Wolf Szmuness & The U.S. AIDS Epidemic

February 23, 2006

by Brian Harring, Domestic Intelligence Editor

Note: The U.S. military and civil authorities have been quietly reviewing U.S. National Archives documents, open to the public, with an eye to reclassifying those which “reflect badly” on both the government and the military. Fortunately for historians, researchers, aided by willing Archive employees have been copying hundreds of thousands of pages of this material prior to its reclassification. Among many of the declassified/reclassified documents are lists of known Nazis employed by both the U.S. military (Army and Airforce) as well as the CIA, U.S. counter insurgency activities in Vietnam, the so-called ‘Operation Phoenix’ which contain detailed accounts of the murder and torture of tens of thousands of suspected Vietnamese, approved and instigated by both the highest U.S. military commands and diligently executed by some of their elite Rangers, Green Berets and Special Forces in cooperation with CIA agents, the murder of Dominican Republic President Trujillo by US operatives, the destabilization of the left-wing government of Chile and the murder of its president, Allende, by U.S. special forces and many, many more subjects. Mr. Harring is drawing on these documents for a series of articles on the government within the government. The first of these studies is concerned with the sudden eruption of AIDS in the United States, Ed.

First of all, what constituted HIV and AIDS?

Human immunodeficiency virus, commonly known by the initialism HIV, formally known as HTLV-III and lymphadenopathy-associated virus, is a retrovirus that primarily infects vital components of the human immune system such as CD4+ T cells, macrophages and dendritic cells. It also directly and indirectly destroys CD4+ T cells. As CD4+ T cells are required for the proper functioning of the immune system, when enough CD4+ T cells have been destroyed by HIV, the immune system functions poorly, leading to the syndrome known as AIDS. HIV also directly attacks organs, such as the kidneys, the heart and the brain leading to acute renal failure, cardiomyopathy, dementia and encephalopathy. Many of the problems faced by people infected with HIV result from failure of the immune system to protect from opportunistic infections and cancers

HIV is transmitted through direct contact of a mucous membrane with a bodily fluid containing HIV, such as blood, semen, vaginal fluid, preseminal fluid or breast milk. This transmission can come in the form of: penetrative (anal or vaginal) sex; oral sex; blood transfusion; contaminated needles; exchange between mother and infant during pregnancy, childbirth, or breastfeeding; or other exposure to one of the above bodily fluids. There is no known cure.

AIDS is now a pandemic. At the end of 2004, UNAIDS estimated that nearly 40 million people were currently living with HIV  The World Health Organization estimated that the AIDS epidemic had claimed more than 3 million people and that 5 million people had acquired HIV in the same year. Currently it is estimated that 28 million people have died and that it is set to infect 90 million people in Africa, resulting in a minimum estimate of 18 million orphans in Africa alone

HIV is now a global epidemic. UNAIDS and the World Health Organization (WHO) estimate that AIDS has killed more than 25 million people since it was first recognized on December 1, 1981, making it one of the most destructive pandemics in recorded history. In 2005 alone, AIDS claimed between an estimated 2.8 and 3.6 million, of which more than 570,000 were children. In countries where there is access to antiretroviral treatment, both mortality and morbidity of HIV infection have been reduced. However, side-effects of these antiretrovirals have also caused problems such as lipodystrophy, dyslipidaemia, insulin resistance and an increase in cardiovascular risks. The difficulty of consistently taking the medicines has also contributed to the rise of viral escape and resistance to the medicines

Since neither HIVor AIDS has a family tree; that it obviously was developed in a laboratory instead of evolving over a period of time, there have been growing beliefs that these diseases were man-made. Since they would have no commercial value, the only reason for their development would be for political or military purposes. One school of thought claims that this was developed as a military weapon by the U.S. military (both Army and Navy.) Other reports claim that an operation known as the Special Virus Cancer Program run by Litton Bionetics developed AIDS. This was apparently accomplished under a US government contract tasked with creating a lethal biological warfare entity that was refractory to the human immune system. a firm called Litton Bionetics, a subsidiary of the mega-military contractor Litton Industries, whose President, Roy Ash, was being considered as an alternate to Henry Kissinger for the National Security Advisor post. Instead, Roy Ash became Richard Nixon's chairman of the Presidents Advisory Council on Executive Organizations, and "Assistant to the President of the United States." And Litton Industries was given over $5 billion in military contracts during the first term of the Nixon administration, $10 million of which went towards the development of AIDS-like viruses. A mere drop in the bucket. Named after inventor Charles Litton Sr., Litton Industries was a large defense contractor in the United States, bought by the Northrop Grumman Corporation in 2001

Litton started in 1953 as an electronics company building navigation, communications and electronic warfare equipment. They diversified and became a much bigger business, with major shipyards, etc, and even manufacturing microwave ovens

In the early 1990s, Litton Industries split into separate military and commercial companies. The $2 billion commercial business, which included Litton's oilfield services, business and automated assembly line operations, was named Western Atlas Inc.

The HIV/AIDS viruses were in all probability  first engineered for defensive bio-warfare purposes, and then spread through contamination of vaccines: hepatitis B in New York City, and the smallpox vaccine in Africa. The evidence is based on the nature of AIDS, as well as on the circumstances surrounding early reported cases. AIDS originated with the hepatitis B vaccine trials in New York City in the late 1970s. For a century homosexuals had been erroneously classified as psychologically deranged. Under pressure from gay activists, the American Psychiatric Association finally took homosexuals off their list of mentally ill people in the early 1970s. However, the World Health Organization (WHO) still classifies homosexuality as a mental illness.

Soon after their mental status was clarified, American gays faced another serious health problem. The physical health of homosexual men now came to the attention of the medical authorities. According to public health statistics provided by government epidemiologists, the gay community was infested with venereal disease. The most shocking rates of infection were for hepatitis B.

When hepatitis B was also proven to be a sexually transmitted disease, it was discovered that half the gay population was infected with hepatitis B virus. The epidemiologists determined that homosexual men were a potential public health menace not only to themselves, but to the larger public as well. Developed at the Merck Institute for Therapeutic Research at West Point, Pennsylvania, the first crude experimental vaccine was tested in chimpanzees, the only animal susceptible to the human hepatitis B virus. Later, the vaccine was tried on a small group of retarded children.

When the experimental vaccine was ready to be more widely tested in humans, several "high risk" groups were considered. These included male homosexuals, drug addicts, mentally deficient adults, Chinese-Americans, indigenous Alaskans, and patients and medical staff of kidney dialysis centers. After much debate, the epidemiologists decided that young promiscuous gay men would be the best group to test the efficiency of the vaccine.

Wolf Szmuness, a Polish physician trained in the Soviet Union, was placed in charge of the hepatitis B vaccine trial to be conducted at the New York City Blood Center..

Szmuness, a Jew born in Poland in 1919, was a young medical student in eastern Poland when the Nazis invaded the country in the summer of 1939. When Poland was partitioned by Germany and Russia, Szmuness was sent to Siberia as a political prisoner. His entire family in western Poland vanished during the German occupation . His years in exile in Siberia were "a long dark period that he was most reluctant to talk about."

During confinement he was repeatedly interrogated and beaten by the Russian KGB for refusing to cooperate in spy activities. When he could not be broken, they warned him: "Say nothing of this to anyone, but remember. We will reach you anywhere in the world. No matter where you go, no matter where you try to hide, you will never be out of our grasp."

After release from detention in 1946 he was allowed to finish his medical education in Tomsk in central Russia. While a student, he married a Russian woman. He specialized in epidemiology, and when his wife contracted a nearly fatal case of hepatitis, Szmuness decided to dedicate his life to the study of this liver disease.

Szmuness was driven out of Poland in a 1968 Communist purge of the few remaining Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. Polish anti-Semitism cost Szmuness his job, resulting in his applying for a visa which eventually enabled him to get out of Poland legally. From Rome the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society arranged for the family to come to the U.S.

Szmuness arrived in Manhattan with $15 in his pocket. Through the intervention of Walsh McDermott, Professor of Public Health at New York Hospital, Szmuness was fortunate enough to secure a position as a lab technician at the New York City Blood Center. Within a few years he was given his own lab, and a separate department of epidemiology at the Center was created for him. In record time he was appointed Professor at the Columbia School of Public Health.

By the mid-1970s he was a world authority on hepatitis and transfusion medicine. In another startling occurrence, Szmuness was invited back to Moscow in 1975 to give a scientific presentation. As a defector he was terrified to set foot in the Soviet Union, and memories of KGB torture and interrogation still plagued him. However, his colleagues assured him he would have the full protection of the U.S. State Department. His return to Russia was a scientific triumph.

By the late 1970s he had been awarded millions of dollars in grant money and was phenomenally successful in his hepatitis work. Now he was fully prepared to undertake the most important mission of his life: the hepatitis B vaccine experiment.

First, Szmuness became acquainted with the gay community, and added homosexual physicians and activists to his staff. He was taken into the gay ghetto where he viewed the baths and the bars and the discos. Promiscuous homosexuals were perfect guinea pigs. They would prove, beyond doubt, that Szmuness could wipe hepatitis B off the face of the earth.

The hepatitis experiment was a costly one, and Szmuness didn't want any uncooperative or hard-to-find gays messing up his experiment. There was too much money at stake. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, were all involved in the study, as well as big pharmaceutical companies, such as Merck, Sharp & Dohme Inc., and Abbott Laboratories.

The first group of gay men was inoculated in November 1978 at the New York City Blood Center. The experiment continued until October 1979. Over one thousand men from Manhattan were injected with Szmuness' vaccine.

In January 1979, a few months after Wolf Szmuness began his experiment, purple skin lesions began to appear on the bodies of young white gay men in the Village. The doctors were not sure exactly what was wrong with these men. During the next thirty months, Manhattan physicians encountered dozens of cases of a new disease characterized by immunodeficiency, Kaposi's sarcoma, and a rapidly fatal lung disease, known as Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. All the men were young and gay and promiscuous. Almost all were white. All died horribly.

Within a few years, AIDS would become the leading cause of death of young men and young women living in New York City. The Big Apple would be designated the epicenter of the new plague with the highest number of AIDS cases in the country.

Wolf Szmuness was thrilled with the tremendous success of his hepatitis experiment. In March 1980 the CDC supervised additional gay experiments in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, St. Louis and Chicago. In the fall of 1980 the first West Coast case of AIDS appeared in a young man from San Francisco.

Six months later, in June 1981, the AIDS epidemic became "official." The epidemiologists and health experts could not understand why large numbers of young, white, previously healthy homosexual men were dying mysteriously in Manhattan, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

By the beginning of the 1980s, Szmuness was awarded millions of dollars for his research, and his hugely successful hepatitis vaccine was hailed as having tremendous global implications. He collaborated with the most powerful medical institutions in the nation: the NIH, the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the FDA, the WHO, and the Cornell, Yale and Harvard Schools of Public Health and the Russian Academy of Medical Science. Other global connections included the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyons, France, and close associations with third world African countries. Even the services of the Sengalese Army were employed to secure blood specimens in one of Szmuness' many African experiments.

In June 1982 Wolf  Szmuness  died suddenly of lung cancer

Those who paid tribute to Szmuness include the top government scientists in AIDS and cancer, the two discoverers of the AIDS virus, the most well-known researchers in animal experimentation, the heads of the most prestigious biomedical establishments in the nation, and the chief executives of drug companies tied to genetic engineering, vaccine production, and biological warfare research

HIV/AIDS was obviously the culmination of biowarfare research conducted by the U.S. Government (and later, by the Soviet government) throughout the 20th century. AIDS was developed and proliferated for the primary purpose of  affecting the immune system of enemy military forces, leaving them prey to influenza or other induced diseases with the intent to negate their ability to fight against American forces. Unfortunately, AIDS ended up by wiping out blacks, gays, and other social groups considered to be "excess population." that an effective cure for AIDS has already been developed and patented (United States Patent 5,676,977) by a company called Antelman Technologies Ltd., but is being withheld.

HIV is a genetically modified organism developed by US Government scientists; that it was introduced into the population through hepatitis B experiments performed on gay and bisexual men between 1978-1981 in Manhattan, Los Angeles, San Francisco, St. Louis, Denver, and Chicago (these experiments were directed by Dr. Wolf Szmuness); and that there is an ongoing government and media cover-up regarding the origin of the AIDS epidemic. Matilde Krim, a cancer virologist, AIDS expert, and the co-chairperson of the American Foundation for AIDS Research, has also suggested that Dr. Wolf Szmuness' hepatitis B vaccination experiments of the late 70's caused the AIDS epidemic

Dr. Robert Gallo, famous for his laim to have discovred  HIV, lent credence to this theory when he said, "the link between the World Health Organization [vaccination] program and the [AIDS] epidemic in Africa is an interesting and important hypothesis. I cannot say that it actually happened, but I have been saying for some years that the use of live vaccines such as that used for smallpox can activate a dormant infection such as HIV".

Dr. Leonard G. Horowitz, author of Emerging Viruses: AIDS & Ebola. Nature, Accident or Intentional? and Death in the Air: Globalism, Terrorism and Toxic Warfare, has advanced the theory that the AIDS virus was engineered by such US Government defense contractors as Litton Bionetics for the purposes of bio-warfare and "population control." Dr. Horowitz believes that Jews, blacks, and hispanics are prime targets in these attempts at "population control." He cites the historical preoccupation with eugenics on the part of the American medical establishment as evidence of a greater conspiracy to commit genocide.

Jakob Segal, a biology professor at Humboldt University in the former East Germany, believes that HIV was engineered at a US military laboratory in Fort Detrick, Maryland 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. It was through these prisoners that the virus was spread to the population at large, starting with the gay community.

On the other hand, the US Government has an established history of performing atrocious experiments on its own citizens without their knowledge or consent. Between 1932 and 1972, the United States Public Health Service conducted a covert experiment called the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male. In this experiment, the Public Health Service deliberately deprived black, syphilis-infected residents of Tuskegee, Alabama of treatment in order to see what would happen to them. Between 1953 and 1972, the CIA conducted secret experiments on unwitting human subjects under the umbrella of project MK-ULTRA. The full nature and scope of these experiments may never be known, since most of the records on MK ULTRAwere deliberately destroyed by the CIA in 1972. What is known, however, is that some of these experiments involved: electro-shock treatment, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, administration of psychoactive drugs, psychosurgery, the effects of radiation, the testing of chemical and biological weapons on American city streets, "brainwashing" and "mind control", interrogation and torture techniques. The US Army has admitted to conducting similar experiments.

One of the least publicized of these experiments is known as  Legionnaires Disease. This is the name given to an outbreak of serious pulmonary infections among people attending a convention of the American Legion in Philadelphia during the US Bicentennial celebration in July 1976 prompted the description of Legionnaires disease and its causative organism, Legionella pneumophila.

Members of the American Legion contracted this disease which was later officially alleged to have come from the “air conditions system” at the Bellvue-Stratton Hotel in Philadelphia. It is noted that no other hotel guests nor, more important, no member of the hotel staff contracted this disease

Since it is impossible for this disease to have originated in a hotel cooling system, highly classified reports from the CDC that state that the disease was man-made and initiated at the convention as an experiment make complete sense. The persistence of the CDC in labeling subsequent outbreaks of this disease as Legionnaires Disease are an obvious attempt to deflect rumors that it originated in a military laboratory.

Conclusions: HIV  was generated in a laboratory and has no traceable ancestry such as smallpox, measles or other diseases. It was created to weaken an enemy’s immune system and make him vulnerable to diseases of opportunity. HIV is a retrovirus and experiments by the US Naval Medical service office in Haiti resulted in the infection of many young Haitian males. They, in turn, spread the disease to American homosexuals who came to Haiti for sexual contact with willing young men. When U.S. governmental agencies realized the damage HIV and AIDS were capable of creating, the labs involved were closed and the notes and papers of participating medical personnel destroyed. It should also be noted that the largest group of victims were homosexuals or blacks and that as these groups were detested  by the conservative elements in the American government, one can easily understand why this disease was viewed by some as advantageous. Neither HIV nor Legionnaires Disease have any traceable history and competent biologists and virologists agree that both deadly diseases must have been created in a laboratory and not in nature.

As a footnote, Generalarzt Walter Schreiber, the foremost German specialist in   communicable diseases and a senior German Wehrmacht medical officer, was ordered by his military superiors to infect the over 3 million Soviet prisoners of war with the bubonic plague to thin their numbers and the prohibitive costs of housing and feeding them. Schreiber was captured in Berlin in 1945 and in 1948 escaped to the West. When the U.S. military discovered his previous employment, they at once hired him to work on further plagues (aimed then as before against Soviet Russia) and Schreiber was assigned to the Air Force Medical school at San Antonio in Texas. Fortunately for the Russians, Schreiber’s presence was leaked to the media and the resulting uproar ended his career in America and forced his return to West Germany. All of this unfortunate business is contained in his personal file which the author obtained from NARA.