Anthony Fauci’s division at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) provided cover for sensitive CIA research on bioterrorism threats, according to documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
An undated interagency agreement between the CIA and Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) appears to shed light on the origins of the institute’s involvement in biodefense. The CIA’s Biological Technology Center (BTC) initiated the collaboration on “forensic microbiology” on bioterrorism bugs for the intelligence community (IC).
CIA funds would be used to leverage pre-existing civilian research efforts in a way that would benefit both CIA and NIH, the documents state. Unclassified basic research on viruses “will be used to augment and complement” CIA research and development, the document says.
The CIA had “robust” capabilities to detect and identify viruses but wanted to go further, the documents indicate. The project sought to do “forensic comparative analyses,” but the documents do not define this term. The work would study complete viruses rather than examining one gene at a time.
The CIA would help NIAID obtain the germs, the contract shows. Work produced under the collaboration would be considered sensitive, not classified, but the CIA must give permission before data were shared.
Fauci collaborated with President George W. Bush to remake the NIAID into a biodefense research hub in the shadow of the 9/11 anthrax attacks, according to public reporting.
“Vice President Cheney assigned Fauci to head US biodefense research programs in 2002, including bioweapons-agents-development and bioweapons-agents-characterization research programs that approached, and arguably crossed, red lines set by the Biological Weapons Convention,” said Rutgers Chemistry Professor Richard Ebright, a longtime critic of NIAID’s pivot to this work, after reviewing documents shared by DCNF. “The documents show early steps in the process of transferring funding for, and direction of, CIA and DoD biodefense projects to Fauci’s agency, NIAID.”
Fauci and the CIA did not respond to a request for comment.
The document states that the BTC falls under CIA’s Advanced Technologies and Programs (ATP). Two other partners named in the documents are the Intelligence Technology Innovation Center (ITIC) and the private nonprofit Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), located just outside of NIH headquarters in Rockville, Maryland, now called the J. Craig Venter Institute.
The TIGR may have already had a partnership with the intelligence community, the documents indicate, as one of its collaborators is redacted.
“TIGR has also sought to foster a specific capability in forensic microbiology by building a partnership with REDACTED,” the document continues. “The collaborative efforts between TIGR and REDACTED are producing a research program in Integrated Bio-threat Forensics-Systems Biology. … To date no such collaborative efforts exist anywhere at the REDACTED level with this specific goal.”
The J. Craig Venter Institute did not respond to a request for comment.
NIAID may not have been the only federal agency the CIA worked with on the project.
The CIA is “leveraging partnerships across government agencies wherever possible to support and further develop robust forensic microbiology capability,” the documents state.
The Darker Bioweapons Future
Sen. Rand Paul’s investigation into Fauci has included other evidence of a relationship between civilian biodefense and American spy agencies.
The Kentucky Republican pressed Fauci on whether the CIA ever transferred funds to the NIH or conducted research with any intelligence agency in a high-profile hearing on July 29.
And a CIA whistleblower told Paul’s committee in written testimony that biology work undertaken on behalf of U.S. intelligence “incentivized dangerous research at U.S. labs and abroad.”
A November 2003 CIA memo titled “The Darker Bioweapons Future” highlighted by Paul’s team describes the rationale for biologists working hand-in-glove with spies.
Making nuclear weapons requires resource-intensive enrichment that rival nations may detect, the CIA said in the memo. But detecting biological weapons is much harder, especially with rapid advances in biotechnology. (Earlier that year, in April 2003, the NIH had finished mapping the entire human genome.) The memo revealed that a group from the National Academy of Sciences told the CIAthat in order to detect biological weapons, intelligence agencies needed more assets in biology labs around the world.
Sniffing out biological weapons will require “a much closer — and perhaps qualitatively different — working relationship between the intelligence and biological sciences communities,” the memo reads.
One member of the National Academy suggested that scientists form a “living sensor web” that would collect intelligence from foreign colleagues at conferences and university labs.
The memo notes that academics had gotten over their Vietnam-era skepticism of the national security establishment and “would be more open to collaboration.”
It’s long been understood that concerns about bioweapons in the early 2000s prompted an overhaul of biodefense policy at the NIH.
The U.S. invaded Iraq in March 2003, citing false intelligence that the country harbored nuclear and biological weapons of mass destruction. In his January 2003 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush asked Congress to surge funding to defense against biological weapons. That surge would be concentrated under Fauci’s department at the NIH. Paul also released Fauci’s diary entries from this heady period.
NIH and National Academy did not respond to requests for comment.
‘Blurred Beyond Recognition’
A CIA whistleblower recently filled in more details about the NIH-intel connection.
Former CIA Senior Operations Officer Jim Erdman, a former member of a declassification task force under former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, described the NIH-intel connection that developed in the early 2000s in written testimony to Paul’s committee.
“The lines between public health and biodefense have been blurred beyond recognition ever since,” Erdman wrote.
Some scientists conduct lab research on “sensitive WMD topics” under contracts for the intelligence community, he said. Sometimes the research contributes to open-source papers funded through civilian health agencies like the NIH.
In addition, biologists advised the IC through a group called the Biological Sciences Expert Group (BSEG).
These advisers included coronavirologist Ralph Baric, who collaborated on coronavirus engineering experiments with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Baric recently retired from the University of North Carolina, and could not be reached for comment.
“They received funding from NIAID and other agencies for vaccine research, USAID’s PREDICT project, the cooperative threat reduction program, and even worked with Chinese scientists on coronavirus and other pathogen studies pursuing vaccines,” he wrote. “There was no oversight monitoring how this web of relationships influenced research, policy, and public health in any holistic way for over 20 years.”
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