"Probably the most successful anti-American active measure of the Gorbachev era, promoted by a mixture of overt propaganda and covert action by Service A, was the story that the AIDS virus had been "manufactured" by American biological warfare specialists at Fort Derrick in Maryland. An East German, Russian-born physicist, Professor Jacob Segal, claimed on the basis of "circumstantial evidence" (later wholly discredited) that AIDS had been artificially synthesized at Fort Detrick from two natural viruses, VISNA and HTLV-1. Thus fortified by spurious scientific jargon, the AIDS fabrication not merely swept through the Third World, but took in some of the Western media as well. In October 1986 the conservative British Sunday Express made it its main front-page story. During the first six months of 1987 alone, the story received major news coverage in over forty Third World countries. At the very height of its success, however, the AIDS fabrication was compromised by a combination of Western protests and "new thinking" in Soviet foreign policy. "We tell the truth and nothing but the truth," Gorbacev proudly proclaimed at a Moscow press conference in July 1987. Faced with official American protests and the repudiation of the AIDS story by the international scientific community, the Kremlin for the first time showed signs of embarassment at a successful active measures campaign. In August 1987 US officials in Moscow were informed that the story was officially disowned and Soviet media coverage of it came to an abrupt halt. The AIDS fabrication, however, was swiftly followed by other, equally scurrilous anti-American active measures in the Third World, some of which also seduced sections of the Western media..."

The Sword and the Shield, Christopher Andrew e Vasili Mitrokhin, Basic Books 1999, pag. 244-245