Nick the Spacecat claims that HIV is the product of recombination between SIV and the Visna-maedi virus.
He said "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]
Nick wasn't able to answer which part of the genome of HIV was taken from HIV, but he just said that Gallo was "sizing up Visna as a dance partner for SIVs": [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 sheet virus with that STLV we mentioned before."
At that point I had already told him 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]
Nick's Visna recombination theory 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.
Alan Cantwell copied his theory that cancer was caused by bacteria from the alternative health practicioner Virginia Livingston-Wheeler. In his 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.'"
Cantwell also 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 Strecker 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/]
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]
In December 1985 the British communist newspaper Morning Star also reported on statements by Seale. In the paper "Disinformation squared: Was the HIV-from-Fort-Detrick myth a Stasi success?", Erhard Geissler and Robert Hunt Sprinkle wrote: [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]
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]
The same paper also said 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 and Visna. Robert Strecker also claimed that HIV was a recombinant of bovine leukemia virus and Visna, even though BLV is not a lentivirus. There is no part of the genome of HIV that is anywhere near similar to HTLV-I or BLV (apart from short segments of only a few nucleotides).
In the 1986 report, Jakob Segal claimed 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 tne 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/KTLV-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 Virna 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 pert with the 3'end Iron 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 KTLV-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 journal 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."
The person who sent the letter to the journal likely misunderstood what Moscow Radio meant by Seale's report. In the paper that the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine published in August 1985, 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 probably referred to the article that was published in the London communist newspaper a few days before the radio show.
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.
In 2013 Cambridge University Press published a paper by Erhard Geissler and 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.
Page 17 (Koehler refers to John Koehler, who wrote a book about the Stasi):
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."
Page 18:
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.
Page 22:
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]
Page 24 (the source here was an email from Grossman's publisher to Geissler):
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]
Page 25:
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]
Page 27-28 (German original in brackets 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 geneaccident ... 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 heac of HV A/X Section 7, "Trade and Industry,"[178] but was later described as having beer responsible for disinformation within HV A/X.!" Brehmer said he had been responsible for Westert 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]
Page 30:
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.
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]
Page 32-33:
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.
Page 51-52:
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.
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] Hans Habe was a Jew who fled from Germany to America in 1940. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Habe]
Page 63-64:
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]
In 2019 Geissler and Sprinkle published a follow-up paper to their 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]
They wrote that 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 Seele 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]
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]
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 a journal run by the CIA called "Studies in Intelligence". 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 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 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". The book has not been translated to English, and I didn't find it at Anna's Archive. Geissler wrote that he found Bohnsack to be an untrustworthy source.
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 a source.
In the "Disinformation squared" paper, Geissler and Sprinkle wrote: "Further, the claim that 'HVA X had provided Segal with much of the material for his pamphlet'[183] is not supported by documentary proof; it relies instead on Boghardt's personal communications with Behling and former Stasi officer Bohnsack. The MfS could hardly have provided Segal with background papers since it learned about the spreading of the myth first in September 1986 from foreign press reports and its own surveillance of US diplomats' activities."
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 responsible for creating HIV.
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 t 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)
The "Disinformation squared" paper said: "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 said that the Segals moved to the GDR in 1948 and not 1952, so I don't know what explains the discrepancy.
The "Disinformation squared" paper said:
Jakob and Lilli were both biologists, but they were also both Jews and communists and partisans of the French resistance. In Paris on 21 November 1943, Lilli was arrested by Vichy French police and interrogated over several weeks. On 20 December she was transferred to German authorities and spent the next eight months in a Wehrmacht prison nearby in Fresnes. In August 1944, with Allied armies threatening from the west and the south, Lilli was deported. After four days on a train she arrived at Auschwitz in Nazi-occupied Poland.[72] Lilli was an inmate there while anthropologist-physician Josef Mengele, "Der Todesengel [the Death Angel]," was conducting inhumane experiments - on twins when he could get them. Mengele sorted arriving prisoners, sending most to die, selecting some as workers, others as subjects. He selected Lilli. "Someone shouted: 'Old people and mothers with kids to the left, women to the right [Alte und Frauen mit Kindern links, Frauen rechts].' ... It was Dr. Mengele. ... The majority of us were killed immediately after arrival by gas, including 300 kids from an orphanage."[73] In November 1944, after a second selection by Mengele, Lilli was transferred to a slave-labor camp near Zittau, in Saxony, to manufacture aircraft parts. From Zittau on 20 November 1944 she escaped. Lilli made her way to Switzerland and then in March 1945 to a liberated Paris.[74]
Lilli Segal may have also produced disinformation about the Holocaust and not only HIV. A common trope among Auschwitz survivors is that they claim they were personally selected by Josef Mengele when they arrived to Auschwitz. In his biography of Mengele, the Jewish mainstream historian David Marwell wrote: "There are some who recall a confrontation with Mengele but are mistaken, having confused him with another SS doctor or simply having assumed it must have been Mengele who carried out the monstrous deed that left them alive while taking so many they loved. 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. [...] 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." [https://books.google.com/books?id=JCCfDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT77]
The "Disinformation squared" paper said: "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 Covert Action 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 on the other hand he also presented the theory of the Segals that HIV was a bioweapon, and he reconciled the two 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?" In the fashion of Sasha Latypova, he proposed that AIDS was caused by some unspecified poison or toxic substance.
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."
Covert Action Information Bulletin was founded by the former CIA officer 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 US Army Signal Corps 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 to the Soviet war effort from the international Jewish community. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_Mikhoels]
An obituary of 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/] 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] The second director of the Russian Institute was Philip Mosely, who held top secret clearances at nine government 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-subsidised translation service of Soviet press. [ibid.] Another director of the Russian Studies 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]
Boghardt wrote: "The campaign reopened with an article in the newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta, the KGB's 'prime conduit in the Soviet press for propaganda and disinformation.'[38]" [https://digitallibrary.tsu.ge/book/2019/september/books/Soviet-Bloc-Intelligence-and-Its-AIDS.pdf]
The source he cited was the Soviet defector Oleg Kalugin's book "The First Directorate: My 32 Years in Intelligence and Espionage against the West". In the book Kalugin wrote: "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." [https://annas-archive.se/search?q=kalugin%20first%20directorate]
I found an article about someone called Konstantin Kapitonov, who was a Russian intelligence operative masquerading as a journalist, and who used to work as an Egyptian correspondent of Literaturnaya Gazeta. It said that Literaturnaya Gazeta also published a story about 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 a 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 of the weaponized mosquitoes was supposedly based on leaked documents provided by an editor of Covert Action Information Bulletin:
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]
It sounds just like a story by George Webb. It's only missing encrypted Blackberries and a nuclear deal.
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 London, 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 Caib of being a Soviet bloc 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. The manual was delivered to CAIB by a person who presented himself as an anonymous US Army whistleblower.
In the same book Rid 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 original Russian text said: "По словам Е. Примакова, материалы, раскрывающие «кованый» замысел американских ученых против человечества, выдуманы в кабинетах КГБ." (Where the word "кабинет" means an office and not a filing cabinet.)
The booklet about the AIDS theory of Jakob and Lilli Segal was distributed in Eighth Conference of Non-Aligned Nations in Harare, Zimbabwe in 1986. Rid wrote that the same conference was used to distribute other Soviet disinformation material, and a list of CIA officers similar to the lists published in 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."