Originally Posted by The USIA Report to Congress

Until mid-1987, by which time the conciliatory themes of "new political thinking" had become ascendant in Soviet policy, Soviet disinformation under Gorbachev had proceeded in its usual confrontational mode, seemingly guided more by the policy of "uskorenie," or acceleration, than by that of glasnost. In fact, in late 1986 and early 1987, as the Soviets were making "glasnost" and "perestroika" key principles of their policy at home and abroad, they were simultaneously beginning or significantly accelerating a number of crude, anti-American disinformation campaigns. These included false claims that the United States had invented the AIDS virus in a military laboratory; that it had killed the 918 people who died in the mass suicide at Jonestown, Guyana in 1978; and that Americans were adopting Latin American children in order to butcher them and use their body parts in organ transplants, the so-called "baby parts" story. (For a detailed account of these campaigns, see the 1988 USIA report to Congress, Soviet Active Measures in the Era of Glasnost.) As a measure of the times, such outrageous claims were printed through mid-1987 in publications such as Moscow News, which was soon to gain a deserved reputation as one of the flagships of glasnost.

The U.S. government had, of course, made its displeasure about these disinformation charges made known to the Soviets both publicly and privately. In response, in August 1987, Soviet officials assured the U.S. government that Soviet media would stop spreading the AIDS disinformation claim. Despite some exceptions, AIDS disinformation charges diminished drastically not only in the Soviet press but also worldwide.