Judicial Watch has released over 300 pages of internal Department of Defense (DOD) documents that show the U.S. has funded work on Anthrax in Ukraine. While the papers were heavily redacted, details indicate that in 2018, a portion of over $11 million worth of funding was allocated towards conducting “Anthrax Laboratory activities” in the former Soviet state.
The documents, which were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, add more context to the revelations uncovered in the Government Accountability Institute’s (GAI) report on Ukrainian Biolabs. That report shed light on the U.S.’s involvement in biological research in Ukraine through the Biological Threat Reduction Program (BTRP).
According to the newly released documents, the work involving anthrax was disclosed in an executive summary for a training program involving a research tool called Pathogen Access Control System (PACS), a software that tracks the reception, transfer, and movement of dangerous pathogens being transported to and from different labs around the world.
The documents also list several participants in the exercise, including researchers, scientists, and lab managers. Although all the participants names are redacted, their titles are admitted. Two of the listed contributors are anthrax specialists with the titles “Head of the Anthrax Laboratory” and “Researcher, Anthrax Laboratory.”
The PACS training program in Ukraine was implemented by a defense contract company called Black and Veatch. The company has an extensive history in Ukraine spanning back to 2008, when it won a U.S. defense contract to build Ukraine’s first Biosafety Level 3 laboratory.
Funding for the work was awarded to Black and Veatch by the DOD’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), a military support agency involved in dealing with chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons.
The DTRA is responsible for overseeing and funding the U.S. governments Biological Threat Reduction Program, which was created after the cold war to help former Soviet states dismantle their bioweapons facilities. The BTRP also allowed for former Soviet scientists to continue working in places like Ukraine so that they would not defect to a hostile nation or terrorist group. The program has been active in Ukraine since 2005, when Senators Richard Lugar and Barack Obama signed a deal with Ukrainian leaders allowing the U.S. to have access to Ukrainian labs and research materials.
The U.S.’s biological work in Ukraine has received extensive media attention this year when Russia claimed that its invasion of Ukraine was partly in response to an alleged U.S. biological weapons program operating near Russia’s borders.
Senior Russian officials claimed that the U.S. had been weaponizing deadly pathogens like anthrax, African swine fever, and “bat coronaviruses” as part of a program to develop biological diseases for military use. Such work would be in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention treaty of 1972 (BWC), which prohibits countries from creating biological weapons.
Although U.S. media outlets denied the claims, the Russian narrative was bolstered by an admission from Undersecretary of State, Victoria Nuland, when she admitted that biolabs in Ukraine do exist and that the U.S. had an interest in keeping any dangerous pathogens out of the hands of the Russians.
Russia’s claims received even more attention when it was discovered that President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, had been funding a Black and Veatch subcontractor called Metabiota in 2014 through his venture capital firm Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners.
According to GAI’s report, Metabiota was awarded an $18.4 million contract from the DTRA for work in Ukraine involving “Physical, Engineering, and Life Sciences” relating to “International Affairs and Cooperation.” While the details of that project are unclear, GAI’s report sheds light on a leaked 2014 pitch deck memo from Hunter Biden’s firm which shows Metabiota had received a defense contract from the DTRA to “implement a research project in Ukraine aimed at understanding the threat of tularemia and anthrax.”
While the U.S. maintains that its biological programs are meant for peaceful and biosecurity purposes only, some past programs have cast doubt on the claim.
Prior to the Ukrainian agreement in 2005, the New York Times reported that the U.S. had been conducting several secret research programs that may have straddled the line between biosecurity and biowarfare. Those programs involved mass-producing anthrax, creating a vaccine resistant strain of the disease, and testing Soviet style bomblets capable of spreading it.
According to Jonathan B. Tucker, a renowned biological weapons program expert, those projects were clearly outside the scope of the 1972 BWC agreement.
