In September 1950 Burchett left Europe and briefly returned to Australia to campaign against the atom bomb and the ban on the Australian Communist Party. Then, on 4 February 1951, he crossed into Communist China: ‘My intentions were to stay in China for a few months and gather material for a book about what was going on in Chairman Mao's China … In fact, things turned out quite differently. Among other things I was not to see Australia again for almost twenty years.’

The reason he would not see his country for almost twenty years was Korea.

As he was ready to go home with enough material for a book, the left-wing French paper Ce Soir, edited by Louis Aragon, asked him to cover the ceasefire negotiations in Korea. He set out for Kaesong intending to stay for just three weeks.

Burchett's writings on Korea merit special scrutiny because they earned him the label ‘traitor’ in the country of his birth, Australia. He was accused of fabricating the germ warfare story detailed in this chapter, and of brainwashing American and Australian POWs and torturing them to extract confessions.

In February 1952 the Korean Foreign Minister accused the US of waging bacteriological warfare against North Korea. Wilfred Burchett investigated the claims and came to the conclusion that the US had indeed conducted experiments in bacteriological weapons delivery. He stood by his story till his death in 1983. The US has always denied germ warfare allegations. An International Scientific Commission was set up to investigate the claims. It was headed by Professor Joseph Needham of Cambridge University and concluded that North Korea and China had indeed been the objective of bacteriological weapons. To this day the matter is still contested.