Matters of health and medicine figure prominently in what are often referred to as ‘conspiracy theories.’ As was clearly the case during the Covid-19 pandemic, rumours of a medical nature have the capacity trigger widespread alarm and substantially modify human behaviour. They even induced attacks on critical infrastructure and personnel. As such, they constitute major threats to public health and national security. But analysis of these problems is often simplistic. Too often, ‘conspiracy theories,’ ‘disinformation’ and ‘misinformation’ are convenient scapegoats which detract from a deeper understanding of the problem addressed or from the failings of others.
Misleading information (whether accidental or deliberate) can have a devastating effect but rumours can only gain traction if conditions are right. The most potent medical rumours tend to play on a combination of existential fear, suspicion of the motives of institutions and elites, and concerns about the power of big business, most obviously pharmaceutical companies. For any health-related rumour to make a substantial impact, there has to be a high level of pre-existing anxiety related to one or more of the above.
A case in point is Operation Denver (a.k.a. Infektion): an active-measures (covert propaganda) campaign launched by the KBG in the mid-1980s, with assistance from the Stasi and other Soviet Bloc intelligence services. This campaign propagated the idea that HIV was manufactured by the United States as a biological weapon, tested initially in Haiti and then on marginalised populations in the US. The spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa was attributed to deliberate contamination by US operatives who covertly spread HIV in public health programmes.1 As a result, some medical laboratories funded by the US were shut down and the South African president Thabo Mbeki infamously cited the ‘experiment’ when denying the science of AIDS.2 In the US, too, there were many who came to believe that the virus originated in an American laboratory. In 2005, a RAND study found that 50% of African-Americans thought the virus was man-made and 12% that it was deliberately spread by the CIA to kill black people.3
Operation Denver may be the most ‘successful’ medical disinformation campaign ever and it was certainly the most successful active measures campaign launched by the KGB. It was successful precisely because the rumour spoke to existing concerns relating to the US government and its agencies. The KGB knew of African-American anger over the Tuskegee syphilis study4 and was aware that conspiracy theories concerning the origin of AIDS were circulating in the US during the early 1980s. It amplified and elaborated them, making additional allegations concerning the precise origins of the virus in the US Army’s Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick, Maryland.5 Similarly, Soviet Bloc intelligence agencies drew on critiques of Western involvement in Africa by portraying the simian African-origin hypothesis as an example of racist stereotyping. Years after the Cold War had ended, and even after the disinformation campaign had been exposed, the notion that HIV was a ‘White Man’s Plot’ still had political currency in a number of African countries.6 Other notable features of the campaign were the enlistment of fringe scientists in framing an alternative hypothesis and the participation, often unwittingly, of Western intellectuals who gave credibility to certain aspects of the Soviet narrative.
Similar patterns appeared in rumours circulating in Western nations during the Covid-19 pandemic. Misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories had most impact where trust was already lacking. As is often the case in epidemics, latent social tensions and grievances came to the surface as a result of pressures generated by the official response.7 Though welcomed initially, protracted and unprecedented movement controls faced mounting opposition from those who were economically and socially disadvantaged by them. These tended to be the poorer sections of society, the self-employed and young people. Many of them already felt that their position was precarious or resented attempts to control their speech and behaviour. Some came to believe that there was an elite ‘globalist’ agenda which intended to deprive them of their liberty and livelihoods or even sterilise or kill them through measures such as vaccination (especially with the new MRNA vaccines) and radiation from 5G towers. Operating together, these technologies were said to form a kind of ‘kill grid’.
Most people would find it difficult to understand how anyone could believe that vaccines or 5G technology had been developed for nefarious purposes. But such claims lay behind the sabotage or arson of hundreds of 5G towers and attacks on telecom engineers. Some activists were wholly convinced of these conspiracies but it is likely that many were not; at least, not fully. Like rumours arising in some previous epidemics, conspiracy theories gained purchase because they spoke to deeper perceived ‘truths’ about the corrupt and evil nature of elites and their dislike of the common people. The precise details of these theories and their veracity were largely irrelevant. Essentially, they were ‘weapons of the weak’,8 instrumentalised by those who lacked power in order to destabilise, disrupt and discredit.
Although such rumours arose organically in many cases – e.g. based on personal experiences of the side-effects of vaccination – growing distrust of government and of expert opinion allowed biomedical fears to become entangled with other political concerns, for instance about mass migration and the push for Net Zero. Scientists, pharmaceutical industry executives and other well-known figures stepped forward, lending credibility to dissenting arguments and giving them greater visibility. By the end of the pandemic, specific Covid-related grievances had been transformed into a new political identity, defined largely in opposition to what was perceived as progressive authoritarianism.
Few of the wilder rumours which circulated during the pandemic would have gained much traction had it not been for the fact that many people already felt that they were losing control of their lives. Rather than acknowledging these fears, officials tended to aggravate the situation by demonising those who had legitimate concerns, e.g. about the safety of vaccination. Media and social media censorship also backfired, driving many people to find answers to their questions on marginal platforms where they encountered narratives that ‘made sense’ of their alienation and amplified their suspicion of elites. Minor grievances escalated to the point where the public health response was comprised (e.g. by vaccine refusal) and security endangered by extensive rioting and arson; at least in many Western nations. The bitter legacy of those years is still with us, evident in the diminished legitimacy of key institutions, political volatility and polarisation.
If we are to deal effectively with a future crisis, such as a pandemic, we will require a far more sophisticated approach: one that attempts to understand the complexities of the information domain and its relationship to lived experience. Censorship and similar measures rarely work. Nor can they be justified when there is genuine scientific uncertainty over the safety and efficacy of medical procedures or the health impact of other new technologies. It is far better to monitor the information space and deal with concerns as they arise, rather than to play into the hands of those who wish to amplify anxieties about social control and provoke civil unrest.
Not all medical or health-related rumours have security implications, but many of them do. Identifying those that have is, or should be, one of the primary roles of medical intelligence. By bringing scientists, physicians, social scientists and others together with intelligence professionals, we can better understand the dynamics of the information environment and how different sections of the population are likely to react to certain kinds of information (true or false). Such a capability is vital if we are to craft more effective interventions in the information domain (i.e. to counter mis/disinformation) and to identify the potential for unrest and exploitation by hostile actors. Specialised intelligence is also vital for law enforcement, allowing resources to be directed to where they are most needed and to help officers engage with the public in ways that are likely to maintain legitimacy.9 These considerations are as vital to public health as they are to national security, for an effective response to any medical emergency depends on trust and the maintenance of public order.
- Douglas Selvage, ‘Operation “Denver”: The East German Ministry of State Security and the KGB’s AIDS Disinformation Campaign, 1985-1986 (Part I),’ Journal of Cold War Studies, 21, 4 (2019), 71-123; Douglas Selvage, ‘Operation “Denver”: The East German Ministry of State Security and the KGB’s AIDS Disinformation Campaign, 1986-1989 (Part 2),’ Journal of Cold War Studies, 21, 4 (2021), 4-80. ↩︎
- Lessons From Operation “Denver,” the KGB’s Massive AIDS Disinformation Campaign | The MIT Press Reader ↩︎
- Thomas Boghart, ‘Operation Infektion: Soviet Bloc Intelligence and its AIDS Disinformation Campaign,’ Studies in Intelligence, 53, 4 (2009), 1-24, p.19. ↩︎
- The deliberate infection of nearly 400 African-American men with syphilis between 1932 and 1972 in order to study the effects of the disease when left untreated. This only came to light in the mid-1970s and by the early 1980s was being written about at length, e.g. James H. Jones, Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (New York: Free Press, 1981). ↩︎
- Selvage, ‘Operation “Denver” … (Part I), pp.79-81. ↩︎
- Boghart, ‘Operation Infektion’, pp.18-19. ↩︎
- Paul Slack, ‘Introduction,’ Epidemics and Ideas: Essays on the Historical Perception of Pestilence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp.1-20. ↩︎
- James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). ↩︎
- Clifford Stott, Owen West, Mark Harrison, ‘A Turning Point, Securitization, and Policing in the Context of Covid-19: Building a New Social Contract Between State and Nation,’ Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, Volume 14, Issue 3, September 2020, Pages 574–578, https://doi.org/10.1093/police/paaa021 ↩︎