
Lessons from Operation “Denver,” the KGB’s Aids Disinformation Campaign - anarbadalov
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/operation-denver-kgb-aids-disinformation-campaign/
======
brandmeyer
Title nit: "Aids" should be "AIDS"

~~~
anarbadalov
it was! no idea how it got changed to "Aids"

~~~
8ytecoder
Aids is not wrong. [1]

> However, our style is to use lower case with an initial cap for acronyms
> where you would normally pronounce the set of letters as a word (eg Aids,
> Nafta, Nasa, Opec, Apec).

[1]
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/en/articles/art201307021121335...](https://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/en/articles/art20130702112133548)

~~~
oh_sigh
It seems weird that this overrides the actual messaging from the groups
themselves. NASA calls themselves NASA, not Nasa. English orthography is so
removed from pronunciation that it seems quite arbitrary and useless to rework
it for one specific case.

Also, it is irrelevant because this is the MIT reader press, not the BBC,and
it is literally "AIDS" in the article title. BBC has their own standards. They
don't set the standards for every article written in English.

~~~
knolax
The real reason is likely HN's broken auto-capitalization system.

------
peter_d_sherman
>"A cycle of misinformation and disinformation arose in which the KGB cited
U.S. conspiracy theories, and U.S. conspiracy theorists, in turn, began to
cite texts associated with KGB disinformation."

Forgive me -- but... _that 's hilarious_! <g>

Bridge of spies? More like _bridge of lies_...<g>

Reminds me of a quote I have long since forgotten:

 _" The borrower runs in his own debt"_

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

This whole thing is akin to two students, students A and student B, where
student A is copying student B's answers on a Math (or other) Test, while
student B is simultaneously copying student A's answers, _but neither one
knows that they 're copying each others answers -- which were originally from
themselves!_ <g> (it makes no sense (how was the original answer originated,
fractal recursion, 0 becoming 1 after an infinity of recursive iterations?) --
but apparently that's what happened! <g>)

------
ttctciyf
The 1991 article "Cancer Warfare"[1] by "Richard Hatch", is interesting in
this regard.

Extensively footnoted and appearing erudite and informed, it examines the
National Cancer Institute's (NCI) Viral Cancer Program (VCP) - "launched in
1971 with great fan­fare as part of Nixon’s War on Can­cer" \- concluding
that:

> While Nixon ordered a sup­posed end to BW offen­sive efforts in 1969, the
> Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency retained a secret BW and tox­in weapon
> capability.43 Giv­en this record of decep­tion in the U.S. BW pro­gram, the
> Viral Can­cer Pro­gram may well have used the search for a cure for can­cer
> as a cov­er to con­tin­ue its exper­i­ments on bio­log­i­cal war­fare.

(the footnote "43" refers to: _Church Com­mit­tee Report, “Unau­tho­rized
Stor­age of Tox­ic Agents” Vol. 1, pp. 189–99._ )

Along the way, it sidles _almost_ up to the notion of lab created HIV:

> One of Bio­net­ics Research Lab­o­ra­to­ries’ most impor­tant NCI con­tracts
> was a mas­sive virus inoc­u­la­tion pro­gram that began in 1962 and and ran
> until at least 1976, and used more than 2,000 mon­keys. Dr. Robert Gal­lo,
> the con­tro­ver­sial head of the cur­rent U.S. AIDS research pro­gram at NCI
> and its chief of its tumor cell biol­o­gy lab­o­ra­to­ry, and Dr. Jack
> Gru­ber, for­mer­ly of VCP and then NIH, were project offi­cers for the
> inoc­u­la­tion pro­gram. The mon­keys were inject­ed with every­thing from
> human can­cer tis­sues to rare virus­es and even sheep­’s blood in an effort
> to find a trans­mis­si­ble can­cer. Many of these mon­keys suc­cumbed to
> immuno­sup­pres­sion after infec­tion with the Mason-Pfiz­er mon­key virus,
> the first known immuno­sup­pres­sive retrovirus,31 a class of virus­es that
> includes the human immun­od­e­fi­cien­cy virus.

[...]

> Exper­i­ments per­formed under NCI con­tract includ­ed many dan­ger­ous
> viral inoc­u­la­tion pro­grams, like the pri­mate inoc­u­la­tion pro­gram
> run by Gal­lo and Gru­ber.. So-called “species bar­ri­ers” were rou­tine­ly
> breached in efforts to find or cre­ate infec­tious can­cer virus­es.
> Virus­es native to one species were inject­ed into ani­mals from anoth­er
> species in hope of trig­ger­ing can­cers.

When I first heard of the disinfo program covered in TFA, I immediately
thought of this article, which I first read in the mid 90's. I still wonder
how much of its content is diligent journalism and how much is high quality
disinfo.

1: [http://spitfirelist.com/news/cancer-
warfare/](http://spitfirelist.com/news/cancer-warfare/) from _Covert Action
Information Bulletin 39, Winter 1991-92_

------
m0zg
I still remember that one. Trouble with these "disinformation" campaigns is
that when your entire "news" is disinformation people don't trust it and learn
to read between the lines. And the Soviet people were experts at that by then,
so almost nobody believed this bullshit. People would jokingly say it was
invented in a CIA lab, but at that point just about any other calamity was
reported to have been created there as well, so nobody gave this any credence.
This effect was so profound that to this day "invented in a CIA lab" is used
only as a joke. Remember, this was during the years when Russian magazines
unironically wrote that "black workers in Harlem get paid in heroin" and other
ludicrous stuff like that. Coincidentally, this reminds me of the stuff I read
about Russia in US press today.

~~~
ardy42
> Trouble with these "disinformation" campaigns is that when your entire
> "news" is disinformation people don't trust it and learn to read between the
> lines. And the Soviet people were experts at that by then, so almost nobody
> believed this bullshit.

My understanding is that the the ultimate goal of disinformation _isn 't_ get
get people to believe the lies, it's to politically neutralize them by making
them cynical and mistrustful of everything, including the truth.

~~~
m0zg
There's no such thing as "truth" really. What gets reported through "official"
channels is always in accordance with someone's agenda. You may agree with
that agenda, but that doesn't make the reporting "true" in any sense of the
word. Nor does disagreeing with the agenda make reporting automatically
completely false, although people tend to perceive it as such.

Soviet people knew some version of the "truth" though, from reading between
the lines. When all the news is fake, "citizen journalism" naturally arises,
and it did in the Soviet Union. There was always the "official" version of
events that everyone knew was a lie and the "unofficial" one that you'd hear
from e.g. your relatives near to where the events took place, or, if events
took place abroad from Radio Svoboda or Voice of America on the shortwave
(naturally, with corrections for _their_ propaganda). From that you can build
up a fairly accurate version of what's really going on, if you care. Americans
are only now learning this skill, I was "born in it, molded by it".

To give you a concrete example, people knew about the real extent of Chernobyl
well before the Central Committee of the Communist Party decided it was
necessary to tell us the _sanitized_ version of the news. We did not know why
it blew up until years later, but we knew it _did_ blow up pretty much the
next day. We also knew firefighters were dousing an open reactor core without
any protective equipment, that stuff could leak into the river and poison
Kiev, etc, etc. All in spite of KGB's very best efforts to conceal the facts,
and its near unlimited power.

~~~
ardy42
> There's no such thing as "truth" really. What gets reported through
> "official" channels is always in accordance with someone's agenda. You may
> agree with that agenda, but that doesn't make the reporting "true" in any
> sense of the word. Nor does disagreeing with the agenda make reporting
> automatically completely false, although people tend to perceive it as such.

Let me put it another way: there are agendas that are more helpful to you and
your people and agendas that are more harmful; the people who put out
disinformation have the goal of making it harder for you to tell the
difference.

------
trhway
well, similarly - recent news articles on the State Department concerns few
years back about safety in the BSL4 Wuhan labs which conducted coronavirus
"gain of function" research (my non-professional understanding - trying to
make virus more deadly and virulent in order to research whether it can become
more deadly and virulent) pretty much achieved in my brain the same effect
wrt. China/coronavirus what "Denver" was trying to achieve back then wrt.
US/AIDS.

------
peisistratos
> The Covid-19 pandemic has provoked a wide range of lurid conspiracy theories
> in countries whose governments are hostile to the United States, notably
> Russia, China, Iran, and Venezuela... authoritarian regimes have exploited
> widespread public fear and confusion to generate suspicions about U.S.
> motives, to stoke hostility toward the United States, and to discredit the
> U.S. government’s sincerity in combatting the global pandemic.

With Trump tweeting "LIBERATE MICHIGAN" in support of the armed anti-lockdown
group who shut down the Michigan statehouse and its lockdown efforts, I think
the so-called "authoritarian regimes" have more to "exploit" regarding "the
U.S. government's sincerity in combatting this global pandemic" than just
"widespread public fear and confusion".

