The HIV-visna recombination theory is disinformation - sars2.net

Contents

• Nick the Spacecat's visna recombination theory
• Origin of visna recombination theory
• Erhard Geissler's paper Disinformation squared from 2013
• Selvage and Nehring's 2014 German book
• Geissler's follow-up paper from 2019
• Thomas Boghardt's 2009 paper
• Lilli Segal
• Stefan Heym
• Nathaniel Lehrman
• Literaturnaya Gazeta and story about weaponized mosquitoes
• Thomas Rid's book Active Measures
• Early timeline of HIV conspiracy theories
• Valentin Zapevalov
• Executive Intelligence Review on AIDS
• Alan Cantwell
• Robert Strecker on visna recombination
• Len Horowitz
• Ed Hooper on Segal's visna theory
• Douglas Selvage's 2019 paper

Nick the Spacecat's visna recombination theory

Nick the Spacecat claims that HIV is the product of recombination between SIV and the visna-maedi virus.

He said that "I've seen there are 12 genes in HIV from Visna", even though HIV doesn't even have 12 genes: [https://x.com/pizzapicklespur/status/1835335880049037801]

In the thread below I asked Nick which part of the genome of HIV was taken from visna, but he was not able to answer my question: [https://x.com/henjin256/status/1874240728853078195]

Here I again showed him similarity plots which showed why his Visna recombination theory didn't make sense: [https://x.com/henjin256/status/1880786821292101754]

A month later Nick again posted the paper titled "Visna virus-induced fusion of continuous simian kidney cells", so I pointed out to him again that the word "fusion" referred to syncytium formation: [https://x.com/henjin256/status/1889686323109277853]

He eventually blocked me because of these tweets: [https://x.com/henjin256/status/1903818908898857222]

In March 2025 Nick hosted a video roundtable, which featured presentations by himself, Adam Finnegan, Charles Rixey, and Aaron Baalbergen. During his own presentation, Nick showed the graphic below where he claimed that HIV was a recombinant of visna and SIV, and he said: "And then they'd get a whole brady bunch of different chimeras or hybrids. This is my very crude scientific rendering of that process building HIV - and today's presentation is not about the details of this - but 'viral fusion' are the keywords that you want to use if you'd like to search more about this process." [https://rumble.com/v6qu21c-2025-spring-roundtable.html?start=3974]

Then he showed a screenshot of the paper titled "Visna virus-induced fusion of continuous simian kidney cells", and he said "Here, in my opinion, is the final step that created HIV, and that would be fusing this, a sheep virus with that STLV we mentioned before."

At that point I had already told Nick multiple times that the paper had nothing to do with the genomic recombination of visna and HIV, and the word "fusion" referred to syncytium formation and not recombination. So I told him on Kevin McCairn's Discord that he seems to be deliberately producing disinformation, because he should've realized himself that the paper had nothing to do with his visna recombination theory. And I posted even more evidence on the Discord that showed why his theory didn't make sense.

However even after that Nick has kept posting screenshots of the paper on Twitter: [https://x.com/pizzapicklespur/status/1969025766005293286, https://x.com/pizzapicklespur/status/1950171201021554847, https://x.com/pizzapicklespur/status/1940032110900703672, https://x.com/pizzapicklespur/status/1935572390974812370, https://x.com/pizzapicklespur/status/1934602174627016899, https://x.com/pizzapicklespur/status/1921941325877854649, https://x.com/pizzapicklespur/status/1916464228153565313]

In one video Nick said: "They called the whole general body of science recombinant DNA. And the specific area - that I believe created HIV - they referred to as fusogenics, or fusion products." [https://rumble.com/v70qy3w-ai-scientific-tyranny-enforced-through-reliance-on-fraudulent-data.html?start=3285] However neither of the terms "fusogenics" or "fusion products" refers to genomic recombination of two species of viruses.

ChatGPT said: "Fusogenics refers to the scientific study of the mechanisms and applications of membrane fusion, a fundamental biological process in which two separate lipid membranes merge into one continuous bilayer. This field investigates how fusogenic proteins, lipids, or synthetic agents initiate and control fusion events at the molecular level. In virology, fusogenics focuses on understanding how viruses such as HIV or influenza use specialized envelope proteins to fuse with host cells and deliver their genetic material."

And ChatGPT said: "In the context of HIV biology, the term fusion product most commonly refers to the molecular or cellular outcome of the viral fusion process that enables the virus to enter host cells. HIV relies on its envelope glycoproteins, gp120 and gp41, to mediate fusion with the membrane of a CD4+ target cell. After gp120 binds to the CD4 receptor and a coreceptor (CCR5 or CXCR4), gp41 undergoes conformational changes that bring the viral and cellular membranes into close proximity, leading to their merger. The resulting fusion product is the fused membrane complex, which permits the viral core to enter the host cytoplasm."

Origin of visna recombination theory

Nick's theory that HIV is a recombinant of visna and some other virus had earlier been presented by his mentor Alan Cantwell. Cantwell in turn appears to have copied the theory from Robert Strecker, who had presented it by March 1986 or earlier. The visna theory had also been presented by John Seale by December 1985 or earlier, and by Jakob Segal by May 1986 or earlier. However I'm not sure if Strecker, Segal, or Seale came up with the theory first.

In the book AIDS and the Doctors of Death, Alan Cantwell wrote: "I remember distinctly the early morning phone call from Dr. Virginia Livingston-Wheeler that started it all in August 1986." And he wrote she invited him to a meeting held by Robert Strecker, who "carefully explained the unique molecular composition of the AIDS virus, emphasizing how it greatly resembles a virus in sheep called 'visna virus.'" Virginia Livingston-Wheeler was an alternative health practicioner who claimed that cancer was caused by a new species of bacteria she had discovered.

Cantwell wrote that Strecker had presented the visna theory in a report dated March 1986: "Strecker began to pass out copies of a report entitled 'This is a Bio-Attack Alert.' The manuscript was dated March 28, 1986, and was written by the Strecker brothers. The report contained detailed information on their theory, and provided documented evidence to show that the AIDS epidemic was biological warfare."

In the report the Strecker brothers wrote: "The AIDS virus is Bovine Visna Virus (BVV) in man with a transacting transcriptional regulator gene inherited from Bovine Leukemia Virus". [https://strecker.pugik.com/bio-attack-alert/] "Bovine visna virus" was an early name for the bovine lentivirus that is now called BIV (bovine immunodeficiency virus), which is not the same species of virus as the visna-maedi virus in sheep. But Robert Strecker claimed that bovine visna virus was created in a laboratory based on the sheep visna virus, so according to his theory HIV was still descended from the sheep visna virus.

In December 1985 the Los Angeles Times published an interview of John Seale, which said: "Seale, who is in private practice and specializes in urinary and venereal diseases, said the AIDS virus, which attacks the body's immune system, has one gene extra over the Visna virus. [...] 'Inserting an extra gene into a virus is a routine procedure in modern genetic engineering,' Seale said." [https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-12-19-mn-30652-story.html] It's not clear if by visna Seale meant the sheep visna virus, or if he meant the bovine visna virus like Strecker.

In December 1985 the British communist newspaper Morning Star also reported on statements by Seale. In a paper titled "Disinformation squared: Was the HIV-from-Fort-Detrick myth a Stasi success?", Erhard Geissler and Robert Hunt Sprinkle wrote: [f/Geissler_Sprinkle_Disinformation_squared.pdf]

On 20 December 1985, nine days after Literaturnaya Gazeta published its Drozdov interview, London's Morning Star, a communist newspaper, reported that the New Zealand AIDS Foundation had received a letter with claims similar to Professor Drozdov's. John Seale had been reconsidering his presumption that the origin of HIV had been natural. He now said that "the AIDS virus may have been manufactured in laboratories as a slow but deadly biological warfare weapon." He went on to say that "there was 'circumstantial evidence' to back the belief that the AIDS virus was genetically engineered in a laboratory."[56]

On 26 December 1985, Moscow Radio's "World Service," broadcasting in English, presented Seale's ominous new inference as a conclusion.[57]

Geissler and Sprinkle also wrote that Jakob Segal had presented the visna theory by May 1986: "Five months after his mention on Moscow Radio, Seale was contacted by an ambitious new ally soon to eclipse all earlier theorists. In a letter dated 29 May 1986, Jakob Segal, a Soviet citizen long retired from a professorship of biology in East Germany, wrote to suggest that 'the AIDS virus is a chimera.' By this he meant a recombinant of the human T-cell lymphotropic virus type I (HTLV-I) and the Maedi-Visna virus".

HTLV-I is not even a lentivirus like HIV, visna, and BIV. Robert Strecker claimed that HIV was a recombinant of bovine leukemia virus and bovine immunodeficiency virus, even though BLV is not a lentivirus either. There is no part of the genome of HIV that is anywhere near similar to HTLV-I or BLV.

I found the text of Jakob Segal's 1986 report from archive.org. In the report Segal wrote that the "The 5' end of the genome therefore originates from HTLV-I, its larger part with the 3' end from Visna virus": [https://archive.org/details/AIDS-nature-and-origin/page/n9/mode/2up?q=visna]

The hybridisation between Visna end LAV/HTL7-III takes an entirely different course (fig.2c). The ranges of hybridisation are evenly distributed over the entire lenght of the genomes, making up altogether 35 per cent of their lenght.

To investigate in how far coincidental conformities can simulat hybridisation, the LAV/HTLV-III strand was implanted in a reversed direction in a further experiment (fig.2d). In that case there is no hybridisation at any point, which indicates that the relations demonstrated in fig.2c are not conditioned by coincidence.

It is therefore clearly shown that in the main part of their genomes Visna and LAV/HTLV-III are largely in conformity. The differences may well lie in the magnitude of mutations. On the other hand in this part of the genome LAV/HTLV-III fundamentally differs from the genome of HTLV-I. It is therefore completely excluded that the HTLV-I should of itself have changed, by an unfortunate combination of mutations, into the AIDS virus LAV/HTLV-III.

One might well be tempted to reverse Gallo's original hypothesis and to assume, that the Visna virus spontaneously changed into the AIDS virus. Yet, so far no scientist has gone as far as that conclusion - for a very good reason. By a coincidence - or a series of coincidences - a genome part of 275 nucleotides from the Visna virus would have had to change so greatly, that at least 50 per cent of them fitted to the corresponding section of the HTLV-I genome, since it is common to the HTLV-I and the HTLV-III, as shown above. The probability that this might happen is 1:6 x 10⁸². Such an event is therefore absolutely impossible, and corresponding results will also be obtained, if, instead of hybridising the genomes, their nucleotide sequences are compared with oneanother. There could not have been a coincidental, spontaneous transition from Visna to AIDS virus.

The 5' end of the genome therefore originates from HTLV-I, its larger part with the 3' end from Visna virus. The whole thing is a "chimera", a system, of two components of different origin, artificially by nature and only brought by the skills of genetic engineering.

Recently the nucleotide chain of the Visna virus has been sequenced (Sonigo et al. (21)). On that basis Stephens et al. (22) drew up a phylogenetic tree of the retroviruses. According to this, the LAV/HTLV-III are very closely related. A branch far remote from them comprises HTLV-I, HTLV-II, BLV (bovine leukemia virus) and other animal viruses. The marked [two words not visible] between HTLV-I and LAV/HTLV-III is is also demonstrated by the phylogenetic trees drawn up independently by Chiu et al. (23), Wayne-Hobson et al. (14), Gonda et al. (24) and Watanabe et al. (25) (fig.4). A spontaneous transition from the sub-family HTLV-I to the sub-family HTLV-III/Visna must be completely excluded biologically.

In August 1986, the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine published a letter which said: [https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1290430/pdf/jrsocmed00187-0068b.pdf]

Sir, The excellent editorial on the AIDS virus infection by John Seale (August 1985 JRSM, pp 613-15) has stimulated a very productive discussion. However, I would like to draw your attention to a commentary on this paper on Moscow Radio's 'World Service' in English on 26 December 1985, 21.00 GMT:

Identifying the origin of a disease makes the search for a remedy easier. Following this rule, Dr John Seale of Britain has concluded that the AIDS virus has been artificially created and its appearance is possibly the result of a human error. This conclusion supports the view that the AIDS epidemic has been caused by experiments with humans carried out in the USA as part of the development of new biological weapons.

Dr Seale claims in his report that, from the viewpoint of genetic engineering, to develop the AIDS virus artificially is not a problem, for this it is only necessary to add one gene to the virus causing a similar disease among sheep. There is ample evidence to believe that such an operation has been carried out at a secret American laboratory.

The journal also published a response to the letter by John Seale, who wrote about the articles that were published in October and December 1985 in the Soviet magazine Literaturnaya Gazeta, and then he wrote: "These Soviet articles led me to consider seriously the circumstantial evidence that the Aids virus might have been man-made." I don't know if he is supposed to have read the original Russian-language articles or translated versions of the articles, or how he found the articles. Was the Soviet magazine even available in the UK? Seale's letter didn't include footnotes for the articles, and he only provided English translations of the titles of the articles but not the original Russian titles.

The person who sent the letter to the journal appears to have misunderstood what Moscow Radio meant by Seale's report. In the paper by Seale that was published in August 1985 by the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Seale did not yet write about the visna theory, and he didn't even speculate that HIV would be a bioweapon. [https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epdf/10.1177/014107688507800801] So by Seale's report, Moscow Radio might have rather referred to the article that was published in the communist newspaper Morning Star a few days before the radio show, or to Seale's interview with the Los Angeles Times. In an interview Seale did with the Executive Intelligence Review in October 1985, he did not yet say that HIV was created in a laboratory. [https://larouchepub.com/eiw/public/1985/eirv12n41-19851018/eirv12n41-19851018_054-dr_john_seale.pdf]

But anyway, I don't know if Seale, Strecker, or Segal presented the visna theory first. None of them seemed to credit the others as a source for the visna theory.

Geissler and Sprinkle wrote: "The Streckers, who were manifestly eccentric, were never to be mentioned in Segal's publications, never to be credited as an influence. The Segals did keep track of Robert Strecker, but they began to only in July 1987, as Lilli told an East German writer, Stefan Heym, in a telephone conversation recorded by the Stasi.[89]" [f/Geissler_Sprinkle_Disinformation_squared.pdf]

Geissler and Sprinkle wrote that in October 1986 the Sunday Express magazine published an article where they interviewed Seale, where they wrote: "The Sunday Express reported also that, independent of Segal, two other scientists, Dr. Seale again and, in California, Dr. Robert Strecker, had come to believe 'the AIDS virus is man-made' and 'genetically engineered'."

In 2018 Alan Cantwell wrote: "Robert Strecker was not alone, and it is unknown what, if any, influence he gained from his East German predecessor, Dr. Jakob Segal." [https://rense.com/general96/robert-strecker-memorial.html] However it's not even clear if Segal was Strecker's predecessor or successor in promoting the theory that HIV was a bioweapon.

Erhard Geissler's paper Disinformation squared from 2013

Erhard Geissler is an East German molecular biologist who wrote a paper where he debunked Jakob Segal's HIV theory in 1987, and who later did extensive research on Segal in the archives of the Stasi. In 2013 Cambridge University Press published a paper by Geissler and his coauthor Robert Hunt Sprinkle titled "Disinformation squared: Was the HIV-from-Fort-Detrick myth a Stasi success?" [https://sci-hub.ee/https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/politics-and-the-life-sciences/article/disinformation-squared-was-the-hivfromfortdetrick-myth-a-stasi-success/8CFEA2F6B8FA780208DFAC39DC57A03E / mirror f/Geissler_Sprinkle_Disinformation_squared.pdf]

I saved the following excerpts from the paper as notes.

The story of how the Strecker brothers became involved in HIV research sounds phony:

In 1983 two brothers were, supposedly, engaged by the Security Pacific Bank of Los Angeles, California, to form a health-maintenance organization, an HMO. The local prevalence and typical actuarial costs of AIDS cases would logically have altered the prospects of any such plan. One brother was Robert B. Strecker, presenting himself as an MD-PhD internist-gastroenterologist-pathologist-pharmacologist; the other was Theodore A. Strecker, presenting himself as an attorney. A literature review proceeded. Theodore "had difficulty estimating the probable cost of the 'Human Retroviruses' as related to [insurance] premium costs and was led deeper and deeper into the literature of virology attempting to solve the problem." Soon, he "stumbled into a written order for the AIDS virus and a written plan to inject disease during preventive vaccinations for experimental purposes. ... Apparently, individuals in the United States National Institute [sic] of Health and National Cancer Institute have combined with the United Nation's World Health Organization to attack the United States with BioWeapons." As seen now in its Internet afterlife, the document in which this charge appeared took for its title a warning: "THIS IS A BIO-ATTACK ALERT, MARCH 28, 1986."

Geissler pointed out that in the book Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police, John Koehler wrote that Segal was still a die-hard Marxist in 1991 and Segal still stuck to his story about HIV:

In his third paragraph, Koehler added this: "I spotted Segal's name in Stasi documents. ... In a 1991 interview with me in Berlin, Segal presented himself as a die-hard Marxist, totally incapable of accepting the demise of communist East Germany. Segal, then eighty years old, insisted that his information on the origin of the HIV virus [sic] was solid, and he denied having had any contact with the Stasi. He was lying."[103]

Segal's communist Jew friend advised him to send a copy of his booklet to a Japanese communist writer:

Segal's work was now ostensibly "in press" in West Germany - and under a distinguished editor. His other 12 March 1986 transmission was not in German but in English, and it went to Tokyo:

Dear Professor [Shingo] Shibata, our common friend Eva Brück [according to the Center for Jewish History a Holocaust survivor and the author of Shadows of the Past: Childhood Years in Austria 1933-1938] gave me the advice, to send you a paper my wife an [sic] I just finished. It deals with the origin of AIDS and concludes, that this disease did not originate in Central Africa and come to us via the Green Monkey, but that the AIDS virus is a chimera from HTLV-I and visna virus, performed by gene surgery in the P-4 laborators [sic] of Fort Detrick, Maryland, USA, in the fall 1977.

Shingo Shibata was a member of the Japanese Communist Party. [https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/芝田進午]

Eva Brück's father was the head of a counceling center for young criminals, which was run by Workers International Relief. WIR was a German organization that was initially formed to send famine relief funds to the Soviet Union, but it was later repurposed to provide assistance from the USSR to communists in Germany, and to produce communist propaganda films and to import Soviet propaganda films to Germany. [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eva_Brück, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers_International_Relief]

Eva Brück worked for an English edition of a German trade union newspaper. She translated texts from Russian to German, and she worked as a Russian interpreter for people including the Soviet propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg: [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eva_Brück]

In 1947 she married Josef Brück, who had been rescued from Vienna on a Kindertransport in 1939. With him, the Lviv Jew, who was considered a Soviet citizen by the British, she wanted to enter the Soviet Union in 1949, but they were detained in East Berlin and remained there out of political conviction. In 1958 she became a citizen of the GDR. She worked for the English edition of the trade union newspaper Lehrer der Welt[1] and for other newspapers and magazines in the GDR. Thanks to her knowledge of Russian, she also worked as a simultaneous interpreter, for example for Ilya Ehrenburg at the World Peace Congress in Vienna in 1952. She translated educational texts from Russian and museum catalogs as well as a few comics by Hannes Hegen into English. For her trips abroad to Scandinavia, Mongolia, North America, Asia, Africa, and even Austria, she fought with the SED party bureaucracy over travel permits.

Jews from East Germany who were involved in promoting disinformation about AIDS include Jakob Segal, Lilli Segal, Eva Brück, Samuel Mitja Rapoport, and Markus Wolf. But according to ChatGPT, there were only about 400-1500 Jews in East Germany:

Here are the main scholarly and archival sources supporting those figures on the Jewish population in the German Democratic Republic (DDR):

1. Central Council of Jews in Germany (Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland) - archival demographic summaries (post-1990 reports referencing pre-reunification membership data).
2. Robin Ostow (ed.), Jews in Contemporary East Germany: The Jewish Communities of East Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig, and Erfurt (Cambridge University Press, 1989).
   • Gives detailed community membership numbers and notes that "fewer than 700 registered Jews" remained in the GDR by the 1980s.
3. Michael Brenner, After the Holocaust: Rebuilding Jewish Lives in Postwar Germany (Princeton University Press, 1997).
   • States that about 1,500 Jews lived in the Soviet zone in 1949, declining to around 400 by 1990.
4. Monika Richarz, Juden in Deutschland nach 1945: Leben im Zeichen des Aufbaus (C.H. Beck, 1994).
   • Provides corroborating demographic trends and discusses migration from East to West Germany in the early 1950s.
5. Statistisches Jahrbuch der DDR (Statistical Yearbook of the GDR) - although it did not record religious or ethnic data, these figures can be inferred from contemporary Jewish community membership reports and emigration statistics.

In summary, across the academic literature the range 400-700 Jews (≈0.005% of the DDR population) during most of the state's existence is consistently cited.

Segal worked as an informant for the Stasi:

The Segals many years earlier had moved to East Berlin after the Soviet consulate in Paris had "proposed" they do so.[149] Jakob had then become an active unofficial Stasi informer.[150] [...] Segal had been assigned to a Fübrungsoffizier - "an intelligence officer directly responsible for an individual agent"[153] named Captain Kairies. But in 1955 Segal had been shuffled over to new direction. Captain Kairies had filed this note: "Today instructed by comrade advisor not to have additional meetings with Segal. All actions that can be performed by S. are to be arranged by instructor."[154] The terms "comrade advisor" and "instructor" usually referred to officers of the KGB responsible for maintenance of cooperation with the MfS. By 1962 the MfS had decided to end its cooperation with Segal. Its reasons were substantive: "[H]e adopts a platform contrary to the DAW [Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, German Academy of Sciences at Berlin]. ... Information provided by him is very general ... [and] the IM [the informer, Segal] is shunned by many scientists."[155]

Werner Grossman was the head of the Stasi's reconnaissance department HVA. His publisher sent an email to Geissler which said that "the KGB initiated the affair involving Segal":

In 2011, Colonel General Werner Grossmann - from 1986 Deputy Minister of State Security and successor to Markus Wolf as head of HVA[157] - said in response to our inquiry, but through his publisher, "that the KGB initiated the affair involving Segal [die Sache mit Segal initiiert habe]."[158]

However Geissler wrote: "No document available to us proves or refutes the claim that the KGB invented the HIV-from-Fort-Detrick myth or that the KGB in 'initiating the affair' told Segal what ideas to have rather than urging him to promote the ideas he already did have or already had borrowed, whether or not he credited all his own sources."

Soviet sources promoted the Segals, Strecker, and Seale, who all claimed that HIV was a recombinant of visna and some other virus:

For public consumption, as noted by the Los Angeles Times, Soviet stories consistently cited four conveniently vocal conspiracy theorists:

Robert Strecker, invariably described only as an "American scientist;" John Seale, "a prominent specialist working in London," and the East German husband-wife team of Jacob [sic] and Lilli Segal, whom the Soviet press often identifies as French.[33]

The story that HIV was created in Fort Detrick was promoted by Rolf Wagenbrecht, who was the head of the disinformation department of Stasi. Günter Bohnsack was the head of the "trade and industry" section of the disinformation department, but the three people he credited for popularizing about the story about HIV were Jakob Segal, Stefan Heym, and Johannes Mario Simmel, who were all Jews (German original text omitted here):

Not long thereafter, on 27 January 1992, AIDS disinformation entered its exponential phase, its disinformation-squared phase. Panorama, a German television news magazine, was reporting that the story of HIV having spread from Fort Detrick "after a gene-accident ... had been elaborated by the Russian KGB and the Stasi, as [Colonel Dr. Rolf] Wagenbreth and his team boast today. They also took responsibility for its world-wide dissemination."[177] When Segal had most actively been propagating the myth, Wagenbreth had been head of Department X - the "X" meaning "10" of the Main Directorate for Reconnaissance, HV A; thus, Wagenbreth had been head of HV A/X. His responsibility, about which he refused to comment during the broadcast, had been disinformation.

Stasi veterans, their civil liberties assured, were stepping up to brag: to take credit, not to take blame. More soon followed, Günter Bohnsack and Herbert Brehmer most notably. Bohnsack said he had been head of HV A/X Section 7, "Trade and Industry,"[178] but was later described as having beer responsible for disinformation within HV A/X.[179] Brehmer said he had been responsible for Western agencies within HV A/X Section 5, "Secret Services."[178]

That same year, 1992, Bohnsack and Brehme published a book, Auftrag Irreführung. Wie die Stas Politik im Westen machte [Mission Misleading: How the Stasi Made Politics in the West]. "The superpower [the Soviet Union] dealt the cards," they wrote, "and also took care not to reveal its own hand. It respected the junior partner [the GDR], but saw the appropriate balance of power at the negotiation table through Moscow's eyes - and so the GDR shrunk back to being a small country in central Europe." Then came five paragraphs about the myth:

But Moscow communicated clearly when it came to the planned AIDS campaign against the USA. The quick spread of this terrible disease to millions of people, especially in Africa, renewed the discussion about the origin of the virus. During this time, a number of theses and theories were proposed; a prominent one among them was that new genetic research undertaken in the US could have produced a deformed organism that threatened humanity. With this background, the concept for the campaign practically wrote itself. The campaign allowed us to tie in our other active measures, such as our argument, launched to reach across the world, that the United States already had experience with germ warfare in Korea.

The substance of our disinformation action consisted of the following propositions: The AIDS virus was created in a special secure virus and gene laboratory of the military research institute in Fort Detrick (Maryland/USA). By 1977 it had passed via experimental subjects uncontrolled into the public sphere and had initiated the deadly catastrophe. The USA as repository of all threats - the classic closeup used by the East. And the HVA went all out to publicize the idea.

First, the East Berlin professor Jakob Segal took up this version. Stefan Heym made sure, through an interview he conducted for the West Berlin [daily newspaper] tageszeitung (taz) with the scientist, to spread the AIDS lie in Europe, [and] journalists carried the story to Africa and to other regions afflicted by the disease.

Finally, the best-selling author Johannes Mario Simmel, who was then writing about the topic of genetic research, availed himself innocently of the materials sent to him and adopted the details of our construction. The corresponding passages appear in the 1987 novel Along with the Clowns Came the Tears, published by Droemer Knaur in Munich. A masterpiece of active measures, as one in the GDR leadership circle found it to be.

Who contributed knowingly to disseminating this dirty story and who deceived themselves and let themselves be used is an open question. The subsequent General Secretary of the Communist Party, Mikhail Gorbachev, did, by the way, apologize to the United States for this action.[105]

Geissler also wrote:

Boghardt's assessments of Bohnsack and Brehmer and also of Klaus Behling, a former GDR diplomat, were not limited to written records but were enhanced by more interactive personal contacts. These assessments occurred long after Jakob and Lilli Segal had died. According to Boghardt and his sources, the GDR Ministry of State Security became involved in the myth through its branch responsible for disinformation and other "active measures," Department X [10] of the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung HV A [Main Directorate for Reconnaissance]:

Having decided to revive the AIDS campaign, the KGB informed its East German counterpart unambiguously that Moscow expected it to participate. The East Germans were told specifically to employ a"scientific approach" and produce disinformation contending the AIDS virus had been developed at Fort Detrick from where it spread to the general population through human testing. Beyond those obligatory details the East Germans were given a free hand in devising their own strategy and spreading the story.[181]

"As Moscow shifted its active measures focus to subjects other than AIDS," Boghardt has related, "the East Germans became the AIDS campaign's primary sponsor."[182] The East German "agent of choice"[181] to spread the fiction on behalf of the KGB and MfS was, according to Boghardt and his sources, Professor Jakob Segal.

Segal was a close friend of the communist Jew Samuel Mitja Rapoport, who proposed publishing a daily newspaper about the HIV conspiracy theory:

On 29 November, Dr. Helmut Theodor, a high-ranking staffer at the GDR Ministry of Health, noted that Samuel Mitja Rapoport, Professor of Biochemistry at Humboldt University and a leading communist health politician as well as Segal's colleague and close friend, had proposed "to publish in the daily news a paper on AIDS. Objective: The AIDS agent has been manipulated and has escaped from an American laboratory (biological weapons)."[197] Referring to reports about the presence of antibodies against the AIDS agent in sera taken in Africa between 1960 and 1965 - and presumably also because his superior, Health Minister Professor Ludwig Mecklinger, had decided already by early 1984 not to deal with the AIDS problem in public[298] - Theodor rejected the proposal.

This story is a little strange, since Rapoport never dealt with the HIV-from-Fort-Detrick myth in any of his numerous publications. He might have realized soon that the myth was totally unfounded.[198] Or Theodor might not have been informed correctly. Perhaps the proposal came not from Rapoport but from Segal. Documents available to us are silent on this question.

On 2 December 1985, three days after Theodor's rejection of the putative Rapoport proposal, Segal wrote to Müller-Hill, mentioning a suspicion raised primarily "in the Indian newspaper Citizen [sic] and" secondarily in Literaturnaya Gazeta that the AIDS agent had been assembled, through genetic engineering, to be a biological weapon.[104] Neither of the Segals was to mention either article in any published work.

Footnote 197 referred to a file in the German federal archives (Bundesarchiv): "Helmut Theodor, note. 29 November 1985. BArch DQ1 13080. Translated by E.G.".

The Wikipedia article about Samuel Mitja Rapoport says: "Of Jewish descent and a committed communist, he fled Austria after its annexation by Nazi Germany, and moved to the United States. In 1950, as a result of an investigation of un-American activities, he was offered a professorship in East Berlin." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Mitja_Rapoport]

Lilli Segal claimed that her source for the Fort Detrick theory was Urania Press. It was published by the URANIA Society, whose biology section was headed by Erhard Geissler beween 1971 and 1990:

Third, according to Christopher Dobson of The Sunday Telegraph, Lilli Segal told officials of the US Embassy in East Berlin "that her source for the accusations that the virus was made at Fort Detrick was the East German Urania Press. Urania's prime function is disseminating Soviet propaganda."[234] Whether Dobson's description of the prime function of the URANIA was Lilli's wording or his own is unclear. In any event, the description was wrong. URANIA's Biology Section, which would have been the Segals' contact point, was no mouthpiece, not the KGB's, not the Stasi's.

The URANIA Society - Gesellschaft zur Verbreitung wissenschaftlicher Kenntnisse [Society for the Dissemination of Scientific Knowledge] - was a "mass organization" of the GDR acting under the supervision and direction of the Socialist Unity Party, the SED. It was funded almost solely by the government, its main function being to spread Marxist ideology. Nonetheless, in its natural-sciences sections, members - mainly scientists and teachers - informed the public on progress in their respective fields. The Biology Section, headed by E.G. between 1971 and 1990, was heavily involved, for example, in "disseminating scientific knowledge" about modern genetics, cancer research, neurobiology, and so on. Even topics breaking a GDR taboo, such as the taboo against research into human behavior, URANIA could and did explore.

Some members of the Biology Section had also been involved in activities to prevent the military misuse of new developments in molecular biology. E.G., contributor to the 1984 yearbook of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)[213] and consultant to SIPRI from 1985 to 2000 for biological warfare matters,[214] expressed his concern about the potential of genetic engineering to develop biological and toxic warfare agents. The SIPRI Yearbook contribution was translated and reprinted in a booklet published by the Presidium of URANIA.[215] In another SIPRI book, E.G. quoted,[216] inter alia, the US Department of Defense, which in Soviet Military Power 1984 had explained "that for biological warfare purposes, genetic engineering could open a large number of possibilities. Normally harmless, non-disease-producing organisms could be modified to become highly toxic or produce diseases for which an opponent has no known treatment or cure. Other agents, now considered too unstable for storage or biological warfare applications, could be changed sufficiently to be an effective agent."[217] This assessment was also quoted in a popular-science journal edited by the GDR Academy of Sciences.[218] Segal himself quoted a French translation of a passage from this assessment in 1986 in "Le SIDA - sa nature et son origine"[241] and quoted a shorter version in a chapter he wrote for another book.[219] After a 1986 experts' meeting in which E.G. rejected allegations about Fort Detrick being responsible for AIDS, Segal stopped using this passage altogether.[220]

The Segals might well have been influenced by URANIA insofar as genetic engineering was described as making bioweaponry research more dangerous, and they might have wondered whether American concerns about Soviet efforts were designed to screen America's own efforts. But the myth itself was not to be found there. To the contrary, in 1988, under URANIA's aegis, E.G. published an article criticizing the myth expressly.[221]

The founder and president of URANIA Society was Werner Rothmaler, who fled Germany to Spain in 1933 because he was a member of the German Communist Party, but he was later forcibly repatriated to Germany. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Rothmaler]

ChatGPT said:

After 1945, Soviet and Eastern European states viewed science popularization as a key instrument for:

• Secularization (combating religion and superstition);
• Ideological formation (building the "scientific-materialist worldview");
• Mobilization for modernization (promoting industrial, technical, and agricultural knowledge).

This program was administered through mass organizations that mixed adult education, propaganda, and public science communication.

URANIA was the GDR's implementation of that model, directly inspired by Soviet precedents.

And ChatGPT generated this table, which indicates that the Soviet, Czechoslovakian, and Bulgarian equivalents of the URANIA Society were all subordinate to the propaganda department of the Communist Party:

An article published in Los Angles Times in 1987 said: "Upon learning of the Segal report, U.S. embassy officers in Berlin met on Oct. 10 with Dr. Lilli Segal to point out the fallacies. She repeated her allegations, citing as a source Urania Press, a publishing house run by the government of East Germany that disseminates propaganda to the general public." [https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-04-19-op-1947-story.html]

Jakob and Lilli Segal were members of a division of Stasi that was responsible for gathering scientific and technical information published in western countries:

Jakob Segal was just an "IM," an inoffizieller Mitarbeiter or "unofficial collaborator," an informer for the Ministry for State Security - one of approximately 180,000 IMs reporting to the MfS.[230,231] Whether he was actively informing in the mid-1980s we do not know. Lilli, however, did report to the MfS at least twice on the interest of the US Embassy in East Berlin in Jakob's activities.[81,116] No document reveals whether she was asked to provide such reports or provided them conscientiously - or prudentially.

In one document dealing with the HIV-from-Fort-Detrick myth, Colonel Oldenburg, deputy head of Department IX/C of the HV A, mentioned that Segal and his wife "are registered by HV A/SWT/XIII."[232] This registration was of long-standing and could not have related to AIDS. Moreover, responsibilities of the departments chancing upon the Segals' AIDS activities did not include "active measures." Department IX of the HV A performed external counter-intelligence, especially in West Germany. Department HV A/SWT was responsible for the gathering of scientific and technical information in developed "capitalistic countries." HA II, among whose filings were found Lilli's two reports and Oldenburg's comment on the Segals' registration, was responsible for counter-intelligence activities within the GDR proper.

Segal was interviewed by a journalist who ended up not publishing the interview because of questions about Segal's heteroduplex micrographs:

This caller was Stern journalist Hans-Herrmann Klare,[334] who later published a critical review of the myth.[335] He told Heym that Stern would not publish the interview "because of a very simple reason: The fundamental argument of Segal's chain of evidence in my view collapses [underlining added by a recipient of the message in the MfS]."

According to Klare, Segal's data regarding the interaction between the genomes of two different viruses were irreproducible. Klare asked Heym where Segal had published his experimental data. Heym answered that the said experiments had not been carried out by Segal himself. Heym conceded he would not be able to comment on Klare's critique but would have to call Segal for clarification.[333] (Figure 18)

Heym himself believed he had seen evidence of the phenomenon Segal had described. In his files at home, Heym had copies of electron micrographs showing "these gene threads that stick together."[333] Heym presumably was referring to electron micrographs presented by the Segals in several papers.[91,336,337] These pictures had not been created by Segal or his collaborators but had been reproduced from a paper already published in early 1985.[338] The "gene threads" shown were strains of viral nucleic acids fused by heteroduplex hybridization, a technique developed in 1961 to estimate the relationship between different species, including viruses, before more precise evaluations had been made possible by sequence analysis. Nevertheless, Jakob Segal described the heteroduplex technique as "a gene manipulation at the highest level [Genmanipulation auf höchster Ebene]"[339] - by 1986 a false description.

A Jewish fiction writer wrote a popular novel about the Fort Detrick theory:

Prominent among the Stasi's surmised successes was inducing a venerable Austrian author to write a novel advertising the myth as reality.

Johannes Mario Simmel was born in Vienna in 1924. His father, a chemist, was a Jew; at the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938, the elder Simmel fled to London.

[...]

Still more information, especially about how and with what success the Stasi used Simmel as their instrument, was added by Klaus Behling, the former GDR diplomat, in a short article in the widely circulated German newspaper BILD[179] and in an additional book.[365]

Boghardt has written that the "biggest coup" of the HV A was to send Simmel "material pertaining to Segal's AIDS theory" and then to find that he had used it as hoped in a work of popular fiction.[366] The background for this claim was Behling's 8 April 2000 BILD article, "Stasi eavesdropper: The AIDS lie and the misused Simmel." Behling had quoted Bohnsack, who

reveals the disinformation campaigns of the Stasi. By means of telephone surveillance we learned that Johannes Mario Simmel planned to write a book on biological weapons. We passed material on to him, [and] a GDR scientist named Prof. Segal - our IM [our informer] - provided expertise. In his novel Doch mit den Clowns kamen die Träanen [Along with the Clowns Came the Tears] the legend was disseminated a million times over that the AIDS virus escaped from a weapons laboratory of the USA. Our aim was to make the Africans angry against the USA because that plague is most widespread there.[179]

After the war in occupied Austria, Simmel worked as a translator and interpreter for the United States Office of Military Government. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Mario_Simmel]

Erhard Geissler wrote a paper where he debunked Segal in 1987, but he decided to not publish the paper after a meeting he had with a big wig at the East German communist party:

Feist directed E.G. to give him the manuscript, and he, Feist, would discuss the matter with Karl Seidel, head of the health department of the Central Committee, das Zentralkomitee or ZK.[384] After delivering the manuscript, E.G. was to see Seidel, on 9 March.

Seidel was extremely reserved. He made no mention of the manuscript's factual arguments but emphasized that the CIA of course would appreciate being absolved of AIDS-related accusations. Then he threatened distinctly. If E.G. were to publish the manuscript, the leadership of the Party would assume that he had acted on behalf of the CIA.[385] Since any such interpretation of his intentions could have been lethal in East Germany, E.G. decided to forgo publication.

On 11 March 1987, two days after E.G.'s appointment with Seidel, an anonymous HA XX/1 document noted that Comrade Seidel had been informed only the day after the appointment, 10 March 1987, about Heym's interview with Segal. Presumably an officer of HA XX/1, responsible for public health, had been the informer since an addendum noted: "Comrade Prof. Seidel knows the circumstances of the publication of Prof. Segal's opinions about the AIDS problem and [the theories that] have been supported by him. Prof. Seidel immediately realized that any internal discussions of Segal's hypotheses regarding the origin and spread of AIDS counteract the political [purpose] of these publications and have to be prevented."

Selvage and Nehring's 2014 German book

The following are machine-translated excerpts from the book Die AIDS-Verschwörung: Das Ministerium für Staatssicherheit und die AIDS-Desinformationskampagne des KGB by Douglas Selvage and Christopher Nehring. [https://annas-archive.se/md5/9bebe253e2a05a6921a796d76b6836b6 / mirror f/Selvage_Nehring_Die_AIDS_Verschworung.pdf]

Based on in-depth research into the files of the former state party SED, the East German Ministry of Health, and MfS service units in the BStU archives, molecular biologist and bioethicist Erhard Geißler concluded that J. Segal's "propaganda campaign" was "by no means" a disinformation campaign by the MfS.[7] There is no evidence in the BStU archives that the HV A played a role in the creation or dissemination of the various versions of Segal's hypothesis.[8] Geißler found important sources on the SED government's AIDS policy in the holdings of the other MfS service units in the BStU archive, as well as sources concerning the activities of Jakob and Lilli Segal and the negative reaction of most East German experts to Segal's AIDS thesis. Based on these sources, he concluded that the MfS only learned of Segal's thesis in September 1986.[9] However, Geißler did not, or did not visibly, reflect on the fact that the HV A's archives, which shed light on the HV A's activities, are in fact not available for research. The lack of evidence of any influence by the HV A does not constitute proof of its inactivity, but is primarily due to the current state of sources. Findings of influence or non-influence on the Segals and their research by the MfS must be evaluated against this background.

However, the authors of this study have uncovered new documents on the KGB's disinformation campaign and the accompanying role of the HV A in the archives of the former Security and Intelligence Services of Bulgaria (AKRDOPBGDSRSBNA or COMDOS-A) in Sofia and, thanks to inferences from these files, also in the archives of the Federal Office of State Security (BStU) in Berlin. They also drew on the former HV A database (SIRA: System of Information Research of the HV A)[10] and the (partial) index card of the HV A "Rosenholz"[11], two sources that have not been used in previous research.

One example of this is the journalistic activity of the American psychiatrist Nathaniel S. Lehrman, who - apparently unknowingly - acted as a multiplier of the KGB's disinformation on AIDS in the USA. In various articles for the New York-based African-American newspaper "Amsterdam News," he hinted at a possible "AIDS conspiracy" by the American government. In November 1985, he allegedly claimed to the newspaper that the spread of the AIDS epidemic in parts of Africa was the result of CIA bacteriological and chemical experiments; that similar experiments were openly conducted on Western homosexuals, drug addicts, and African Americans; and that the Centers for Disease Control had participated in CIA experiments. All three claims fit Zapevalov's article in Literaturnaya Gazeta and the guidance the KGB had given the Bulgarians. Beyond the KGB's theories, Lehrman claimed that chemical agents were likely responsible for AIDS and that the associated HTL virus caused only a mild infection.[77] Lehrman later denied in a letter to the editor of the Amsterdam News[78] and in a press release[79] that he had ever made the first three KGB-related claims.

In the February [1986] press release, he focused more on his thesis that there might be a chemical agent causing AIDS.[80] However, in his letter to the editor, he left open the possibility that the "spread of AIDS in Africa could be the result of activities by the American government, including the CIA."[81] In the press release, he softened his statement on alleged human experiments, which was summarized in the newspaper report:

Although our government did conduct such "experiments" on unwitting populations, I did not say that they were conducted "openly," nor that they were certainly conducted on homosexuals, drug addicts, or Blacks, which I suspect, however.[82]

In another article in the "Amsterdam News" in January 1986, he revived his theory of a chemical agent causing AIDS and suggested that the possibility that "religious terrorists" or others with "gay dust" wanted to kill not only homosexuals, but also drug addicts and African Americans. He hypothetically asked whether AIDS in Africa could be the result of the activities of "American government agencies" seeking to effect a change of leadership there.[83]

The question arises: Did Lehrman work for the KGB? There is no evidence of any knowing or willing activity on behalf of the KGB. Nevertheless, there were indications of possible indirect influence by Moscow on him. In his letter to the editor of the "Amsterdam News," Lehrman substantiated his claim of possible CIA involvement in the spread of AIDS by pointing to an issue of the Washington magazine "Covert Action Information Bulletin" (CAIB) from the summer of 1982 (No. 17).[84]

The CAIB had a colorful past. Its founding by CIA defector Philip Agee, some left-wing Washington journalists, and disaffected former CIA employees was announced in 1978 at the 11th World Festival of Youth and Students in Cuba. According to the memos of defected KGB archivist Vasily Mitrokhin, the "K" (Intelligence) line of the KGB's First General Staff was behind this founding. Agee had long been listed as a KGB agent (code name: PONT), according to Mitrokhin's notes, while the other members of the CAIB's editorial board (KGB code name: RUPOR) knew nothing of this. A working group with employees from the "K" line and the "A" service of the KGB's First General Staff, responsible for active measures, was set up under the leadership of VN Kosterin, the deputy head of Service A, to supply the CAIB with compromising materials about the CIA. Ultimately, however, the KGB found it difficult to find enough classified material for the quarterly publication. Therefore, the publishers searched for publicly available materials that could be used against the CIA or American government agencies.[85]

Even though Lehrman was unknowingly a multiplier of the KGB's AIDS disinformation, the KGB nevertheless used his publications to substantiate its own disinformation thesis. In a follow-up article to Zapevalov's contribution, the "Literaturnaya Gazeta" on May 17, 1986, entitled "AIDS: More Questions Than Answers," quoted Lehrman as an American expert who confirmed the theory of the artificial origin of AIDS. He claimed, the paper continued, that AIDS victims "could in some cases be the targets of premeditated murder" and named the possible perpetrator - the CIA.[86] "Literaturnaya Gazeta" had not invented the quotes; they came from Lehrman's press release, which was also available to HV A87 and presumably to the KGB or at least to the "Literaturnaya Gazeta."[88]

In the AIDS-themed issue of CAIB in 1987, there were two articles about the AIDS bioweapon theory by Robert Lederer, who was a member of the editorial board of CAIB:

In the same and the following issue of CAIB, there was a longer article on AIDS by journalist and editorial board member Robert Lederer, who presented several "alternative theories" on the origin of the HIV virus.[93] He wrote not only about the possibility of an artificial origin at Fort Detrick based on the theories of Jakob Segal,[94] but also about other possible origins in connection with the American government's alleged chemical and biological warfare plans.

Robert Lederer is a gay Jew who grew up in the DC area. [https://www.fightback.nyc/bob-lederer]

The description of a podcast about CAIB says: "Agee started CovertAction Magazine (originally named CovertAction Information Bulletin) in 1978 with Louis Wolf, William Schaap, Ellen Ray, James and Elsie Wilcott, William Kunstler, and Michael Ratner." [https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/on-philip-agee-and-the-history-covertaction-magazine/id1600345904?i=1000546450373] Out of the 8 people listed as founders of CAIB, Philip Agee, James Wilcott, and Elsie Wilcott were all former CIA agents. At least 4 out of the remaining 5 people were Jews. [https://socialistorganizer.org/2023/11/22/an-open-letter-to-our-jewish-allies-appeal-issued-by-14-018-palestinians-please-endorse/, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Schaap, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kunstler, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Ratner] The one person I'm not sure of is Ellen Ray, but she was married to one of the Jews.

The KGB explained to the Bulgarian comrades that since 1985 it had "carried out a series of activities" on this topic together "with the German [...] colleagues."[109] The HV A had been commissioned by the KGB to make its own "scientific" contribution to the campaign.[110] The organizational work was undertaken by Section 1 of the HV A, Department X (HV A/X/1), which was responsible for active measures intended to provoke or intensify differences between the USA and its NATO allies (OVO "Axis", XV 173/72), promote disarmament and the peace movement in the West (OVO "Mars", XV 1971/75), and mobilize states in the Third World against the USA (OVO "Forward", XV 3741/73).[111] Although the HV A had already begun its work in 1985, according to the KGB, Ingo Dams of the HV A/X/1 only initiated a corresponding object operation (OVO) "Denver" on July 17, 1986.[112]

[...]

At a meeting with his Bulgarian colleagues in September 1986, the deputy head of HV A/X, Wolfgang Mutz, claimed that "Denver" constituted a "significant part of the AM of the department [HV A/X]."[114] The study mentioned - "a major study with scientific value," according to Mutz - was already finished.[115] It proves, according to Mutz, that "AIDS is a result of a biological weapon of the USA" and that it "was and is being used by them [i.e., the HV A] in various AMs around the world." Furthermore, the Americans wanted "a copy from the author."[116] The study described by Mutz as part of the "Denver" process could only refer to the manuscript "AIDS - Nature and Origin"[117] by Professor emeritus Jakob Segal, his wife Lilli, and chemist Ronald Dehmlow. The brief description of the content fits exactly with Segal's study. It was translated into English. The study ("AIDS - Its Nature and Origin")[118] had already been distributed during the summit of the Non-Aligned States in Harare in September 1986 as part of a brochure entitled "AIDS USA-home made evil, NOT imported from AFRICA."[119] A week before Mutz's meeting with the Bulgarians, a diplomat from the US Embassy in East Berlin had asked the Segals for a copy of their study.[120] This study and the Segals' further work on AIDS were discussed by the KGB and the HV A during their exchange with their Bulgarian colleagues as part of the OVO "Denver."

Professor Hans-Alfred Rosenthal, Director of the Institute of Virology at the Charité Hospital in East Berlin, later claimed that Segal continued to support Lysenko's ideas - including the non-existence of genes - even after Lysenko himself had abandoned them.[165]

According to current knowledge, Segal began his AIDS research in the summer of 1985.[180]

Footnote 180 said: "This is what Segal claimed privately to an East German scientist. See letter from Jakob Segal to an East German geneticist, July 16, 1987; BArch, NY 4516, prel. K. 12, AIDS+Nazi Crimes, np"

The MfS was able to learn a lot about Segal's research from "Nils", as he was the graduate chemist Ronald Dehmlow, the aforementioned co-author of Segal's thesis. Dehmlow had known Jakob Segal since 1978. As a student at Humboldt University, he began researching ultraviolet irradiation (UVB) and oxygen therapy (HOT) with Segal.[188] He continued this joint research, now also on AIDS, at the People's Police Hospital (KHdVP) in Berlin. Dehmlow had been known to the Stasi for some time. During his studies, from 1975 to February 1984, he was registered by HV A/XI/6 as IM "Niels".[189] Shortly after his appointment to the KHdVP, he was contacted by the staff of HA VII/7[190] and from December 1984 as IM candidate "Nils" (now without the "e")[191] and from June 1986 as IMS "Nils" (Reg. No. XV 2987/86)[192]. Although the officers of HA VII/7 "Nils" were primarily responsible for securing their area of responsibility - i.e. the government hospital - to spy on his colleagues,[193] they repeatedly received reports and documents from Dehmlow about the Segals' AIDS research, even though they had absolutely no interest in it.[194] As he himself recalls, Dehmlow met with Jakob Segal every one to two weeks to discuss the Segals' research on AIDS. Because of these regular conversations and his translation assistance for the English version of the study, Jakob Segal would have named him as a co-author of the study.[195]

The purpose of Segal's AIDS research was not purely scientific from the outset. As mentioned above, Jakob Segal did not believe in a natural science detached from communist ideology. In a conversation with Dehmlow and his superior, the Medical Director of the KHdVP, Reinhard Uhlig, in June 1986, he admitted that his research was also intended to serve "propaganda purposes." Such a use was in keeping with his then-current contact with Axen, who was responsible for foreign propaganda. Segal agreed with Uhlig that Dehmlow's name should not be mentioned in such propaganda cases.[196] In the version of his study that appeared in the Harare brochure, Segal adhered to the agreement. The only change to the text was the deletion of Dehmlow's name; all that remained of him was a telltale comma after the names of the two Segals.[197]

On July 31, 1986, Dehmlow, as IMS "Nils," urgently reported to his commanding officer, Lt. Axel Theisinger, that Segal had "deconspired" to him. In a discussion with Dehmlow about his AIDS research, he had stated that "the comrades in security had advised him to do so." Until then, Segal had always referred to the "Party" as his client. Theisinger continued: "The IMS [i.e., Dehmlow] recognized [...] that the professor might have been in contact with the 'friends' [i.e., the KGB] or the MfS."[202] Theisinger, for his part, knew exactly for whom Segal was conducting his research at this time. He noted that Segal "had been positively registered for the HV A and was conducting AIDS research on behalf of the Central Committee of the SED, Comrade Axen, and the HV A and was undertaking trips in this context to the NSW. The service unit that had positively registered Segal was, however, the only one."[203] not the HV A/X, but Section 5 of Department XIII in the Science and Technology Sector of the HV A (HV A/SWT/XIII/5).[204] The phrase "positively recorded" was used in the MfS to describe a person who worked for the MfS.[205]

For the HV A/X, Mutz informed his Bulgarian counterpart in September 1986 that the HV A/X was collaborating "with the operational department on the problem [AIDS]" in the creation of disinformation.[206] For espionage activities in the area of AIDS and biotechnology or genetic engineering, the responsible "operational department" was the department HV A/SWT/XIII/5 under the leadership of Lutz Thielemann.[207] He was the superior of Lieutenant Colonel Dieter van de Sand, for whom Jakob Segal was registered. Lilli Segal was also registered by HV A/SWT/XIII/5.[208] The "security" advice to Jakob Segal will have been sent via the registering unit, HV A/SWT/XIII/5.

Although Jakob Segal demonstrably knew of the MfS's interest in his research, the surviving files of the HV A in the BStU archives contain no details about his positive registration by the HV A/SWT/XIII/5. Because both Segals were registered by the HV A, there must also have been index cards for them in the HV A index. However, the corresponding files are missing from the BStU's "Rosenholz" database.[227]

[227] If the Segals were registered as Soviet or French citizens, it is possible that the CIA did not hand over the corresponding cards in "Rosenholz" to the German government. According to CIA guidelines, only copies of card indexes on German individuals in the former HV A card index in the Rosenholz files were handed over to the Federal Republic. See Müller-Enbergs: "Rosenholz" (note 11), p. 52. It is also possible, however, that the cards for the couple were removed from the card index by the HV A earlier or destroyed. One can only speculate as to what happened to the cards.

The fact that an interview between Stefan Heym and Jakob Segal was published in the West Berlin newspaper "taz" in February 1987, however, was due to the assistance of the HV A, as shown below.[254]

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MfAA), for its part, announced that foreign journalists were not required to obtain permits to conduct interviews with the Segals. The official reason: Both were retired professors and therefore did not need to apply for a permit.[260] However, for most ordinary pensioners in the GDR, such freedom of speech did not apply to Western media. The SED (Social Democratic Party of Germany) and the State Security Service (Stasi) evidently wanted to support the international dissemination of Segal's thesis by all means.

In private, however, the Segals not only complained about their "publication ban" in the GDR.[261] They also portrayed themselves as if they were on their own when it came to potential publications of their thesis and journalistic activities in Western countries. In April 1987, Lilli Segal even claimed that they had to organize and finance their lecture tours to West Germany themselves.

The American government suspected Victor Louis, a well-known KGB disinformation specialist and informant for the Sunday Express, of being responsible for the publication,[267] but the KGB claimed to its Bulgarian colleagues that the article had appeared "independently" of its own efforts.

Footnote 267 is "Williams: Soviet disinformation (Anm. 233), S. B16."

Strecker was familiar with at least one of Seale's earlier letters to the JRSM and presumably knew the others as well. See Strecker, Robert B.: "Letter to the Editor." In: JRSM 79 (1986), pp. 559 - 560. Strecker hinted to another AIDS conspiracy theorist, Leonard Horowitz, that he was influenced by Seale's research. See Horowitz, Leonard G.; Emerging Viruses: AIDS & Ebola. Nature, Accident or Intentional? Rockport 1996, p. 104.

After the article in the Sunday Express, for example, the Segals were contacted by the Indian journalist Kunhanandan Nair.[273] Nair had been an accredited correspondent for the Indian newspapers Blitz and Patriot in East Berlin for many years,[274] which were known for publishing Soviet disinformation.[275] Nair was also a fixture for HV A. In the run-up to the summit in Harare, HV A/X had written a book that "exposed" and harshly criticized the CIA's policies regarding the Non-Aligned Movement and the Third World in general, using a mixture of facts and disinformation theories from the KGB and the Eastern "brother agencies."[276] The book was alternately referred to by HV A/X as an active measure, "mirror"[277] or "jungle"[278]. At an international press conference on August 21, 1986 in New Delhi, where the Executive Committee of the Non-Aligned Movement was meeting in preparation for the summit in Harare, the book Devil and his Dart: How the CIA is Plotting in the Third World. Nair appeared as the author of the book,[279] which was subsequently distributed by the HV A during the summit in Harare.[280]

Following his success in Harare and the article in the Sunday Express, Nair now interviewed Jacob Segal. Although the interview first appeared in Blitz on July 2, 1987, under the title "AIDS - A US Military Monster: Yankee Business, not Monkey Business," it had already been published earlier in the Nairobi Sunday Times without naming the author and was reprinted in the Senegalese newspaper Le Devoir.[281] In India, an English version of Segal's study, along with Nair's interview, was published in book form in 1989.[282]

"Booby Hatch" said he had worked in the US:

"Hatch" described himself as a doctor of natural sciences, molecular biologist, and former scientist at a genetic research center in California.[288]

Footnote 288 is "Sigusch, Volkmar; Gremliza, Hermann L. (eds.): Operation AIDS. Konkret Sexualität Hamburg 1986, p. 3."

One gets the impression that Heym was only able to offer his interview with Segal in the Federal Republic because HV A/SWT/XIII was working behind the scenes. Heym was constantly monitored and frequently hindered in his work as a writer by HA XX/9 of the MfS, which pursued him in the Operational Procedure (OV) "Diversant."[300] Without further explanation, HA XX/9 could have prevented the publication of the interview in the West. But Heym's contact with the Segals led to Tustanowski, the officer in HA XX/9 responsible for the OV "Diversant," inquiring about HV A/SWT's jurisdiction over the Segals. On October 28, 1986, he met with van de Sand to learn more about the meetings between the Segals and the Heyms. If van de Sand had not already made it clear at that time, Colonel Jesse, Head of Department of HV A/SWT/XIII, informed by November 12th at the latest that HV A had an "operational interest [...] in ensuring that Prof. Segal's thesis that the AIDS virus is a product of American biological weapons research is spreading in NSW."[301]

In other words, HA XX/9 was to take no action to prevent the publication of the Heym-Segal interview. Subsequently, HA XX informed the Deputy Minister of State Security, Rudi Mittig, of HV A's "operational" concern to have Heym's interview with Segal published in the West.[302]

Because Heym hadn't managed to publish his interview with Segal even after months, HV A/X provided some help behind the scenes. Joachim Nölte, a major and officer on special assignment (OibE) of HV A/X/4,[303] working under the alias of an employee in the press department of the GDR Foreign Ministry, informed Arno Widmann of the "taz" newspaper that Stefan Heym had a "bombshell story" about AIDS. For Heym, Widmann's contact in early 1987, after so many disappointments, must have been a relief. At Heym's request, Widmann promised to print the interview in its entirety.

[...]

One week after the publication in the "taz," Pfeifer flew to Moscow under his working name "Glaser," accompanied by the Soviet liaison officer to the HV A/X in Berlin, Yevgenii Ditschenkow, for a "short-term consultation" with the First HV of the KGB on active measures.[309]

As IM "Fritz Steiner," and later as department head in the Central Committee of the SED, Seidel worked closely with the MfS and Soviet government agencies in defending Soviet psychiatry against accusations and condemnation in the World Psychiatric Association for political abuse.[345] Even before the AIDS problem emerged, Seidel had experience in helping the MfS and Moscow with joint projects.

After his conversation with the Stasi, Seidel warned the scientists Geißler and Rosenthal. Geißler recalled: "If we publish this, people would have to assume we were conducting CIA business."[346] Jakob Segal later wrote of a compromise whereby neither he nor his numerous critics in East German science were allowed to publish on the origin of the AIDS virus in the GDR.[347] Seidel, the Stasi, and Segal also wanted to prevent East German scientists outside the GDR from publishing criticisms of Segal's thesis. For this reason, and because of the popularization of his thesis outside the GDR, Segal can be considered a beneficiary of both the Stasi and the Central Committee of the SED.

But the GDR's AIDS experts neither gave up their private criticism of Segal nor their attempts to overturn the Central Committee's publication ban. Sönnichsen, for example, explained to an MfS informant shortly after Seidel's decision:

It is an undisputed fact that Professor Segal has backing; otherwise, it would be impossible for him to operate unhindered in this way. He is a Soviet citizen (with a passport), but has lived in the GDR for about 30 years and now travels around as a pensioner. Professor Sönnichsen's opinion: Whoever backs him must discipline him.[348]

Ronald Dehmlow was commissioned by the Stasi to write a rebuttal to Erhard Geissler:

The newspaper [Neue Zeit] became a platform for opponents of Segal's thesis. One day after Segal's conversation with Schneidewind, the newspaper quoted Geissler as saying that he had "vigorously" rejected the claim that "the HIV virus, the AIDS pathogen, was created through genetic manipulation."[351] The HV A switched to defense. It commissioned Dehmlow, alias "Nils," via HA VII/7, to prepare an article for the "Neue Zeit" newspaper, which it described as a "counter-speech to Prof. Rosenthal" should have served. Dehmlow fulfilled the order in December 1987,[352] but the article was apparently never published in the "Neue Zeit."[353]

Footnote 352 is "Oltn. Theisinger, Meeting Report: IMS 'Nils,' December 3, 1987; BStU, MfS, AIM 4835/88, Vol. 2, p. 17 f."

While there is no documentary evidence for the years 1985 to 1986 that would prove that the MfS supported the Segals and their research and lecture activities, the situation is different for the period after 1987.

The first evidence of such assistance dates back to a meeting between Dehmlow (IMS "Nils") and his commanding officer in HA VII/7, Theisinger, and with Thielemann from HV A/ SWT/XIII/5 on 27 August 1987. During this meeting, Thielemann explicitly commissioned Dehmlow to provide "professional and scientific support to Prof. Segal." Furthermore, Thielemann tasked "Nils" with developing "scientifically sound counterarguments against the common theory" of the artificial production of the AIDS pathogen through genetic engineering and the "checking of Prof. Segal's environment for possible enemy attacks as well as for possible persons,[359] which support the above theory".

At the meeting, Thielemann even offered Dehmlow a new position at an institute of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin-Buch. The position would have involved the IM being taken over by HV A/SWT/XIII/5. However, Dehmlow, supported by Theisinger, declined.[360] The job offer was presumably the HV A/SWT/XIII/5's reaction to Dehmlow's growing professional problems. His position at the People's Police Hospital became increasingly difficult as a result of the harsh criticism of Segal's thesis at the colloquium at the Charité in November 1986.[361] One of Dehmlow's superiors had decided after the colloquium that Dehmlow should generally cease his research on "all sorts of unimportant problems, such as AIDS, UVB, etc." at the KHdVP and his collaboration "with the senile old Professor Segal."[362] The superior wanted Dehmlow's labor to be used for his own research project.[363] He even claimed to Dehmlow that "the Enlightenment" - i.e., the HV A - had instructed him "to slow down Segal and especially me [Dehmlow], we had already caused enough damage - through our activities we had exposed a source of 'A' who was very close to the situation."[364] Dehmlow then replied to his superior that "Prof. Segal's activities are covered by Comrade Axen at home and abroad."[365]

From April 1988, Dehmlow was able to devote himself fully to Segal's research and other assignments from HV A/SWT/XIII/5. He became the head of a research center for medical biophysical chemistry, which corresponded exactly to his ideas. He reported to the GDR Deputy Minister of Health, Ulrich Schneidewind. Thielemann indicated to Theisinger that he had helped to create the position.[378] When Dehmlow took up his new position, Thielemann officially took over the file on IMS "Nils" from Theisinger and handed it over to van de Sand shortly thereafter.[379] Jakob Segal was employed under Dehmlow as the "scientific director" of the research center, and his wife Lilli as a "documentation consultant."[380] Jakob Segal wrote in May 1988 to an acquaintance: "We were promised generous funding for staff, equipment, and devices, and we began very slowly and carefully to look for young, interested people."[381] According to Lilli Segal in an interview with "taz," the new research center would conduct "fundamental AIDS research."[382] The new arrangement corresponded to Dehmlow's plan.[383] It made van de Sand's work easier because he knew that Jakob Segal, whom he had "positively identified," Lilli Segal, and the IM "Nils," whom he had taken over, were working in the same environment. He could more easily pass on information to them and more easily collect information from and about them.

Following Zapevalov's article, which allegedly suggested a high number of AIDS-infected people among US military personnel,[412] the Literaturnaya Gazeta delivered further "black propaganda." In April 1986, it reported on an alleged decision by the Honduran parliament to relocate American military bases to isolated areas so that soldiers would not spread the virus among the local population.[413] In May 1986, it reported on alleged concerns in other countries that "the USA had not taken effective steps to initiate quarantine measures against the spread of AIDS outside the USA." In this context, it pointed to public appeals in Japan, where ships of the American fleet were to be kept away from Japanese ports for fear of infection with the AIDS pathogen.[414] The KGB considered it a success that there was a large demonstration in 1988 calling for the closure of American bases in Seoul because of the alleged threat of AIDS.

The propaganda in the Soviet press about the alleged American origin of AIDS was stopped in September 1988, despite the objections of the Soviet press agencies TASS and Novosti (especially Falin).[421,422] Around this time, according to his own account, Jakob Segal was invited to a meeting by the Soviet embassy in East Berlin. The cultural attaché apologized to him that his thesis would no longer be published in the USSR "alongside the classical theories."

In September 1988, Mutz and Pfeifer personally handed over the next, revised version of Segal's study from the left-wing Munich journal "Streitbarer Materialismus"[428] to their Bulgarian colleagues in Sofia for further use in active measures. The article, according to the Stasi officers, was a "revised version of the book [sic] by [the] Prof. [redacted] [...], in which he considered the latest results of .investigations and argued against all opponents." The HV A/X assessed the article as "good material, relatively peaceful, but convincing."[429] The "German comrades" confidently declared: "Regardless of their angry reaction, the Americans are unable to refute Professor [redacted]'s hypothesis regarding the origin of the AIDS virus."[430]

Wolfgang Mutz was the deputy head of HV A/X, and Hans Pfeiffer was the deputy head of HV A/X/1, which was "responsible for active measures intended to provoke or intensify differences between the USA and its NATO allies".

During their visit to Bulgaria a year earlier, Mutz and Pfeifer had already spoken of the film project as part of the "De-trick" operation. It was said at the time that HV A/X had requested "the production of a film."[449] The film was "a matter for their operational channel (illegal)." They continued:

The film that the comrades in West Germany are preparing about the AIDS problem will be a work of their operative channel (illegally). This channel has already signed a contract with West German television. They are taking every measure to ensure that no one notices that the GDR has any connection to the film, even though they have to provide financial support. The interview that Prof. Segal's presentation in October of this year is intended to be the culmination of this effort. [...] It will be a documentary in the style of English investigative crime films. The arguments will be presented objectively, with one exception: It will show that the Americans are spreading disinformation about AIDS and that they are abusing technological interventions.[450]

Segal promoted false treatments for AIDS:

Segal even put forward several suggestions for alternative therapies. In a 1990 article co-authored with his old research colleague Dehmlow, he cautiously suggested that ultraviolet radiation (UVB) could "delay or prevent the infection of new cells and the development of disease," even in the case of HIV infection.[508] Segal repeated this "therapeutic approach" in his own book "AIDS: Cell Physiology, Pathology and Therapy" in 1992.[509] One such possibility had already been mentioned by Dehmlow in 1987 - as IMS "Nils" in a report for the Stasi on UVB and oxygen therapy. He had also pointed out the economic advantages of the potential, successful treatment of AIDS and other diseases with UVB therapy. The GDR would have been able to carry out such a therapy without expensive imports gfrom Western countries.[510] Segal had already wanted to treat HIV-infected patients with UVB during the GDR era, but this was rejected by Seidel.[511]

After the end of the GDR, Dehmlow increasingly specialized in such alternative therapies and even became president of the Society for Ozone and Oxygen Applications in Berlin.[512] However, UVB and HOT found no support in the Joint Federal Committee of Physicians and Health Insurance Funds, which generally recognized "no reliable evidence for the benefit and medical necessity" of their use, without even mentioning AIDS.[513]

Segal saw other possibilities for early AIDS therapy in traditional and natural remedies from Africa and Asia. Regarding the negative results of tests with African medicinal plants against HIV infections in the USA, he wrote - completely illogically and unscientifically: "If in America all patients in the late stages [of AIDS] died, it was to be assumed that in Africa patients in earlier stages survived to a high degree when treated with native medicinal plants." Good news also came from China: "And if in May 1995 Chinese doctors reported cures for AIDS with a natural remedy, this is entirely in line with our expectations.[514]

But the "new approach" to AIDS therapy, on which Segal particularly focused, looked something else entirely: regular administration of small doses of aspirin in the early stages of HIV infection.[515] In 1992, he explained: "Aspirin should [...] effectively inhibit HIV proliferation."[516] He asked hypothetically why doctors were not using aspirin to treat AIDS. His answer was: "Imagine: If the patient can now be cured without having to go to the hospital with two aspirin tablets daily, i.e., with pennies, then it is obvious that the doctors don't like me, the pharmaceutical industry, and the USA don't like me either."

Particularly traumatic for the proponents of Segal's thesis and characteristic of its classification as a conspiracy theory was the fact that the Segals could not provide any empirical evidence to support their to prove the famous "chain of evidence." For example, none of the US prisoners allegedly used as guinea pigs for the Fort Detrick virus could ever be identified.

Ljungqvist was not the only one who continued to propagate Segal's thesis alongside alternative therapies for AIDS in the 2000s. The intellectual heir of Segal's thesis and its early therapy did the same: its co-author Christoph Klug, a member of the Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany (MLPD) and director of the MLPD-affiliated publishing house "Neuer Weg" in Essen,[544] which published the Segals' last books in the 1990s. The left-wing extremist[545] MLPD used the Segals' conspiracy theory to promote, among other things, its goal of "an international socialist revolution."[546] Klug and the MLPD-affiliated support group "Neue Wege in der HIV-Therapie" (FNW) propagated Segal's thesis.

Neuer Weg is the publishing house of the Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany, which publishes the party's newspaper and books. Klug is no longer listed as the director of Neuer Weg, but their website says he is the former manager of Neuer Weg. [https://www.neuerweg.de/wir-ueber-uns, https://www.neuerweg.de/autoren/klug-christoph]

Neuer Weg published Segal's book AIDS - Die Spur führt ins Pentagon. They also published a book about treatments for AIDS, which Jakob and Lilli Segal coauthored with Christoph Klug.

A new reason for the renewed publicity controversy surrounding Segal's thesis was aroused. The Duisburg hip-hop duo "Die Bandbreite" was disinvited from the Christopher Street Day (CSD) in Duisburg because they wanted to rap their new song about AIDS. The lyrics reflected Segal's thesis:

...Do you believe the crap about the monkeys, the nasty green monkeys?
The animals that their Zairian hunters first infected,
SIV mutates, and the blacks bring it across the pond,
so that HIV 81 then reaches the USA via Haiti.
But it can't be that easy, as a mistake can creep in,
because SIV and HIV have virtually no similarities.

Doctor MacAthur [sic] in 69 asked the House of Representatives for money
because the country needed a biological weapon for its military.
And so it happened, the money went out and then Robert Gallo showed up.
They say he discovered AIDS. False! The man built AIDS. [...]
AIDS has the same morphology as the Visna virus, which affects sheep,
the same molecular weight, and sixty percent genome identical.

[...]

During his research, journalist Philipp Wahl learned that the "pseudo- scientific song" had been commissioned by the FNW.[587] The chairman of the FNW, Detlef Rohm, had given the duo the paid commission and presented the song, including the corresponding video on YouTube, at the very last general meeting of the association in April 2012.[588] The last verse of the song makes the sponsorship clear:

Wojnarowicz calls for the implementation of the association's "immediate program," including early treatment with aspirin.[589]

Footnote 587 referred to an article titled in German "Wide-ranging AIDS and Nazi songs divide homosexuals ahead of Pride". [https://web.archive.org/web/20120629021252/http://www.derwesten.de/staedte/duisburg/aids-und-nazi-songs-der-bandbreite-spalten-homosexuelle-vor-dem-csd-id6817083.html]

FNW was Klug's group "Förderverein »Neue Wege in der HIV-Therapie«" ("Support Association 'New Approaches in HIV Therapy'").

At first glance, the writings of the Segals, Klugs, the FNW, and the MLPD, including conspiracy theories and proposals for early AIDS treatment, do not appear to have had the destructive consequences of the activities of Duesberg and other AIDS deniers. The latter significantly influenced Mbeki's policies. In contrast to Duesberg, the Segals were always aware of the dangers of HIV and therefore supported "safe sex."[617] During a lecture tour through South Africa, Klug, as a member of the MLPD, together with its sister party, the Communist Party of South Africa Marxist-Leninist (CPSA-ML), took a stand against Mbeki's AIDS policy. As part of their "militant alliance" for the introduction of Klug's emergency program against AIDS in South Africa, they called for early treatment with aspirin and the development of a p24-based vaccine, as well as the immediate introduction of ARVs without profit for the pharmaceutical industry. Klug and the FNW reject Duesberg's AIDS denial as unscientific and false.[619]

Geissler's follow-up paper from 2019

In 2014 Douglas Selvage and Christopher Nehring published the book Die AIDS-Verschwörung in response to Geissler's paper published in 2013.

Geissler responded to the book in 2019 in a paper titled "Were our critics right about the Stasi?: AIDS disinformation and 'disinformation squared' after five years". [https://sci-hub.ee/https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/politics-and-the-life-sciences/article/abs/were-our-critics-right-about-the-stasi/4216D41CEA8551BF569C33D46366C77F / mirror f/geissler-sprinkle-were-our-critics-right-about-the-stasi.pdf]

Christopher Nehring found a memo in the archives of the former Bulgarian state security service KOMDOS, where the KGB invited KOMDOS to join the AIDS disinformation campaign, and they outlined the main themes of the campaign. Two months later part of the text of the memo appeared in the first article published in Literaturnaya Gazeta. However the memo did not say anything about the visna-maedi virus:

Nehring found in the archives of the former Bulgarian state security service, KOMDOS or COMDOS, a memorandum from the KGB describing a disinformation campaign designed to misrepresent the origin of HIV. It was dated 7 September 1985 and marked "Absolutely Secret." The KGB's First Main Directorate was writing to Bulgarian counterparts to enlist their assistance.

[...]

Fifth, some of the text in this memorandum would reappear 53 days later in the Literaturnaya Gazeta article of 30 October 1985, which itself would repeat nearly word-for-word the allegations already presented in Patriot.[8]

The DC Spy Museum historian Thomas Boghardt relied on false information from the former Stasi disinformation agent Günter Bohnsack:

Selvage and Nehring have supported their interpretation by reference to the former Stasi officers Bohnsack and Brehmer, who we found untrustworthy, and by reference to Boghardt, whose confidence in Bohnsack worked seriously against him. Notably, Boghardt's exposition of the Segals' contacts with American diplomats - Bohnsack had persuaded Boghardt these had been Stasi officers impersonating CIA agents pretending to be American diplomats[29] - we proved to have been erroneous. One of the American diplomats had gone on to become United States Ambassador to the Republic of Cyprus and kindly described to us his Segal contacts in detail.[30]

Segal finished an early draft of his thesis in January 1986, which was after Seale had presented the visna hypothesis in December 1985:

No later than 3 October 1985 Segal had come to doubt the African origin of HIV and mentioned "strong indications that AIDS evolved in the US research center for biological warfare in Fort Detrick by genetic engineering."[31] A first draft of his thesis was ready by January 1986;[57] Segal's protégé and sometime coauthor Ronald Dehmlow secretly shared parts of this thesis with HA VII/7, the MfS department conducting counter-espionage at Dehmlow's place of work.[58]

Segal had begun to promote the AIDS conspiracy theory by October 3rd 1985:

Other scientists and conspiracy theorists had already raised it in HIV-origin context; no later than 3 October 1985,[31] Segal had begun transforming the myth being propagated by the KGB.

Footnote 31 said: "Jakob Segal, letter to Harry Mehner, SED-Kreisleitung [leadership of the Communist Party], East German Television, Berlin, 3 October 1985. Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR im Bundesarchiv [Foundation Archives of the Parties and Mass Organizations of the GDR in the Federal Archives] (SAPMO-BArch), NY 4516, vorl. K. 12. Translated by EG."

In another paper Geissler wrote that Segal's letter mentioned "suspicions [...] that AIDS originated in the US biological warfare research center Fort Detrick through genetic manipulation." [https://zeitschrift-fsed.fu-berlin.de/index.php/zfsed/article/view/569/544] I don't know if the letter mentioned visna.

People from Stasi were opposed to Segal's hypothesis and thought it might harm the reputation of GDR:

Some departments of the Stasi also examined this report. An officer of the department responsible for counter-intelligence in economic and scientific affairs informed other departments of the MfS, including the Regional Administration East Berlin, that "[o]fficials of the ministry of Health as well as Humboldt-University Berlin, who deal with the AIDS problem and with homosexuality, share the opinion that Segal's claim is not tenable from a scientific and medical view."[106] Selvage and Nehring have not mentioned this letter.

Major Dewitz of the Stasi's East Berlin Administration initiated a comprehensive evaluation of Segal's claims.[107] Dewitz, too, in a comprehensive four-page memorandum, concluded that "all GDR experts are convinced that Prof. Segal's theory is untenable." But that was a scientific consensus. What Dewitz described next, though, was a political consensus, that Segal's activities "are considered to be politically harmful" and that spreading the myth generated "disadvantages for the GDR" - "scientific disadvantages,... economic disadvantages... and political disadvantages."[108] Consequently, the Stasi, "Shield and Sword of the Party," should not support but rather should suppress Segal's activities. Major Dewitz went on to contemplate measures "[t]o protect the esteem of the GDR with appropriate measures" by making Segal desist.[109]

At one point Segal claimed that Gallo had created HIV:

Greenwald referred to a Segal interview published in an Austrian journal, Basta. In that interview Segal had not only g/repeated his allegations but had also asserted that virologist Robert Gallo - along with Montagnier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi a co-discoverer of HIV was responsible for the creation of the AIDS agent through genetic manipulation.[141] Later Segal explained that "the Pentagon simply purchased Gallo."[142]

The Segals may have been presented as French to downplay their ties to the eastern bloc:

In September 1986 in "Pentagon behind AIDS?" Moscow's New Times referred to "French scientists Jacob and Lily [sic] Segal."[145] Later the GDR's Ministries of Health and Foreign Affairs described Jakob Segal as French.[135,138] But the Ministry of State Security - the MfS or Stasi - knew Segal was a citizen of the Soviet Union. USDoS also knew this: "Throughout the early and middle stages of the disinformation campaign, Soviet-bloc media repeatedly misidentified Segal as a French national." USDoS assumed disinformation in "an effort to downplay his ties to the G.D.R." But USDoS also suggested not disinformation but misinformation: "Segal, who resides in East Berlin but claims to have graduated from the Sorbonne in 1940, has been repeatedly misidentified as a French researcher."[146]

Selvage and Nehring have seen here only disinformation: an attempt to hide Segal's ties to East Berlin ties that Segal himself made patently obvious again and again. Pretending Segal was French, Selvage and Nehring have proposed, would have been advantageous since "AIDS disinformation spread from the East ought to be supported by 'Western scientists.'"[147]

Thomas Boghardt's 2009 paper

This section consists of my notes from Thomas Boghardt's paper "Soviet Bloc Intelligence and Its AIDS Disinformation Campaign". [https://digitallibrary.tsu.ge/book/2019/september/books/Soviet-Bloc-Intelligence-and-Its-AIDS.pdf]

The paper was published in 2009 in the journal Studies in Intelligence, which is published by the CIA. The paper received the CIA's "Studies in Intelligence Award", which is awarded annually to a single paper published in the journal.

Boghardt used to serve as the historian at the International Spy Museum in Washington DC, but he is now a senior historian at the US Army Center of Military History.

Boghardt wrote: "East German intelligence routinely floated disinformation depicting West German politicians as former Nazis, because, from East Berlin's perspective, the Federal Republic of Germany was merely an incarnation of the Third Reich."

It reminded me of the radio show of Dave Emory, who found Nazis hiding under every rock, and who claimed that Western countries were covertly controlled by the "underground Reich" or the "Bormann network". Dave Emory did several radio shows about the theory that HIV was an American bioweapon, and he had Len Horowitz, Alan Cantwell, and Ed Haslam as guests on his show. A frequent guest on his show was Adam Finnegan's mentor John Loftus, who is a leftist conspiracy theorist like Emory who finds Nazis hiding under every rock. Loftus is a former military intelligence officer, and he said that he learned about the history of biowarfare from the publisher of his book, who was a former high-level CIA agent. [https://open.spotify.com/episode/1ly6eXrVXG3ORiKtN2mHjY, time 2:40] Loftus organized an annual intelligence conference in DC called The Intelligence Summit, whose advisory board included two former heads of the CIA and high-level Israeli intelligence officers. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intelligence_Summit] The main financial sponsor of the conference was the Israeli gangster Michael Cherney, whose protege Oleg Deripaska was at one point called the richest man in Russia. Cherney organized a similar intelligence conference in Israel called the Jerusalem Summit.

An article about Bohnsack in a UK newspaper also said: "Herr Bohnsack trained as a journalist and worked for 26 years in disinformation. Much of Division X's work was directed against West Germany. It collected sensitive or secret information from agents in the West and leaked it to cause harm; it manufactured documents and spliced together recordings of conversations that never took place to damage persons in the public sphere; and it spread rumours. Division X men fed 'coups' to Western journalists about the Nazi past of West German politicians; it funded left-wing publications and it managed, at least in one instance, to exert an extraordinary influence over the political process in West Germany." [https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/a-breed-apart-the-stasi-man-who-outed-himself-732968.html]

Boghardt wrote: "The East Germans were told specifically to employ a 'scientific approach'[42] and produce disinformation contending the AIDS virus had been developed at Fort Detrick, from where it spread to the general population through human testing. Beyond those obligatory details, the East Germans were given a free hand in devising their own strategy and spreading the story. The HVA code named the operation INFEKTION and VORWÄRTS II [Forward II] and henceforth was the KGB's junior partner and main ally regarding AIDS.[43]"

His sources were Bohnsack's book and Bohnsack's letters to him. Bohnsack is a former Stasi disinformation officer, who wrote a book about the Stasi titled Auftrag: Irreführung. Wie die Stasi Politik im Westen machte.

Boghardt wrote: "The HVA's biggest coup was yet to come. In the mid-1980s, the Austrian-born best-selling author Johannes Mario Simmel mulled over a book project on the perils of genetic manipulation and biological warfare. By that time, Simmel had already authored 20 novels, numerous screenplays, and various short stories and children's books. His works had been translated into 25 languages and sold over 65 million copies. By sheer coincidence, HVA Department III (electronic surveillance) recorded a phone conversation referencing Simmel's project and forwarded a copy to Department X. The disinformation specialists spotted an opportunity and decided to anonymously send Simmel material pertaining to Segal's AIDS theory.[71]" The source he cited was the book Kundschafter a.D.: Das Ende der DDR-Spionage by Klaus Behling.

Boghardt also wrote: "Raving about his agency's coup, Markus Wolf proudly piled 10 copies of Simmel's novel on his desk. Bohnsack and his colleagues were both happy and surprised that Simmel accepted the HVA material as genuine and made such extensive use of it.[73]" He cited Bohnsack's letter to himself as the source.

Boghardt wrote:

Around 1987, HVA X gave Segal material "from secret service circles" on the 1969 congressional testimony of Donald MacArthur, then deputy director of research and engineering in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. In his testimony, MacArthur stated that "within a period of five to 10 years it would be possible to produce a synthetic biological agent, an agent that does not naturally exist and for which no natural immunity could have been acquired." He elaborated further that "A research program to explore the feasibility of this could be completed in approximately five years at a total cost of $10 million."[100]

For Segal, the MacArthur testimony was near-certain evidence that the Pentagon had not only contemplated an HIV-type virus since 1969 but also had gone through with the project within the 10-year time frame MacArthur had suggested. Henceforth, MacArthur's testimony became a cornerstone of Segal's conspiracy theory.

MacArthur's testimony is also frequently quoted by Nick the Spacecat.

Boghardt wrote that Segal later started to blame Gallo for creating the virus:

In his earlier publications and utterances, Segal had dispassionately and largely accurately described Gallo's contribution to the identification of HIV, but he sharply changed his tack in the late 1980s, when Gallo became the key figure in Segal's theory. In his final years, Segal developed an apparent pathological hatred of Gallo as the man personally responsible for creating AIDS, and he seized every opportunity to lambast the American scientist.

In 1989, just one year before East Germany's demise, Segal went on a lecture tour across West Germany. Even though the SED leadership had avoided endorsing Segal and he did not travel as an official GDR representative, his trip was inconceivable without the Politburo's knowledge and approval. In his presentations, Segal touted his latest piece of evidence - the MacArthur hearing of 1969 - and pilloried Gallo.[103] According to the recollections of one of his listeners, Segal referred to Gallo as "a huge gangster" [ein ganz grosser Gangster] who was responsible for creating the virus.[104]

[...]

Segal's last major accomplishment during the Cold War was the publication in 1990 of his book AIDS - die Spur führt ins Pentagon [AIDS - the trail leads to the Pentagon], which incorporated the bits on Gallo and the MacArthur hearing into his original thesis. The book was published by Neuer Weg, a publishing house closely associated with the far-left, Maoist Marxist Leninist Party of Germany (MLPD).

Nick the Spacecat also claims that Gallo was involved in creating HIV.

Neuer Weg is not only closely associated with the Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany, but it is the party's publishing house, which publishes the newspaper and literature of the party. [https://www.neuerweg.de/wir-ueber-uns] The director of Neuer Weg used to be Christoph Klug, who coauthored a book with Segal, and who was Segal's main spiritual successor in Germany. [https://www.neuerweg.de/autoren/klug-christoph] Klug went on a speaking tour in South Africa to promote Segal's theory together with the Communist Party of South Africa.

Lilli Segal

A biography of Lilli Segal said: [https://en.convoi77.org/deporte_bio/segal-lilli/]

His second wife, Edith Albrecht, threatened to denounce Lilli to the police as a communist, to make her leave the shared residence. Because of the tightening restrictions for Jews in Germany, Lilli moved to France in 1933 and studied at the Toulouse University of Agriculture.

During her stay in Toulouse she met the student Jakob Segal, a Lithuanian national, who was a member of the German Communist Party (KPD). He had immigrated to France because of his involvement in the communist 'Red Student Union'. They married on May 25, 1935 and Lilli was given Lithuanian citizenship by virtue of the marriage, which made her a citizen of the Soviet Union from 1940.

Due to her non-German nationality, Lilli Segal was able to travel to Germany without any difficulties after 1935. During these trips she took on several missions for the KPD without being a member of the party. These were among other things the housing of endangered comrades, the production and distribution of leaflets, and courier activities. In addition, she remained in contact with a group of Bavarian Catholic officers who were opponents of the Hitler regime. They provided her with money for political work.

Until the outbreak of war, Lilli Segal worked in a laboratory in Paris from 1937. She joined the French Communist Party, with which she was regularly involved until the beginning of the war. Because they feared that she was under surveillance by the Gestapo, the French comrades broke off the connection with her.

When Germany occupied France, she left Paris and lived in Mende. In the summer of 1943 party leaders decided to transfer Lilli Segal to the same working group as her husband, because both had lived together for a long time and worked in the same office.

From 1943 until her arrest she worked as a so-called liaison agent for her husband, who worked at the technical headquarters of a party section which dealt with transporting materials, as well as the contact management of liaisons with the headquarters.

The persecution of party official Paul Grasse led the police to their office in the summer of 1943. With the arrest of a number of German and Austrian party comrades on November 23rd Paul Grasse also disappeared.

Lilli Segal was also questioned by the French police (see picture above) at the Prefecture de Police. She was not cooperative and was arrested as a result. After a month, she was handed over by the French police to the German run jail of Fresnes, where she remained until the end of June 1944.

At the end of June, she was taken to Drancy, and after a month, on 31 July 1944, Lilli Segal was deported to Auschwitz in Convoi 77. In the train, she made contact with two Austrian comrades; one of them was Anni Sussmann, with whom she was transferred in November 1944 to a Labour unit at Kratzau in the Sudetenland. (1)

[...]

After returning to France, Lilli Segal continued working for the French Communist Party until 1947. (5) Since it became prohibited for Soviet citizens to work for a political party abroad, she left France together with her husband, Jakob Segal, and they emigrated to the German Democratic Republic. From 1948 she worked in the GDR in various official political organizations, e.g. as an interpreter. (1)

In the "Disinformation squared" paper, Geissler wrote: "The Segals had both become Soviet citizens following the Soviet Union's annexation of Lithuania in 1940, and in autumn 1952, as Lilli later wrote, 'they had been asked to see the Soviet consulate [in Paris]. The consul proposed to us that we move to Berlin, in the German Democratic Republic.'[75] They accepted the consul's proposal, in late December 1952 going to Humboldt University, East Berlin." [f/Geissler_Sprinkle_Disinformation_squared.pdf] But the biography I quoted above indicated that the Segals emigrated to the GDR in 1947 or 1948 and not 1952, so I don't know what explains the discrepancy.

In his 2019 paper Selvage wrote: "On the orders of the same embassy, they had emigrated to the GDR in 1953, where Jakob Segal established the Department of Biology at Humboldt University in Berlin." But he didn't cite any source. [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Douglas-Selvage/publication/336654901_Operation_Denver_The_East_German_Ministry_of_State_Security_and_the_KGB%27s_AIDS_Disinformation_Campaign_1985-1986_Part_1]

Lilli Segal's autobiography was translated to English under the title From Protest to Resistance. [https://annas-archive.se/md5/284ce54d7d38e2d271329568e5825e13]

She appears to have produced disinformation about the Holocaust and not only HIV. She claims that she was personally selected by Josef Mengele when she arrived to Auschwitz, which is a common trope among Auschwitz survivors. Like many Auschwitz survivors, she incorrectly said that Mengele was tall. She also repeated the cliches that Mengele held a whip in his hand, and that he was somehow elegant:

Someone called out: "Old people and women with children to the right, women to the left." SS men stood on the platform and pushed us forward with their rifle butts. For the first time we heard the commands that would accompany us throughout our entire time in the camps: "Move! Move! Faster! Stay in line!" Stumbling, we pressed forward, into the glare of the spotlight, past an elegant, tall, dark-haired officer, who poked at the marchers with the butt of his whip, directing them to the group of the old people and children, or to the other side. Dr. Mengele! He was whistling, quite audibly, a melody from Wagner's Goetterdaemmerung.

In his biography of Mengele, the Jewish mainstream historian David Marwell wrote: [https://books.google.com/books?id=JCCfDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT77]

Historian Zdenek Zofka notes that many survivors recall Mengele speaking to them in Hungarian, a language he did not speak but which was spoken by his colleagues, the pharmacist Viktor Capesius and the physician Dr. Fritz Klein. "Often Mengele would be described as tall and blond, when he was only 5ft 8½ inches tall and dark-haired."[31] "Almost all inmates" at Auschwitz, according to Zofka, maintain that they had been selected by Mengele.

Hermann Langbein, a former Auschwitz inmate and author of the authoritative People in Auschwitz, wrote of this phenomenon, which he deemed the "Mengele Effect," a particular form of "memory displacement":

If a member of the SS is repeatedly named in public in connection with especially monstrous deeds, it is possible that survivors will project their experiences on to him. ... More than once I heard survivors say that Mengele did this or that to them, even though Mengele had not yet arrived in Auschwitz at the time. Olga Lengyel has described him as a blonde angel, even though Mengele was a markedly dark-haired type. In short, crimes of an anonymous SS physician were imputed to Mengele, about whom people had read so many bad things. ...

Some well-known SS men have been positively idealized after the fact. Thus Fania Fénelon has called Mengele a "handsome Siegfried," and Therese Chassaing writes, "Mengele is immaculate in his belted uniform, tall, with shiny black boots that bespeak cleanliness, prosperity, and human dignity." Elie Wiesel mentions as one of Mengele's characteristic attributes "white gloves, a monocle, and the rest."[32]

Langbein saw Mengele "almost every day in the office of the SS infirmary where he was doing routine bureaucratic work," and he claims that Mengele never struck him as either attractive or elegant. He never saw him with a monocle. Doris Bergen, describing the work of Israeli historian Na'ama Shik, wrote about the "so-called Mengele Effect," noting that survivors' accounts decades after the fact could be shaped by what "they have read and heard in the meantime."[33]

Geoffrey Hartmann, who wrote extensively on survivor testimony, observed that "every Auschwitz survivor seems to have gone through a selection by Mengele, as if he manned his post 24 hours a day."[34] In fact, Mengele took his turn at "ramp duty" like the rest of the medical staff in the camp. There is no evidence that he served there more frequently or for longer hours than his colleagues.

Stefan Heym

In the "Disinformation squared" paper, Geissler wrote: [f/Geissler_Sprinkle_Disinformation_squared.pdf]

Soon, though, readers would see Segal himself defending his claims eloquently in an interview published 18 February 1987 in West Berlin in the daily newspaper tageszeitung (taz).[86]

The interview was performed and published by Stefan Heym (1913-2001), a widely admired journalist and public intellectual. In 1933, Helmut Flieg, a German Jew, fled to Czechoslovakia, becoming Stefan Heym. In 1935, he moved on to the United States, where he attended the University of Chicago and became an American citizen. In 1943 Heym joined a psychological-warfare unit of the US Army and the next year took part in the Normandy landings; these experiences formed the background for one of his best known novels, The Crusaders. Protesting the Korean War, Heym in 1951 returned all his American military decorations and left the US for Prague, Czechoslovakia, and in 1952 for East Berlin, where he became famous as a writer and dissident, his pseudonym by then a pen name. Although steadfastly a socialist, Heym published articles and books sharply critical of the politically repressive behaviors of Soviet-bloc leaders, including leaders in the GDR. Much of his work could be published only in the West, and Heym was observed and harassed by the Stasi intensely.[321,322,323,324] Not least because of harassment itself, Heym's publications found broad interest in both Germanies and abroad, and attention to the Segal interview was widespread. In following issues the taz published numerous received comments, many of which were later compiled by Kuno Kruse in his book AIDS - Pathogens from a Gene Laboratory?[243]

Heym became the subject of an Operativer Vorgang or OV, an "operational procedure," and he became a victim of OV Diversant. The aim of OV Diversant was to monitor and frustrate: "by evaluation of the manner of his connections into the NSW [non-socialist currency area, meaning the West] to examine whether Heym acts on demand of secret services (or) other hostile organizations of individuals [and] to restrict his further hostile activities by appropriate politically operative measures[.]" This was all to be accomplished through IMs - unofficial informers to the MfS - and by activities of HA XX in cooperation with HV A, HA II, and friendly security services.[325] (Figure 15)

According to Boghardt, Heym's "enlistment in the AIDS campaign was a major coup for Segal and the HVA."[301] The term "enlistment" suggests that Heym became a knowing participant in disinformation, yet Boghardt and his sources have not speculated on how the Stasi might have succeeded in recruiting one of their most resilient victims. Boghardt has also written that "like his interviewee [Segal] he [Heym] was probably unaware of HVA involvement."[301] The implication here is that the Stasi controlled these two, making them act as they otherwise would not have acted, that it controlled them so effectively, so cleverly, so subtly that they "probably" never caught on. Heym had been "enlisted" subliminally. This implication is not reconcilable with archival findings or live questioning. Actually, the Stasi initially were aware of neither Heym's interest nor his Segal interview. Heym's physician, Professor Doctor Dagobert Müller, had drawn his patient's attention to an item written by Jakob Segal. [326] Heym immediately grew fascinated by the HIV-from-Fort-Detrick myth. This was 9 October 1986; in his diary, unpublished but kindly provided to us by his widow, Inge Heym, he recorded the date.[327] What was the item his physician had? A copy of the draft paper received by Bond? A copy of the material Segal had provided to African journalists? A Harare handout? We know neither what it was nor how he came to have it. In June 2007, one of us, E.G., gained access to part of Stefan Heym's estate. There, in a box containing many AIDS-related books and articles, was nothing likely to have been the item shown to Heym by his physician.

Geissler also wrote: "Mr. [redacted] emphasizes that Segal and Stefan Heym - writer - are good friends. He reports that Stefan Heym before he published on the origin of AIDS very frequently spoke with Segal and that here presumably a connection has to be registered.[358]" He cited a Stasi file of information provided by an anonymous informant.

Geissler concluded his section on Heym by writing: "Was Stefan Heym a recruit? No. He was a self-deluded writer following a bad lead. He was impetuous enough to imagine he could judge intuitively what many others knew they could judge only scientifically and forensically. He set out to tell a story and ended up among its characters. Thus did this notable victim of hard-at-work Stasi manage to become, after die Wende, a notable victim of out-of-work Stasi." But considering Heym's background as a psychological warfare officer, I have a hard time believing he was just a useful idiot.

When Heym lived in the United States, he worked as the editor-in-chief of the official German-language newspaper of Communist Party USA. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English_press_of_the_Communist_Party_USA]

The Wikipedia article about Heym says: "He was a member of the Ritchie Boys, a unit for psychological warfare under the command of émigré Hans Habe. His work consisted of composing texts designed to influence Wehrmacht soldiers, to be disseminated by leaflet, radio and loudspeaker." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan_Heym] The Ritchie Boys were largely made up of Jews. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ritchie_Boys] In addition to producing propaganda, they were also responsible for interrogating prisoners of war, and they served as prosecutors and translators in the Nuremberg show trials.

Hans Habe was a Jew who fled from Germany to America in 1940. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Habe] After the occupying forces dismantled the German press, Hans Habe established numerous newspapers in Germany that were controlled by the US military government. Heym was an editor of one of the so-called "re-education" newspapers called Die Neue Zeitung, whose editor-in-chief was Hans Habe. A scholarly paper about Die Neue Zeitung said: "the paper came to be run by European - mostly Jewish - émigrés who, during their exile, had received American citizenship and joined the Psychological Warfare Division (PWD) of the U.S. Army". [https://sci-hub.ee/https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/0145-2096.00150]

Before the war, Hans Habe was the editor-in-chief of a Viennese socialist newspaper called Der Morgen. German-language Wikipedia mentioned that the newspaper opposed attacks on Freemasonry. [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Morgen%2e_Wiener_Montagblatt] The newspaper was founded by a Jew who was a member of the Grand Lodge of Vienna. [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximilian_Schreier] A book about freemasonry in Nazi-era Austria said that about 70-80% of the members of the lodge were Jews. [https://dokumen.pub/sterreichische-freimaurer-im-nationalsozialismus-treue-und-verrat-9783205790938-9783205785460.html]

The scripts of Stefan Heym's radio plays were published in a book titled Reden an den Feind ("Speeches to the Enemy"). You can download the book as epub from Anna's Archive, convert it to HTML with pandoc input.epub -o output.html, and open it in a browser to translate it to English. [https://annas-archive.se/search?q=heym+reden+feind]

The book included the script of a radio play about Auschwitz that was broadcast by Radio Luxembourg on April 20th 1945. The first voice in the script asked: "And who decided who should die?" And the second voice answered: "Two SS doctors, Dr. Mengele and Dr. Thilo."

The script is one of the earliest sources of any kind where Josef Mengele is portrayed as an evil doctor at Auschwitz, or as selecting people who would be killed. ChatGPT was not able to find any earlier source, but Grok found three sources that predated Heym's broadcast, which were all scripts for propaganda radio broadcasts. They were a script dated April 8th prepared by the United States Office of War Information, a script dated April 12th by the SHAEF Psychological Warfare Division, and a script dated April 15th by the British Political Warfare Executive. [https://x.com/i/grok/share/OaXn2DtdXYuufXXp2slj6ivgk] Grok said the radio play by the OWI "was part of a series of OWI 'black propaganda' broadcasts (voiced by German exiles or POWs) designed to demoralize German troops/civilians".

The earliest article I found at Newspapers.com that mentioned Mengele was published on May 4th 1945, which was two weeks after the broadcast date of Heym's radio play. [https://www.newspapers.com/image/281212980]

In Heym's radio play about Auschwitz, an anynymous Auschwitz survivor said that between 12,000 and 20,000 people were killed at Auschwitz every day (which would amount to about 4 to 7 million people during a single year, even though the mainstream death toll of Auschwitz is about 1.1 million people over a period of about 5 years). The Auschwitz survivor also said "by night, the flames from the crematoria gave the camp a ghostly glow". Numerous other Auschwitz survivors also claim they saw flames shooting up from the chimneys of the crematoria, even though the chimney of a crematorium does not produce flames.

Heym's book also included the script of a radio play about Buchenwald, where an anonymous soldier spoke of the horrors at the camp. He said that the chief torturer at Buchenwald was "SS-Doktor Dietrich", who I didn't find mentioned in other sources, and who ChatGPT said was likely a fictional character.

Nathaniel Lehrman

Geissler wrote: "The retired Clinical Director of the Brooklyn State Hospital, Nathaniel S. Lehrman, a psychiatrist, grew concerned that AIDS was not caused by a virus alone but by a virus in combination with toxic waste or other poisons. Quite sensibly, Lehrman was reminding investigators to consider environmental factors. Less sensibly, Lehrman bounded far into conspiracy theory, raising the possibility that the AIDS virus had been tested covertly by the CIA in Africa." [f/Geissler_Sprinkle_Disinformation_squared.pdf]

In 1987 the CovertAction Information Bulletin published an article by Nathaniel Lehrman titled "Is AIDS Non-Infectious? The Possibility and its CBW Implications". [https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP90-00845R000100170001-8.pdf] Lehrman presented Duesberg's theory that HIV did not cause AIDS, but in a seeming contradiction, he also presented Jakob Segal's theory that HIV was an American bioweapon. He reconciled the two conflicting theories by asking: "Might the virus then be a laboratory-created, minimally infective agent intended to be blamed for the chemical poisoning it actually accompanies?" Then in the fashion of Sasha Latypova, he proposed that AIDS was caused by an unspecified poison or toxic substance.

In the CAIB article, Lehrman also wrote: "The Segals' assertions, as well as that of Dr. Seale, Dr. Strecker, this author, and others, have received considerable attention in the international press, particularly the Soviet press, which has had many articles about the Segals since 1985."

CovertAction Information Bulletin was founded by the former CIA officer turned KGB agent Phillip Agee, who said that the goal of CAIB was "a worldwide campaign to destabilize the CIA through exposure of its operations and personnel." Wikipedia says: "The Mitrokhin Archive, by ex-KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin and British intelligence historian Christopher Andrew, alleged that CAIB received assistance from the Soviet KGB and Cuban DGI. Mitrokhin claimed that a Soviet project (code-named RUPOR) was responsible for the Bulletin, although it cautioned that of the publication's founding members, only Agee would have been aware of the foreign government connection. KGB files recovered by Mitrokhin boasted of their ability to pass information and disinformation to Agee.[7][12][13]" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CovertAction_Quarterly] (But CAIB was based in Washington DC like the CIA, and it was staffed by former intelligence agents, so it's also possible that CAIB was controlled by US intelligence agencies as an outlet of controlled opposition to the CIA.)

Nathaniel Lehrman was a member of the Young Communist League and the Zionist student organization Avukah, and he served in the Signal Corps of the US Army during WW2. [https://jewishcurrents.org/nathaniel-s-lehrman-may-26th-1923-january-19th-2020] Another highlight of his biography worth mentioning is that he served 7 months in prison for Medicaid fraud. [ibid.]

Lehrman's wife and son both worked as translators of Russian. Lehrman's wife Emily migrated from the Soviet Union to the United States as a child, and she was the "junior division chair of Russian War Relief and interpreter for Solomon Mikhoels in Boston during World War II". [https://www.jewishboston.com/read/meet-the-lehrmans/] Mikhoels was a Soviet actor who was the chairman of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. In 1941 he led a rally in Moscow to raise funds for the Soviet war effort from the international Jewish community. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_Mikhoels]

An obituary of Nathaniel Lehrman's wife said: "Emily Lehrman completed a Masters degree in Russian literature at Columbia. Following her graduation, she worked as the secretary for the department chairman, Ernest J. Simmons, and then for the American Soviet Medical Society." [https://www.longislandpress.com/2015/02/06/emily-r-lehrman/] A paper about the history of Russian studies said that several leaders of the Russian Institute of Columbia University had a radical left-wing background, and that Ernest Simmons had served as the vice-chair of the American Labor Party. [https://journals.openedition.org/monderusse/8696]

CHD's CEO Mary Holland also got her BA, MA, and JD degrees from the Russian Institute of Columbia University, where she studied Soviet law under an area studies scholarship. [https://www.linkedin.com/in/mary-holland/details/education/] She studied for a semester in the Soviet Union, and she later also worked for three years in Russia.

The Russian Institute of the Columbia University was home to the first area studies program in the United States, which was established on the initiative of the Rockefeller Foundation. A paper about the history of Russian studies said: "The transplantation of the OSS to Columbia's Russian Institute (RI), founded in 1946, seemed most direct - yet deceptively so. The RI's founding director was Geroid Tanquary Robinson, a historian who had run the office's USSR Division; economist Abram Bergson (who had led Robinson's economics branch) was also on the founding staff of the RI. The other key RI faculty (legal scholar John Hazard and historian Philip Mosely) had served in the State Department during the war. [...] The RI's M.A. degree, in particular, aimed to train Russia experts for work in government agencies. (In the argot of Sovietology, references to unspecified 'government agencies' usually meant the CIA, though it could include the State Department.)" [https://journals.openedition.org/monderusse/8696] Both Emily Lehrman and Mary Holland got an MA degree from the Russian Institute.

The second director of the Russian Institute was Philip Mosely, who held top secret clearances at several intelligence agencies including the CIA, and who worked with the Rockefeller Foundation to plan the development of the area studies initiative. [https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2009/septemberoctober/feature/the-cold-war%E2%80%99s-organization-man] The Russian Institute also published a CIA-subsidized translation service of Soviet press. [ibid.] Another director of the Russian Institute was Marshall Shulman, who served as a psychological warfare officer in WW2, and who was a member of Le Cercle and the Bilderberger Group. [https://www.nytimes.com/1966/11/03/archives/a-captain-in-air-force.html, https://isgp-studies.com/le-cercle-membership-list]

Literaturnaya Gazeta and story about weaponized mosquitoes

In the book The First Directorate: My 32 Years in Intelligence and Espionage against the West, the Soviet defector Oleg Kalugin wrote: [https://annas-archive.se/search?q=kalugin%20first%20directorate]

In all the years I was in Foreign Counterintelligence, Literaturnaya Gazeta was our prime conduit in the Soviet press for propaganda and disinformation. Whenever we called the editor, Alexander Chakovsky, and asked him to print an article, he complied. Sometimes we wrote the stories and put them under the names of nonexistent authors. Sometimes journalists such as Borovik or Iona Andronov wrote the stories themselves, using information supplied by the KGB."

Konstantin Kapitonov was a Russian intelligence operative whose cover was working as a journalist. He used to work as the Egyptian correspondent of Literaturnaya Gazeta. An article about Kapitanov mentioned that Literaturnaya Gazeta also published a story about the CIA creating weaponized mosquitoes: [https://agentura.ru/en/new-nobility/how-a-renegade-middle-eastern-mafia-invented-modern-russian-espionage/]

In 1982, Kapitonov was dispatched to Beirut as a correspondent of Literaturnaya Gazeta weekly, an ostensible literary review which was actually the KGB's "prime conduit in the Soviet press for propaganda and disinformation," according to former KGB General Oleg Kalugin. The year Kapitonov left Moscow for Beirut, Literaturnaya Gazeta published a long story titled, "Incubator of Death," about a CIA factory for weaponized mosquitoes. The story was a response to the American accusations that the Soviet army had used chemical weapons in Afghanistan, and was designed to deflect blame.

The network of Literaturnaya Gazeta's foreign bureaus around the world was essentially a joint enterprise sponsored by the KGB. The weekly got bureaus, and KGB spies were given journalistic cover.

The article also said:

He couldn't get another posting as a correspondent in the Middle East, but thanks to the internet, he kept busy. "I'm doing a lot of writing of black stories on Timoshenko," he said, referring to Yulia, one of the architects of Ukraine's 2004 Orange Revolution. "These stories," he said cheerfully after a few shots of vodka, were all being published "on some shitty Ukrainian websites - under a pseudonym, of course." His publisher had also tasked Kapitonov with finding other writers to contribute, with an enticing payment plan. "Andrei, it's a lot of money, and I can secure it for you just like that."

The author of the article was Andrei Soldatov, who is the editor Agentura.ru, which he describes as "a watchdog of the Russian secret services' activities", so he might be a biased source. [https://agentura.ru/en/about/]

In the book Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare, Thomas Rid wrote that the story about the weaponized mosquitoes was supposedly based on leaked documents that were provided to a Russian journalist by an editor of CAIB:

A vast dark cloud of billions of buzzing mosquitoes swarms toward a distant city skyline. The lead mosquito's legs are armored with spikes, its eyes and mouth so magnified they appear gigantic. At second glance, the creature's mouth is not that of a normal mosquito, but an engineered, razor-sharp syringe. The swarm is emanating from the dark eye sockets of a human skull, a skull smoking a cigarette.

This bizarre illustration appeared in Literaturnaya Gazeta on February 3, 1982, above a long story titled "Incubator of Death." The piece, written in the first person, was a kind of travelogue into a CIA factory for weaponised mosquitoes. The author, Iona Andronov, started his adventure after visiting the editor of "the journal 'Covert Action' in Washington," (a reference to Covert Action Information Bulletin). That Washington editor showed Andronov, he claimed, "leaked documents from the CIA" that led his investigation to Lahore, Pakistan. En route from Moscow to Lahore, Andronov recounted, his luggage was taken away during a layover, then he was followed by Pakistani security, and diplomatic phone numbers appeared to mysteriously stop working. American spies were on his heels. Nevertheless, the intrepid reporter managed to charm his way into the secret mosquito lab.

[...]

The killer mosquito story was part of a larger, more complex campaign to deflect blame, and to compromise the U.S. and NATO over biological and chemical weapons. The campaign was code-named TARAKANY, "cockroaches" in Russian. Even if the Soviet claim that the CIA was developing chemical weapons in Lahore was revealed as fake, that revelation would make it easier for the USSR to claim that the CIA's reports of Soviet chemical weapons in Afghanistan were equally made-up. Just when the United States was getting ready to publish a major report on Soviet chemical weapons, Literaturnaya Gazeta alleged that the Pakistan Malaria Research Center was a CIA-funded laboratory to breed weaponized mosquitoes.

The story was clumsy but creative. Iona Andronov depicted the Americans he met in the "mosquito factory" as cartoonish villains - fat, fiendish, crude, and cunning. The University of Maryland lab in Lahore and its fight against malaria, he claimed, was only a façade; behind it were "poisoners from overseas" who plotted to infect entire cattle herds with viruses and then take advantage of the seasonal migration of the herds from Pakistan to Afghanistan to start an epidemic of encephalitis in Afghanistan. The Gazeta story also claimed that a recent outbreak of dengue fever in Cuba had been caused by imported Lahore-bred mosquitoes. TARAKANY replayed similar tales about U.S. killer germs in India, Iran, Bangladesh, Lebanon, and South Africa. The KGB considered its "cockroaches" campaign a big success, especially after Service A concluded that Pakistan had declared the American head of the University of Maryland lab in Lahore persona non grata as a result of their work. Andropov, the chairman of the KGB, even awarded a testimonial to his resident in Pakistan.[3]

[...]

Just a few months later, Covert Action Information Bulletin published a special issue on chemical weapons. The Bulletin also claimed that the same virulent 1981 outbreak of dengue fever in Cuba had been a CIA operation - it was unclear whether the idea originated at Dupont Circle or Yasenevo.[4] The Soviets launched an entire range of measures in the early 1980s that attempted to blame various diseases on the United States, particularly the Cuban outbreak of dengue fever.[5]

The story about the weaponized mosquitoes sounds like a story concocted by George Webb. It's only missing encrypted Blackberries and a nuclear deal.

Thomas Rid's book Active Measures

In the book Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare, Thomas Rid wrote that when CAIB's founder Philip Agee lived in the UK, he maintained contact with the KGB through the London correspondent of Literaturnaya Gazeta:

One day Agee approached the KGB rezidentura in Mexico City and offered what one senior Soviet intelligence officer later called "reams of information about CIA operations."[26] The KGB Mexico station chief, however, suspected that Agee was a CIA plant, what spies then called a "dangle," an undercover agent posing as a defector in order to inject disinformation into the KGB, and rejected Agee. Agee then went to Cuba's foreign intelligence agency, the Dirección General de Inteligencia, or DGI, which welcomed its first high-profile CIA source with open arms and soon shared Agee's file with the KGB.[27] Oleg Kalugin recalled the disappointment of failing to recruit the American quasi-defector himself: "The Cubans shared Agee's information with us. But as I sat in my office in Moscow, reading reports about the growing list of revelations coming from Agee, I cursed our officers for turning away such a prize."[28]

In December 1971, Agee moved from Mexico to Paris, where he lived hand-to-mouth at different addresses in the Fifth Arrondissement. It was then that he began to entertain the idea of writing a tell-all book on the CIA. From late 1972 to mid-1977, he lived first in London, then in Truro, Cornwall, and finally in Cambridge, maintaining contact with the KGB through the Literaturnaya Gazeta correspondent in London.

British authorities accused Agee of being a Soviet influence agent, and he was deported from the UK in 1977. After that he founded CAIB. In the third issue of CAIB, he published a fake appendix to a US intelligence manual which was written by the KGB according to Rid. CAIB is supposed to have received the fake appendix from a person who presented himself as an anonymous US Army whistleblower.

In the book Active Measures, Rid also wrote:

In 1992, the head of Russian foreign intelligence, Yevgeny Primakov, confirmed the KGB's role in the AIDS disinformation campaign during a talk at MGIMO, an academic institute affiliated with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Moscow. Primakov revealed that the AIDS story was "created in the cabinets of the KGB,"[47] and had simply aimed to distract from the Red Army's use of chemical weapons.

He cited an article published in the Izvestia newspaper in 1992 titled "Внешняя разведка ищет таланты". The article said in Russian: [https://www.reddit.com/r/tjournal_refugees/comments/1c0geh5/к_вопросу_о_секретных_лабораториях/]

The head of the Foreign Intelligence Service issued a series of truly sensational announcements. He recalled the well-known articles published several years ago in our national newspapers about the alleged origins of AIDS in secret Pentagon laboratories. According to Yevgeny Primakov, the materials revealing the American scientists' "forged" plot against humanity were concocted in the offices of the KGB.

(The Russian word which Rid translated as "cabinets" was "кабинетах", which means offices, and not filing cabinets like some people might think.)

Jakob and Lilli Segal's booklet was distributed in 1986 in the Eighth Conference of Non-Aligned Nations in Harare, Zimbabwe. Rid wrote that the conference served as a channel for the distribution of other Soviet disinformation material, along with a list of CIA officers similar to the list that was later published by CAIB:

The KGB was running DENVER as a joint campaign with help from partner agencies.[31] Ten days after the conference, the deputy head of the X, Wolfgang Mutz, traveled from Berlin to his partners in Sofia, Bulgaria. Mutz briefed his counterparts on a long list of ongoing active measures. One, code-named MIRROR, also boosted in Harare ten days earlier, was a slim book nominally written by the East Berlin correspondent of Patriot and Blitz, an investigative Indian weekly. The book, Devil and His Dart: How the CIA Is Plotting in the Third World, was dripping with anti-American clichés and CIA conspiracy theories. Mutz told the Bulgarians that it contained a list with the names of 300 CIA officers,[32] again titled, like HVA's earlier volume, Who's Who in CIA.[33] The Americans, Mutz added, had already bought 600 copies of "our book" from the publisher.[34] HVA had the book translated and published in German. The Bulgarians agreed to help push the anti-CIA pamphlet into Lebanon and Syria.

Then Mutz told his counterparts that the AIDS campaign, DENVER, occupied "a considerable amount" of the resources in his department, and added that another HVA department had done "a great deal of scientific work." Mutz was referring to the 52-page Segal study that had surfaced in Harare, and to HVA's science and technology department, which listed Segal as a collaborator.[35] The Bulgarians considered it challenging to find a local scientist to "support the German professor's thesis."

Footnote 33 says: "HVA's detailed collaboration with the named, East Berlin-based author, Kunhanandan Nair, remains unclear. HVA referred to the book as 'our book' in 1988. See Christopher Nehring, Die Zusammenarbeit der DDR-Auslandsaufklärung mit der Aufklärung der Volksrepublik Bulgarien. Regionalfilialen des KGB?"

Footnote 35 referred to pages 55-57 of Selvage and Nehring's book Die AIDS-Verschwörung.

The Indian newspaper Blitz published an interview of Jakob Segal by Kunhanandan Nair in 1987. Nair's article was later republished in two African newspapers without crediting Nair as the author, and it was published as a book accompanied by Segal's report.

The original book titled "Who's Who in the CIA" was published in 1968 and credited to Julius Mader. Rid mentioned that the Czech defector Ladislav Bittman said that he was one of the co-authors of the book:

Julius Mader was notorious, at least in intelligence circles. He had already published seven books in the 1960s, all of them attacking Western spy agencies - but he was not working alone. A dozen years later, Bittman was asked about Who's Who before the House Select Committee on Intelligence.

"I am very familiar with the book," responded Bittman, "because I am very sorry to admit that I am one of the co-authors of the book." Bittman went on to explain the genesis and purpose of the operation:

The book Who's Who in the CIA [sic] was prepared by the Czechoslovak intelligence service and the East German intelligence service in the midsixties. It took a few years to put it together. About half of the names listed in that book are real CIA operatives. The other half are people who were just American diplomats or various officials; and it was prepared with the expectation that naturally many, many Americans operating abroad, diplomats and so on, would be hurt because their names were exposed as CIA officials.[35]

Some reviewers and even the CIA had criticized the joint KGB-StasiStB publication for being inaccurate, and hence a botched operation - but including innocents was not an error; it was part of the action. The purpose of the operation, as Bittman explained, was to "paralyze" not just the CIA but also those innocent diplomats, journalists, and others falsely implicated in spying.[36]

In Western countries, the book was more likely to be seen as an obvious fake. In the developing world it would cause more harm, even deadly harm, as it turned out. The CIA's damage assessment has not been declassified, but Mader's little red book was damaging enough to cause the CIA to retaliate in kind. Langley's response was years in the making.

The Stasi's now-open archives have confirmed Bittman's account: the Ministry of State Security in East Berlin listed Mader and his secretary as "officers in special service."[37] He was promoted to major in 1964, and received a salary from the Stasi. He had several code names, including FAINGOLD, HUNTER, and X54.

Rid wrote that part of the objective of HV A/X was to a break up NATO:

In the spring of 1966, Markus Wolf was called to a meeting in Moscow on short notice, to meet the first deputy chief of the KGB's First Chief Directorate. After speaking about the wider context, the officer deferred to Igor Agayants, the head of Service A.

"Comrades," Agayants intoned, "this strategic assessment requires a new quality of active measures, clear strategies leading into the 70s and effective measures that go beyond merely destructive methods." Agayants rearticulated the strategic objective that had been set by the Central Committee: "The long-term goal is to remove the USA from the so-called Atlantic Alliance."[8]

Wolf got the message. On the flight back, he began sketching out plans to upgrade the HVA's own disinformation unit, and the X was born.[9]

The coordinators of the Stasi's HIV operation included Wolfgang Mutz and Hans Pfeiffer. Mutz was the deputy head of HV A/X, and Pfeiffer was the deputy head of department 1 of HV A/X, which was responsible for "active measures intended to provoke or intensify differences between the USA and its NATO allies".

Rid wrote that when the department X of the Stasi launched an operation to portray West Germans as neo-Nazis, the Stasi collaborated with the Bulgarian state security agency COMDOS, which later also took part in the AIDS disinformation operation:

Next, Wagenbreth's unit forged a leaflet that purported to come from the organizers of the neo-Nazi youth congress. The faux leaflet called for a stronger far-right movement in order to "free Europe," as it approvingly quoted the secretary of the 1936 Olympics Games, and highlighted that the games in 1972 also were not global but European, "reflecting the racist understanding of the superiority of European nations," as the X explained in an internal memo.[40] HVA operatives posed as far-right extremists, even threatening violent action[41] to escalate the confrontation between West German police and the radical right, to "engage their forces in the fight against extremists."[42] The Stasi distributed the pamphlet to the press and various national Olympic committees.

A few months before the games began, the Stasi's acting head of disinformation met with a delegation of the Bulgarian disinformation unit in East Berlin. The X leadership informed the Bulgarians that they were preparing a range of additional measures under the ZEUS code name, including threatening letters sent from supposed right-wing extremists to the federal and state interior ministries in Bonn and Munich. Department X also suggested sending another batch of letters to the same interior ministries, this time purportedly from "emigrant organizations" in Germany, in order to "create compromising materials on the basis of which arrests and liquidations of emigrant organizations could be carried out." Major Hans Knaust of the HVA asked Bulgarian state security for help in distributing the racist leaflets to newspapers in Turkey, Italy, Greece, and Arab countries in order to harm West Germany's image and "strengthen disagreements between NATO countries."[43]

Early timeline of HIV conspiracy theories

This list is mainly based on Erhard Geissler's paper "Disinformation squared". Timezone information for the dates was not provided, but most dates are probably in the local timezone.

• 1983-07-09: Gay Community News publishes an article by Charlie Shively, who speculates that AIDS was an American bioweapon based on the African swine fever virus, which the CIA had deployed against Cuba.
• 1983-07-17: The Indian newspaper Patriot publishes a letter about AIDS from an anonymous American anthropologist.
• 1983: The Strecker brothers supposedly "stumbled into a written order for the AIDS virus and a written plan to inject disease during preventive vaccinations for experimental purposes".
• 1985-08-19: John Seale writes a letter titled "AIDS and National Security" to editors of major medical journals and major papers in London, which none of them ends up publishing.
• 1985-09-07: Date of a memo where the KGB invites the Bulgarian COMDOS to participate in the AIDS disinformation program. A part of the text of the memo later appears in the article by Valentin Zapevalov.
• 1985-10-03: In a letter to Harry Mehner, Jakob Segal mentions his suspicion that AIDS originated at Fort Detrick.
• 1985-10-18: Executive Intelligence Review publishes an interview of John Seale titled "AIDS and the security of the Western world". [https://larouchepub.com/eiw/public/1985/eirv12n41-19851018/eirv12n41-19851018_054-dr_john_seale.pdf]
• 1985-10-25: Executive Intelligence Review publishes an article by Warren Hamerman titled "The Soviets are covering up the deadly AIDS pandemic". [https://larouchepub.com/eiw/public/1985/eirv12n42-19851025/eirv12n42-19851025_026-the_soviets_are_covering_up_the.pdf] Hamerman claims that the Soviets control the WHO and the CDC, and the Soviets are responsible for spreading AIDS in the west.
• 1985-10-30: Literaturnaya Gazeta publishes an article by Valentin Zapevalov titled "Паника на Западе, или Что скрывается за сенсацией вокруг AIDS" ("Panic in the west, or what is hiding behing the sensation surrounding AIDS").
• 1985-11-13: Literaturnaya Gazeta published an article titled "Pochemu mlochit pressa SShA" ("Why the USA Press is Silent"), about why the US press had not responded to the article by Zapevalov that had been published two weeks earlier.
• 1985-11-20: According to Geissler's bibliography, the Wall Street Journal publishes an article by Nathaniel Lehrman titled "The containment of AIDS". However I didn't find the article at Newspapers.com or on the website of the Wall Street Journal.
• 1985-11-22: Executive Intelligence Review publishes an article by Warren Hamerman, who claims that the article in Literaturnaya Gazeta was published in response to his article in EIR a month earlier. [https://larouchepub.com/eiw/public/1985/eirv12n46-19851122/eirv12n46-19851122_006-journal_admits_aids_could_be_bio.pdf]
• 1985-11-30: The African American newspaper N.Y. Amsterdam News publishes an article by J. Zamgba Browne titled "Link AIDS to CIA warfare".
• 1985-12-11: Literaturnaya Gazeta publishes an interview of the virologist Sergey G. Drozdov titled "AIDS: Panic continues" (Russian title unknown).
• 1985-12-20: The London communist newspaper Morning Star publishes an interview of Seale titled "AIDS germ warfare fear", with no author listed.
• 1985-12-26: Moscow Radio's English-language World Service airs a program about Seale's theory. It contains the earliest reference to the visna recombination theory I have found, even though I have not found the text of the article in the Morning Star newspaper, which may have also mentioned the visna theory.
• 1985-12-28: N.Y. Amsterdam News publishes an article by Nathaniel Lehrman titled "Some Minor Inaccuracies".
• 1985-12-29: Los Angeles Times publishes an interview of John Seale. [https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-12-19-mn-30652-story.html]
• 1986-01-18: N.Y. Amsterdam News publishes an article by Nathaniel Lehrman titled "AIDS - a 'natural' epidemic?"
• 1986-03-28: Date of Theodore and Robert Strecker's pamphlet "This is a Bio-Attack Alert".
• 1986-05-29: Jakob Segal writes a letter to John Seale where he says HIV is a chimera of HTLV-I and visna.
• 1986-08-26 to 1986-09-06: The Eighth Conference of Non-Aligned Nations is held in Harare, Zimbabwe. Segal's booklet is distributed before or during the conference.
• 1986-08: Alan Cantwell receives an invitation from his mentor Virginia Livingston-Wheeler to attend Strecker's meeting.
• 1987-02-18: The West German taz newspaper publishes Jakob Segal's interview with Stefan Heym.
• 1987-03-01 The journal Cancer Research publishes a paper titled "Retroviruses as Carcinogens and Pathogens: Expectations and Reality", where Peter Duesberg questions whether HIV is the cause of AIDS. [https://aacrjournals.org/cancerres/article/47/5/1199/492213/Retroviruses-as-Carcinogens-and-Pathogens]
• 1988: Alan Cantwell's book AIDS and the Doctors of Death is published.
• 1988: The "Strecker Memorandum" videotape is released.

Valentin Zapevalov

Russian-language Wikipedia had interesting details about Valentin Zapevalov: [https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Запевалов%2c_Валентин_Васильевич]

In 1977-1983, he was a staff correspondent for the USSR State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company in the FRG. Since the autumn of 1985, he worked in the international department of the Literaturnaya Gazeta[3], and in 1985-1996, he was the newspaper's staff correspondent in Bonn (Federal Republic of Germany). In 1996-1998, he was the head of the international department of LG.

[...]

During his years working in Germany, Zapevalov regularly appeared on the talk show "Internazionale Frühschoppen" on the German television channel ARD, hosted by Werner Höffer, a former Goebbels propagandist who had undergone social adaptation.

[...]

From January 1999 to February 2001, at the invitation of government official and former foreign intelligence officer Grigory Rapota, Zapevalov became head of the public relations bureau of the state-owned companies Rosvooruzhenie and Rosoboronexport.

[....]

In his memoirs and the accompanying interview, Zapevalov described his role as a foreign correspondent as something between a diplomat and an intelligence officer, expressing confidence that "it's unlikely that politicians would refuse such a good channel of communication even now."

Zapevalov appears to be an ethnic Russian from Estonia with one quarter Estonian ancestry, and not a Jew. However in an interview in 2018, Zapevalov said: [https://web.archive.org/web/20200926203029/http://inforing.net/publications/infopress/culture.php?ELEMENT_ID=44648]

There were some very talented journalists, real golden pens, at Literaturnaya Gazeta: Yuri Shchekochikhin, Arkady Vaksberg, Anatoly Rubinov - his real name was Abram Zalmanovich... When I came to LG, 90 percent of the staff were Jews. And when I needed to fit in, I said, "I'm from Estonia, and my mother's name is Senne-Heleene Alfredi tytar Sorgus, it's an Estonian surname." To which they replied, "Valya, we're all Estonians here..."

Executive Intelligence Review on AIDS

On October 18th 1985, LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review published an interview of John Seale titled "AIDS and the security of the Western world". [https://larouchepub.com/eiw/public/1985/eirv12n41-19851018/eirv12n41-19851018_054-dr_john_seale.pdf]

At the time AIDS had not yet spread to the Soviet Union, so Seale speculated that the Soviets might be trying to make AIDS spread faster in the west by encouraging homosexuality and drug use, or by promoting disinformation about how AIDS spreads:

I wrote as long ago as May 4, 1983, over two years ago, to the bureau chief of Newsweek in London, and to the bureau chief of Time magazine in London. In the letter, I wrote: "If my hypothesis is correct, and we wait perhaps 20 years before we take drastic' preventive action, half the population of the Western world will be wiped out. Meanwhile, the communist countries, sheltering behind their closed frontiers, will watch capitalism collapse in a way never predicted by Marx."

[...]

And I wrote a letter on Aug. 19 to the editors of the major London papers and to four or five of the major medical journals. It's headed "AIDS and National Security." What I said was: "Once the AIDS virus gets into an intravenous drug abusing community, it spreads even faster than among homosexuals. Long before even half the NATO forces and their reservists were infected with the AIDS virus, the West would be a pushover for the Soviets. Employing the AIDS virus is much less messy and self-destructive than using nuclear weapons or nerve gas. Its spread is easily prevented in a totalitarian state, unlike incoming missiles containing nuclear or chemical warheads. The Soviets did not deliberately start the AIDS epidemic as a form of biological warfare, but only a moron or an idiot in the Krenuin could fail to see its potential in the East-West power struggle, now that it is here. Gorbachov could easily contain the AIDS epidemic behind the Iron Curtain using methods far less draconian than those employed by Stalin in the '20s and '30s. And if he makes sure that heroin and cocaine keep flooding into the West, and the porno industry keeps pumping out propaganda glorifying ever more promiscuous and bizarre effects, he could be laughing all the way to world domination by about the year 2000."

I did write a letter for publication to the editors of the Times, the Telegraph, and the Guardian on Sept. 3, the 46th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II as far as the British were concerned. I asked a number of questions: Can the totalitarian Soviet system easily prevent the spread of the AIDS virus? The answer, I am sure, is "yes." Another very important question: Can the speed with which the AIDS virus spreads amongst our people be accelerated by actively encouraginga permissive attitude toward drug abuse, homosexual promiscuity, and various bizarre forms of heterosexual anal sex. And the answer is, obviously, "yes." And then, would the provision of disinformation and misinformation in the West about the many ways in which the virus is really spread, would that speed up transmission? And the answer clearly is "yes." My last two questions were: Does the Politburo in Moscow believe that the answer to all these questions is "yes"? Has World War III already started?

In the article Seale did not yet say that AIDS was an engineered bioweapon, and he said AIDS had been in Africa longer than the west. He did not yet mention the visna recombination theory, but he only said: "This is like what is known with other so-called slow virus diseases - one or two rare ones are known to occur in man - but is very like the disease known as visna, which occurs in sheep. What has now transpired is that the virus which causes this progressive btain disease in sheep is extremely similar in its nucleitide sequence, or genetically, to the AIDS virus." (However the reference genome of HIV-1 has only about 50% nucleotide similarity to the reference genome of visna if you ignore positions with gaps, or about 40% if you don't ignore positions with gaps, which is hardly "extremely similar".)

In order to find more articles about AIDS in EIR, I tried searching Google for site:larouchepub.com/eiw/public/1985 aids.

I found an article from October 1985 by Warren Hamerman titled "The Soviets are covering up the deadly AIDS pandemic". [https://larouchepub.com/eiw/public/1985/eirv12n42-19851025/eirv12n42-19851025_026-the_soviets_are_covering_up_the.pdf] Hamerman said that he was the "Director of the EIR's Biological Holocaust Task Force", and he wrote "For most of this year, high officials of the U. S. government have systematically rejected Executive Intelligence Review's attempts to raise the national security implications of the global AIDS pandemic and declare a full-scale War on AIDS."

He wrote "The entire chain of command within the WHO responsible for AIDS surveillance programs and information is under explicit Warsaw Pact Command." He also said that the WHO controlled the CDC, and he wrote: "The lethal pandemic is infecting tens of millions in the West, while the Soviets chortle that they have no native-born AIDS cases. We now know why EIR's requests for national security action have been rejected. The Soviets have been running the global command and control of all AIDS policies through WHO. How convenient."

So apparently other authors at EIR had similar views as John Seale.

A month later November 22nd 1985, EIR published an article where Warren Hamerman claimed that the first Literaturnaya Gazeta article was published in response to his article in EIR: [https://larouchepub.com/eiw/public/1985/eirv12n46-19851122/eirv12n46-19851122_006-journal_admits_aids_could_be_bio.pdf]

In the journal Literaturnaya Gazeta on Oct. 30, for the first time in history anywhere in the world, the Soviets have admitted the possibility that the deadly AIDS virus could have been "bioengineered" and worked up into a weapon in a military laboratory. The extaordinary Soviet admission that it was technically possible to prepare a virus like AIDS as a biological warfare agent came in the context of an article which featured an attack on EIR and its founder, Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. EIR had published a cover story titled "Soviet Role in Covering Up the Deadly Threat of AIDS" in its Oct. 25, 1985 isssue.

The EIR expose reported that Dr. Sergei K. Litvinov and other top officials of Warsaw Pact nations run the Communicable Disease Division of the Geneva-based World, Health Organization (WHO), placing them in charge of all AIDS work. Five days later, Moscow responded like a wounded bear. In its defensive rage, the bear revealed more about its own maraudings than about its victims.

[...]

The Literaturnaya Gazeta article builds in intensity to an extraordinary conclusion in the form of a "postscript" attack on Lyndon LaRouche and EIR directly. The postscript reads in full:

P.S. While this material was in preparation, the American magazine Executive Intelligence Review published a "sensational" notice to the effect that the Soviet Union was blocking the fight against AIDS. Note that this publication is one of the press organs of the extreme right-wing American grouping of LaRouche, known for his ties to the CIA. It is not excluded that the publication in the Executive Intelligence Review is nothing but a clumsy attempt to cover up the tracks.

[...]

Therefore, the EIR Biological Holocaust Task Force has intensified its investigation into the Soviet role in the spread of the 100% lethal AIDS pandemic. Currently under preparation is a scientific evaluation of the basic Soviet biophysics capability.

Selvage's 2019 paper also mentioned that Zapevalov referred to Hamerman's article, but for some reason it had been overlooked by the earlier papers by Boghardt, Geissler, and Selvage.

I haven't found the full text of the Literaturnaya Gazeta article anywhere so I could verify if it actually contains the postscript. But anyway, Soviets had clearly started planning for the HIV operation before Hamerman's article was published in October 1985, and the KGB even sent the memo to Bulgarian COMDOS in September 1985.

However it's still possible that EIR was part of the HIV disinformation operation but it was scripted to play an opposing side of the debate, or to promote an alternative version of the disinformation that would appeal to an American right-wing audience. So it might have been part of the plan that Hamerman would first write an article that Zapevalov could later respond to.

In November 1986 the EIR published an article by Criton Zoakos, who wrote: [https://larouchepub.com/eiw/public/1986/eirv13n45-19861114/eirv13n45-19861114_050-the_bankers_cia_and_the_russian.pdf]

Charles Z. Wick employs in the USIA one Herbert Romerstein, a former Communist Party youth leader, as an expert for combatting KGB dezinformatsia projects. His credentials for the job were supplied by Roy Godson, formerly of the National Strategy Information Center, and more recently, head of a project to study Soviet disinformation techniques at Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and disinformation techniques at Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and International Studies, the current home of ex-National Security Advisers Robert McFarlane, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Henry Kissinger. Roy Godson, Romerstein's patron, is also a "former communist," strongly influenced, throughout his life, by Jay Lovestone, one of the founders of the Communist Party-U.S.A., together with Dr. Armand Hammer's father Julius Hammer. Herbert Romerstein, as member of a State Department USIA Interagency Working Group on Soviet Disinformation, traveled to London some time after Surgeon-General Koop's return from Moscow, and discussed with an associate of his, Ian Elliott, editor of Soviet Analyst magazine, a project to discredit Dr. John Seale, a member of the Royal College of Physicians and outspoken backer of Proposition 64, as a "Soviet disinformation channel." On Oct. 31, Ian Elliott, citing "ex-communist" Herbert Romerstein as his authority, alleged that Dr. Seale had charged that "U. S. intelligence" had artificially manufactured the AIDS virus and that that allegation had been picked up by Soviet publications which, supposedly, were about to have a propagandistic field day. Though Dr. Seale protested the absurdities of the Ian Elliott piece, three days later, at a State Department briefing, Herbert Romerstein's slander reappeared under new wrapping. Department spokesman Charles Redman presented a document, produced by the Interagency Working Group on Soviet disinformation, denouncing the Soviets for alleging that the U.S.A. artificially produced the AIDS virus for biowarfare purposes. So far, so good. But, inside the otherwise very true charges against the Soviet disinformation practices, was embedded the lie that Dr. Seale was part of the Soviet disinformation campaign.

What are all these 'ex-communists?'

"Ex-communist" Herbert Romerstein, a protege of "ex-communist" Roy Godson, himself a man trained in intelligence by "ex-Communist Party founder" Jay Lovestone, is employed by Charles Z. Wick, the friend of "ex-Communist" Armand Hammer. USIA chief Wick is the offspring of a Central European "ex-communist" family originally named Zwick. This is one hell of a patriotic group to pronounce expertise on the subject of Soviet "disinformation" techniques.

Alan Cantwell

I don't know if Cantwell later stopped claiming that HIV was a recombinant of visna and some other virus. He didn't mention it in his book Queer Blood: The Secret AIDS Genocide Plot, which was published in 1993. Many of his articles were posted at rense.com, but when I googled for site:rense.com "alan cantwell" visna, I didn't find any article where he said that HIV was a recombinant of visna.

In fact even in the book AIDS and the Doctors of Death published in 1988, Cantwell didn't himself claim that HIV was a recombinant of visna, but he simply wrote it was what Strecker, Seale, and Segal were saying.

In an interview in 2007, Cantwell was asked: "Do you believe it was the Bovine visna virus and the sheep visna virus, that was used to create the AIDS virus and how similar do these viruses look to the AIDS virus under a microscope?" [https://rense.com/general75/mmo.htm] But Cantwell answered: "I am not a virologist and I would never speculate exactly how HIV was 'made.' Suffice to say, I believe HIV came out of primate (monkey, chimp) animal cancer research whereby primates were injected (before AIDS) with various cancer-causing and immunosuppressive viruses - and these viruses were transferred between various animal species as well and adapted to human tissue. All of this was part of the 'war on cancer' conducted by the National Cancer Institute. The NCI also had close ties to the U.S. biological warfare establishment. The military's biological warfare unit at Ft Detrick, Maryland, was joined to the National Cancer Institute in the early 1970s, by order of President Richard Nixon."

Robert Strecker on visna recombination

In the Strecker Memorandum video, Robert Strecker said: [https://rapeutation.com/streckermemoscreenplay.pdf]

If you say, well, we look at the AIDS virus, and we say, "Well, it's only 50% identical to visna, and it's only 50% identical to bovine leukemia." And they say, "That's distally related." It's like saying I'm distally related to my mother or my father because I only contain 50% of their genes. Of course that's nonsense! The fact is that containing 50% of the genes of the virus, you could be the direct descendant of the parents. It's the same as each of us. Each of us is a direct descendant of our parents and we contain 50% of our mother's genes, and 50% of our father's genes.

However that was a poor analogy, because if in the 1980s HIV-1 would've been a recent recombinant of visna and BLV, then early sequences of HIV-1 would have some segments that would be close to 100% identical to visna and other segments that would be close to 100% identical to BLV.

In the next plot I compared an early French HIV sequence from 1984 against the reference genomes of visna and BLV. You can see that HIV is has about 40-60% similarity to visna and BLV throughout the genome. The similarity would be even lower if I didn't ignore positions with gaps:

# curl 'https://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/efetch.fcgi?db=nuccore&rettype=fasta&id=NC_001802.1,NC_001722.1,AF115393.1,NC_001452.1,NC_001414.1'>strecker.fa
# brew install mafft
# mafft --thread 8 strecker.fa>strecker.aln

# install.packages("BiocManager");BiocManager::install("Biostrings")

library(Biostrings);library(data.table);library(ggplot2)

gene=fread("name,start,end,height
gag,336,1838,1
pol,1839,4642,1
vif,4587,5165,2
vpr,5105,5396,3
tat,5377,5591,2
rev,5516,5591,3
vpu,5608,5856,4
env,5771,8341,1
tat,7925,7970,2
rev,7925,8199,3
nef,8343,8963,1")

t=as.matrix(Biostrings::readAAStringSet("strecker.aln"))
rownames(t)=sub("\\.\\d .*","",rownames(t))

names=fread("accession,name
NC_001802,HIV-1B HXB2
NC_001722,HIV-2
AF115393,SIVcpz Marilyn
NC_001452,Visna
NC_001414,BLV")

rownames(t)=names[match(rownames(t),accession),paste0(name," (",accession,")")]

ref=t[grep("HIV-1",rownames(t)),]
targ=grep("HIV-1",rownames(t),value=T)

pos=seq_along(ref)+cumsum(ref=="-")
gene$start=pos[gene$start]
gene$end=pos[gene$end]

window=500;step=100

t1=t[rownames(t)!=targ,]
t2=t[targ,]
ncol=ncol(t)
starts=seq(1,ncol,step)

sim=apply(t1,1,\(seq)sapply(starts,\(i){start=max(1,i-window%/%2);end=min(ncol,i+window%/%2)
  mean((seq[start:end]==t2[start:end])[seq[start:end]!="-"&t2[start:end]!="-"])
  # mean(seq[start:end]==t2[start:end]) # don't ignore gaps
}))

p=na.omit(data.table(x=starts[row(sim)],y=100*c(sim),z=colnames(sim)[col(sim)]))
p[,z:=factor(z,p[,mean(y),z][order(-V1),z])]

hue=c(0,210,120,60,300,160,30,250)+15
color=c(hcl(hue[1:3],130,55),"black",hcl(hue[4:5],130,55),"gray50",hcl(hue,100,30),"gray20")[1:nlevels(p$z)]

ystart=0;yend=100;ystep=10;xstart=0;xend=max(p$x);xstep=1000
annoh=.065

legend=data.table(x=.985*xend,y=seq(yend-(yend-ystart)*.06,ystart,,15)[1:nlevels(p$z)],label=levels(p$z))


ggplot(p)+
geom_vline(xintercept=seq(0,xend,xstep),color="gray88",linewidth=.4)+
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In the book Emerging Viruses, Len Horowitz reported on the following conversation he had with Robert Strecker (where the ellipses and brackets are part of the original text): [https://survivorbb.rapeutation.com/viewtopic.php?f=194&t=2016]

LEN: OK. Now let's get a little bit more specific about the virus itself. With regard to the AIDS virus, had it been specifically manufactured, what might have been the first steps? What do you think the researchers began with?

ROBERT: I think they began with bovine visna virus, which they knew was a T-cell destroyer. And they made that by crossing bovine and visna [viruses] in cattle. ...

Visna is the virus in sheep. Its characteristic is a destroyer, and they wanted a T-cell destroyer. So they took a T-cell attacker-the bovine leukemia virus and crossed it with a visna to make a T-cell destroyer, which is exactly what they got.

But then all they had was a T-cell destroyer in cattle which wasn't very good for humans. So then they grew it in human tissue, and when you do that it adapts to human beings (see fig. 7.1). And there are a host of ways to get these things to grow in tissue even if the receptors won't take [the virus]. ...

LEN: They could have delivered the viral RNA a number of ways.

ROBERT: Yes. One of the ways is by pseudovirus formation. ... Pseudovirus formation is where you put in a simultaneous mixture of cells and viruses, and what happens is, for instance, if you put bovine and visna viruses in with herpes virus; in the packaging process, you'll get BVV genome inside a herpes coat and visa versa.

So then you separate out all the herpes ones, and it just infects any cells which are sensitive to herpes. And you can artificially introduce BVV into a herpes-sensitive cell, because it has BVV on the inside and herpes on the outside.

LEN: I remember reading through studies about that technique being used.

ROBERT: Yeah. Another way is you treat 'em with heat, and they open up. Or you can use some detergents that will open them up, or there's a host of different things; even some viruses will tend to open them up. It makes the cells permeable even though they normally wouldn't be, so you can introduce the one you want to get in even though there's no real receptor for it.

LEN: OK. So it could've been bovine visna virus, BVV, but also there was some speculation it could have been scrapie, another sheep virus, right?

ROBERT: Yeah, well. ... Scrapie's a little bit different than visna, but basically I don't think scrapie's a retrovirus. It's like it, but it's not the culprit.

LEN: During our first conversation, you also mentioned, like other researchers, you could actually take a look at the AIDS virus, and it looks like it's been spliced in particular regions.

ROBERT: Oh yes. Actually, looking at it was one of the first things that told us what it was because BVV and AIDS, of course, look identical, and there weren't that many 'D-type' retroviruses. There were only a few.

The 'D-type' are cylindrical-shaped retroviruses which of course BVV and AIDS are identical. Besides the fact that they were both magnesium dependent and were T-cell attackers that would produce syncytium and could wipe out cells.

And then what you do is look at the genome. Actually, a paper by Gallo published in 'Science' I think about '83, or '86, said he took the restriction endonucleases [scissor-like enzymes] and treated the virus, and showed that when the virus falls apart, that where it falls apart are exactly at the gene lines.

In other words, it manages to fall apart just at the places where they could have constructed it.

LEN: Is that right? Just where the foreign pieces might have come together?

ROBERT: Yes, it falls apart in ten or twelve places... because those endonucleases cut at specific points.

But, what's interesting is ... if it occurred spontaneously [in nature], why would it fall apart exactly where the genes occurred - the gag, pol, envelope, the tat genes? [30] Everything sort of cuts apart just the way you would put it together if you were constructing it. ... [This] we thought [was] the strongest piece of evidence that would have said they actually put it together entirely in a lab.

LEN: And how might they have done that then? Let's say they started with BVV.

ROBERT: Well, in this case if you start with BVV, you just manipulate it to grow it in human tissue to adapt it to humans.

If you started with BLV and visna, you would ... take the viruses, cut them up [with enzymes], then chromatograph them so that they're homologous. That is, the ten different parts [separate], then you take each different part that you want uniquely and put it together with other parts and zip' em up.

LEN: And how do they 'zip 'em up' or combine them?

ROBERT: They have enzymes that sew them back up just like they've got ones which cut' em apart. These are repair enzymes.

LEN: Then they separate those particular viruses, and they put them into cells?

ROBERT: They put them into serum ... [add] your enzymes and [other] parts and wait for awhile. And then throw [everything] ... into a culture and see what happens."

[I was still a bit fuzzy.]

ROBERT: But you see that's work. You don't have to do that. Nature does it all for you. All you do is take a cow and simultaneously inject bovine in one hip and visna in the other, and the cow is your mixer. And it will do it for you automatically. Because what happens is the viruses are so unstable that they will recombine and produce every thermodynamically stable recombinant possible.

LEN: Interesting. It's unbelievable.

ROBERT: Yeah. You see that's why everybody says, "We didn't make these viruses! We didn't have the techniques."

LEN: That's nonsense.

Which was followed by this figure:

So I guess if you want to create the ultimate killer virus, the only thing you need to do is inject one virus in one hip of a cow and another virus in another hip of the cow, and then the cow will automatically mix together a deadly bioweapon for you.

I don't even know what advantage there is in injecting the viruses into different hips of the cow, because in order for the viruses to recombine, they have to infect the same cell.

But anyway, ChatGPT offered the following rebuttal to Strecker's bovine speculation:

1. "Bovine visna virus" does not exist

• Visna virus infects sheep (Ovis aries) and is a lentivirus (the same genus as HIV).
• Bovine leukemia virus (BLV) infects cattle and is a deltaretrovirus, not a lentivirus.
• There is no such natural or laboratory entity as "bovine visna virus."
• The idea of "crossing" visna and BLV to make a "bovine visna" virus is scientifically incoherent: they are taxonomically and structurally too divergent to recombine naturally or even under laboratory conditions.

2. Inter-species viral recombination between such distant retroviruses is not viable

• Retroviruses can recombine only when co-infecting the same cell and sharing closely related genomic structures.
• BLV and visna virus have highly divergent genomes (~40-50% or less homology), use different receptors, and have different replication mechanisms.
• They cannot "zip up" or recombine into a viable hybrid capable of replication or packaging.
• Attempting such recombination would yield nonfunctional, replication-defective genomes.

3. The described "pseudovirus" method is misunderstood

• "Pseudotyping" refers to packaging the genome of one virus inside the envelope proteins of another (e.g., vesicular stomatitis virus G-protein used for lentiviral vectors).
• It does not alter the genome, nor does it cause recombination between unrelated viruses.
• Pseudotyping works only when the core genome and packaging machinery are compatible, which is not the case for herpesviruses and retroviruses - these belong to completely different viral families (DNA vs. RNA viruses, different replication sites, and assembly pathways).
• Hence, you cannot get a retrovirus genome inside a herpesvirus coat in any biologically meaningful or stable way.

4. Claims about "restriction enzyme cut sites" are misinterpreted

• Restriction enzymes cut specific short DNA sequences - often at sites that occur naturally within genes.
• The claim that HIV "falls apart exactly at the gene lines" is incorrect:
  • HIV's genome organization (gag-pol-env-tat-rev-nef, etc.) is continuous, and restriction sites are not aligned with gene boundaries.
  • In fact, natural HIV isolates show no evidence of artificial junctions or restriction signatures typical of engineered constructs.
  • Extensive sequencing of early HIV samples (from 1959, 1960, 1976) shows natural evolutionary continuity, not signs of synthetic assembly.

5. Growing viruses in human tissue does not "adapt" them across species barriers so easily

• While viruses can adapt through serial passage, cross-species adaptation typically requires hundreds or thousands of generations and favorable receptor compatibility.
• Visna virus cannot infect human cells because its entry receptors and host range restrictions are incompatible.
• Simply "growing it in human tissue" would not produce a functional, replicating, human-tropic virus.

6. "Heat" or "detergent" treatment does not make cells "permeable to viruses"

• Heating or treating cells with detergents kills or lyses them, destroying membranes and proteins essential for infection.
• These procedures are incompatible with maintaining living, replicating viral systems.

7. "Mixing viruses in a cow" would not produce new recombinant retroviruses

• Injecting a cow with two unrelated viruses would produce no recombinant hybrid because:
  • The viruses infect different cell types and have incompatible replication cycles.
  • Even if both infected some common cell, the probability of viable recombination across genera is astronomically low.
  • Such hybridization has never been observed in any experimental or natural context among retroviruses of distinct genera.

8. HIV's molecular and evolutionary features contradict artificial origin

• Phylogenetic analyses show that HIV-1 and HIV-2 evolved naturally from simian immunodeficiency viruses (SIVs) in chimpanzees and sooty mangabeys, respectively.
• The divergence patterns match natural zoonotic spillover, not laboratory recombination.
• Early samples from 1959-1960 (Kinshasa) predate any conceivable recombinant DNA technology.
• HIV's genetic variability and geographical spread cannot be explained by an artificial creation in the 1970s or 1980s.

9. Terminological confusion ("D-type," "magnesium-dependent")

• HIV is a lentivirus (L-type), not a D-type retrovirus. D-type refers to mason-pfizer monkey virus-like retroviruses, morphologically distinct from HIV.
• All retroviral reverse transcriptases are magnesium-dependent; this is not a diagnostic or distinguishing feature.

10. Lack of any corroborating evidence

• If HIV had been artificially constructed, we would expect laboratory records, plasmid backbones, chimeric restriction patterns, or unique engineered sequences - none exist.
• The complete genomes of HIV-1 and HIV-2 show normal evolutionary divergence, consistent with a natural origin and long-term replication in primate hosts.

The first point by ChatGPT was partially wrong, because "bovine visna virus" was an early name for the bovine lentivirus that is now called BIV (bovine immunodeficiency virus). [https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/014107688908200634] If positions with gaps are ignored, the reference genome of BIV has about 50% nucleotide identity to the reference genome of visna:

$ curl 'https://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/efetch.fcgi?db=nuccore&rettype=fasta&id=NC_'{001413,001452}|mafft --thread 8 ->temp.fa
$ seqkit seq -s temp.fa|awk 'NR==1{split($0,a,"");next}{split($0,b,"");for(i=1;i<=length;i++)if(a[i]!="-"&&b[i]!="-"){++len;id+=a[i]==b[i]}print id/len*100}'
53.8615

But still, you cannot just magically create BIV out of visna by infecting a cow with visna and with another virus that is not even a lentivirus.

Horowitz also wrote that Strecker told him about Segal: "He was writing the same stuff, but again, he thought that the virus was constructed from HTLV-I and visna. And that's correct except he didn't go far enough because really HTLV-I is just bovine leukemia virus in man." [https://survivorbb.rapeutation.com/viewtopic.php?f=194&t=2016]

HTLV-I and BLV are both deltaretroviruses, but their reference genomes have only about 50% nucleotide identity if positions with gaps are ignored:

$ curl 'https://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/efetch.fcgi?db=nuccore&rettype=fasta&id=NC_'{001436,001414}|mafft --thread 8 ->temp.fa
$ seqkit seq -s temp.fa|awk 'NR==1{split($0,a,"");next}{split($0,b,"");for(i=1;i<=length;i++)if(a[i]!="-"&&b[i]!="-"){++len;id+=a[i]==b[i]}print id/len*100}'
54.5394

Len Horowitz

Len Horowitz was knighted by the Russian branch of the Knights of Malta in 2006: [http://web.archive.org/web/20230423183611/http://67.225.245.71/Press/press_releases/personal/knighting_2006.html]

When Napoleon invaded Malta in 1798, the Tsar of Russia offered refuge to the Knights of Malta in St. Petersburg, and relics and insignia of the Order were transfered to Russia, and the Tsar was elected as the Grand Master of the Order by a faction of the knights. [https://www.sosjinternational.org/frequently-asked-questions/] A few years later the Catholic branch was reestablished in Malta, and it has remained the primary branch of the Knights of Malta. In the 19th century Protestant branches of the Knights of Malta were also established in the UK, Netherlands, and Sweden. The Russian branch is not recognized by the Catholic branch, but the Russian branch appears to still be an authentic offshoot of the original Knights of Malta.

Ed Hooper on Segal's visna theory

In the book The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS, Ed Hooper wrote: [http://www.aidsorigins.com/wp-content/uploads/The-River-by-Edward-Hooper-2021-edition.pdf]

The Segals proposed that HIV was in reality a genetically engineered recombinant of the visna virus of sheep and the HTLV-1 discovered by Robert Gallo, and that it had been developed as a germ warfare agent at Fort Detrick in 1977. They proposed that this "new germ" was tried out later that year on male prisoners who had become practicing homosexuals during their incarceration and that, upon their release, it spread to the gay community in New York.[10] The story was widely publicized around the world throughout 1987, causing serious damage to America's reputation, particularly among Third World nations.

[...]

Many might feel that the claims of the Segals, the Streckers, and their supporters are so patently absurd that they themselves smack of disinformation campaigns. Others would simply argue that they do not merit serious attention. Perhaps the best way to respond, however, is to cite examples of watertight archival samples from before 1977 or 1974, when HIV was apparently "created": for example, the 1959 sample from Leopoldville or any of the three Norwegians whose blood from 1971 and 1973 later tested HIV-positive.[16] Furthermore, we now know that visna, HTLV-1, and BLV are only distantly related to HIV, far too distantly to have played a role in its origin (see chapter 11). The credibility of such theories was dealt a further blow in 1992 when Yevgeni Primakov, the former head of the Soviet Union's foreign intelligence service, publicly admitted that "the KGB planted stories in the late 1980s which alleged that the HIV virus was the result of a Pentagon experiment."[17] Sadly, supporters of the Streckers have continued to peddle their ill-informed and outdated versions of the myth, blaming variously the Soviets, the CIA, the Germans, and the World Health Organization, well into the nineties.[18]

Douglas Selvage's 2019 paper

This section consists of excerpts from the paper "Operation 'Denver': The East German Ministry of State Security and the KGB's AIDS Disinformation Campaign, 1985 - 1986 (Part 1)", which was published in the MIT's Journal of Cold War Studies in 2019. [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336654901_Operation_Denver_The_East_German_Ministry_of_State_Security_and_the_KGB%27s_AIDS_Disinformation_Campaign_1985-1986_Part_1]

Selvage wrote:

One advantage that the HVA's former officers have had in influencing research and public discussion of their former activities, in contrast to other divisions of the MfS, was their success in late 1989 and early 1990 in destroying most of their operational files - all told, around 90 percent of all the files regarding their activities, including files potentially related to the AIDS disinformation campaign.[20]

Footnote 20 is "On the destruction of the HVA's files, see Hubertus Knabe, West-Arbeit des MfS: Das Zusammenspiel von 'Aufklärung' und 'Abwehr' (Berlin: Ch. Links, 1999), p. 133."

Selvage wrote that an American gay magazine published an article about the AIDS bioweapon conspiracy 8 days before Patriot:

Based on the Patriot article, the KGB has been credited as the originator of the HIV-as-U.S.-bioweapon thesis, but in fact the assertions in Patriot in 1983 and LG in 1985 did not go much beyond conspiracy theories already circulating within the gay community in the United States at the time.[29] For example, on 9 July 1983, the Boston Gay Community News published an article by Charlie Shively, a radical gay-rights activist and one of the newspaper's founders and editors, that placed responsibility for the AIDS epidemic squarely on the U.S. government.[30] In the article, Shively cited a theory from another leading gay newspaper, the New York Native, that the AIDS virus had originated in the African Swine Fever Virus (ASFV). The Native had also reported allegations that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had brought the African virus into the Western Hemisphere for biological warfare against Cuba. The U.S. government, Shively wrote, had hoped the ASFV would remain isolated in Cuba, but the virus had then spread to Haiti and the United States. Because of the high cost to the U.S. government of combatting the resulting swine fever epidemic - an $18 million indemnity for the slaughter of pigs in Haiti alone - Shively posed the question, "Would it be possible that - given $100 million - the doctors would just decide to kill all the queers, Haitians, and IV [intravenous] drug users exposed to AIDS?"[31]

The "doctors" in this case were the medical researchers at the CDC, whom Shively blamed (incorrectly) for the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study in which the U.S. Public Health Service had observed the long-term effects of syphilis on infected African-American sharecroppers for four decades, from 1932 to 1972, without providing them with effective medical treatment.[32] Shively also insinuated that AIDS might be an "ethnic weapon" developed by the Pentagon. He based this accusation on a somewhat distorted version of the 1969 testimony of a Defense Department official, Donald MacArthur, before the U.S. Congress. MacArthur had asserted that "within a period of 5 to 10 years, it would be possible to produce a synthetic biological agent, an agent that does not naturally exist and for which no natural immunity could have been acquired."[33] Nearly all AIDS conspiracy theorists, both then and today, as well as the KGB and Stasi in their disinformation, have cited MacArthur's 1969 testimony as "proof" of a U.S. government conspiracy to construct the AIDS virus.

Footnote 29 is "Nattrass, AIDS Conspiracy, pp. 34, 69."

Selvage pointed out that Zapevalov's postscript referred to the EIR article by Warren Hamerman (which for some reason was not mentioned in earlier papers about the HIV conspiracy theory):

In October 1985, the magazine of the perennial crackpot presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche, Executive Intelligence Review, declared that the Soviet Union was exploiting AIDS as an offensive bioweapon by somehow contributing to its spread in the West.[44] Zapevalov referred to the article in Executive Intelligence Review and accused the LaRouche organization - without any evidence - of cooperation with the CIA.[45]

Footnote 44 is "See Warren J. Hamerman, 'AIDS Epidemic Explodes: What Is the Russian Angle?,' Executive Intelligence Review (EIR), Vol. 12, No. 41 (18 October 1985), pp. 52 - 54."

Footnote 45 is "Valentin Zapevalov, 'Panika na zapade, ili shto skrivaets'a za sensatsei vokrug AIDS,' Literaturnaya gazeta (LG) (Moscow), 30 October 1985, p. 14. There is no evidence that the link posited by Zapevalov actually existed."

Selvage continued:

In East Berlin, KGB liaison officer Vitalii Lyamin, responsible for coordinating operations with the Stasi's divisions for foreign disinformation (HVA/X) and domestic agitation and propaganda, requested on 12 November 1985 that the latter provide him with all known reactions in the Western press to Zapevalov's article.[47] The Western press, he said, might decide to "hush up" (totschweigen) the existence of the article and its thesis. Lyamin was also interested in alternative explanations regarding the origin of AIDS that "the Yankees [Amis] might have spread or may be spreading" in the Western press.[48] The Stasi complied with Lyamin's request and provided him with relevant (yet unspecified) materials.[49]

The KGB "Center" in Moscow was growing frustrated with the lack of response to its Fort Detrick thesis in the United States. In a follow-up article on 13 November 1985 titled "Why the USA Press Is Silent," LG wrote:

It has been well-known for a long time, and it has been confirmed repeatedly: Every time that an article is published that brings to light a subversive activity of the CIA or Pentagon, an order for silence goes out in Washington, and the "free American press" follows this order.[50]

Two days later the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, Arthur Hartman, officially protested against the Zapevalov article in a letter to the editors of LG, but his letter was not published.[51] The KGB apparently decided that a rebuff to the letter would not suffice to fuel its disinformation campaign.

Next Selvage wrote:

More interesting and useful to the KGB was the response of LaRouche and his associates to the Zapevalov article. At this time, a cycle of misinformation and disinformation arose between conspiracy theorists in the United States and those in the United Kingdom - especially individuals associated with LaRouche - and various publications promoted by the KGB or the Soviet government in general. Two major strains of the HIV-as-bioweapon thesis had, as it were, begun to evolve: a version promoted by LaRouche and his associates and a version promoted by Moscow and the KGB.

In November 1985, LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review reprinted Zapevalov's article in English translation under the title, "Text of Admissions by the Russians."[52] Warren J. Hamerman, the chair of LaRouche's "Biological Holocaust Task Force," claimed that the article marked Moscow's response to LaRouche's earlier accusations.[53] According to Hamerman, Moscow had confirmed with its article "the possibility that the AIDS virus could have been 'bioengineered' and worked up into a weapon in a military laboratory."[54] However, Hamerman turned Moscow's accusation on its head. He now wrote of "overwhelming circumstantial evidence" of "direct Soviet involvement in spreading AIDS in the West."[55] That is, Moscow had somehow arranged for the bioengineering or weaponization of the AIDS virus and then spread it throughout the United States and Western Europe. Hamerman insinuated that the World Health Organization (WHO), allegedly dominated by the Soviet Union, had played a key role.[56]

Selvage made this diagram of the evolution of the HIV bioweapon theory, where he indicated that the visna recombination element was introduced by Seale:

Based on the sources I have found, Seale appears to have mentioned the visna recombination theory earlier than the Segals or the Streckers, but I don't know if that means that Segal originated the theory. It might be that Seale, Segal, and the Streckers were different arms of the same disinformation operation, and they were all instructed to incorporate the visna element into their presentation. It's also possible that the Segals or Streckers mentioned the visna theory before Seale in some source that has been overlooked.

Selvage wrote:

For example, at the end of October 1988, the KGB's disinformation specialists in Service "A" told their Bulgarian colleagues: "In the USA there is an Islamic sect that is blaming Jewish-American doctors of intentionally infecting Muslims and especially children with AIDS. This can be exploited with regard to the export of American blood."[89] The accusation in question came from Steve Cokely, the "health minister" of Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam and then adviser to Chicago Mayor Eugene Sawyer. For many years thereafter, Farrakhan's organization continued to spread the allegation that Jewish doctors were intentionally infecting African-American children.

An interesting detail in the biography of the Segals is that they lived in Cuba for a few years after the communist revolution:

In the 1950s, both had willingly provided information to the Stasi, although only Jakob was designated a "contact person," and for a short period the KGB took over the contact with the Segals. From 1959 to 1962, Jakob was returned to the Stasi, which registered him as an unofficial collaborator. The Stasi broke off contact in 1962 because Jakob, although still a loyal and convinced Communist, had proven too independent and had refused to follow the Stasi's orders. The Segals taught in Cuba after the revolution there before returning to the German Democratic Republic (GDR).

In the "Disinformation squared" paper, Geissler mentioned Cuba only briefly, when he wrote "Jakob taught in Cuba for three years and in Mexico for three semesters."

Phil Agee also lived in both Cuba and Mexico in the 1970s, and he announced the founding of CAIB during the World Festival of Youth and Students in Cuba in 1978.

Selvage wrote:

At the very latest, HVA/X was activated for the AIDS disinformation campaign in November 1985, when KGB liaison officer Lyamin secured the assistance of the Stasi's division for domestic propaganda in gathering reactions in the Western press to Zapevalov's article and Moscow's Fort Detrick thesis.[111] Given that the KGB "Center" in Moscow had ordered its station in Karlshorst to have Lyanin track Western reactions to AIDS disinformation, he likely would have informed not only the Stasi's domestic propaganda division but also HVA/X, with whom he mainly coordinated, about his requirements. By the end of the year, the Stasi, prompted by Lyamin, was also seeking East German scientists who might come out in support of Moscow's Fort Detrick thesis.[112]

Wolfgang Mutz, the deputy director of HVA/X, later suggested to his colleagues in Bulgaria's Durzhavna Sigurnost (State Security) organs that the HVA had taken steps to "attract" GDR scientists to the AIDS disinformation campaign and that one of them - clearly, Jakob Segal - had "prepared a study that proves that AIDS was the by-product of a biological weapon of the USA."[113] Mutz also credited the "operational division" of the HVA, with which HVA/X had been cooperating, for successfully obtaining "a great work with scientific value" - that is, Segal's study - for the AIDS disinformation campaign.[114]

The operational division of the HVA to which Lyamin and the HVA/X turned when seeking open-source intelligence, such as newspaper accounts regarding the origins of AIDS or, for that matter, information about East German scientists working in the fields of AIDS, biotechnology, and genetic engineering, was the office responsible for foreign intelligence in the latter three fields - namely, Department (Referat) 5 in Division XIII of the HVA's Sector for Science and Technology (Sektor Wissenschaft und Technik, SWT), abbreviated HVA/SWT/XIII/5.[115] At the beginning of September 1985, its officer Dieter van de Sand registered a "security dossier" (Sicherungsvorgang, SVG), "Wind," apparently regarding the protection of East German scientists in the areas of AIDS research, genetic engineering, and biotechnology from outside "attacks" in the form of espionage or manipulation by foreign agents.[116] At some point between the registration of "Wind" in September 1985 and May 1986, when van de Sand ordered the monitoring of the Segals' mail, both Segals were added to the dossier and thus to van de Sand's security responsibilities.[117] Thus, the "operational division" of the HVA, which Mutz later associated with Segal's study; the office in the HVA that gathered relevant intelligence about AIDS, genetic engineering, and biotechnology that could be used in the AIDS disinformation campaign; and the office responsible for "securing" the Segals on behalf of the Stasi were one and the same: HVA/SWT/XIII/5.

Beyond the registration of the Segals under "Wind," another likely indicator of the interest of HVA/SWT - or, alternatively, the KGB - in the Segals in connection with the AIDS disinformation campaign is Jakob Segal's early knowledge of Lehrman's publications in New York. On 19 March 1986 (i.e., before LG published its May 1986 article referring to the publications), Segal had written to a colleague about Lehrman's findings and their publication in an "obscure club newspaper" - apparently Segal's (incorrect) understanding of Amsterdam News. [118] This occurred about one month after Lehrman had published a press release including copies of the articles from Amsterdam News and his letters to the editor. He added typewritten comments regarding the publications and hinted at alleged attempts at intervention in the same by the CIA.[119] Segal cited the alleged accusations by Lehrman regarding repression by the CIA in his March letter.[120] How did Segal, living in Communist East Berlin, learn so quickly about Lehrman's articles in the "obscure" Amsterdam News in New York?

At some point HVA/SWT obtained Lehrman's press release, a copy of which can still be found in the Stasi files, but whether this was before or after Segal's letter is unclear.[121] Even though one cannot rule out that HVA/SWT received its information about Lehrman from Jakob or Lilli Segal, the question of how Jakob Segal heard of Lehrman would need to be explained. A more likely possibility is that Segal learned about Lehrman from HVA/SWT. This is far more plausible than the other way around, given HVA/SWT's access to foreign intelligence, including open-source intelligence from the HVA's s station in New York. Another plausible scenario is that Segal and HVA/SWT learned about Lehrman's activities from a common source - possibly the KGB, which was monitoring the U.S. press closely for materials related to the HIV-as-US-bioweapon thesis.

Whatever role the KGB or HVA might or might not have played in the Segals' research, Jakob Segal began in mid-March 1986 to send his study to editors and academics abroad for potential publication in scientific journals and also in newspapers and popular magazines - that is, for propaganda purposes.[122] With regard to his activities, Segal claimed privately to have the backing of the international secretary of East Germany's ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED), Hermann Axen.[123] Segal may have been exaggerating or lying when it came to Axen - perhaps he had simply informed the latter about his own planned research - but Axen did oversee the party's foreign propaganda, including campaigns in which the Stasi's active measures played a role.[124] He certainly had the authority to give Segal the green light for publishing abroad and may have even commissioned Segal's study for use in foreign propaganda at Soviet request.[125]

Whether Segal decided on his own to begin his research in the summer of 1985 (as he claimed) or was prompted by the KGB, the Stasi, or someone else, HVA/SWT became aware of Segal's research at the very latest in the spring of 1986.[126] On 7 May 1986, the HVA/SWT's van de Sand, the Stasi officer associated with "securing" the Segals, ordered the surveillance of their mail.[127] Perhaps the HVA - and Moscow - wanted to know about Segal's contacts for potential use in their disinformation campaign; at the very least, HVA/SWT wanted to prevent the Segals from being approached by Western agents who might seek to contact them.[128]

The month of July 1986 marked a turning point for the HVA with regard to both the Segals and the KGB's AIDS disinformation campaign. By this point HVA/SWT had been in touch with Segal to provide him with at least one piece of advice regarding his study.[129] Whether he took the advice or ignored it remains unclear, but by this time he would have learned - if he did not know long before - about HVA's interest in his research. In the same month, HVA/SWT received its first piece of intelligence information from a contact person, "Diagnosis" - the apparent codename for one or both of the Segals.[130] The nominal coauthor of the Segals' study, Ronald Dehmlow (IM "Nils"), also received his first secret assignment from HVA/SWT at the beginning of July 1986 regarding the Segals and their research.[131] At the end of July 1986, Dehmlow's control officer noted that the Segals were preparing their AIDS study not only for Axen, as Jakob Segal was claiming privately, but also for HVA/SWT.[132] Although the Stasi officer had likely learned of Axen's alleged role from Dehmlow (and thus indirectly from Segal), the information regarding HVA/SWT's role could have come only from within the Stasi itself.[133]

Footnote 124 says: "The Segals knew Axen personally through his daughter, who had taken classes from Segal at Humboldt University. See Geißler, 'Es gab keine AIDS-Verschwörung,' pp. 101 - 102."

Selvage wrote:

Given the intensification of HVA/SWT interest in the Segals and their AIDS study in July 1986, it is not surprising that in the same month HVA/X officially registered an Operation "Denver" - not Operation "INFEKTION" as Bohnsack claimed in the 2000s - in the HVA's files.[136]

Footnote 136 says: "OVO 'Denver,' Reg.-Nr. XV 3429/86. The question of the true codename for the AIDS disinformation campaign may seem trivial, but the name 'Infektion' has become indelibly associated with it and even dominates the Internet as a meme. A Google search on 27 January 2019 for 'Operation Infektion' and 'AIDS' yielded 21,200 results."

Selvage wrote:

Given the registration of Operation "Denver" in July 1986, Wolf's claim that the KGB first requested HVA/X's assistance in the disinformation campaign in the fall of 1986 rings untrue.[138]

Footnote 138 is "Wolf, 'L'arte della simulazione,' p. 12."

Selvage wrote:

Newly uncovered evidence suggests the KGB, too, played a role in arranging for the publication and distribution of the Harare brochure - a fact that conforms to the general claims of both the KGB and the HVA regarding their cooperation on the AIDS disinformation campaign.165 In a 1992 letter, Lilli Segal named a specific African journalist resident in West Germany in 1986 as the "publisher" of the brochure distributed in Harare in 1986.[166] The journalist in question worked for an African magazine published in the FRG. The magazine, at least according to the papers of former KGB archivist Mitrokhin, was subsidized by the KGB, and its publisher, who also worked as a correspondent for a Nigerian and a Ugandan newspaper, had allegedly been recruited as KGB agent "Borisov."[167] The journalist whom Lilli Segal named as the "publisher" of the Harare brochure had also authored articles in African newspapers denouncing theories of a natural, African origin of AIDS as "racist," and he had been cited to this effect in the U.S. and West European press.[168]

Selvage wrote:

Specifically, the Segals had argued, like the KGB before, that what became the AIDS virus had resulted from the weaponization of previously existing viruses at Fort Detrick. Like Seale, they argued that the visna virus had been genetically manipulated, but not through the removal of a gene; instead, it had been recombined with HTLV-1.[172] Jakob Segal claimed that he had discerned the genetic engineering of the visna virus independently of Seale.[173] However, their choice of HTLV-1 as the alleged virus recombined with visna turned out to be more malignant. The leading AIDS researcher in the United States, Robert Gallo, had assumed incorrectly that HIV belonged to the HTLV family, which he had discovered. In the United States, Shively quickly grasped what the Segals merely insinuated. Based on the alleged genetic engineering that had taken place, Gallo, the discoverer of HTLV-1, was the scientist best placed to have genetically engineered what became HIV.[174] Only later did Jakob Segal openly accuse Gallo of having created HIV, but this demonization of the eminent U.S. scientist as the "father of AIDS" became part of many subsequent HIV-as-bioweapon conspiracy theories.[175]

Footnote 174 is "Shively, 'AIDS and Genes (Part I of III).'".

Footnote 175 is "Jakob Segal's first-known public accusation that Gallo had constructed HIV in the laboratory was published in an interview in the Austrian magazine BASTA in December 1988. See 'Der AIDS-Krimi,' BASTA, December 1988. This discovery was made by Geissler. See Geißler, 'Es gab keine AIDS-Verschwörung,' p. 100."

Selvage wrote:

After the head of the AIDS Advisory Group of the GDR Health Ministry, Niels Sönnichsen, suggested in an interview with the West German press that the Segals' "hypothesis" was incorrect, Jakob Segal, supported behind the scenes by the Stasi, obtained a ban on his East German detractors offering any further commentaries or publications in the West regarding the origins of AIDS. Nonetheless, after 1989, Segal claimed a dissident status for himself in the GDR by citing the government's refusal to permit the publication of his thesis inside the GDR. This was at best a half-truth. Publications regarding the origins of HIV had been banned inside the GDR - a ban apparently imposed by East German leader Erich Honecker personally. Thus, Segal actually had a special status. He could at least publish on the origins of HIV in the West, whereas East German scientists opposed to his thesis faced a ban on such publications both at home and abroad.[191] Still, a few East German scientists violated the ban, and one, molecular biologist Geissler, even denounced the Segals' thesis as an "unsavory political thriller" and "complete nonsense" in an interview with a journalist at the congress of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco in 1989.[192] Nevertheless, the ban against the Segals' detractors remained officially in place until the collapse of the GDR's Communist regime in 1989, and Segal was never held accountable by the East German government.[193]

Selvage wrote:

In the wake of the article in the Sunday Express, Lilli Segal wrote to a friend regarding the aftermath: "Journalists have been literally pounding on our door for the last 14 days."[200] Among the journalists who contacted the Segals and sought to report on or even promote their thesis internationally were Erich Friedländer, Kunanhandnan Nair, and Heimo Claaßen - all of whom were apparently known quantities to the HVA and thus, at least potentially, witting multipliers of Soviet-bloc disinformation.

"Comrade" Friedländer had been working undercover as "Hugo Lang" for the HVA in Tanzania.[201] As of October 1986, he was officially serving as a "lecturer/trainer" and photographer on behalf of the East German Journalists' Union (Verein der Journalisten) at a school for African journalists in Dar-es-Salaam.[202] In the fall of 1986, he reported in a letter to the Segals about his success in arranging the publication of a letter to the editor defending their thesis in Tanzania's Sunday News. He also had plans to have his African students at the journalism school assist in securing the publication of similar articles throughout Africa. He thought the newsmagazine African Events, similar to Newsweek, would be a good possibility. It was financed, he claimed, by "pro-Iranian Shiites, and they have something against the Yankees [Amis]."[203]

Nair had worked as East Berlin correspondent for the Indian newspapers Blitz and Patriot, both known publication outlets for KGB disinformation.[204] Before the summit of the NAM in Harare, HVA/X had arranged for the drafting of a book manuscript criticizing alleged CIA attacks against the NAM and the developing world in general. Allegedly, Nair had merely presented himself as the author of the finished book, published as The Devil and His Dart: How the CIA Is Plotting against the Third World, which HVA/X sought to distribute during the summit in Harare. Nair, for his part, met with Segal and published an interview in Blitz in July 1987 under the title, "AIDS - A U.S. Military Monster: Yankee Business, Not Monkey Business." The interview, the U.S. government claimed, had already been published, without naming Nair as its author, in the Nairobi Sunday Times and then reprinted in the Senegalese Le Devoir. In 1989, an English version of the Segals' study was published along with Nair's interview in book form in India.[205]

Claaßen was a West German freelance journalist living in Brussels who contacted Jakob Segal at the end of 1986.[206] In 1963, the HVA had created a dossier for unofficial collaborator "Joachim" and registered Claaßen under the file. Since 1983, Pfeifer, whose department in HVA/X oversaw "Denver," had taken over "Joachim's" file.[207] Claaßen tried to arrange for the publication of Segal's study in the West German science journal Wechselwirkung and in a planned anthology to be titled AIDS from the Gene Lab? Claaßen did not succeed in his efforts, most likely because other individuals, especially in the West German press, rushed in and did what he had been planning. In any event, Claaßen has denied any involvement with the HVA or the Stasi in general.[208]

Kunanhandnan Nair's book included a list of 300 people said to be CIA officers, which was similar to the list of CIA officers that was later published by Phil Agee in CAIB. The list in Nair's book was titled "Who's Who in CIA", which was also the title of a book published in 1968. The book was credited to Julius Mader, who was later revealed to be a Stasi officer. The Czech defector Ladislav Bittman said that the book was prepared by Czechoslovakian and East German intelligence services, and that he was one of the coauthors of the book.