Meet the El-Hibri Family
In 1998, Lebanese-born financier Ibrahim El-Hibri and his son, Fuad, with former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral William Crowe, Jr., established a corporation called BioPort and paid the state of Michigan $25 million for its aging vaccine manufacturing campus. The purpose the El-Hibris intended to use the factory for was to manufacture anthrax vaccine for sale to the US military. El-Hibri Sr. was a longtime associate of both Robert Kadlec and Admiral Crowe—who chaired the Joint Chiefs under Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush. The El-Hibris had previous success in the anthrax vaccine business, having made a small fortune by purchasing anthrax vaccines made by the UK government and reselling them at 100 times the purchase price to the Saudi Arabian government.22 Less than a month after taking over the Michigan-based business, BioPort signed an exclusive $29 million contract with the Pentagon to “manufacture, test, bottle, and store the anthrax vaccine” for American troops stationed abroad.23 The secretary of the Army indemnified the factory the day before signing the contract on September 3, 1998. The El-Hibris never safety-tested their concoction. They didn’t have to—they had no liability for injuries.
Ten months before the El-Hibris bought the plant, an FDA audit uncovered contamination problems, suspect record keeping, and assorted security breaches at their laboratory, as well as nine million stored doses that were adulterated. Almost as soon as BioPort was formed, it began receiving large sums from the US Army to rehabilitate the anthrax plant. But it was still unable to pass an FDA audit. In 1999, they bulldozed the factory and rebuilt it at taxpayer expense. The state of Michigan sweetened the deal. But the FDA would not give its stamp of approval to the new manufacturing facility. BioPort, with a hefty lobbying team and designer furniture in its executive offices, kept crying poor and coming back to the US government for additional handouts24 before finally falling into a death spiral around the bankruptcy drain in mid-2001.25 The October 2001 anthrax incidents proved the El-Hibris’ salvation. The Pentagon leveraged the strange attacks, turning them into the long-awaited provocation, justifying the crusade to expand the battlefront in bioweapons research.
The 1972 Biological Weapons Convention meant neither the brass nor the spooks could legally research or produce bioweapons. But the convention left open the loophole that signatories could develop “dual use” vaccine and weapon technologies so long as the projects had a defensive rationale. After the anthrax attacks, “vaccines” suddenly became a euphemism for bioweapons and a ticket back to deep water for a beached biowarfare industry. Military planners at the Pentagon, BARDA, DARPA, and the CIA (through USAID) began pouring money into “gain-of-function” experiments. “Dual use” research was suddenly in vogue.
Dark Winter 2001
During June 22 and 23, 2001, less than three months before the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon launched a war game code-named Operation Dark Winter at Andrews Air Force Base that emphasized the military’s earnest commitment to bioweapon vaccines. Robert Kadlec, the lead organizer of this pandemic simulation, also coined its code name.26
The “tabletop” scenario simulated a smallpox attack on US locations, beginning in Oklahoma City (the site of a real domestic terror attack in 1995). Dark Winter participants explored strategies for imposing coercive quarantines; censorship; mandatory masking, lockdowns, and vaccination; and expanded police powers as the only rational responses to the pandemic. The failure, in the Dark Winter case, to quickly implement such countermeasures allowed the galloping spread of the Pentagon’s imaginary smallpox epidemic to overwhelm America’s response capabilities, precipitating massive civilian casualties, widespread panic, societal breakdown, and mob violence. The Pentagon summary of the exercise concluded that scarcity of vaccines to curtail the contagion’s spread proved the most severe limitation on management options.
The Dark Winter exercise eerily predicted many aspects of what would follow just months later with the anthrax letter attacks. Such uncanny miracles of foreshadowing became a recurring feature of each subsequent Germ Game.
The Spooks and the Simulations
By playing the role of US president, the Senate Defense Committee’s longtime chairman, Senator Sam Nunn, a dyed-in-the-wool war hawk, brought prestige, urgency, and a militaristic gestalt to Kadlec’s Dark Winter exercise.
Most of the other key participants shared Kadlec’s intelligence agency pedigrees. CIA involvement was a consistent feature of this and all the subsequent simulations. Other participants included: Robert Kadlec’s fellow intelligence officer and War College professor, Colonel Randall Larsen (USAF), another career bioweapons expert, who helped choreograph the exercise and appeared in its fictional, scripted news clips; CIA’s former director, James Woolsey, was a participant and organizer, as was a pharmaceutical industry lobbyist and biological weapons expert; Tara O’Toole, a Director of the CIA hedge fund In-Q-Tel;27 the CIA’s former deputy director for Science and Technology, Ruth David; Hopkins bioterrorism expert Tom Inglesby; and New York Times journalist Judith Miller also participated.28
James Woolsey’s presence and that of Col. Larsen, Ruth David, and Tara O’Toole signaled the intelligence community’s ubiquitous but shadowy presence in biosecurity and all things vaccine. (I sat on a board with Woolsey for several years and am familiar with his deep anxieties about germ warfare.) Woolsey’s germophobia rivals Kadlec’s; Woolsey calls a biological weapons attack “the single most dangerous threat to US national security in the foreseeable future.”29