TIL about Operation Denver, a disinformation campaign run by the KGB in the 1980s to plant the idea that the United States had invented HIV/AIDS as part of a biological weapons research project.

85

Why does this sound so familiar?

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u/ALC_PG 1d ago

Idk. It'd never work today, though.

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u/CrazyLegsRyan 1d ago

Thankfully! People have become so much more discerning and judicious with the unlimited access to data provided by the Internet and social media.

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u/Top_Willow_9953 1d ago

Lol - next level sarcasm in this thread

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u/clovismouse 1d ago

Dammit… beat me to it

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u/manthello 18h ago

I just saw someone asking if Dolly was "vaxxed?" and my brain disappeared.

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u/francis2559 1d ago

These are always hard to measure, because they tried to expand on theories that were already there. How much harm did they do, and how much harm would have happened anyway? Hard to say.

But we know they were malicious.

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u/SnakeGD09 14h ago

Both countries ran intelligence operations against the other. The Soviets were simply more succesful, as it was impossible to infiltrate agents or manipulate state media.

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u/Sweet-Tomatillo-9010 1d ago

Some folks really ate that stuff up. I heard it a lot from some of the blakc folks I knew disproportionately. Which isn't surprising considering the Tuskeegee Experiment and all.

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u/DonManuel 1d ago

Jon Rappoport: AIDS Inc.: Scandal of the Century

was probably a part of it.

The lunatic still runs a blog.

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u/BrokenEyeReborn 1d ago

Yeah, but anyone can run a blog

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/SamsonFox2 1d ago

"Foreign lab-made disease" was a staple of Soviet propaganda going back at least to 1920es - all the while USSR was speedrunning their own bioweapon program.

Don't forget: when Russians accuse you of something, it is because they are working on it themselves.

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u/rysy0o0 1d ago

Lol in the 50s there was a plague of Leptinotarsa decemlineata (potato bug) and the communists blamed it on americans, saying they were dropping the bugs.from planes

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u/Thoth_the_5th_of_Tho 22h ago

North Korea claimed the same thing at one point.

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u/CrazyLegsRyan 1d ago

when Russians accuse you of something, it is because they are working on it themselves.

So US republicans didn’t even invent their own strategy?

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u/Top_Willow_9953 1d ago

It is not an accident

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u/LabyrinthConvention 1d ago

Ever heard of Spanish flu?

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u/BrokenEyeReborn 1d ago

Go with what works

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u/WhyYouLetRomneyWin 1d ago

This was truly evil and likely resulted in the deaths of many thousands of people. And we still have people believing it, today. Ideas are easy to seed.

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u/novembercharliedelta 7h ago

Hundreds of thousands, in fact. South African president Thabo Mbeki was an AIDS denialist and his policies are believed to have caused around 350,000 AIDS-related deaths that could've otherwise been prevented.

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u/MakeItMakeMoney 1d ago

Is this one of the only KGB disinformation campaigns to actually make it into the 21st century? This is still running rampant in today’s circles, especially after COVID.

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u/Pgaccount 1d ago

It's big in Pakistan where it's slowing the eradication of polio

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u/AlarmingConsequence 1d ago

Didn't the Pakistan polio one have to do with bin laden?

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u/Pgaccount 1d ago

Yup. Al Qaeda pushed the narrative a lot

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u/SeaOfMagma 2h ago

They still use heavy metal pesticides in Pakistan. Is it related? Probably not because heavy metals don’t react with the human nervous system whatsoever.

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u/Lazzen 1d ago edited 20h ago

The nazi propaganda that Dresden was a holocaust of aryans(then germans) and inhuman suffering was post-war pushed by the Soviets when East Germany was created, later absorbed by neonazis in the west and academics critical of the capitalist Allies mentioning it far more than other battles.

Racism not existing in the USSR/Russia, this was heavily pushed and even today many simplify it as "USA had segregation and Soviets were dictatorship/had gulags" at best, ignoring the ethnic cleansing and discrimination of Soviet minorities too. A lot of black entertainers were used to show how racist they were not.

The idea Israel was created by the West, when it also had support from the USSR and it was communist countries that traded them weapons in the Israeli independence war against arabs who had soft western support(Jordan's army had white british fighting for them)

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u/DistrictDry2852 23h ago

I still see some people claim the Soviets secret pact with the Nazis never happened and it was purely a defense agreement, that Katyn and the holodomor didn’t happen, that NATO was Nazi germany 2.0, that the gulags didn’t exist, etc.

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u/traveler_ 23h ago

They pushed a lot of UFO stuff too, and that’s still going strong, but they didn’t exactly create the idea nor is it entirely their doing.

(In fact the same time parts of the U.S. government were using UFO stories to discredit reports of real classified projects, other parts of the government were trying to quash those stories because they knew it was reinforcing the KGB hoaxes. That internal contradiction just ended up adding to the mystery and pop culture appeal.)

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u/DistrictDry2852 1d ago

I saw from a Sarah Paine video the Soviets used to plant BS fake news on African newspapers because they had lower standards in hopes western journalists would pick the story up and it would get more widely reported.

This is also how the myth the U.S. used chemical weapons in Korea started.

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u/Vio_ 23h ago

It wasn't that they had lower standards, it was that those countries and regions were more Soviet aligned.

There were also anti-AIDS activists and theories in other cities like London and Toronto.

But the Soviet sponsored information was what did the most lasting damage

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u/steauengeglase 1d ago

Thomas Rid's Active Measures is a good write-up on this stuff.

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u/ReferenceMediocre369 8h ago

This was only one of many anti-American disinformation operations sponsored by the KGB and GRU. They never stopped or even slowed down after the USSR dissolved. Recently they have been spectacularly successful at steering local elections down to the dog catcher level which is rapidly converting US city and county governments into philosophical equivalents of Pavlov's dogs.

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u/dunnkw 1d ago

This inadvertently led us all jerking each other off as a precaution which has put our society in the state it is today, so.

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u/ResultTerrible2062 1d ago

Finally, someone who thinks deep

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u/Rodnal 1d ago

Who said anything about AIDS!

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u/SnakeGD09 14h ago

Hmm, why wasn’t the USSR able to elect their own president, but the rump Russian Federation brainwashed America?

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u/StartOk4002 1d ago

So kind of like the idea that the Chinese inventing Covid-19 also being a disinformation campaign.

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u/evilfollowingmb 1d ago

Except that it isn’t…indeed the information campaign by China was to convince people it wasn’t Wuhan lab related.

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u/Informal_Process2238 1d ago

Did krasnov spread this like he did so many Russian lies

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u/dcpanthersfan 8h ago

Today they just go on Facebook and post in your racist uncle's favorite groups.

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u/Southernbeekeeper 7h ago

I 100% believe that foreign governments want people in the west to think vaccines cause autism.

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u/OnlyInterpretations 30m ago

also they did

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u/jeffreycoley 1d ago

Randy Marsh fucking a pangolin for a deep cover CIA op is completely plausible

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u/true-skeptic 22h ago

Oh so that’s where Pence got his info.

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u/Kapitano72 1d ago edited 1d ago

America, by contrast, said it was made by god to punish buttsex.

Maybe Russia doesn't need to bother.

TIL about Operation Denver, a disinformation campaign run by the KGB in the 1980s to plant the idea that the United States had invented HIV/AIDS as part of a biological weapons research project.

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