A bizarre theory about the origins of AIDS has been getting play in the Soviet press lately: that the illness is the result of U.S. germ-warfare experiments gone wild. AIDS experts scoff at the farfetched notion, and Washington has accused the Soviets of waging a "disinformation campaign." U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Arthur Hartman publicly protested a Pravda cartoon depicting a U.S. scientist and an officer exchanging a vial of AIDS viruses.
In September the Soviet weekly New Times reported that Jacob Segal, a retired East Berlin biologist who is unknown to Western AIDS experts, claimed that the virus originated in biological-warfare...