number of incubators in all of Kuwait City’s hospitals. Prominent American scholar Tom Regan, writing for the Christian Science Monitor, recalled regarding the powerful effects Nayirah’s testimony had on public opinion:

More than 10 years later, I can still recall my brother Sean’s face. It was bright red. Furious. Not one given to fits of temper, Sean was in an uproar. He was a father, and he had just heard that Iraqi soldiers had taken scores of babies out of incubators in Kuwait City and left them to die. The Iraqis had shipped the incubators back to Baghdad. A pacifist by nature, my brother was not in a peaceful mood that day. ‘We’ve got to go and get Saddam Hussein. Now,’ he said passionately. I completely understood his feelings. Although I had no family of my own then, who could countenance such brutality? The news of the slaughter had come at a key moment in the deliberations about whether the U.S. would invade Iraq. Those who watched the non-stop debates on TV saw that many of those who had previously wavered on the issue had been turned into warriors by this shocking incident.

The next stage in strengthening the narrative involved Western human rights organisations, which from 1990 would increasingly emerge as a key tool in atrocity fabrication efforts. The perceived credibility of these organisations, which presented themselves as having no connection to any government or political agenda and working impartially for the interests of humanity, was a major asset to efforts to lend weight to both media reports and Nayirah’s testimony. The most prominent Western human rights organisation at the time, London-based NGO Amnesty International, publicised multiple independent reports which claimed Iraqi personnel had indeed carried out such killings.

Amnesty was the first in the world to produce publications which claimed to independently verify what Nayirah had said. Amnesty published a report on December 19 which played a vital role in further escalating the demonisation of Iraq, stating that Iraqi troops “left 300 premature babies to die after stealing their incubators.” It claimed to have talked to several doctors and nurses who “gave details of the deaths of 300 babies removed from incubators in hospitals by Iraqi troops and left to die on cold floors.” The NGO further declared that it had “substantial information on the extent of the killings.” The report was said to have given the story “the ring of authority because it carried Amnesty’s imprimatur,” thereby giving the claim of Iraqi soldiers slaughtering babies “a quantum leap in public relations terms.” Amnesty’s U.S. executive director, John Healy, gave testimony to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on January 8 confirming the story.

Amnesty further claimed that Iraqi forces were committing castration, rape, mass executions and mass torture. The British source, held in high regard as a global champion of human rights, gave much credibility to the growing narrative against Iraq and, through false portrayals extreme Iraqi barbarism, greatly contributed to building widespread public and political support for military action. Amnesty International had worked closely with British and U.S. intelligence agencies in the past, and published multiple reports in the lead up to the war to similar effect citing a range of sources. The British NGO worked to form an impression that its claims had left little room for doubt and were fully verified.

The Nayirah testimony was widely cited by senators in speeches urging public support for the war. President Bush repeated the story at least ten times in his public statements over the following weeks, which was itself a testament to the importance of the alleged Iraqi atrocities as the cornerstone in the case for war against the country. He used particularly emphatic language such as “babies pulled from incubators and scattered like firewood across the floor.” On January 10, 1991, as the U.S. Senate voted to authorise military action against Iraq, seven senators cited Nayirah’s testimony in speeches backing the use of force, with some quoting Amnesty’s report on incubator babies word-for-word. The authorisation notably passed by just five votes, 57:42, leading many to conclude after stories of Iraqi atrocities were later debunked that they had proven decisive and provided the Bush administration with the bare majority it needed. As the New York Times noted, the Nayirah testimony “created a furore that helped convince several Senators to vote in favour of authorising military action against Iraq.”

Allegations of mass infanticide were part of a far larger media campaign in the Western world demonising Iraq and were placed at the centre of efforts to build a consensus for war using human rights precisely because focus groups found they were expected to move public opinion the most. There were numerous other examples of alleged atrocities, and Western media outlets very often uncritically reproduced stories sourced from Hill+Knowlton which complemented the Nayirah story and made it appear part of a wider trend of Iraqi barbarism. President Bush, for one, spoke on Thanksgiving Day 1990 of other stories including “mass hangings” and “kids shot for failing to display the photos of Saddam Hussein,” comparing Iraqi conduct to “the days of the slave trade.” He further warned of a potential Iraqi nuclear menace and compared a policy of non-intervention against Baghdad to appeasing Nazi Germany.

Aziz Abu-Hamad from Middle East Watch stated on January 6 regarding the coverage of the conflict in both the U.S. and in U.S.-aligned Arab states:

In August, while I was in Saudi Arabia, I reported to MEW [Middle East Watch] how the leading Saudi daily, Al-Riyadh, published on its front page photographs of four children who had died of thirst while trying to cross the border from Kuwait. It turned out that the story was bogus and so were the photographs, as the newspaper had to admit a week later. Saudi, Kuwaiti, and Egyptian newspapers are full of similar stories. So are U.S. papers. Many prominent Kuwaitis had been reported dead before I left for Saudi Arabia in mid-October, but I was surprised to find them alive and well in the Kuwaiti Popular Conference. For example the L.A. Times reported [on October] that Dr. Abdul al-Sumait, a senior official of the Red Crescent, had been killed and his mutilated body was thrown in front of his house. Dr. al-Sumait is also alive and well. When he is not on public relations tours for the Kuwaiti cause, he shares offices with the Kuwait government-in-exile. He is also the source of much of AI’s [Amnesty International’s] information on incubators.

Regarding the importance of the Kuwaiti incubator story in particular, among multiple accounts of Iraqi atrocities, John MacArthur noted: “The significance of the baby incubator story in the larger propaganda campaign against Saddam Hussein and for the war option cannot be underestimated. Without it, the comparison of Hussein with Hitler loses its lustre; to make the case effectively, one had to prove Hussein’s utter depravity.” MacArthur notably recalled a later meeting with the American-educated head of Citizens for a Free Kuwait, Hassan al-Ebraheem, who alongside U.S. public relations firms put out stories alleging gruesome Iraqi atrocities. Although they were thinly evidenced or even totally unevidenced, they had a major impact on public opinion in America. MacArthur emphasised that although by that time the Gulf War was over, al-Ebraheem

was still unable to relax and stop selling his story. Iraqi ‘atrocities’ in Kuwait were still very much on his mind, and he said he wanted to show me some shocking photographs. The pictures, at first glance were horrifying. Some were amateurish out-of-focus shots of human figures covered with bloody gashes. A couple of figures had metal shafts driven through their chests, and some were trussed with straps. Another picture showed ‘torture’ instruments. For a few minutes my scepticism about Dr.al-Ebraheem was checked, but on closer examination I realised the human figures were actually mannequins. Someone had reconstructed the alleged results of the Iraqi occupation for public relations purposes.

This was highly symbolic regarding the entire campaign of atrocity propaganda. The Kuwaiti propaganda agency could do whatever it pleased to the mannequins and claim whatever atrocities it liked had taken place, and with Washington’s blessing this would be widely re-reported by NGOs and media outlets. As MacArthur observed: “The significance of this little pantomime cannot be underestimated; vaguely documented photographs and testimony from unidentified Kuwaitis provided some of the staples of the Hill and Knowlton campaign throughout the late summer and fall.”

A Million Iraqi Deaths Caused by Atrocity Fabrication

The Gulf War was optimally timed to further U.S. interests, with its military at peak strength in 1990 after a decade of high spending initiated under the Reagan administration, in contrast to its much weaker position in 1980 when Iraq had invaded Iran. Had the war taken place five years later, post-Cold War decommissioning of much of the U.S. arsenal, demobilising of its assets and deep spending cuts would have made it considerably harder to fight. With the Soviets and then Russia beginning to offer a new generation of very capable heavyweight fighter and interceptor aircraft and long-range air defence systems for export, and Iraq having begun to seriously invest in fleet modernisation from 1988, Iraqi airspace would have been significantly more difficult to penetrate by 1995. As the American campaign was very heavily centred on air power, this could have caused serious complications. Iraq’s ballistic missile arsenal, which already proved a challenge to tackle despite using 1960s Scud technologies, was also expected to be brought several decades forwards technologically with the purchase of new high precision solid fuelled designs in the early 1990s which would have placed U.S. assets at much greater risk.

Had the Kuwait crisis occurred five or ten years earlier, the Soviet Union would likely have intervened to protect Iraq as it had throughout the Cold War against Western targets across Asia and the Arab world. Moscow would have, at the very least, ensured a peaceful withdrawal of Iraqi forces while guaranteeing Iraq’s security against any post-withdrawal Western attacks. In 1990, however, Iraq faced an adversary at the height of its power both militarily and economically in one of the most unipolar moments in world history, and at a time when Baghdad was more isolated than ever.

On November 27, two days before the United Nations was scheduled to vote on whether to support military action, the walls of the Security Council chamber were “covered with oversize colour photographs of Kuwaitis of all ages who reportedly had been killed or tortured by Iraqis.” Chairing the Council, the U.S. gave an audio visual presentation alleging widespread Iraqi atrocities. John R. MacArthur, reported that the presentation

was loaded with anonymous charges of Iraqi thuggery, mayhem and murder. One videotaped ‘witness’ was clearly scripted to sound the ‘Saddam-is-Hitler’ theme that proved so useful to the White House…. It seemed that Saddam was everywhere, personally meting out punishment, torturing Kuwaitis, and bayoneting and raping women. The videotapes were interspersed with live witnesses, one of whom reiterated the baby incubator story. A Kuwaiti claiming to be a surgeon, and identified in the U.N.’s provisional transcript as ‘Dr. Issah Ibrahim,’ or Witness No. 3, explained that after the Iraqis took over ‘the hardest thing was burying the babies. Under my supervision, 120 newborn babies were buried the second week of the invasion. I myself buried 40 newborn babies that had been taken from their incubators by soldiers.’ The next day, the major media failed to mention Hill and Knowlton’s involvement with the hearings, and their news reports converted the claims of ‘witnesses’ into ‘testimony.’ Evidently no one thought to point out that the Kuwaiti spokesmen were not under oath…. Had they made inquiries, the U.N. reporters might have discovered that five of the seven witnesses at the U.N. that day – coached by the Hill and Knowlton team led by Lauri Fitz-Pegado – had used false names without saying they were doing so.

Rather than common observers, MacArthur found that the witnesses giving fake names had various ties to the Kuwaiti government and Citizens for a Free Kuwait, and that Issah Ibrahim was a dentist rather than a surgeon. He later admitted his story had been false.

The lies put to the Security Council reflected the broader metanarrative which had encompassed Western discourse on the Iraq-Kuwait issue. That day the Toronto Star published a quote from a surgeon name Mohammed, who said that he had supervised the burying of 120 new born babies in Kuwait and that he himself had buried 40 “new born babies that had been taken from their incubators by the soldiers.” Mohammed was later found not to be a doctor and to have no knowledge of the issue. Shortly beforehand on November 11, Kuwaiti physician Dr. Ali al-Hawil denounced doubts of the baby incubator story and claimed to have personally buried 50 babies alongside his colleagues. This was among several further alleged eyewitness accounts widely cited in the West that proved to be totally fabricated.

On November 29 Washington gained support from the United Nations Security Council through Resolution 678 to use all necessary means to evict Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Having recently capitulated in the Cold War, the USSR was increasingly dependent on Western aid and voted in favour. With China seeking to avoid confrontation with the West at a time of instability, and thus abstaining, the Western world gained UNSC legitimisation for its attack. As was demonstrated twice in the past decade, and would be again in later years, when the Western Bloc countries failed to obtain UNSC authorisation to launch attacks on other target states, they were perfectly willing to carry out offensive overseas military action without such authorisation and in direct violation of international law. Panama and Grenada, and subsequently Yugoslavia and the second war against Iraq (2003) were among the many examples.

For 118 days leading up to the UNSC’s vote the United States had been redeploying over half a million personnel to the Gulf region alongside vast quantities of equipment, from battle tanks with depleted uranium shells and carrier battle groups to new F-117 stealth fighters. With such a large force built up, the momentum towards war was so great by this stage that authorisation from Congress and from the UNSC almost appeared to be afterthoughts. The U.S. refused Soviet offers for a joint command, ensuring that the campaign would be waged overwhelmingly by the Western powers. The United States initiated hostilities with an intensive aerial bombardment under Operation Desert Storm, which from January 17, 1991 saw U.S. and allied aircraft fly over 100,000 sorties and drop 88,500 tons of munitions across a range of Iraqi targets.

On February 15, in a speech at the Fort Hood base in Texas, Vice President Dan Quayle emphasised the virtue of the U.S.-led war effort by stressing the atrocities allegedly committed by Iraq. “There are pictures Saddam doesn’t want us to see. Pictures of premature babes in Kuwait that were tossed out of their incubators and left to die.” The same claim was still being widely repeated throughout Western media. The following day, for example, in a column dedicated to maligning the “egregious” and irresponsible critics of the war, popular historian and journalist Paul Johnson wrote in Britain’s Spectator stressing Saddam Hussein’s “slaughter of 7,000 Kuwaitis – including babies torn from life-support machines which were then stolen – and his systematic stripping of this small country of all its valuables, public and private, are well authenticated.” Discourse regarding the highly dubious nature of these claims was only allowed to begin once the war was over.

On February 24, after 38 days of aerial bombardment, U.S.-led ground forces crossed into Kuwait. Facing heavily fortified Iraqi positions including an estimated 70 miles of defensive trenches, large ploughs were used to bury the defenders alive. Thus, when war correspondent Leon Daniel subsequently asked the commander of the U.S. Army First Infantry Division “where are the bodies,” he replied “what bodies?” They were all buried under several tons of sand. As U.S. Army Colonel Anthony Moreno recalled: “What I saw was a bunch of filled-in trenches with people’s arms and legs sticking out of them. For all I know, we could have killed thousands.” While this action was criticised in the limited coverage it did receive, there was a case to be made that it was a military necessity and much ‘cleaner’ than going into the trenches with flamethrowers and bayonets. Had the Iraqis perpetrated any similar act when entering Kuwait, however, it would have been ensured that this shaped the country’s public image and forever became associated with ‘what kind of country’ Ba’athist Iraq was. The American mass burial of live Iraq troops was quickly forgotten, and for the overwhelming majority of people it would not be permanently associated with the images of the U.S. Military or the Gulf War.

Iraqi soldiers in trenches widely reported having been bombarded heavily with napalm, a weapon previously employed extensively in Vietnam and Korea which stuck to their skin and burned them alive. They described such attacks as “unimaginable … like a living hell.” When it emerged that napalm was being employed U.S. officials denied it was being used against enemy personnel, although this claim appeared increasingly tenuous as the body of evidence grew that it was being doused across Iraqi troop concentrations. Although horrific, napalm’s use in the Gulf was far less extreme than its uses in prior conflicts in East Asia where it was dropped in tremendous quantities by American aircraft to douse civilian population centers from end-to-end. These American attacks, which many considered to be inhuman atrocities in their own right, were only made possible by the vilification of Iraq using fabricated atrocities in the lead up to the war.

Another notable tragedy that resulted directly from the fabrication of Iraqi atrocities was the fallout from the use of depleted uranium rounds by U.S. forces in the theatre. During Operation Desert Storm an estimated 340–350 metric tons of depleted uranium was fired in battle releasing millions of grams of airborne radioactive particles with half-lives of over four billion years – meaning contamination would be effectively indefinite. Depleted uranium rounds were made from low-level radioactive waste left over from manufacturing nuclear fuel or warheads, and although not designed for the purpose of contamination this was a very significant side effect of their employment. As one of the densest elements on the planet – 84 percent as dense as the world’s densest element osmium – depleted uranium had applications both in tank armour and in various anti-armour and anti-bunker weapons. According to the U.S. Army, depleted uranium rounds fired by an American M1A1 Abrams tank provided “the force of a race car striking a brick wall at two hundred miles per hour, but with all of its energy compressed into an area smaller than a golf ball.” These weapons later saw extensive use by U.S. forces in Yugoslavia and Syria, as well as within Iraq’s own borders for years after the 2003 invasion.

Upon impacting its target a depleted uranium round oxidises into an easily inhalable dust which can travel for at least 42 kilometres from the site of impact. Effects of exposure to depleted uranium contamination include an extreme rise in cancer rates, genetic abnormalities and severe deformities in children at birth. The element’s particularly long half-life makes contamination from it much more dangerous than that from neutron and thermonuclear bombs. This affected both Iraqis and Western personnel. As British Royal Navy Commander Robert Green stated in a paper in the New Zealand International Review, citing a range of scientific sources:

Since the 1991 Gulf War, there has been a surge of unexplained illnesses, cancers and children born with genetic deformities among the Iraqi people, especially in the south near the battlefields. At the same time, both American and British veterans have reported similar health and reproductive problems, collectively known as Gulf War Syndrome. Many of their problems, particularly cancers and birth defects, seem consistent with radiation exposure. The official U.S. casualty total in 1991 was less than 300 dead and another 300 wounded or ill. Now over 8000 are dead, and over 200,000 of those same troops are claiming disability benefits. In Britain, more than 600 veterans have died and 9000 are seriously sick with multiple ailments. This amounts to around 30 per cent of American and 17 percent of British troops who went to the Gulf.

Green’s conclusions were widely supported by a range of sources, which as time passed increasingly represented a majority consensus on the issue. A confidential UN report leaked in May 1999 notably stated regarding depleted uranium: “this type of ammunition is nuclear waste, and its use is very dangerous and harmful.” The Gulf War would hardly be the last time that atrocity fabrication facilitated American military offensives abroad in which depleted uranium was then very widely used.

While the results of extensive use of depleted uranium rounds by U.S. forces would become clearer only with time, as is the case with all forms of nuclear contamination, the most devastating immediately visible impact of the war was the Western air campaign and in particular its targeting of Iraqi population centres. While shortages of precision guided weapons limited U.S. capabilities against tactical targets, attacks focused primarily on key civilian infrastructure targets such as water and sewage processors. The British military intelligence company Jane’s Information Group concluded that coalition operations had worked to “bring Iraqi’s infrastructure virtually back to where it was at the country’s birth” – back to 1921 setting back 70 years of sustained development. U.S. forces launched 109,390 of the 126,581 coalition air sorties, or 86 percent, with Saudi Arabia and Britain between them making up most of the reminder with over 12,000 between them. According to a report by the Washington Post in 1991, the purpose of the U.S. bombardment was to drive down Iraqi living standards by destroying key infrastructure such as oil refineries, electrical plants and transportation networks. Examples included the destruction of 80 percent of Iraq’s power generation capabilities and the crippling of its sewage treatment system.

The U.S. air campaign targeted eight dams, destroying not only a major supply of hydroelectric power but also municipal water supplies and flood control. Other consequences included the emergence of widespread malnutrition and associated illnesses, and an inability to store vaccines which ended the vaccinations of children. Farm herds were devastated and food storage facilities were destroyed. Among the targets the U.S.-led air campaign destroyed were 676 schools, 16 chemical and petrochemical plants, seven textile factories and five engineering plants. As a result the population was forced to subsist on a starvation-level calorie intake at half the calories per person of the minimum standard for healthy living, with malnutrition rising steeply across the country. From an upper-middle income country, Iraqi living standards quickly plummeted with a subsequent 12 years of economic sanctions further deepening the population’s impoverishment. Living standards never recovered to pre-war levels and over 1 million of its population died as a result. Sanctions proved highly effective in preventing post-war recovery, and according to statistics from U.S. sources they had caused the deaths of half a million Iraqi children by 1996.

Pulitzer Prize-winning CNN war correspondent Peter Arnett, who reported from Baghdad during the war, recalled having a very tense relationship with the U.S. Military because they did not approve of his coverage of the air campaign. Relations deteriorated, he said, “as the bombing campaign developed and I was revealing every day more excesses of bombing. There were villages [where] 20, 30, 40 houses had been destroyed. Only about 6 percent of the bombs used in the Iraq war were guided missiles, and they were mainly in Baghdad – the most high-profile target. Elsewhere in the country they were using these dumb bombs and they were devastating many localities we were visiting.”

When Arnett’s team filmed a bombed out Iraqi baby milk factory, U.S. intelligence claimed that it was a biological weapons facility. Arnett ridiculed the claim, stating:

if this was a biological testing centre, they would not have let us walk all over the premises. Accompany us around the premises. Let us touch everything. Pick up samples such as this bag [of powdered baby milk]. We used it for coffee – that’s how confident I was. The U.S. government is perfectly capable of lying to achieve its aims in a time of national crisis – and they did. It was very effective because in the years that followed the Gulf War, that was the most frequently asked question: ‘what about the baby milk plant.’ And the question was always: ‘you weren’t duped, were you?’ That was the single most effective piece of military black propaganda that I’ve seen in my whole career. And I’ve been in this business for 35 years.

Arnett was chastised as a “dupe of Saddam Hussein,” which was particularly reputationally harmful as Hussein had by then been built into a “worse than Hitler” figure primarily on the basis of fabricated atrocities attributed to him. The metanarrative surrounding Iraq meant that civilian targets could easily be portrayed as parts of menacing weapons programs to legitimise their destruction. U.S. and allied justification of attacks on civilian targets on the false premise that they were part of weapons programs became increasingly common in the following years. These ranged from a cruise missile strike on one of East Africa’s largest medicine factories in Sudan in 1998, under the false pretext that it was a chemical weapons facility, to an Israeli attack on Syria in 2007 under the dubious claim that the target was part of a Syrian-Korean nuclear weapons program. By fabricating claims of enemy weapons facilities the U.S. gave itself a free hand to attack civilian targets at will – much as fabricating claims of Iraqi atrocities had allowed it to go to war. The U.S. was further able to cover up its involvement in a major disaster by blaming Baghdad, with an oil spill resulting in a 30-mile-long oil slick at sea and footage of a bird struggling in the black water used to claim that Iraq had “declared war on nature itself” by intentionally causing it. The Daily Mirror referred to it as “Saddam’s Black Sea” on its front page. William Arken, a former military intelligence officer with access to Pentagon records, stated regarding the fabrication of Iraqi environmental terrorism:

I think that one of the biggest coverups of the Gulf War is the fact that the U.S. Navy and allied air forces attacked Iraq oil installations and oil tankers and didn’t want to acknowledge that there was a tremendous amount of controversy over that very point. And so they hid behind claims of Iraqi environmental terror to avoid a debate over whether those are legitimate targets in warfare…. They attacked those two oil platforms at Mina Al Bakur and also at Al Kabar, and also at the same time they attacked oil related ships. On the 18th of January, on the second day of the war, French aircraft attacked an Iraqi tanker that was at Mina Al Ahmadi on the Kuwaiti coast. And those were the very tankers that a few days later they stated were expelling their oil into the sea.

When asked if there was a coverup, Arken replied: “Oh absolutely. There’s no doubt about it. Of course they lied about it. Have you ever read in any report that the U.S. Navy or the French Air Force attacked Iraqi oil tankers and were responsible for much of the oil that flowed into the gulf. No. Is that a coverup, is that a lie? Of course it is.” The strict regulation of reporters during the war meant that many potentially scandalous incidents were not made known to the public.

Arguably the most important military discrepancy between Iraq and the U.S.-led coalition was in intelligence gathering capabilities, an advantage the Americans exploited to the fullest and translated into massive battlefield gains. Without the support of the USSR, which at the time had far more satellites in space than any other country and would have previously been expected to at the very least provide updates on American positions and movements, Iraq’s armed forces could be described as going into battle blind and deaf relative to their adversaries. While its air force’s sole squadron equipped with high performance MiG-25 interceptors from the 1970s put up a strong fight and took down as many American fighters as it lost, it was overwhelmingly outnumbered by America’s own heavyweights, lacked supporting assets such as airborne early warning aircraft, and saw airfields quickly destroyed. Control of the skies allowed American air power to devastate not only Iraqi population centres, but also its ground forces which suffered from deficiencies in organisation, equipment and, following sustained bombardment, also morale. The Kuwait campaign was unique in the history of conventional wars fought by the U.S. Army, as while neutralising enemy ground units was traditionally primarily an Army task in this case the Air Force laid down the bulk of the firepower used against them. With Iraqi ground units deployed on Kuwait’s flat lands, often with little-to-no cover, American air units perpetrated a massacre causing well over 100,000 Iraqi military casualties in just 44 days. The BBC claimed up to 200,000, alongside thousands more civilians killed.

Large numbers of Iraqi personnel seeking to leave Kuwait on the six-lane Highway 80 were killed from the air by U.S., French, British and Canadian units after a large vehicle column was trapped using cluster bombs. It came to be known as the ‘Highway of Death.’ The concerted attacks on retreating soldiers were highly controversial and came to be widely considered a serious war crime. Reports from U.S. journalists also showed disarmed and surrendering Iraqi personnel being fired on by American heavy weapons. American Photojournalist Peter Turnley reported U.S. personnel digging mass graves for the victims, seeing bodies scattered across the road, and a stretch of destroyed vehicles over a mile long. He stressed that Western media outlets avoided publishing the extensive footage they had of the incident. The Atlantic similarly referred to “the war photo no one would publish” – specifically an image which humanised an Iraqi soldier trying to pull himself over the dashboard of his truck but was incinerated in his place. It observed:

The colours and textures of his hand and shoulders look like those of the scorched and rusted metal around him. Fire has destroyed most of his features, leaving behind a skeletal face, fixed in a final rictus. He stares without eyes…. The image, and its anonymous subject, might have come to symbolise the Gulf War. Instead, it went unpublished in the United States, not because of military obstruction but because of editorial choices … the hypnotising and awful photograph ran against the popular myth of the Gulf War as a ‘video-game war’ – a conflict made humane through precision bombing and night-vision equipment. By deciding not to publish it, Time magazine and the Associated Press denied the public the opportunity to confront this unknown enemy and consider his excruciating final moments.

In sharp contrast to the emotive depictions Kuwaiti babies who were never slaughtered, or of tortured mannequins which CFK presented as supposed evidence of Kuwaiti suffering, the very real and often brutal deaths of Iraqis was sanitised with strict censorship and with “bloodless language” such as “surgical strikes” and “kinetic warfare.” These were far removed from the often gruesome reality on the ground.

The commander of U.S.-led coalition forces General Norman Schwarzkopf notably justified the mass killing of retreating soldiers by citing the atrocities they had allegedly committed, stating: “This was a bunch of rapists, murderers and thugs who had raped and pillaged downtown Kuwait City and now were trying to get out of the country before they were caught.” The New York Times similarly stressed that most of those who observed the incident “thought the Iraqis were getting only what they deserved.” Even after the war’s outcome was decided, the fact that fabricated atrocities vilifying the enemy had become central to the metanarrative surrounding it made almost any measure against Iraq, including the slaughter of thousands of retreating soldiers, seem acceptable.

The ‘Highway of Death’ came at the close of the war and was one of the few parts of the conflict which the press had relatively free access to. As professor and award-winning journalist Ben H. Bagdikian reported: “the military learned its own lesson from Vietnam: keep wars short and keep the news media completely controlled in the opening days of the engagement. By maintaining total control of the initial image in a military action, the government can create the framework into which the public theatre fits subsequent information.” Censorship was described as “unprecedented” and “draconian,” even compared to the extreme precedent set by the Korean War. Bagdikian further elaborated: “In the opening days of the Gulf War, American news people were sequestered and forced to transmit totally controlled military versions of what was happening. After the shooting war was over and reconstruction of the realities known, once again, the major news media failed to collect all the facts and present them in a coherent way that would effectively correct the misleading and inadequate information the public had been given earlier.” Press seen to be overstepping their bounds were in some cases physically assaulted and arrested by the U.S. Military. The few parts of the war the press did gain free access to, however, they found truly horrific, and it can only be speculated how many more atrocities were committed in the preceding 40 days leading up to the Highway of Death.

U.S. military intervention against Iraq in 1991 paved the way for over a decade of economic sanctions followed by full scale invasion of the country in 2003. This had further consequences not only for Iraq, whose population would endure several more massacres by Western hands, but also for the wider Middle East. Decades of Western warfare on Iraqi soil, both economic and kinetic, were made possible by successful atrocity fabrication from August 1990 to January 1991, with Western forces having never left Iraqi territory ever since. Only once the Gulf War was over was the content of Nayrah’s testimony confirmed to have been completely false – as was the case with many other alleged Iraqi atrocities which had been reported as total certainties but lacked verifiable sources. By this stage, with Iraq lying in ruins not to recover for well over three decades and with the country’s image cemented as ‘evil’ in the Western world and beyond, the facts disproving the anti-Iraqi narratives were only an afterthought.

As NBC News’ John Chancellor wrote shortly after the war ended: “The conflict brought with it a baggage train of myth and misconception, exaggeration and hyperbole…. Accounts of Iraqi atrocities were accepted without question. There was the tale of premature babies thrown out of incubators in a Kuwait hospital and left to die. It never happened…. There were facts misperceived, truth bent out of shape and a fog of myth and misconception.” In Kuwait City John Martin from ABC News interviewed the director of Kuwait’s primary healthcare system, Dr. Mohammed Matar, and his wife the chief of obstetrics at the maternity hospital on March 15 1991. Matar firmly denied that Iraqis had taken babies from incubators. Martin, apparently very surprised, then asked again: “But, I mean, this is very specific. Iraqi soldiers took them out of the incubators and put them on the floor to die.” “I think this is something just for propaganda,” replied Dr. Matar.

Martin subsequently questioned the surgeon who had testified under a false name at the UN Security Council, who was in fact the dentist Ibrahim Behbehani and served as the acting director the Kuwait’s Red Crescent Society. Asking him about the incubator atrocity, Behbehani conceded: “I can’t tell you if they were taken from incubators … didn’t see it.” He backed off from his previous claim of supervising burials of 120 babies – although with the war premised on his lie now over this counted for very little. The narrative nevertheless persisted. An example was the wife of U.S. Senator John McCain, a leading advocate for military action, who as late as June 1991 insisted under questioning that allegations were true. She later acknowledged that she had been relying on hearsay. While the story was disproven, the metanarrative it created, and the way it shifted public discourse and perceptions of Ba’athist Iraq would stain that state’s image indefinitely.

The incubator baby killings were far from isolated among Western allegations in proving to be entirely fabricated. Another was the report that Iraq had forcibly relocated 40,000 Kuwaitis to its own territory, although the actual figure was 1500–2000. Another came from Amnesty International, which had claimed in its December 19 report that “the number of extrajudicial killings runs into the hundreds and may be over 1,000.” According to senior Kuwaiti officials, the figure was “a little bit over 300.” Stories of Iraqi soldiers raping and looting at will were also seriously questioned. Paris Match, for example, had received a picture allegedly depicting Iraqis shooting blindfolded Kuwaiti resistance in Kuwait City. It later emerged that the picture was of Iraqi soldiers who had looted the city being executed by their own military as a disciplinary action – indicating zero tolerance for such conduct. Although this was discovered before U.S.-led military operations had begun, the French source notably withheld this evidence until after the war to avoid improving Baghdad’s image and undermining the West’s prevailing narrative. The editors later described their motive as follows: “it was our obligation to renounce publication so as not, in the name of the scoop, to aid the image of Saddam Hussein.”

In contrast to Iraqi-occupied Kuwait, where premature babies in their incubators were relatively safe, many prematures were killed in Iraq by the U.S. and its allies. In July 1991 Patrick Tyler from the New York Times interviewed the director of Baghdad’s Saddam Paediatric Hospital, Dr. Qasm Ismail, who recalled that on the first night of the Western air campaign the targeting of civilian infrastructure caused major losses. The hospital lost electricity, and as a result: “mothers grabbed their children out of incubators, took intravenous tubes out of their arms…. Others were removed from oxygen tents, and they ran to the basement, where there was no heat. I lost more than 40 prematures in the first 12 hours of bombing.” Iraqis did take babies out of incubators during the war, but they were not Iraqi soldiers at hospitals in Kuwait – rather they were Iraqi parents trying to save their children from Western attacks in Baghdad.

While the Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait was seen to have concluded the conflict, the U.S., Britain and France pressed the offensive further and created two ‘no fly zones’ that prevented Iraq from operating aircraft in its own airspace. These zones had no authorisation from the United Nations Security Council and covered over 60 percent of Iraqi airspace. Their imposition was widely seen by experts to be a violation of international law – one which was only made possible and acceptable by the vilification of Iraq from 1990. Iraq would remain under tight Western and UN economic sanctions which seriously impeded post-war reconstruction, and alongside a UN arms embargo which remained in place long after the Gulf War ended this effectively eliminated the country as an independent pole in the Middle East and as a major power outside the Western sphere of influence. This remained the status quo for 12 years until a much-weakened Iraq faced a full-scale U.S.-led invasion in 2003. The U.S.-led assault in 1991, facilitated by fabricated claims of humanitarian abuses, led to a decades-long humanitarian catastrophe from which Iraq is unlikely to fully recover for at least half a century. The result was over 700,000 Iraqi deaths at a conservative estimate between 1991 and 2003, and over 1 million deaths between 2003 and 2008 in a second war made possible by Desert Storm. This did not account for the deaths and extreme deformities in children caused by depleted uranium, stunted growth of an entire generation, or the sharp decline in the quality of life seen after 1991.

Iraq faced multiple further rounds of Western attacks throughout the 1990s which similarly relied heavily on fabricated narratives and false claims for justification. A notable example in December 1998 saw Washington and London claim that Baghdad had expelled weapons inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission, which Western-drafted resolutions at the United Nations Security Council required to be deployed to disarm the country. The alleged expulsion was used as a pretext to launch Operation Desert Fox, which added to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed over the past seven years by Western attacks with a further 2,000 Iraqi lives taken. The pretext for the attacks proved to be fabricated, with head weapons inspector Richard Butler revealing years later that it was the U.S. ambassador Peter Burleigh, acting on orders from Washington, who suggested inspectors be pulled out of Iraq to protect them from planned U.S. and British airstrikes. The withdrawal of inspectors was done in order to pave the way for attacks, and was then used to justify those same attacks which the withdrawal had been carried out to facilitate in the first place. In 2003 U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell repeated multiple times that Iraq had forced inspectors to withdraw, which he claimed proved Baghdad held malign intentions regarding weapons of mass destruction and justified the illegal U.S. invasion then being planned. The nature of the withdrawal was only later made public.

A particularly notable aspect of the use of atrocity fabrication in the Gulf War was the role of Amnesty International and other Western human rights NGOs in providing legitimacy to false claims of atrocities, as this marked the starting point of a predominant trend in future Western atrocity fabrication efforts. This saw Western NGOs, under the pretext of supporting human rights, publish vilifying and very often poorly evidenced content to target a particular Western adversary whenever there was a need to turn opinion against them. While weaponisation of human rights was far from unprecedented before 1990, the use of major NGOs for this purpose, with Amnesty joined by several more over the next three decades, became common only from 1990.

Western human rights NGOs followed a very consistent pattern of targeting those states whose policies undermined the interests of the Western world, and particularly those whose governments the West was seeking to overthrow, with criticisms generally being proportional to how hostile the target state’s relations were with the West. This had the impact not only of building public consensus in support of hostile policies, be it military action or economic sanctions, but also of delegitimising opposition to such policies by portraying those who failed to sufficiently oppose the targeted state as uncaring for human rights and ‘regime apologists.’ Such reactions to those who opposed military action against Iraq were widespread and often emotionally charged by Nayirah’s testimony and the other similar fabricated reports. The Gulf War saw Western atrocity fabrication efforts achieve a new level of sophistication, and very similar trends could be observed in multiple subsequent conflicts where similar fabrications consistently played central roles in shaping perceptions of Western adversaries.