On July 17, 1983, an anonymous letter in India’s Patriot newspaper claimed that AIDS had come out of Pentagon experiments. The story was false. It was also a textbook case of the thing the Russians call dezinformatsiya.
The English word is a translation of that Russian term, and dictionary.com dates its arrival in English to between 1965 and 1970. The Russian original traces to a Soviet KGB department that distributed propaganda during the Cold War. The definition has stayed narrow: false information, spread by a government or intelligence agency as an act of political subversion. What separates it from plain misinformation is intent. Misinformation can be an honest mistake. Disinformation never is.
How the KGB ran it
Leonid Shabarshin, a former chief of KGB Foreign Intelligence, described the aim as “inflicting political and moral damage” on opponents, whether politicians, newspapers or Americans whose activities were unwelcome. According to Herbert Romerstein, a former staff member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the First Chief Directorate ran such operations abroad. At home, Directorate Z, formerly the 5th Directorate, handled dissidents.
The recipe was spelled out by the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police: “One can select actual events, problems etc. using a mixture of truths, half truths, fiction and other well conceived interpretations, so the recipient finds them believable.”
Romerstein, writing in the Ukrainian Quarterly in November 2004, showed how that worked against emigre groups in the West. Agents spread invented accusations about political opponents and worked to drive a wedge between Ukrainian and Jewish communities that both opposed communism. Real historical grievances supplied the raw material.
Operation Denver
The AIDS story is the best documented case. The Wilson Center traces the timeline: the KGB sent a telegram to Bulgarian State Security on September 7, 1985, formally starting the effort. The Stasi registered the operation, which it called “Denver”, on July 17, 1986. A brochure carrying the claims was handed out at a Non-Aligned Movement summit in Harare in August and September of that year.
The scientific cover came from Jakob Segal and Lilli Segal, Soviet-East German biologists whose study “AIDS: Its Nature and Origin” anchored the narrative. Their work found “considerable resonance in African countries.” Bulgarian services helped carry it abroad, and by 1987 the KGB was reporting the campaign as “proceeding successfully.”
One correction worth making: the codename “Infektion” that most accounts use is not what the Stasi called it. The files say Denver.
Sources
- Divide and Conquer: The KGB Disinformation Campaign Against Ukrainians and Jews (Institute of World Politics)
- Operation "Denver": KGB and Stasi Disinformation regarding AIDS (Wilson Center)
- Disinformation (Dictionary.com)
