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Operation Infection was the code name of an “ active disinformation measure ” carried out by the KGB during the Cold War .

Part of these "active measures" was, among other things, the targeted spreading of various rumors with the aim of discrediting NATO and especially the USA and Israel internationally and thereby weakening them. One of these measures was the code name Operation infection and propagated the AIDS - epidemic as a failed or targeted biological weapons operation of the United States.

The AIDS epidemic should be portrayed as an (accident) bioweapons operation in the USA.

The operation becomes known

In 1992 the Russian KGB defector Vasily Nikititsch Mitrochin managed to smuggle a large amount of classified material into the British embassy in Lithuania , which he had secretly copied over the course of twelve years in the KGB archive , to which he had access as the head of the archive. The British historian Christopher Andrew published together with Vasily Mitrochin the book The Sword and the Shield (Basic Books 1999). As early as 1990, the former KGB officer Oleg Gordijewski claimed that the KGB had disinformation about the origins of AIDS . The British journalist Edward Hooper claims that the former head of the Russian foreign intelligence service Slushba vneschnei raswedki (SWR) and former deputy head of the KGB, Yevgeny Maximovich Primakov, had confirmed the spread of false reports on the history of AIDS. Unequivocal evidence for the existence of this operation was provided by Christopher Nehring, who came across relevant KGB documents in Bulgaria .

method

On July 17, 1983, an article was published in the Indian magazine The Patriot , which allegedly had been written by a "renowned American sociologist". Here worries were simulated that the construction of an American laboratory in Pakistan could spread HIV samples that were hoarded there to India. To make it appear credible, facts were interspersed in the report that had already been disclosed to the public under the Freedom of Information Act concerning the American biological weapons program. On October 30, 1985, an article with similar content appeared in the Soviet weekly newspaper Literaturnaja Gazeta . According to this, American researchers looking for biological warfare agents are said to have discovered a novel virus in Africa, which is reproduced and examined in the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), a P4 research laboratory for the study of infectious diseases in Fort Detrick , Maryland has been. It escaped the laboratory and triggered the AIDS epidemic. They allegedly relied on intelligence information that was not specified. The allegations aroused great indignation in America.

In the course of the policy of détente initiated by Gorbachev , the so-called fort-detrick thesis was revised before 1990 . In November 1987, the Soviet Academy of Sciences publicly distanced itself from it, further public statements followed, and in September 1988 the spread of the claim that AIDS was the result of failed US biological weapons research was finally stopped.

Role of the Segals

The conspiracy theory spread by the KGB was taken up in 1985 by the then emeritus Jakob Segal , former head of the Institute for General Biology at the Humboldt University in Berlin ( GDR ). His wife Lilli Segal was also involved. He went public with his own conspiracy theses, some of which supported the KGB's assertion - initially in an interview with the taz and in several monographs. Segal's theses fueled the scandal surrounding the US allegations regarding AIDS on an apparently scientific basis. Segal himself denied having acted “on behalf of the Stasi”. After studying Stasi files , the molecular biologist Erhard Geißler came to the conclusion that the Ministry for State Security was not interested in spreading the theses. Rather, Segal's allegations of the GDR leadership, which at that time was trying to establish a policy of détente with the USA, were rather inconvenient. The allegation that the Stasi is behind Segal's conspiracy theory is itself a conspiracy theory.

In the past it has repeatedly been claimed that Segal was involved in appropriate action plans by the KGB and the Stasi or was even directly commissioned to provide a scientific basis for Operation Infection. However, research into Stasi files did not produce any reliable findings for this interpretation. The KGB document that emerged in Bulgaria did not contain any references to this either. On the other hand, other KGB documents from 1987 have emerged, in which it is noted that Segal developed his ideas independently of the service. Demonstrably incorrect interpretations of this fact were fueled by Thomas Boghardt , a former historian at the International Spy Museum Washington . He relied on statements made by the former Stasi officer Günter Bohnsack , according to which the AIDS campaign, which Segal had been the focus of, was a "disinformation campaign" by Department X of the head office . The aim was to mislead the Federal Republic. His information about the Segals is in great contradiction to the accessible Stasi documents. Despite these contradictions, Boghardt remained undeterred and received active support from the CIA , which to this day has distributed an award-winning article about the Segals' alleged involvement with the KGB and Stasi operations plan. In this context, Erhard Geißler speaks of “disinformation in a square”. As an example, he stated that Bohnsack and Boghardt had claimed that the Segals had been visited in 1986 by Stasi officers disguised as US diplomats. Geissler proved that they were actually US diplomats.

Douglas Selvage from the authority of the Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service and Christopher Nehring, Scientific Director of the German Spy Museum, believe in an active role of the Stasi and the KGB .

aftermath

In 1992, 15 percent of Americans polled at random said they thought "the AIDS virus was created intentionally in a government laboratory" as "certain or likely to be true," with African-Americans being particularly susceptible to this conspiracy theory.

Another poll conducted in 1997 found that 29 percent of African Americans believed that "AIDS was created intentionally in a laboratory to infect black people" was "true or possibly true."

In a survey conducted by RAND Corporation in 2005, 50 percent of African Americans surveyed said they were certain that HIV was "man-made." 15 percent said that AIDS was targeted at genocide against black people.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ RCS Trahair: Encyclopedia of Cold War espionage, spies, and secret operations , Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004, ISBN 978-0-313-31955-6 (English, p. 391)
  2. ↑ Oleg Gordievsky: The KGB - The Inside Story .
  3. ^ Edward Hooper: The River . Little Brown and Company, 1999, ISBN 0-316-37261-7 , page 154.
  4. ↑ Douglas Selvage and Christopher Neuring: The AIDS Conspiracy. The Ministry for State Security and the AIDS disinformation campaign of the KGB, page 21. ( PDF , ISBN 978-3-942130-76-9 ) In: BF informs 33rd Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic , 2014, accessed on November 19, 2014 .
  5. ↑ a b c d Operation INFEKTION Soviet Bloc Intelligence and Its AIDS Disinformation Campaign
  6. ↑ Douglas Selvage and Christopher Neuring: The AIDS Conspiracy. Department of State Security and the KGB's AIDS Disinformation Campaign, pp. 99–100. ( PDF , ISBN 978-3-942130-76-9 ) In: BF informs 33rd Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic , 2014, accessed on November 19, 2014 .
  7. ↑ Erhard Geißler : AIDS and its pathogens - a web of hypotheses, facts and conspiracy theories . In: Andreas Anton, Michael Schetsche and Michael Walter (eds.): Konspiration. Sociology of Conspiracy Thinking . Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2014, pp. 120–127.
  8. ↑ Jakob and Lilli Segal, Christoph Klug: AIDS is defeatable. Artificial production, early therapy and its boycott , Verlag Neuer Weg, Essen 1995, p. 200.
  9. ↑ Erhard Geißler: Disinformation in the square. Speculation about AIDS viruses from US laboratories in New Germany on February 8, 2014.
  10. ↑ The myth of the origin of the AIDS virus. About secret services and rumors: Did the US military once generate the HI virus? The Stasi spread this myth. What's up The geneticist Erhard Geißler remembers. - The time, 2010.
  11. ↑ http://www.prof-dr-erhard-geissler.de/die-stasi-und-die-aids-legend/5-auch-die-cia-desinformiert/
  12. ↑ Douglas Selvage and Christopher Neuring: The AIDS Conspiracy. The Ministry for State Security and the AIDS disinformation campaign of the KGB, page 48. ( PDF , ISBN 978-3-942130-76-9 ) In: BF informs 33rd Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic , 2014, accessed on November 19, 2014 .
  13. ↑ http://www.prof-dr-erhard-geissler.de/die-stasi-und-die-aids-legend/3-steckte-der-kgb-dahinter/
  14. ^ Günter Bohnsack and Herbert Brehmer: Order of misdirection. How the Stasi made politics in the West . Hamburg 1992, p. 220 foot; John O Koehler: Stasi. The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police . Westview Press, 1999, p. 260.
  15. ↑ Erhard Geißler: "There was no AIDS conspiracy between the MfS and the Segals". Journal of the SED State Research Association . No. 37/2015, 94-120.
  16. ↑ https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol53no4/soviet-bloc-intelligence-and-its-aids.html
  17. ↑ http://www.prof-dr-erhard-geissler.de/die-stasi-und-die-aids-legend/5-auch-die-cia-desinformiert/
  18. ↑ http://www.prof-dr-erhard-geissler.de/die-stasi-und-die-aids-legend/5-auch-die-cia-desinformiert/5-2-keine-verkleideten-stasi-offiziere /
  19. ↑ Douglas Selvage and Christopher Nehring: The AIDS Conspiracy, The Ministry of State Security and the KGB's AIDS disinformation campaign . In: BF informs 33 (2014), pp. 146–150 ( online , accessed on January 10, 2015).