Eventually, East German biophysicist Jakob Segal fell for the hoax, and began publishing his own in-depth articles about how the American government had totally engineered AIDS. Segal claimed that the CIA paid him a visit and threatened him to keep his mouth shut. This seems unlikely, considering how nothing he was writing was true, so either he made the meeting up out of whole cloth or the "CIA agents" were KGB agents in disguise working a kind of reverse psychology. In any case, it worked: Segal's impressive credentials gave the theory the legitimacy it needed, and the conspiracy theory finally blew up.
However, when AIDS inevitably spread to Russia, Soviet scientists were forced to consult with American researchers on how to fight and contain the disease. The whole "AIDS was engineered by America" thing made cooperation a little awkward, so the Russian media took a 180-degree turn on the issue and began loudly discrediting the US-AIDS connection they had spent so much time and energy creating. Unfortunately, like any good rumor, the story was well out of the KGB's hands by this point, and the idea persists to this day. (Note: You cannot kill a good conspiracy theory.)