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Newly reported documents describe an interagency arrangement in which the CIA worked with Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases on forensic microbiology and biodefense research, adding new detail to congressional scrutiny of ties between U.S. intelligence agencies and civilian public-health research.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
Newly surfaced documents are providing a closer look at an early collaboration between the CIA and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases during Anthony Fauci’s tenure, revealing an arrangement intended to combine civilian scientific research with intelligence-community work on biological threats.
An undated interagency agreement involving the CIA and NIAID describes cooperation on “forensic microbiology,” with the CIA’s Biological Technology Center, or BTC, initiating the effort to strengthen intelligence capabilities involving potential bioterrorism agents.
The documents, reported by the Daily Caller News Foundation, indicate that CIA funding would be used alongside existing civilian research so work already underway in the scientific community could also support intelligence objectives.
Unclassified basic research involving viruses “will be used to augment and complement” CIA research and development, according to the agreement.
The records indicate that the CIA already possessed “robust” capabilities for detecting and identifying viruses but sought a more sophisticated ability to conduct what the documents called “forensic comparative analyses.”
The agreement does not define that phrase in detail, but it describes research examining complete viruses rather than analyzing individual genes separately.
The CIA would also assist NIAID in acquiring biological materials needed for the research, according to the agreement.
Although the resulting work was to be considered sensitive rather than formally classified, the documents indicate that CIA approval would be required before data generated through the collaboration could be shared.
The records provide additional context for the transformation of NIAID into a major center for biodefense research during the years following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and subsequent anthrax attacks.
Fauci worked with the administration of President George W. Bush as the federal government dramatically expanded biological-defense research during that period, according to previous public reporting on the shift.
Rutgers University chemistry professor Richard Ebright, a longtime critic of NIAID’s involvement in high-risk biological research, said the newly reported documents show an early stage in that transformation.
“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,” Ebright said after reviewing documents provided by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“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.”
Ebright’s characterization represents his assessment of the records and does not itself establish that NIAID violated the Biological Weapons Convention.
Neither Fauci nor the CIA responded to requests for comment.
The documents identify the CIA’s Biological Technology Center as operating under an organization called Advanced Technologies and Programs, or ATP.
Two additional partners are named in the agreement: the Intelligence Technology Innovation Center, or ITIC, and the Institute for Genomic Research, known as TIGR.
TIGR was a private nonprofit research institute located near NIH headquarters in Rockville, Maryland. It later became part of what is now the J. Craig Venter Institute.
The agreement suggests TIGR may already have maintained its own relationship with the intelligence community, although the identity of one collaborator was redacted from the document.
“TIGR has also sought to foster a specific capability in forensic microbiology by building a partnership with REDACTED,” the agreement states.
“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.
The newly disclosed agreement also indicates that NIAID was not necessarily the CIA’s only federal partner in the effort.
The CIA was “leveraging partnerships across government agencies wherever possible to support and further develop robust forensic microbiology capability,” according to the documents.
Those details have renewed attention on a broader question already being examined by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky.: how closely civilian public-health agencies and U.S. intelligence organizations worked together on biological research during the expansion of federal biodefense programs in the early 2000s.
Paul questioned Fauci during a high-profile July 29 hearing about whether CIA money had ever been transferred to NIH or whether NIH had conducted research in cooperation with intelligence agencies.
His investigation has also included testimony from a former CIA official who argued that biological work undertaken for intelligence purposes contributed to incentives for potentially dangerous research at laboratories in the United States and overseas.
The concerns reflected in that testimony are consistent with a broader intelligence strategy described in a November 2003 CIA memorandum titled “The Darker Bioweapons Future”.
The memo argued that biological weapons posed detection problems fundamentally different from nuclear weapons.
Producing nuclear weapons generally requires industrial-scale processes such as enrichment that can generate detectable signatures. Biological weapons, by contrast, can be harder for intelligence services to identify, particularly as biotechnology becomes cheaper and more advanced.
That concern was growing at a time of rapid progress in genetic research. In April 2003, scientists associated with the NIH had completed the landmark project of mapping the human genome.
According to the CIA memo, a group associated with the National Academy of Sciences told intelligence officials that effectively identifying biological weapons programs would require deeper access to scientists and laboratories around the world.
The result, the memo said, should be “a much closer — and perhaps qualitatively different — working relationship between the intelligence and biological sciences communities.”
One participant proposed creating a “living sensor web” of scientists who could gather information through their contacts with foreign researchers at academic laboratories, conferences and other scientific settings.
The CIA document also said the academic community had moved beyond some of the distrust toward national-security agencies that developed during the Vietnam era and “would be more open to collaboration.”
That convergence between intelligence and biological science occurred amid a major restructuring of U.S. biodefense policy.
The United States invaded Iraq in March 2003 after intelligence assessments incorrectly concluded that Saddam Hussein’s government possessed weapons of mass destruction, including biological and nuclear capabilities.
Two months earlier, during his January 2003 State of the Union address, Bush called on Congress to dramatically increase spending on defenses against bioterrorism and dangerous infectious diseases.
Much of that expanded biodefense funding was subsequently concentrated within Fauci’s NIAID.
Paul has also released Fauci’s diary entries from the period, providing additional documentation of his involvement in the federal government’s rapidly expanding biodefense strategy.
Neither NIH nor the National Academy responded to requests for comment.
More recent testimony provided to Paul’s committee has added another layer to the historical record.
Former CIA Senior Operations Officer Jim Erdman, who later served on a declassification task force under former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, described the relationship between intelligence agencies and civilian health research in written testimony submitted to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
“The lines between public health and biodefense have been blurred beyond recognition ever since,” Erdman wrote.
According to Erdman, scientists have conducted laboratory research involving “sensitive WMD topics” under intelligence-community contracts while some of the resulting work has also contributed to publicly available scientific research funded by civilian agencies such as NIH.
Scientists also advised U.S. intelligence through the Biological Sciences Expert Group, or BSEG, he said.
Among those advisers was coronavirus researcher Ralph Baric, known for research involving the engineering and study of coronaviruses and for collaboration with scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Baric has recently retired from the University of North Carolina and could not be reached for comment.
Erdman described an extensive network of research relationships involving federal health, intelligence, foreign-assistance and defense programs.
“They received funding from NIAID and other agencies for vaccine research, USAID’s PREDICT project, the [Pentagon’s] cooperative threat reduction program, and even worked with Chinese scientists on coronavirus and other pathogen studies pursuing vaccines,” Erdman 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.”
The newly reported CIA-NIAID agreement does not by itself establish that civilian public-health research was secretly converted into an offensive biological-weapons program, nor does it establish unlawful activity by Fauci or NIAID.
It does, however, document direct cooperation between Fauci’s institute and the CIA on sensitive biological research intended to serve both scientific and intelligence purposes.
Combined with the 2003 CIA strategy memo, congressional investigations and Erdman’s testimony, the records provide a more detailed picture of how the boundaries separating public-health science, biodefense and intelligence work became increasingly interconnected after 9/11.
What began as an effort to improve America’s ability to detect and understand biological threats ultimately produced a research structure in which civilian laboratories, intelligence agencies and defense programs could pursue overlapping objectives — a relationship that is now receiving renewed congressional scrutiny more than two decades later.
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