Spycraft - Melton [185]
The Soviets launched a story in the Indian newspaper Patriot based on out-of-context U.S. Congressional testimony and quotes by anonymous scientists. The story, which attributed the disease to biological weapons research, seemed to have no journalistic legs at the time and quickly faded from sight.55 However, two years later, with AIDS spreading rapidly and public alarm growing, the Soviets replayed the allegations in a Soviet publication, Literaturnaya Gazeta. Specific details included assertions that American scientists at Fort Detrick, Maryland, created the disease for use as a biological weapon on specific population groups and were using military personnel to spread it worldwide.56 Within days, newspapers in Europe, Latin America, and Asia picked up the story. Like a successful marketing campaign for a new brand of soap, as the lie sold, the Soviets increased their efforts.
By 1986 at a Nonaligned Movement summit meeting in Harare, Zimbabwe, a bogus scientific paper in English was released detailing “evidence” that the United States had created AIDS. The story spread throughout Africa’s media while the KGB supplemented the campaign with rumors, posters, and flyers along with repetition on radio and television broadcasts.57
The United States responded in 1987 by increasing the distribution of AIDS-related information worldwide and offering a stern warning from then Surgeon General, C. Everett Coop, that a joint AIDS research agreement would not progress until the disinformation campaign ceased. Shortly thereafter Soviet scientists held a press conference to confirm the natural origins of the disease.58
In fact, the fabricated AIDS story had historical precedent. It was essentially a rehash of a 1952 Soviet propaganda campaign claiming the United States used biological weapons in the Korean conflict. The new element was the hot-button mention of AIDS. What was so damaging in the AIDS disinformation campaign was that fears of the dreaded disease gave the story credibility in popular culture. Similar to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the AIDS disinformation campaign continues to live in urban myth and conspiracy theory. A 2005 study conducted by the U.S. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development showed that almost half of 500 African-Americans surveyed believed that the AIDS-causing HIV virus is man-made; more than one quarter believed that AIDS was produced in a government laboratory; and 12 percent believed it was created and spread by the CIA.59
In the Sudan in 1969, a group of goat herders found a cache of weapons in a drainpipe along a rural trail. Hidden for the purpose of discovery, the eclectic collection included a “pen gun,” box of ammunition, and magnetic Limpet mine that could be attached to the side of a ship. There was also a note implicating a U.S. State Department official in an alleged political plot against the Sudanese government.
The timing of the goat herders’ discovery was nearly flawless. Sudan had broken diplomatic ties with the United States following the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Thereafter, each country maintained “official” relations through “interest sections” housed in an embassy that flew the flag of a different nation. Adding to an already complicated situation were the policies of Sudan’s new government that seemingly leaned toward Moscow.
American diplomats in Khartoum needed to reveal the materials as fabrications and defuse the potential for political crisis certain to follow any public release about the find. A break came when a senior Sudanese official, Major Farouk Othman Hamdallah, Minister of Interior and State Security, privately