John Powell; reporter faced sedition charge in Cold War

John W. Powell, publisher of the China Weekly Review, in his office in Shanghai. (ap/file 1947)

NEW YORK - John W. Powell, an American journalist who in 1959 was tried for sedition in a rare and highly public case after he asserted in print that the United States had used biological weapons in the Korean War, died Monday of complication of pneumonia in San Francisco. He was 89.

Mr. Powell's case was one of the rare federal prosecutions for sedition, or inciting resistance to the government, since World War I. Though the government eventually dropped all charges, his case dragged on for five years and became a cause c??l??bre.

The case against Mr. Powell centered on articles he wrote during the war, in the early 1950s, in The China Monthly Review, the English-language magazine he published in Shanghai. Mr. Powell reported assertions by the Chinese government that the US military had used germ weapons against Chinese troops in North Korea.

The US government charged that Mr. Powell had violated wartime sedition laws by printing false statements. It also charged that his articles were used to undermine the loyalty of US troops in North Korean prisoner-of-war camps, who were forced by their guards to read them.

In April 1956, a federal grand jury in San Francisco indicted Mr. Powell on 13 counts of sedition. His wife, Sylvia, and an associate, Julian Schuman, both editors at The China Monthly Review, were indicted on one count each. Each count carried a penalty of 20 years in prison.

John William Powell, known as Bill, had family roots in Shanghai. His father, John Benjamin Powell, had helped found The China Weekly Review, as it was then known, in 1917. In the late 1930s, during the Second Sino-Japanese War, the elder Powell was an outspoken supporter of China during the Japanese occupation there. In December 1941, after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, John Benjamin Powell was placed in a Japanese prison camp.

Bill Powell was born in Shanghai and spent his boyhood with relatives in Hannibal, Mo. He studied journalism at the University of Missouri and during World War II worked in China for the US Office of War Information.

After the war, Mr. Powell took over his father's magazine. When the Chinese Communists came to power in 1949, he publicly supported their cause. In 1950, citing financial difficulties, Mr. Powell turned the magazine into a monthly. In 1953, it ceased publication, and Mr. Powell returned with his family to the United States.

The trial of Mr. Powell, Sylvia Powell, and Schuman opened on Jan. 26, 1959, in US District Court in San Francisco. On Jan. 30, Chief Judge Louis E. Goodman declared a mistrial because of the attention the news media had given to remarks about treason he made in court the previous day. (With the jury out of the room, Goodman had agreed with the prosecutor that the evidence presented so far "would be prima facie sufficient to sustain a verdict of guilty under the treason statute," according to the court record.)

As soon as the mistrial was declared, prosecutors filed a complaint of treason against the three defendants. The government dropped the treason charges in July 1959 after it failed to obtain indictments. In May 1961, with the approval of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the remaining sedition charges against the Powells and Schuman were dropped.

Unable to get work as a journalist, Mr. Powell made his living buying, restoring, and selling Victorian houses in San Francisco. Sylvia Powell died in 2004.

Mr. Powell leaves three sons, John of London, Thomas of Albuquerque and William of San Francisco; and three grandchildren.

Mr. Powell returned to journalism and to national attention, in the 1980s with two articles about Japanese biological experiments during World War II. The articles, published in The Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars in 1980 and The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1981, reported on the special Japanese Army unit known as Unit 731, which during the war carried out large-scale germ warfare experiments in China, killing hundreds of thousands of people.

The existence of Unit 731 was first reported in the Western news media in the late 1940s. Mr. Powell's articles, which drew wide notice, asserted that the US government had agreed not to bring war-crimes charges against Japan in exchange for medical data from Unit 731's tests.