Recycling old KGB disinformation
WHO: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who told foreign ministers of the 100-member Nonaligned Movement gathered in Tehran on Tuesday that Western powers are responsible for the spread of the AIDS virus.
WHAT: Ahmadinejad claimed that AIDS resulted from conditions “imposed by [the] big powers,” including the United States. According to the State Department, blaming the U.S. for the deadly virus is nothing new. In 1992, former Russian Prime Minister Yevgeni Primakov admitted that the KGB deliberately spread the false story that the virus was created by the U.S. military as a biological weapon as part of its disinformation campaign against the West.
HOW: HIV-1, the virus that causes AIDS, is believed to have originated in the west equatorial African chimpanzee. In 2000, scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory calculated it probably crossed over to humans around 1930, based on a plasma sample taken in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where a population explosion between 1900 and 1961 and abandonment of the traditional isolated rural lifestyle helped it spread.
WHERE TO VENT: The U.S. cut diplomatic ties with Iran after the 1979 hostage crisis, but Pakistan’s embassy in Washington hosts an Iranian “interests section”: 202-965-4990.
