When Stasi and KGB involvement in Operation Denver was at its height in the late 1980s, Vladimir Putin, now Russia’s president, was a KGB spy in Dresden.
It is unknown if he was involved in the campaign, but given that KGB spies had to spend a quarter of their time concocting and disseminating disinformation, according to ex-spies, it seems reasonable to conclude that he would have known of its existence.
Mr Putin’s background in espionage certainly explains the importance of disinformation as a Russian policy strategy, some believe.
“This is a repeat of the 1980s,” says a western diplomat who covers the West African region. “It is a cynical, morally bankrupt campaign that shows no regard for the collateral damage that will be inflicted in terms of human lives — and Putin must know this and approve of it.”
At the heart of the new operation, according to US officials, is African Initiative, whose senior Russian staffers were either employed by the FSB, the KGB’s main successor, or the Wagner mercenary group, which has been active in several countries on the continent.
Before Wagner’s founder Prigozhin moved into the mercenary business he was a key figure in Russian state disinformation, running the Internet Research Agency, a troll farm in St Petersburg that sought to interfere in elections in the United States and elsewhere.
Wagner maintained a disinformation arm in Africa until Prigozhin’s death last year when a bomb exploded on his plane, killing all on board.
African Initiative is headed by Artem Kureyev, identified in Estonian court documents as an officer in the FSB, and has been accused of running Russian influence operations in Europe for years.
The group’s founder and chief financier is Viktor Lukavenko, a former Wagner operative who served five years in prison for beating to death a Swiss national of Sri Lankan extraction during an ultranationalist rally in Moscow in 2009.
While Russian nationals head the disinformation unit, the most important element of the spin cycle are African activists, journalists and bloggers with a large following on social media.
Many reliably churn out pro-Russian and anti-Western rhetoric as well health-related disinformation. Diplomats suspect that at least some are in the pay of the Kremlin, though no evidence has so far been produced.
These African influencers can be relied on to amplify disinformation, which often emanates initially from a senior Russian defence ministry official, Lt Gen Igor Kirillov, who heads the country’s anti-biological weapons unit.
Gen Kirillov has claimed that the United States moved secret bioweapons laboratories from Ukraine to Nigeria after Russia’s invasion and is engaged in germ warfare development in Kenya, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone and Uganda.
He also alleges that the mpox epidemic which began last year may also have been deliberately manufactured in US biolabs in Africa.
Despite the fact that none of these claims has any basis, they have been readily amplified on social media, both on Kremlin-backed channels on the Telegram app and by pro-Russian African influencers.
They also repeatedly claim that the United States is creating diseases to kill Africans in order to eliminate migration and keep the continent poor.
Likewise, they further allege that vaccines are being manufactured not to prevent disease but to render African women infertile, again as part of a campaign to depopulate the continent.
Such disinformation could not come at a worse time.
Medical health experts describe the malaria vaccines as a milestone in global health. Yet, in part because Russia has targeted almost every single Western-backed malaria project on the continent, many Africans are likely to shy away from the vaccines that could save their children’s lives.
Egountchi Behanzin, the Togolese activist with 600,000 social media followers, has been at the forefront of the campaign. Recently, he has set his sights on Target Malaria, a research consortium working in Burkina Faso that is releasing genetically altered mosquitoes which cannot transmit malaria in an effort to disrupt the breeding of those that do.
According to Mr Behanzin, the mosquitos were designed not to protect people from malaria but to infect them with it.