For companies claiming innovative technologies, the past few years have provided bountiful opportunities. In our exchange featured below, Selvage sheds light on the origins and main purpose of operation Denver and considers the lessons we may learn in responding to Russian and Chinese disinformation in 2020. But the FBI was put off by Smirnov's cavalier response to questions. Click accept to close this message. [5] John C. Campbell reviewed the book for the journal Foreign Affairs and gave a mixed review, "Going well beyond the author's personal experiencehe left Czechoslovakia in 1968the book ranges over the entire field with many illustrative cases and items of interest, but also with a tendency to write the KGB's role as larger than life". "There's no question your brain is able to perceive things below your ability to consciously express or identify," Schoenbaum said. DS: We actually do not know why the Stasi chose this particular codename because the HVA destroyed around 90% of its records in 1989-90, including the files for Operation Denver. In the 60's the KGB did some psychological experiments. Tech Volunteers Rush to Save Turkeys Earthquake Survivors. Studies show that individuals who believe in conspiracy theories regarding the origins of HIV/AIDS are less likely to follow medical advice regarding safe sex, to test themselves for potential infection, or to take effective medications to contain the disease. Geoff Schoenbaum, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland's School of Medicine, said that he was unaware of any scientific work specifically underpinning the technology described in SSRM Tek. [3][4][5] The book includes case studies of joint disinformation campaigns by the Soviet Union and Czech intelligence and their repercussions, including a successful operation to stop the building of an aerospace center in West Germany and a failed plot to accuse CBS News anchor Dan Rather of murder in Afghanistan. ", The problem, he said, is that there is no science he is aware of that can produce the specificity or sensitivity to pick out a terrorist, let alone influence behavior. Mcdermott, one of our first and thus veteran reporters, is also a data analyst for select independent news and media organizations in the United States. Advancing psychology to benefit society and improve lives. Posted by . Since I knew less about Chinese disinformation efforts, it surprised me that Beijing apparently decided to revamp the old, Soviet disinformation and to apply it to the new virus. They learned that if you bombard human subjects with fear messages nonstop for two months most of the subjects are completely brainwashed into believing the false message. However, in 1993 Smirnov rose to brief fame in the United States when the FBI consulted with him in hope of ending the standoff in Waco with cult leader David Koresh. This leads to fruitless public discussion along the lines of: Who was responsible for constructing the virus China or the US? Such apparently baseless accusations also make the public, especially in third countries, less willing to listen to other, substantiated criticisms of Chinas response to the pandemic, including its initial suppression of warnings from doctors in Wuhan. Effects are most apparent in women and for one-time behaviors, says study. Igor Smirnov, founder of the Psychotechnology Research Institute, died of a heart attack in 2005. In the aftermath of the October Revolution of 1917, Vladimir Lenin, the head of the newly formed U.S.S.R., needed a way to keep the population (and his fellow revolutionaries) in check. "We've had volunteers, a lot of them," she said, the thick concrete walls muffling the noise from the college campus outside. 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To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. "It has not been awarded yet," he replied in an e-mail. Obviously they will revolt, they will be very unhappy frustrated people and the Marxist Leninist regime does not tolerate these people they obviously will join the links of dissenters, dissidents unlike in present United States, there will be no place for dissent in huge markets. Yuri Bezmenov, known by the alias Tomas David Schuman, was a Soviet KGB informant who defected to Canada. MK: What was the main purpose of Operation Denver? But the idea of psychotronic weapons enjoys some respectability in Russia. In the 1960's, the KGB did some interesting psychological experiments. Congress Has a Lo-Fi Plan to Fix the Classified Documents Mess. The terrorist's response to the scrambled image involuntarily differs from the innocent person's, according to the theory. The final . His answer was to create the Cheka, an abbreviation of "The All-Russian Emergency Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage." The two co-creators of the West German film strenuously deny that the Stasi covertly financed the film or was involved with it in any other way. Another such forgery claimed that the CIA plotted a covert assassination attempt on the Indonesian president. ", "Operation INFEKTION - Soviet Bloc Intelligence and Its AIDS Disinformation Campaign", "Book Review: The KGB and Soviet Disinformation: An Insider's View", "Deception, Disinformation, and Strategic. Astronomers like myself often study physical phenomena on timescales so, We should learn to consult with all stakeholders and keep ourselves open to constructive dialogue, and thus craft m, Samanth Subramanian said, The thing that moved me most about Haldane was his willingness to engage with the world:, Wherever social scientists have looked closely, they have found elements of politics in the conduct of science. They learned that if you bombarded human subjects with fear messages non-stop, by the end of two months most of the subjects became brainwashed and believed the false message, to the point that no amount of clear (truthful) information they were shown would change their minds. Selvages article appeared a few months before COVID-19 burst into public consciousness. They found fear appeals to be effective, especially when they contained recommendations for one-time only (versus repeated) behaviors and if the targeted audience included a larger percentage of women. In the United States, talk of mind control typically evokes visions of tinfoil hats. Copyright 2000-2021 Please see our Terms of Service (earnings disclosure / ownership section). These cookies do not store any personal information. MK: When you began writing about the Soviet-East German AIDS disinformation campaign, did you ever imagine that you might live through a global pandemic that would give rise to lurid conspiracy theories in Russia, China, and Iran claiming that the deadly pathogen was manufactured in US biological defence laboratories? Why didnt the industry sponsor itself call for the retraction as part of their settlement with the DOJ? Such accusations seemed plausible to many, given the history of racism in the United States, including in the medical field. Smirnov is best known in the United States for consulting with the FBI during the 1993 Waco siege. Article: Appealing to Fear: A Meta-Analysis of Fear Appeal Effectiveness and Theories, by Melanie Tannenbaum, PhD, Kristina Wilson, PhD, and Dolores Abarracin, PhD, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Justin Hepler, PhD, University of Nevada, Reno; Rick Zimmerman, PhD, University of Missouri, St. Louis; and Lindsey Saul, PhD, and Samantha Jacobs, MPH, Virginia Commonwealth University, Psychological Bulletin, published online Oct. 23, 2015. The institute has for years served as the center of an obscure field of human behavior study -- dubbed psychoecology -- that traces it roots back to Soviet-era mind control research. Share. Getentrepreneurial.com: Resources for Small Business Entrepreneurs in 2022. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. Please consider sending an email to corrections@publishedreporter.com and cite any sources if available. Politically Incorrect. [2] In the book, he warns how disinformation can lead to blowback, causing unintended consequences from intelligence agency actions, which were harmful to the Soviet Union. Ghost-managed medicineis an antidote to such childish behaviour. One term that never came up in talks between the Stasi and their Bulgarian counterparts, let alone in talks between the KGB and the Bulgarians, was Operation Infektion. Despite this fact, practically the entire internet continues to use this incorrect codename in discussing the KGBs AIDS disinformation campaign. It is a great brainwashing process which goes very slow and its divided in four basic stages. 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. The Surgisphere Scandal: What Went Wrong? Yet thats what happened earlier this year, when Illinois-based Surgisphere Corporation began a publishing spree that would trigger one of the largest scientific scandals of the COVID-19 pandemic to date. The KGB and Soviet Disinformation: An Insider's View is a 1983 non-fiction book by Lawrence Martin-Bittman (then known as Ladislav Bittman), a former intelligence officer specializing in disinformation for the Czech Intelligence Service and retired professor of disinformation at Boston University. The warning signs had been there all along. [2] He served within the Czechoslovak intelligence agency as its deputy chief of the disinformation division, the Department for Active Measures and Disinformation, from 1964 to 1966. the truth . on mRNA, Blood Clots and CVT. Elena Rusalkina demonstrates the terrorist-screening tool. a lie). The Stasi claimed to have played a role in photocopying and distributing the study in a brochure entitled, AIDS: USA home-made evil, NOT out of AFRICA at a summit meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement in Harare, Zimbabwe in August-September 1986. In the 1960's the KGB ran a series of psychological experiments. Bearded and confident, Smirnov in the video explains how subliminal sounds could alter a person's behavior. In this case most of them yes simply because the psychological shock when they will see in future what the beautiful Society of equality and social justice means in practice. Douglas Selvageis a Research Associate (wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) at the Institute for History of the Humboldt University in Berlin. Many leaders, journalists and intellectuals in Africa welcomed the Segals thesis of a US origin of HIV as an alternative to the hypothesis of many leading US and Western scientists at the time. All of the technology at the institute is based on the work of Rusalkina's late husband, Igor Smirnov, a controversial Russian scientist whose incredible tales of mind control attracted frequent press attention before his death several years ago. The scientific study to which the Stasi referred was clearly AIDS: Its Nature and Origin by the retired Soviet-East German biologist Jakob Segal and his wife, Lilli, a scientist and author in her own right. But before 1974 the ethics involved in using humans in research experiments was a little, let's say, loose. Within hours of the disaster, software engineers were rolling out applications to help locate people in need and distribute aid. More elaborate strategies, such as training people on the skills they will need to succeed in changing behavior, will likely be more effective in most contexts. Terrorists might also get hold of such weapons, he added. Meet the KGB Spies Who Invented Fake News. The film featured an interview with the Segals, who expounded upon their thesis; conversations with journalists and African scientists, who denounced the hypothesis of a natural origin of AIDS in Africa as racist; and US and Western critics of the ostensibly defensive US biological-weapons research program. To what extent did other Soviet-bloc intelligence agencies also participate? of today . They looked at 127 research articles representing 248 independent samples and over 27,000 individuals from experiments conducted between 1962 and 2014. Still, there is no data indicating that audiences will be worse off from receiving fear appeals in any condition.. At the time, a popular program on West German television, also viewed in East Germany, was Denver-Clan, the German name for the popular US television series Dynasty. 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 WIRED conversation illuminates how technology is changing every aspect of our livesfrom culture to business, science to design. 168 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". Ultimate Bulletin Board 5.46a, Powered by Infopop www.infopop.com 2000 HP 991 ac kartu, yazclar iin nerilen orjinal toner kartular arasndadr. In the 60s, the KGB did some fascinating psychological experiments. It has been estimated that the ensuing delay in the introduction of effective antiretroviral treatment for HIV/AIDS in South Africa contributed to up to 300,000 additional deaths from the disease. 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. The second-ranked search engine is getting a new chatbot interface that attempts to synthesize information from sites across the web. http://1boringoldman.com/index.php/2012/12/21/hide-and-go-seek/. They learned that if you bombard human subjects with fear messages nonstop, in two months or less, most of the subjects are completely brainwashed to believe the false information. "And naturally, you could have avoided all the casualties, and you could have put the terrorists on trial. [4] In some instances such covert operations led to blowback and unintended consequences from intelligence agency actions, which were harmful to the Soviet Union. Whatever the case may be, officers from the Stasis disinformation division, ostensibly convinced that the film contributed to their goals for Operation Denver, encouraged Bulgarian and apparently also Czechoslovak foreign intelligence to covertly support the sale and distribution of the films German and English versions in non-communist countries. 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