After the signing of the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) at Helsinki on 1 August 1975, the Soviet Union sought to compel the West to accept its vision for détente. This meant, on the one hand, the acceptance of the political and social status quo within the Soviet bloc and, on the other hand, the “completion” of the existing political détente with “military détente”—namely, East-West arms control agreements that preserved or augmented existing Warsaw Pact advantages. To this end, the KGB and its Soviet-bloc partners undertook two parallel campaigns of active measures, “Synonym” and “Mars.” Despite tactical successes, both campaigns failed to achieve their goals. The United States, supported by other Western governments, continued to pressure the Eastern-bloc governments on human rights violations, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) continued to modernize its forces in Europe, most importantly with the stationing of U.S. Euromissiles in 1983 in accordance with NATO's dual-track decision of December 1979.

This second part of a two-part article moves ahead in showing how the East German Ministry for State Security (Stasi) came to play a key role in the disinformation campaign launched by the Soviet State Security Committee (KGB) in 1983 regarding the origins of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). The KGB launched the campaign itself, but in the mid-1980s it sought to widen the effort by enlisting the cooperation of intelligence services in other Warsaw Pact countries, especially the Stasi. From the autumn of 1986 until November 1989, the Stasi played a central role in the disinformation campaign. Despite pressure from the U.S. government and a general inclination of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to curtail the campaign by the end of 1987, both the KGB and the USSR's official Novosti press agency continued until 1989 to spread false allegations that HIV was a U.S. biological weapon. Even after the KGB curtailed its disinformation in 1989, the Stasi continued to disseminate falsehoods, not least because it had successfully maintained plausible deniability regarding its role in the campaign. The Stasi worked behind the scenes to support the work of Soviet–East German scientists Jakob Segal and Lilli Segal and to facilitate dissemination of the Segals’ views in West Germany and Great Britain, especially through the leftwing media, and to purvey broader disinformation about HIV/AIDS by attacking U.S. biological and chemical weapons in general.

There has been much debate in recent years about the role of the East German Ministry for State Security (Stasi) in the disinformation campaign launched in the early 1980s by the Soviet State Security Committee (KGB) regarding the origin and nature of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). The KGB's operation, codenamed “Denver” by the Stasi (not “Infektion,” as many online sources now erroneously assert), claimed that AIDS was deliberately devised by U.S. biological warfare specialists for the U.S. government to spread in minority communities in the United States. Based on the available evidence, the Stasi's role in the AIDS disinformation campaign was limited in 1985–1986 to (1) keeping watch over Soviet-East German scientist Jakob Segal, who propagated a variant of the KGB's thesis; (2) helping to arrange for the publication and distribution of a brochure with Segal's thesis at the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Harare in 1986; and (3) facilitating Segal's interviews with certain journalists. Just as important for the ongoing formulation and spread of the KGB's AIDS disinformation was a cycle of misinformation and disinformation that arose between U.S.-based conspiracy theorists—especially Lyndon LaRouche and his followers—and authors and publications espousing Moscow's preferred theses regarding AIDS.

Eight experts on the history of East-Central Europe offer commentaries about the book Imposing, Maintaining, and Tearing Open the Iron Curtain: The Cold War and East-Central Europe, 1945–1990 , edited by Mark Kramer and Vít Smetana. The commentators discuss the main contributions of the book and highlight the important questions it raises as well as the issues requiring further research.