Operation Infektion



Operation INFEKTION was a disinformation campaign run by the KGB in the 1980s to spread information that the United States invented HIV/AIDS as part of a biological weapons research project at Fort Detrick, Maryland. The Soviet Union used it to undermine the United States' credibility, foster anti-Americanism, isolate America abroad, and create tensions between host countries and the U.S. over the presence of American military bases (which were often portrayed as the cause of AIDS outbreaks in local populations).

According to U.S. State Department analysts, another reason the Soviet Union "promoted the AIDS disinformation may have been its attempt to distract international attention away from its own offensive biological warfare program, which [was monitored] for decades." In addition to anthrax, the Soviets were believed to have developed tularemia, the plague, and cholera for biological warfare purposes, as well as botulinum toxin, enterotoxins, and mycotoxins. An alternative explanation is that the operation may have been in retaliation for American accusations that the Soviets used chemical weapons in Southeast Asia, later dubbed the yellow rain incident.

Story genesis and progression
The groundwork appeared in the pro-Soviet Indian newspaper Patriot which, according to a KGB defector named Ilya Dzerkvelov, was set up by the KGB in 1962 for the sheer purpose of publishing disinformation. An anonymous letter was sent to the editor in July 1983 from a "well-known American scientist and anthropologist" who claimed that AIDS was manufactured at Fort Detrick by genetic engineers. The "scientist" claimed that "that deadly mysterious disease was believed to be the results of the Pentagon's experiments to develop new and dangerous biological weapons," and implicated CDC scientists sent to Africa and Latin America to find dangerous viruses alien to Asia and Europe. These results were purportedly analyzed in Atlanta and Fort Detrick and thus the "most likely course of events" leading to the development of AIDS.

The Segal Report
The campaign started in earnest in October 1985 after the story was ignored for two years, with the original article being republished by Soviet newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta. To lend credence, the Soviet Union used a pseudo-scientific paper written in 1986 by a retired Russian-born East German biophysicist named Dr. Jakob Segal, co-authored by his wife, Dr. Lilli Segal; and Dr. Ronald Dehmlow at Humboldt University of East Berlin. The report was quoted heavily by Soviet propagandists, and the Segals (who were educated in France) were often said to be French researchers in order to hide their connections with communism. Dr. Segal postulated that the AIDS virus was synthesized by combining parts of two distantly related retroviruses: VISNA and HTLV-1. An excerpt of the Segal report is as follows:

"It is very easy using genetic technologies to unite two parts of completely independent viruses… but who would be interested in doing this? The military, of course… In 1977 a special top security lab… was set up…at the Pentagon's central biological laboratory. One year after that… the first cases of AIDS occurred in the US, in New York City. How it occurred precisely at this moment and how the virus managed to get out of the secret, hush-hush laboratory is quite easy to understand. Everyone knows that prisoners are used for military experiments in the U.S. They are promised their freedom if they come out of the experiment alive."

Elsewhere in the report, Segal said that his hypothesis was based purely on assumptions, extrapolations, and hearsay and not at all on direct scientific evidence.

Dissemination methods
The AIDS story exploded across the world, and was repeated by Soviet newspapers, magazines, wire services, radio broadcasts, and television. It appeared 40 times in Soviet media in 1987 alone. It received coverage in over 80 countries in more than 30 languages, primarily in leftist and communist media publications, and was found in countries as widespread as Bolivia, Grenada, Pakistan, New Zealand, Nigeria, and Malta. A few versions made their way into non-communist press in Indonesian and Philippine press.

Dissemination was usually along a recognized pattern: propaganda and disinformation would first appear in a country outside of the USSR and only then be picked up by a Soviet news agency, which attributed it to others' investigative journalism. That the story came from a foreign source (not widely known to be Soviet controlled or influenced) added credibility to the allegations, especially in impoverished and less educated countries which generally could not afford access to Western news satellite feeds. To aid in media placement, Soviet propaganda was provided free of charge, and many stories came with cash benefits. This was particularly the case in India and Ghana, where the Soviet Union maintained a large propaganda and disinformation apparatus for covert media placement.

Soviet narrative
To explain how AIDS outbreaks were simultaneously so prevalent in Africa, the Moscow World Service announced that Soviet correspondent Aleksandr Zhukov discovered that in the early 1970s, a Pentagon-controlled West German lab in Zaire "succeeded in modifying the non-lethal Green Monkey virus into the deadly AIDS virus." Radio Moscow also claimed that instead of testing a cholera vaccine, American scientists were actually infecting unwitting Zairians, thus spreading it throughout the continent. These scientists were unaware of the long period before symptom onset, and resumed experimentation on convicts upon return to the U.S., where it then spread when the prisoners escaped.

Claims that the CIA had sent "AIDS-oiled condoms" to other countries sprang up independently in the African press, well after the operation was started. In 1987, a book (Once Again About the CIA) was published by the Novosti Press Agency, with the quote:

"The CIA Directorate of Science and Technology is continuously modernizing its inventory of pathogenic preparations, bacteria and viruses and studying their effect on man in various parts of the world. To this end, the CIA uses American medical centers in foreign countries. A case in point was the Pakistani Medical Research Center in Lahore… set up in 1962 allegedly for combating malaria."

The resulting public backlash eventually closed down the legitimate medical research center. Soviet allegations declared the purpose of these research projects, to include that of AIDS, was to "enlarge the war arsenal."

Worldwide response to AIDS allegations
Ironically, many Soviet scientists were soliciting help from American researchers to help address the Soviet Union's burgeoning AIDS problem, while stressing the virus' natural origins. The U.S. refused to help as long as the disinformation campaign continued. The Segal Report and the plenitude of press articles were dismissed by both Western and Soviet virologists as nonsense.

Dr. Meinrad Koch, a West Berlin AIDS expert, stated in 1987 that the Segal report was "utter nonsense" and called it an "evil pseudo-scientific political concoction." Other scientists also pointed out flaws and inaccuracies in the Segal Report as well, including Dr. Viktor Zhdanov of the Ivanovsky Institute of Virology in Moscow, who was the top Soviet AIDS expert at the time. The president of the Soviet Academy of Medical Sciences clearly stated that he believed the virus to be of natural origin. Other scientists and doctors from Paris, East and West Berlin, India, and Belgium called the AIDS rumors lies, scientifically unfounded, and otherwise impossible to seriously consider. Although Segal himself never said "this is fact" and was very careful to maintain this line throughout his report, "such technical qualifiers do not diminish the impact of the charges, however, because when they are replayed, such qualifiers are typically either omitted or overlooked by readers or listeners."

U.S. Embassy officials wrote dozens of letters to various newspaper editors and journalists, and held meetings and press conferences to clarify matters. Many of their efforts resulted in newspapers printing retractions and apologies. Rebuttals appeared in reports to Congress and from the State Department saying that it was impossible at the time to build a virus as complex as AIDS; medical research had only gotten so far as to clone simple viruses. Antibodies were found decades earlier than the reported research started, and the main academic source used for the story (Segal's Report) contained inaccuracies about even such basic things as American geography—Segal said that outbreaks appeared in New York City because it was the closest big city to Fort Detrick. Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. are all closer, while New York is 250 mi away.

The Gorbachev administration also responded indignantly and launched a defensive denial campaign "aimed at limiting the damage done to its credibility by U.S. efforts to raise world consciousness concerning the scope of Soviet disinformation activities." The Soviet Union interfered with general attempts by U.S. Embassy officials to address misconceptions and expose the Soviet disinformation campaign, to include placing pressure on news agencies that recanted their position. For example, Literaturnaya Gazeta on December 3, 1986, castigated a Brazilian newspaper which earlier in the year had run a retraction following its publication of the AIDS disinformation story. In 1987, Moscow's Novosti news agency disseminated a report datelined Brazzaville (Congo), calling on the West to put an end to the "anti-African campaign," and repeating the charges that the virus was created in US military laboratories" while in 1986 Literaturnaya Gazeta warned specifically against contact with Americans.

In 1988, Sovetskaya Rossiya put out an article defending their right to report different views. The chief of Novosti stated that it drew upon foreign sources for much of the AIDS coverage, and that the press was free under glasnost.

The Mitrokhin Archive reveals that

"faced with American protests and the denunciation of the story by the international scientific community, however, Gorbachev and his advisors were clearly concerned that exposure of Soviet disinformation might damage the new Soviet image in the West. In 1987, US officials were told in Moscow that the AIDS story was officially disowned, Soviet press coverage of the story came to an almost complete halt."

The campaign faded from most Soviet media outlets, but it occasionally resurfaced abroad in third-world countries as late as 1988, usually via press placement agents.

Aftermath
Fairly recent research shows what can arguably be seen as the ongoing effect on the public mind.

In 1992, 15% of Americans considered it definitely or probably true that "the AIDS virus was created deliberately in a government laboratory." In 2005, a study by the RAND Corporation and Oregon State University revealed that nearly 50% of African Americans thought AIDS was man-made, over 25% believed AIDS was a product of a government laboratory, 12% believed it was created and spread by the CIA, and 15% believed that AIDS was a form of genocide against black people. Other AIDS conspiracy theories have abounded, and have been discredited by the mainstream scientific community.

In 1992, KGB Director Yevgeny Primakov admitted that the KGB was behind the newspaper articles claiming that AIDS was created by the U.S. government. Segal's role was exposed by KGB defector Vasili Mitrokhin in the Mitrokhin Archive. The 1999 book Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police describes how the Stasi cooperated with the KGB to spread the story.