PrintMay 2, 2008
Jeremiah Wright and the AIDS 'conspiracy' (updated)
Among all the commentary on Wright's controversial statements, I have seen no informed challenge to his statements that the US government caused (or, he said later, could have caused) the AIDS virus in an effort to kill blacks.
With documentation from KGB archives, British historian Christopher Andrew and former KGB agent Vasili Mitrokhin revealed nearly a decade ago that the AIDS-virus story originated in the 1980s as part of Soviet anti-American active measures or disinformation. The story swept through the Third World and was also reported in some Western media. After the story was discredited, in 1987 the Kremlin informed US officials in Moscow "that the story was officially disowned" and "Soviet media coverage of it came to an abrupt halt" although "it continued to circulate for several years in the Third World and the more gullible sections of the Western media." Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB pp.244-45, 428 & 484 (1999).
Update:
Reader "Eric the Red" who blogs at http://vocalminority.typepad.com/ notes,
This is from Cliff Kincaid at "Accuracy in Media". [emphases added]
The AIDS charge against the Pentagon was disavowed in late 1987 by then Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who said, "No more lying. No More disinformation," in an effort at a more open foreign policy. (In fact, the Russians have continued these disinformation campaigns since the fall of the old Soviet Union, as the book, Comrade J, documents).
At the time, however, Russian officials were trying to put on a fresh face. In fact, four years before the Horowitz book was published, Yevgeni Primakov, former head of the KGB, admitted that "the KGB planted stories in the late 1980s which alleged that the HIV virus was the result of a Pentagon experiment."
In 1992, two former officers of the East German intelligence service, the Stasi, published a book in which they described how they collaborated with the KGB to promote the AIDS disinformation, using Russian-born East German professor Dr. Jakob Segal. This is mentioned in John O. Koehler's 1999 book, Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police.
Former KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky admitted the Soviet KGB role in spreading the AIDS charge against the U.S. in his 1990 book, The KGB - The Inside Story. Gordievsky called the charge a "fabrication" that "also took in some of the Western media." The leading Soviet AIDS expert, Viktor M. Zhdanov, also repudiated the anti-American charge.
