The Allegation the United States Created the HIV/AIDS Virus

Background

Since the viruses was first discovered, HIV and AIDS have long been rumored to have been a biproduct of American experimentation. Varying conspiracy theories and groups alleged that HIV/AIDS was created in a laboratory, and grew beyond anyone’s control.

One write-up by Wikipedia explains a few of the theories:

Jakob Segal (1911–1995), a professor at Humboldt University in then-East Germany, proposed that HIV was engineered at a U.S. military laboratory at Fort Detrick, by splicing together two other viruses, Visna and HTLV-1. According to his theory, the new virus, created between 1977 and 1978, was tested on prison inmates who had volunteered for the experiment in exchange for early release. He further suggested that it was through these prisoners that the virus was spread to the population at large. At the end of the Cold War, former KGB agents Vasili Mitrokhin and Oleg Gordievsky independently revealed that the Fort Detrick hypothesis was a propaganda operation devised by the KGB’s First Chief Directorate codenamed “Operation INFEKTION”. This revelation was later supported by officer Günther Bohnensack of section X of East Germany’s Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung. It is known that Segal was in close contact with Russian KGB officers and Mitrokhin mentioned him as a central asset of the operation. It is not entirely clear whether Segal pursued the hypothesis independently on his own accord or whether he was simply following orders. Segal himself always denied the latter and kept pursuing the hypothesis even after the operation had been canceled and the Cold War had ended.
In Behold a Pale Horse (1991), radio broadcaster and author Milton William Cooper (1943–2001) proposed that AIDS was the result of a conspiracy to decrease the populations of blacks, Hispanics, and homosexuals.
The dentist and entrepreneur Leonard G. Horowitz, author of the self-published works Emerging Viruses: AIDS & Ebola. Nature, Accident or Intentional? (1996) and Death in the Air: Globalism, Terrorism and Toxic Warfare (2001), advanced the theory that the AIDS virus was engineered by such U.S. Government defense contractors as Litton Bionetics for the purposes of bio-warfare and “population control”. He believes that HIV was deliberately designed in a US military lab in the 1970s for use as a genocidal weapon.

I have filed various FOIA requests regarding the topic, and below you will see some of the results. As of the writing of this page, April of 2018, there are more FOIA requests still open. Once they are processed and receive a final response, I will add them to the archive here.

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