Newly obtained documents are providing a much clearer picture of the long-running relationship between Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the CIA.
We knew that Fauci was having “off-the-books” meetings with the CIA at the time the Wuhan laboratory controversy was blowing up.
But this takes his relationship with the clandestine intelligence agency to the next level.
According to documents posted at the Daily Caller News Foundation, Fauci’s NIAID was used to provide “cover” to CIA operations.
As stated in the interagency agreement, the CIA’s Biological Technology Center initiated a collaboration with NIAID focused on “forensic microbiology” involving potential bioterrorism agents.
The partnership called for CIA funding to leverage existing civilian research programs, with unclassified virus research conducted through NIAID used to “augment and complement” CIA research and development.
That is a big deal. Congressional investigators have already spent years probing Fauci’s relationship with the intelligence community, including reports that he visited CIA headquarters without his entry being formally recorded and participated in discussions surrounding the agency’s review of COVID-19’s origins.
But this newly disclosed material goes further by showing what the institutional relationship actually looked like.
The documents indicate that the CIA wanted more advanced capabilities to identify and compare biological threats. NIAID research would help fill that gap.
Fauci’s institute was not simply funding vaccine development or public-health research in isolation. It was participating in a biodefense ecosystem that directly supported U.S. intelligence operations.
Rutgers University chemistry professor Richard Ebright said the documents show that Fauci’s agency may have crossed “red lines” on biological weapons research.
“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 told 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.”
The partnership was part of a larger post-9/11 transformation of the federal biodefense apparatus. After the anthrax attacks and growing fears over biological warfare, the Bush administration poured new funding into biodefense.
NIAID, under Fauci’s leadership, became one of the central civilian agencies tasked with expanding research on dangerous pathogens.
The CIA, meanwhile, was confronting a different problem: biological weapons were becoming much harder to detect.
A 2003 CIA memo titled “The Darker Bioweapons Future” warned that advances in biotechnology could make biological weapons far more difficult to identify than nuclear weapons, which typically require large industrial infrastructure.
The memo argued that intelligence agencies needed a much deeper relationship with the biological-sciences community.
It called for “a much closer — and perhaps qualitatively different — working relationship between the intelligence and biological sciences communities.”
One proposal described scientists effectively serving as a “living sensor web,” collecting information from foreign researchers, universities and conferences.
That overlap is now receiving renewed scrutiny because of COVID-19.
Former CIA Senior Operations Officer James Erdman III recently testified that the relationship between public health and national security became increasingly difficult to distinguish after the early 2000s.
“The lines between public health and biodefense have been blurred beyond recognition ever since,” Erdman wrote in testimony submitted to Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s (R) committee.
Erdman warned that the overlapping relationships between NIAID, the intelligence community, the Pentagon, USAID and foreign researchers operated for years without comprehensive oversight.
“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.”
That warning takes on additional importance given congressional allegations surrounding Fauci’s involvement with the CIA during the COVID-19 origins investigation.
Former House coronavirus subcommittee chairman Brad Wenstrup previously said investigators received information suggesting Fauci had been escorted into CIA headquarters without a record of entry and participated in discussions related to the agency’s COVID origins review.
“The information provided suggests that Dr. Fauci was escorted into Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Headquarters—without a record of entry—and participated in the analysis to ‘influence’ the Agency’s review,” Wenstrup wrote at the time.
But the new documents help establish that Fauci’s relationship with the CIA was not some isolated encounter that began during COVID. It was built on an institutional partnership that apparently stretched back years.
Fauci was much more than a “public health official.” He was deeply connected to the CIA.
Now, he has been exposed as directing the deletion of government emails related to gain-of-function research. What else is Fauci hiding?
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