The authors reveal that on the initiative of its service chiefs, the United States granted immunity to a group of Japanese war criminals in return for their cooperation in sharing their knowledge of biological warfare. These Japanese scientists and military leaders had conducted biological warfare on Chinese cities and had murdered at least 3,000 Allied prisoners of war, including some Americans, in the course of "scientific" germ war tests. The Japanese program and the American deal remained one of the best kept official secrets of the two countries for over 35 years. Even the declassified documentary record remains conspicuously silent on how the Japanese program was integrated into American plans.

Canadian historians Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman fill in this picture through their research in the United States, Japan, Great Britain, Canada, and Europe. In addition, they were the fast foreigners to be given access to classified documents in the Chinese Central Archives, documents that substantiate the claim of Chinese Premiere Zhou Enlai -- initially a skeptic himself on the reliability of early reports -- that outbreaks of cholera and plague were due to an American aerial attack. They interviewed Chinese scientists who investigated these outbreaks, andreviewed the confessions of American POWs who admitted to participating in bacteriological warfare, later to retract those confessions -- under threat of court martial.