Yevgeni Primakov Admits That the KGB Fabricated the Lie That AIDS Originated in Pentagon Laboratories

“I really have to cite this to people who are capable of tying their shoes without instructions?”--Ward Churchill

KGB General Yevgeni Primakov, former head of the Soviet and Russian Foreign Intelligence Service

The Russian Newspaper Izvestia, March 19, 1992:

“The head of the Foreign Intelligence Service [KGB General Yevgeni Primakov] made a number of really sensational announcements. He mentioned the well-known articles printed a few years ago in our central newspapers about AIDS supposedly originating from secret Pentagon laboratories. According to Yevgeni Primakov, the articles exposing the U.S. scientists’ 'crafty' plot against mankind were fabricated in KGB offices. In revenge for this, the U.S. special services cooked up their own version of the attack on the Pope in the early 1980s, accusing the Soviet Union of organizing this terrorist act.”--Izvestia, March 19, 1992

According to the U.S. Information Agency:

Active measures is a Soviet term that refers to the manipulative use of slogans, arguments, disinformation, and carefully selected true information, which the Soviets used to try to influence the attitudes and actions of foreign publics and governments.

The KGB active measures often placed disinformation about the United States in foreign publications that it clandestinely controlled. In the U.S., one such publication was The Covert Action Information Bulletin.

In 1983, the KGB placed a false story in a KGB-founded Indian newspaper called the Patriot that claimed that the AIDS virus had been manufactured by the U.S. Army at Fort Detrick.

It 's very ironic and sad that on Wednesday, August 6, 2008, the FBI revealed that a mad scientist named Dr. Bruce Ivins, who actually did work at Fort Detrick, sickened and killed Americans by mailing the anthrax letters. Of course, he wasn't killing people with the blessings of our government.

Cambridge historian Professor Christopher Andrew and former KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky write:

[In 1987] Faced with official American protests and the repudiation of the AIDS story by the international scientific community, including the leading Soviet AIDS expert, Viktor M. Zhdanov, the Kremlin for the first time showed signs of public embarrassment at a successful active measures campaign. In August 1987, U.S. officials were told in Moscow that the AIDS story was officially disowned. Soviet press coverage of the story came to an almost complete halt; it has not been mentioned at all by Soviet media since 1988. [KGB: The Inside Story. See pages 630-632; the passage cited above is from page 631.]

Although the Soviets discontinued their AIDS disinformation campaign in August 1987 due to U.S. pressure, the "AIDS: Made in America" conspiracy theory developed a life of its own.

In spite of the fact that the State Department has explained the origins of AIDS and publicized Primakov's admission, the AIDS conspiracy theory continues to circulate in the black community where the belief that the U.S. government is trying to infect blacks with AIDS has had a very bad effect on the health of black Americans.

This lie was even spread from the pulpit of Senator Obama's church, and he never denounced this anti-American canard until Americans saw his minister Rev. Wright repeat this discredited lie on T.V.

This is the same kind of vicious lie that Hitler told when he claimed that Jews spread diseases.

This is the same kind of lie that Midieval Christians spread when they claimed that the Jews were poisoning their wells with plague. Perhaps in those days, this destructive falsehood was genuinely believed because people didn't understand about germs. Perhaps the Jewish communities had more sanitary customs and did not take communion. I am not an expert and can only speculate.

This is the same kind of lie that Ward Churchill told when he fabricated his claims that the U.S. Army deliberately infected the Mandan Indians with smallpox.

Senator Obama has still not told Americans that this lie came from the Soviet-era KGB. I think that black Americans deserve to hear Senator Obama explain that this was a KGB lie. After all, even the KGB admitted their responsibility for this lie!

Below I have quoted an excerpt from a chapter called "Looking to the Future" that appeared in Soviet Active Measures in the"Post-Cold War" Era 1988-1991 [U.S. Information Agency, June 1992.]

This passage details the history of the AIDS disinformation campaign. This campaign ended in August 1987, but was officially admitted in the Russian media in March 1992.

The KGB foreign intelligence chief Yevgeni Primakov admitted to elite Russian college students who attended a recruiting lecture given by the Russian Intelligence Service that the USSR fabricated the lie that the U.S. Army made AIDS, but he told the students a few new lies on the same day. Notice how the KGB propagandist Primakov gets his timeline confused just like the discredited ex-professor Ward Churchill does:

When the USSR was dissolved and Russian president Boris Yeltsin took control of the USSR's central institutions, including its foreign intelligence service, he kept [Yevgeni] Primakov as its head...

In his October 1991 press conference, Primakov... pledged that the then-Soviet foreign intelligence service would "strive to provide objective information in order to avoid any disinformation." On March 17, 1992, while recruiting for the RFIS [Russian Foreign Intelligence Service] at the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations, Primakov initially appeared to bolster this reputation for truth-telling by admitting that the KGB had fabricated and planted disinformation stories blaming the United States for the creation of the AIDS virus.

But there appeared to be a mischievous element in Primakov’s admission of KGB wrongdoing.

According to the March 19, 1992 issue of Izvestia, he then claimed - falsely - that the U.S. had retaliated for the USSR’s AIDS disinformation campaign by spreading rumors that the USSR had been involved in the attempt to assassinate Pope John Paul II. The article stated:

“The head of the Foreign Intelligence Service made a number of really sensational announcements. He mentioned the well-known articles printed a few years ago in our central newspapers about AIDS supposedly originating from secret Pentagon laboratories. According to Yevgeni Primakov, the articles exposing the U.S. scientists’ “crafty” plot against mankind were fabricated in KGB offices. In revenge for this, the U.S. special services cooked up their own version of the attack on the Pope in the early 1980s, accusing the Soviet Union of organizing this terrorist act.”

Primakov’s claim was clearly impossible because charges of Soviet involvement in the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II began to appear in 1981 and 1982, well before the USSR’s AIDS disinformation campaign began. (The original AIDS charge, planted in the KGB-founded Indian newspaper Patriot in July 1983, went unnoticed by the world until October 1985, when the Soviets began to replay it in a concerted media campaign.) Even if the U.S. government had wished to respond to the AIDS disinformation campaign in kind - which it did not - it could not have retaliated for something that had not yet occurred. Furthermore, charges of Soviet involvement in the attempted papal assassination were the result of investigations by independent journalists, not the U.S. government, which never blamed the USSR for this event.