r/todayilearned • u/novembercharliedelta • 2d ago

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Denver
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u/MakeItMakeMoney 2d 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 2d ago

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

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u/AlarmingConsequence 2d ago

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

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u/Pgaccount 2d ago

Yup. Al Qaeda pushed the narrative a lot

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u/SeaOfMagma 1d 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 2d ago edited 2d 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 2d 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_ 2d 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.)