Kadlec, in 1999, organized his paranoia into several “illustrative scenarios” to demonstrate the United States’ vulnerability to biological attack. In one of Kadlec’s doomsday fantasies dubbed “Corn Terrorism,” China clandestinely sprays corn seed blight over the Midwest from commercial airliners. Kadlec warns, “China gains significant corn market share and tens of billions [of] dollars of additional profits from their crop,” while leaving the US Corn Belt in ruin. Another Kadlec scenario, titled “‘Lousy Wine,” envisions “disgruntled European winemakers” covertly releasing grape lice concealed in cans of paté to target California wine producers.14
In an April 2001 study for the National Defense University National War College, Kadlec urgently recommended the creation of a Strategic National Stockpile to warehouse countermeasures including vaccines and antibiotics, and recommended regulatory changes to provide for mandatory vaccinations and coercive quarantines in the event of a pandemic. Those ideas helped win him an appointment as Special Assistant for Biodefense Planning to President George W. Bush after the post–September 11 anthrax attacks later that same year.15 From this sinecure, Kadlec’s fervent lobbying persuaded Congress to establish a Strategic National Stockpile, whose contents are currently worth $7 billion. Kadlec would come to control purchases for that stockpile, and—following the lead of his comrades, Bill Gates and Tony Fauci—he would use that power to enrich his vaccine industry friends and sideline public health. As journalist Alexis Baden-Mayer observed, “Kadlec created the biodefense industrial complex as we know it. And he rules it like a czar.”16
The Bill Gates/Anthony Fauci-Funded Biosecurity: “Let the War Games Begin”
In 1999, Dr. Kadlec organized a simulation of a smallpox terrorist attack on US soil for a joint exercise by the newly formed Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies and the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS). The founder of the Center was D.A. Henderson, famed for leading the program that eradicated smallpox in 1977. The Senior Fellow and cofounder of the Johns Hopkins Center was a CIA spook and pharmaceutical industry lobbyist named Tara O’Toole. She took over as chief when Henderson left. The third Center Director was Tom Inglesby, who remains in that role. In 1999, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation committed $20 million to Johns Hopkins to establish the Bill & Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health.17 For the next two decades, Gates would direct a vast stream of funding to the enterprise of elevating biosecurity as the national priority. Some of his most visible investments funded a series of simulations presided over by Inglesby at his Johns Hopkins Center. Those simulations would make Inglesby the congenial face of biosecurity paranoia, feed the burgeoning biodefense industry, and help lay the foundation for the modern security state.
The deal pipeline from NIH and NIAID to Johns Hopkins—an astonishing $13 billion since 2001—dwarfs Gates’s contributions to the school.18 But shoddy or perhaps deliberately obscure reporting makes it nearly impossible to determine how many of these dollars flowed to Inglesby and his center.
Kadlec’s simulations, and over a dozen that would succeed it over the next twenty plus years—many under Bill Gates’s direction—shared common features. None of them emphasized protecting public health by showing Americans how to bolster their immune systems, to eat well, to lose weight, to exercise, to maintain vitamin D levels, and to avoid chemical exposure. None of these focused on devising the vital communications infrastructures to link frontline doctors during a pandemic or to facilitate the development and refinement of optimal treatment protocols. None of these dealt seriously with the need to identify off-the-shelf (now known as “repurposed”) therapeutic drugs to mitigate fatalities and to shorten a pandemic’s duration. None of them considered ways to isolate the sick and protect the vulnerable—or how to shield people in nursing homes and other institutions from infection. None of them questioned the efficacy of masks, lockdowns, and social distancing in reducing casualties. None of them engaged in soul-searching about how to preserve constitutional rights during a global pandemic.
Instead, the simulations war-gamed how to use police powers to detain and quarantine citizens, how to impose martial law, how to control messaging by deploying propaganda, how to employ censorship to silence dissent, and how to mandate masks, lockdowns, and coercive vaccinations and conduct track-and-trace surveillance among potentially reluctant populations.
“Coercion should be the last strategy to consider in a pandemic,” remarked physician and biological warfare expert Meryl Nass, MD. “If you have a remedy that works, people will flock to get it. It’s troubling that the first and only option was creating a police state.”
The Still-Unsolved Mystery of the Post-9/11 Anthrax Attacks
Contemporaneously with Johns Hopkins’ smallpox simulation, the Pentagon launched a top-secret project at a former nuclear weapons site in the Nevada desert to test the feasibility of building a small anthrax production facility using off-the-shelf equipment easily available in hardware stores and biological supply catalogs.19 Code-named Project Bacchus, a small cohort of faux terrorists—military weapons experts—succeeded in producing a few pounds of anthrax. Two years after the Pentagon’s Nevada anthrax project, someone associated with the United States Army mounted a far-reaching campaign of sending anthrax to members of Congress and key media figures, officially launching the “Biosecurity Era.”
In the light of subsequent events, we cannot exclude the possibility that someone in our government carried out a false flag attack against Americans as a provocation for some larger agenda. This is not an outlandish conspiracy theory. During my uncle’s presidential administration, the Joint Chiefs of Staff submitted a plan— termed Operation Northwoods—proposing false flag attacks, including mass murders of random American citizens, to justify an invasion of Cuba. My uncle reacted with horror to Joint Chief Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer’s Northwoods briefing pitch and abruptly walked out of the presentation. “And they call us the human race,” he remarked to his secretary of state, Dean Rusk.20
US intelligence agencies and military industrial complex insiders initially (and ultimately wrongly) blamed the 2001 anthrax letter attacks on Saddam Hussein or al-Qaeda and later used similarly incorrect pretexts to launch a war against Iraq. The mailing of anthrax introduced Americans to a new enemy more frightening than garden-variety terrorism. While terrorists could destroy key buildings and airliners, the biosecurity narrative warns that pathogens could enter any American home and invisibly slay its occupants. Germs, therefore, easily outgunned al-Qaeda as a reliable wellspring of terror. This was the lesson Kadlec had been broadcasting for five years. The delivery of anthrax through the mail brought home his jeremiads. By 2020, biosecurity would altogether eclipse Islamic terrorism as the spear tip of US military and foreign policy. The topic of “infectious diseases” suddenly became the most effective way to open government pockets.21