During our Dec. 22 conversation referenced below, Thomas Boghardt, the historian at the International Spy Museum in Washington, noted that it was curious that the Soviet Union had launched a series of vicious anti-American disinformation campaigns during the late 1980s, when Mikhail Gorbachev was in power. On the surface, this seems incongruous.

Thomas is right. The Soviets AIDS disinformation campaign began in earnest in October 1985, after languishing following an initial covert press placement in 1983, described below. In 1987, the Soviets began disinformation on the false “baby parts” story and also published 100,000 copies of the disinformation book The Jonestown Carnage: Crime of the CIA, which blamed the 1978 mass killing in Jonestown, Guyana on the KGB’s favorite target for slander.

Oleg Kalugin, former Major General in the KGB and a member of the Spy Museum’s advisory board, offered a possible explanation. During Gorbachev’s time, he said, the communist political leadership relaxed its supervision of the KGB. The intelligence professionals had more freedom to pursue initiatives in a way they wished, without as much political oversight. Since standard KGB policy was to heap as much abuse as possible on the United States, they pursued this task with gusto.

(Oleg also mentioned that one of the Jonestown book’s co-authors, Andrei Itskov, was a former KGB colleague of his. Itskov is also identified in Christopher Andrew’s The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB as a KGB Service A active measures officer who worked with CIA defector Philip Agee in Agee’s efforts to discredit his former employer.)

But, at the same time the KGB was doing its disinformation thing, the Soviet political leadership was attempting to wage conciliatory political warfare centered on the theme of “eliminating the enemy image” of the USSR. Georgi Arbatov, head of the USSR’s Institute on the United States and Canada, stated in The New York Times in 1987, “We have a ‘secret weapon’ that will work almost regardless of the American response – we would deprive America of The Enemy.”

This contradiction between trying to “eliminate the enemy image” of the USSR while launching vile, anti-American disinformation campaigns created an opportunity that we exploited. By exposing Soviet disinformation vigorously in the late 1980s, the U.S. government was able to demonstrate to the Soviets that they could not have their cake and eat it, too. As a result, in 1987, the Soviets stopped spreading AIDS disinformation in Soviet media and in 1988 and 1989 they dramatically decreased their overt sponsorship of other anti-American disinformation campaigns.

My name is Todd Leventhal. I’ve worked researching false stories about the United States for the State Department for 15 of the past 21 years.

In 1987, when I started, the big disinformation story was the false Soviet claim that the United States had invented the AIDS virus. No scientists believed this and, in 1999, scientists determined that the virus had come from a West African chimpanzee, Pan troglodytes troglodytes.

The “baby parts” rumor also started in 1987. The false story that Americans or others were adopting or kidnapping Latin American children for use in organ transplants tore through the world press for 10 years. Variants of it won the most prestigious journalism prize in France in 1995 and in Spain in 1996 – both based on untrue stories.

In the 1990’s, I researched false claims that depleted uranium munitions used during the 1991 Gulf War had caused cancer and birth defects in Iraq. We all have powerful fears about the highly enriched uranium used in weapons and nuclear power plants, but depleted uranium is very different; it’s only very weakly radioactive. It’s been “depleted” of its radioactivity. But anything with the last name “uranium” scares people, and emotional associations often trump logic when dealing with things we don’t know much about.

Finally, after the September 11 attacks, I’ve spent a lot of time debunking 9/11 conspiracy theories.

See some examples of my work under “Related Sites” on the right.