DEATH WATCH: The Global Response to AIDS in Africa

James Sherry, director of program development for the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS, or UNAIDS, finds it difficult to speak of the wasted lives without bitterness.

"I can't think of the coming of any event which was more heralded to less effect," he said. "It still hasn't changed. It hasn't changed. In terms of real redeployment of resources, it hasn't changed. The bottom line is, the people who are dying from AIDS don't matter in this world."

'Under Their Noses'

The 1990 CIA projection turned out to be optimistic. Less than 20 years after physicians first described its symptoms, HIV has infected 53 million people. So far, 19 million have died, roughly the population along the Amtrak route from New York to Washington. Especially in Africa, but also elsewhere in the developing world, basic measures of well-being are marching backward. AIDS, by itself, is reversing decades of slow improvement in child survival, adult longevity, educational attainment and economic growth.

When Brown and Hall first proposed to study the phenomenon in 1987, they could not obtain CIA approval for use of personnel and computer modeling resources. Internal critics declared global AIDS an unfit subject of intelligence, or said the impact on U.S. interests would be benign.

Speaking of one military colleague at the National Intelligence Council, Brown said, "His penetrating analysis was, 'Oh, it will be good, because Africa is overpopulated anyway.' Others were saying, 'It may be big, but what are you going to do about it?' " Still others, Brown recalled, discounted the likelihood of damage to allied militaries. If officers began dying of the disease, they said, "That boosts morale, because there's more room for advancement."

Another security official, recalling those debates, said critics reasoned that Africa's limitless pool of unemployed men left armies with plenty of reinforcements. "If you have one 18-year-old with a Kalashnikov [rifle] and he dies, you find another 18-year-old," he said. "The cold truth was that the impact on military stability was minimal."

But the chairman of the intelligence council, Fritz Ermarth, saw a winning argument in the AIDS pitch. "I said, 'This is one of those new-age issues, and nobody else is doing it,' " he recalled.

Ermarth's only hesitation, shared by William H. Webster, then the director of central intelligence, involved the "propaganda liabilities of associating this painful topic with the CIA." Soviet era disinformation charged the CIA with brewing the virus for germ warfare. Barrows remembers anxieties that "somebody would try to imply that we're only monitoring our own dastardly deeds."

In the end the CIA agreed to undertake the work and let the State Department publish unclassified portions as a white paper. In that form in 1992, it reached a wider readership with predictions of "life expectancy at birth reduced by 15 years or more" and infection rates of "10 to 30 percent of the sub-Saharan African population," both of which closely match today's reality.

By any account, little or no fresh response followed the report.

"You've got to have a critical mass of people that are primed to see a problem like this in strategic terms," Ermarth said. "Just to put the words under their noses . . . doesn't get their attention. It's kind of remote, it's distant, it's not obvious what you do about it anyway. And here you're talking 1991, and that critical mass didn't exist."