Photo: Nathan Hodge"I said, 'gee, the guys back at home have got to see this,'" Morris recalled. WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. Enter the Hunter Satellites Preparing for Space War. Elena Rusalkina, the silver-haired woman who runs the institute, gestured to the center of the claustrophobic room, where what looked like a dentist's chair sits in front of a glowing computer monitor. MK: What was the main purpose of Operation Denver? There were some initiatives in this regard during the Cold War in the US. | T, As humans evolved, the demands of the growing population, associated knowledge creation and energy use created a fe, What We Can Learn From the KGBs Big AIDS Disinformation Campaign in the 1980s, Weather Postpones SpaceXs First Astronaut Launch, Next Try on May 31, Genetic Discrimination and the Ghost of the Future Past, Indias Citizen Scientists Rake in Bird Sightings, Second Only to US, in Global Bird Count, Turkey-Syria Quakes: Disaster Survivors Need Psychological First Aid Too, The Ethical Minefield of Screening for Disabilities, Rumours, Misinformation and Self-Verification of Facts in the Age of COVID-19, The Misinformation Pandemic Is Scarier Than the COVID-19 Pandemic. The "player" -- a traveler at an airport screening line, for example -- presses a button in response to the images, without consciously registering what he or she is looking at. Why didnt the industry sponsor itself call for the retraction as part of their settlement with the DOJ? You Can Flip My Stories On The Flipboard Digital Magazine, Corrections: If you are aware of an inaccuracy or would like to report a correction, we would like to know about it. [8] The book was reviewed by Cesare Marongiu Buonaiuti in the Italian-language journal Rivista di Studi Politici Internazionali.[9]. [9], Ladislav Bittman graduated from Charles University in Prague in 1954 and was recruited by Czech intelligence. But the FBI was put off by Smirnov's cavalier response to questions. Already during the Ebola epidemic in West Africa in 2013-16, these Russian propaganda outlets spread reports that the virus had been created by the US in collaboration with Great Britain and South Africa in order to kill off Africans. Despite Smirnov's death, Rusalkina predicts an "arms race" in psychotronic weapons. In the history of U.S. intelligence, only three major molesmen whose betrayals had lethal resultshave . Apparently, believers in HIV/AIDS conspiracy theories reason as follows: If scientists and medical doctors cannot be trusted to tell the truth or have been duped themselves about a viruss origins, why should one trust their medical or public health advice? DS: The KGB informed its Bulgarian colleagues in September 1985 that it had initiated a campaign of active measures that is, covert propaganda regarding HIV/AIDS. It is possible that a Stasi officer heard the term Fort Detrick and thought Denver instead of Detrick that is, a geographical term more familiar to most Germans. The book is about the KGB's use of disinformation and information warfare during the Soviet Union . Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. WIRED is where tomorrow is realized. 27 Jan 2023 14:18:38 HomeArchiveOctober 2020Features Ioffe said he signed a nondisclosure agreement with Conn, and had "a few informal discussions, after which he disappeared to a different assignment and reappeared after (the) DHS announcement.". [7] The other reviewer, Peter C. Unsinger, wrote "At times his examination is superficial, and for depth into some specific events, the reader will have to look at Bittman's earlier work". The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has gone to many strange places in its search for ways to identify terrorists before they attack, but perhaps none stranger than this lab on the outskirts of Russia's capital. Even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still cannot change the basic perception and the logical behavior. Constant barrage of fearmongering propaganda about bad orange man and how he was a threat to democracy and was going to institute a dictatorship. "That kind of thing is reasonable, and there's good experimental evidence behind it. Operation INFEKTION was an active measure 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 at Fort Detrick, Maryland.Historian Thomas Boghardt popularized the codename "INFEKTION" based on the claims of former East German Ministry for State Security (Stasi) officer Gnter . But the idea of psychotronic weapons enjoys some respectability in Russia. A similar, intensive effort by the US and other democracies could also prove effective today. *Photo: Nathan Hodge * MOSCOW -- The future of U.S. anti-terrorism technology could lie near the end of a Moscow subway line in a circular dungeon-like room with a single door and no windows. Within hours of the disaster, software engineers were rolling out applications to help locate people in need and distribute aid. Many of these KGB agents worked in GULAG labor camps and had about 10 times more time (not just 3-4 years that Mengele had) for their brainwashing experiments with 1,000s of human "guinea pigs". While these types of messages are commonly used in political, public health and commercial advertising campaigns (e.g., smoking will kill you, Candidate A . The Chinese government has succeeded to some extent in lumping together accusations about the Wuhan laboratory with all other criticisms of its role and response to the pandemic as mere China-bashing.. Scientist. Click accept to close this message. While Conn said the lack of testing bothered him, the relationship ended when he found out Northam Psychotechnologies went to SRS Technologies, now part of ManTech International Corp. Semyon Ioffe, the head of Northam Psychotechnologies, who identifies himself as a "brain scientist," declined a phone interview, but answered questions over e-mail. Negative commentary about the U.S. grew markedly within the country at a rapid pace. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. A dungeon-like room in the Psychotechnology Research Institute in Moscow is used for human testing. The KGB and StB agents were able to turn the Indonesian Ambassador to their interests and through him they passed along to President of Indonesia Sukarno fabricated analyses and false documents, alleging the Central Intelligence Agency was planning to harm him. #DemVoice1 . DS:Strangely, in retrospect, I did not imagine living through another global pandemic in my lifetime, despite the warnings of the Obama Administration and the example of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. In the meantime, the DHS contract is still imminent, according to those involved, although all parties declined to comment on the details, or the size of the award. Douglas Selvageis a Research Associate (wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) at the Institute for History of the Humboldt University in Berlin. The Stasi also claimed to have covertly co-financed a documentary film shown three times on public-financed West German television in 1989 and subsequently in an English version on British Channel Four in 1990. Perceptions of American interests within the country were decreased to a negligible level, directly due to the Soviet intelligence disinformation campaign. One particularly reprehensible episode was the Tuskegee syphilis study, in which the US Public Health Service had observed the long-term effects of syphilis on infected African-American sharecroppers and their offspring for four decades, from 1932 to 1972, without providing them with effective medical treatment, even after penicillin had proven effective against the disease. This came at least partly in response to their frustration with decades of discrimination, the accelerating death toll from HIV/AIDS, and the lagging, at times callous, response of the Reagan Administration to the pandemic. At $25 a pop$43.99 for a two-hour guided strollthe KGB Spy Museum offers a thoroughly capitalist look at the decidedly Communist spy tools, from the Bolshevik era through the F.S.B. Inmy articlefor the Journal of Cold War Studies, I demonstrate how the perennial right-wing US Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche and his organisation promoted a variant of the AIDS-from-Fort-Detrick thesis. ", Developments in neuroscience, he noted, are followed closely. The terrorist's response to the scrambled image involuntarily differs from the innocent person's, according to the theory. International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, Media censorship and disinformation during the Gezi Park protests, "The Spy Who Came Into the Classroom Teaches at Boston U. Why that many years? Are our representatives in Government voting Constitutionally? Insys Therapeutics profited from Subsys, a fentanyl-based painkiller up to 100 times stronger than morphine, by targeting high-prescribing doctors and nurse practitioners known within the company as whales, misleading insurers, and holding contests for the sales team. PBS America [3], Bittman recounts other case studies, including efforts by the Soviet intelligence services to influence the views of the Third World against Americans so that such countries would support Russian interests in the United Nations. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These appeals are effective at changing attitudes, intentions and behaviors. Smirnov proposed blasting scrambled sound -- the pig squeals again -- over loudspeakers to persuade Koresh to surrender. She also claimed that Russian special forces contacted the institute during the 2003 Moscow theater siege, in which several hundred people were held hostage by Chechen militants. Did the Stasi play the lead role after the Soviet KGB? "We could have stabilized the situation in the concert hall, and the terrorists would have called the whole thing off," she said. The goal of these measures, the KGB wrote, is to create a favourable opinion for us abroad that this disease is the result of secret experiments with a new type of biological weapon by the secret services of the USA and the Pentagon that spun out of control., Around a year later, the Stasi wrote to the Bulgarians about Operation Denver, its contribution to the KGBs AIDS disinformation campaign. [1][2][10] While there, Bittman taught journalism with a focus on disinformation at BU and founded the Program for the Study of Disinformation, the first academic center in the U.S. to focus on the study of disinformation. The institute claims its technology can read the subconscious mind and alter behavior. The author defines disinformation as "a carefully constructed false message leaked to an opponent's communication system in order to deceive the decision-making elite or the public". As it became clear that African-Americans were also suffering disproportionately from the disease, some African-Americans came to believe in and spread similar conspiracy theories. This site participates in the Amazon Associate program and earns revenue from qualifying purchases (links to books or products). You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. "It was used for combating the Mujahideen, and also for treating post-traumatic stress syndrome" in Russian soldiers, she says. In both cases, authoritarian regimes have exploited widespread public fear and confusion to generate suspicions about US motives, to stoke hostility toward the United States, and to discredit the US governments sincerity in combatting the global pandemic. . Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. Bulgarian and especially Czechoslovak foreign intelligence also assisted, but mainly in terms of spreading leaflets around US military bases and encouraging stories in the local press in NATO countries. RT @MStinkerson: In the 60s, the KGB did conducted psych experiments and learned that if you bombard human subjects with nonstop fear messages, most are completely brainwashed to believe the lies in 2 months or less, and no amount of evidence to the contrary can change their minds. GameStop Moderna Pfizer Johnson & Johnson AstraZeneca Walgreens Best Buy Novavax SpaceX Tesla. "If there's something there, that person will need to go through extra checks.". Of course, during the Cold War, the US and other democracies did this, if not to the same extent as the Soviet Union and its allies. "It wouldn't be a handful of Russian folks in a basement.". Communications: How One Interagency Group. The example of the response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic by the democratically-elected government of South Africa under President Thabo Mbeki (1999-2008) should serve as a warning to us today as we grapple with COVID-19. Effects are most apparent in women and for one-time behaviors, says study. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. [3], The KGB and StB ruse succeeded in causing paranoia and the Indonesia president began to make public statements highly critical of the U.S. Reporters within the employ of the two Soviet intelligence agencies promptly capitalized on Sukarno's remarks and incensed the Indonesians with broadcasts of the false reporting on Radio Moscow and groups of angry citizens attacked U.S. buildings in the city of Jakarta. Yuri Bezmenov, known by the alias Tomas David Schuman, was a Soviet KGB informant who defected to Canada. Today, it absolutely does not help, for example, when the Trump Administration and other U.S. politicians openly promote their own conspiracy theories about COVID-19, including basically unsubstantiated claims that the virus escaped from a Chinese laboratory in Wuhan. To help settle the debate, Albarracin and her colleagues conducted what they believe to be the most comprehensive meta-analysis to date. Publisher - National News & Published Reports. 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