Hi Tom, Thanks so much for engaging with this story! I am working on further critique of the Leitenburg Soviet "documents," as well as the "memoir" of Wu Zhili, which Mr. Leitenberg released a few years back now.

I must disagree about the Leitenberg documents. They appear to me to be a melange of actual documents, probably reworked to make certain political points against the BW charges. But the material in the documents concerning BW cannot be corroborated against external sources of information. Indeed, even internally, they are self-contradictory.

As an example of the latter, in Beria's letter to Malenkov and the Central Committee Presidium, dated April 21, 1953, Beria contends that Ignatiev withheld Gluckov and Smirnov's report about falsifying BW sites, having received their report in very early March 1952, before the International Commission of Democratic Lawyers arrived to investigate the BW charges. But other documents released by Leitenberg, particularly the communications of the Party Control Commission on the charges against Ignatiev, claim that Ignatiev received the Gluckov/Smirnov report in April 1952, not March. This is not a small inconsistency. I've pointed out some other issues in my article.

As for the ants, they were certainly dropped, but the ISC investigators under Joseph Needham obtained info from North Korean medical investigators that the ants were not found to have any bacterial or viral material on them. - The ISC certainly did a much better job of determining what happened than they are usually given credit for. Indeed, undermining their report was a special activity of the PSB, and the CIA as well in the early 1950s.

I thank you for the information regarding the PSB report from July 1953. All the best, J.