The documentary begins with a useful case study on the infamous the-US-government-created-AIDS story. It explains that the Soviet Union floated the story in 1983 in a small Indian newspaper. Then it began to spread to various places in Africa, which was hard hit by the AIDS epidemic, which the film shows occurring in 1985. A purported scientific study was published in East Germany in 1986. In March 1986, the film narrator says, "and then, somehow it ends up here," i.e., with Dan Rather reporting it on the CBS News. "A Soviet military publication claims, the virus that causes AIDS leaked from a US Army laboratory conducting experiments in biological warfare."
The narrator comments, "That's Dan Rather reading a fake news story to millions of unwitting Americans on national TV." He later adds that this amounted to the KGB hitting the jackpot on a disinformation campaign.
That seems overblown. It doesn't include any further information from Rather's report. But the fact that a Soviet military publication was making that claim is legimate news in itself. In 1985, most of Rather's viewers would not have assumed that such a publication was a reliable source for such a claim.
The narrator goes on call the AIDS conspiracy story "one of the greatest cons ever carried out on a global scale," while showingred tides preading in Russia, India, Indonesia, the US, and most of Latin America. He proceeds to quote former men who "all worked for the KGB ("The Spies") before defecting to the US" from old documentary footage. One of The Spies said that the goal of KGB operations was "to change the perception of reality of every American."
At this point, a critical viewer may be thinking that This Spy is giving a pretty grandiose vision of what the KGB wanted to accomplish. One of The Spies, Ladislav Bittman, aka Larry Martin now, talks about what the the film identifies as his specialty, "disinformation," which the narrator equates to "fake news." Later, the narrator relates how President Ronald Reagan protested about the claim directly to Gorbachev and, in response, directed the KGB to stop pushing the story.
All this calls for a reality-check. There doesn't seem to be any serious argument about the fact that the story was a Soviet disinformation plant.
Whether it was such a spectacularly successful covert as Operating InfeKtion makes it sound is another question.
I remember seeing some form of this story reported in a left-leaning magazine, which I think was the Covert Action Information Bulletin. I paid enough attention to it that it stuck in my mind. But I never found the story convincing. There was a lot of reporting in the news about developments in AIDS research at the time. The term "safe sex" became part of the American vocabulary around then.
The CIA magazine Studies in Intelligence 53:4 (Dec 2009), carried an article by Thomas Boghardt, Soviet Bloc Intelligence and Its AIDS Disinformation Campaign , that contains an anylsis of this disinformation campaign that is broadly consistent with the documentary's. It also quotes Ladislav Bittman and identifies him as "deputy chief of the Czechoslovak intelligence service’s disinformation department from 1964 to 1966." The Operation InfeKtion film identifies him as having "worked for the KGB before defecting."
It should go without saying that an official CIA magazine has to be read with a critical eye, at least as much as any other source.
"Operation Infektion" was specifically the code name for the AIDS disinformation campaign.
Boghardt does not rate the initial floating of the story as a success:
As an opening salvo, the letter was a dud. Though carefully prepared and planted, no media outlet picked it up at the time. Even though the letter mentioned Pakistan, the Indian press probably ignored it simply because AIDS was not then an issue on the subcontinent. That the Soviet media failed to follow up, on the other hand, may have been because the letter had fallen into that secondary category of disinformation, a single, if clever, piece conceived at the bottom of the Soviet active measures’ pyramid and not reinforced by additional support measures. [my emphasis]A large part of the piece is devoted to the revival of the story by the KGB in conjunction with East German security. It also talks about the considerations involved in judging the credibility of various aspects of the story as conveyed by various actors.
Boghardt also gives a more detailed description about how the presentations of the meme (as we say these days) mixed decent information from respectable sources with the core falsehood, thereby giving it greater credibility. The documentary mentions that technique, but doesn't expand on that aspect, which Boghardt calls "an essential ingredient of a successful disinformation campaign." Boghardt raises a question about whether Soviet intelligence completely discontinued this particular campaign. But he also notes that "conspiracy theories about the US government’s responsibility for creating AIDS cropped up independently of KGB and HVA [East German intelligence] manipulation in gay communities in the early 1980s."
And he describes some of the social factors that made a number of Americans more susceptible to an AIDS conspiracy theory. This is important, because there has to be audience receptive to it before such a ploy to gain traction in public opinion. Timothy Snyder does something similar in his book The Road to Unfredom: Russia, Europe, America (2018) with refernce to more recent Russian disinformation campaigns.
An unstated yet clear implication of Operation InfeKtion is that there is direct continuity between USSR and Russia now. Which is obvious up to a point. The black-and-white snippets from the early years of the Cold War help to imply that without actually explaining it systematically. They also give it a bit much of a Cold War vibe for my taste. And while the USSR before and Russia now may be especially fond of it, the kinds of techniquest they describe for planting false stories aren't that radically different from what other intelligence agencies use. That doesn't mean we in the United States shouldn't take it seriously. It does mean that we should not attribute magical powers of persuasion to it.
Much of the rest of the documentary describes more recent events, much of which has been extensively documented and verified in the press since 2016.
The later part of the film, starting around 40:00, flashes a quick clip of St. Reagan warning against disinformation campaigns, presumably ones coming from the Communist countries. Then it makes the point that the country was particularly let down in the "strong leadership" area by Barack Obama, and they illustrate it by a statement of his repeating boilerplate that the US and Russia have common interests. Are we supposed to understand that stating that painfully obvious reality is a dereliction of "strong leadership"? That's just knee-jerk hawk talk.
It does criticize Trump and talk about his own version of disinformation aimed at the American public and the rest of the world. But the painfully obvious is fairly easy to state!
The spread of that particular AIDs conspiracy theory has been studied and analyzed by other, including:
- Nicoli Nattrass, Russian propaganda aimed at creating a general distrust of the news. Sociology of Health & Illness 35:1 (2013) "Understanding the salience and reach of AIDS conspiracy theory requires both a fine-grained analysis of the social and historical context which renders AIDS conspiracy theories thinkable and a critical appreciation of the role of cultural agents in promoting them."
- Erhard Geissler and Robert Hunt Sprinkle, Disinformation squared: Was the HIV-from-Fort-Detrick myth a Stasi success? (behind subsription) Politics and the Life Sciences 32:2 (Fall 2013) This article reports the results of a study on the role of East German intelligence (Stasi) in spreading the AIDS disinformation study. Its conclusions are more reserved on Stasi involvement, while Boghardt cites directions to do so coming directly from the KGB. However, Jakob Segal, the professor who was the main public face of the East German effort, seems like he may have convinced himself that his theory on AIDS was true.
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