Last week, outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard gave the Kremlin an invaluable gift by releasing what she called “new intelligence” on U.S.-funded biological laboratories overseas. She said information about these labs was “intentionally covered up by powerful people.”
Then she cited publicly available information. And her map of Ukraine’s biolabs incorrectly placed Kyiv in the south and either misspelled or invented a city called “Cherniv.” Real U.S. intelligence products are simply not this stupid.
Even Laura Loomer called out Gabbard’s action as a conflation of “biological safety work being done to prevent dangerous uses of Soviet era pathogens… with bioweapons production so that Russia has another manufactured excuse to continue its prolonged war with Ukraine.” And she showed with screenshots how Gabbard passed off Russian intelligence products as American.
I spoke with Greg Koblentz, a bioweapons expert who leads George Mason University’s Biodefense Graduate Program. “This really is kind of the dream outcome for the Kremlin, because they’ve been pushing this false narrative for several years,” he told me.
“They’ve been having a field day with it. Pretty much every major state-owned Russian news outlet has run stories about DNI Gabbard validating the allegations that Russians have been making all these years about nefarious, suspicious activities going on in these U.S.-funded laboratories in Ukraine. So already this has become a major loss to U. S. credibility and to push back on this disinformation.”
He believes that Gabbard’s release ultimately undermines the U.S.’s ability to build international support to confront Moscow over its violations of the Biological Weapons Convention.
We walked through some of the ironies at play here. For one, it was Gabbard who last year dismantled the ODNI’s National Counterproliferation and Biosecurity Center, stating, “taking action to address global health issues falls well outside of ODNI’s core mission.”
Greg said, “We lost a real important focal point for this kind of research analysis, and that has really set us back in terms of being able to properly calibrate our threat assessments.”
Second, Gabbard vowed to check her viewpoints at ODNI’s doorstep during her confirmation hearing last year, but this release echoed remarks she made in 2022 about “the 25+ biological labs in [Ukraine’s] warzone.” Even then, she was accused of parroting the stream of Russian disinformation about U.S.-funded bioweapons and biolabs in Ukraine.
Third, Greg described how Russia should be our top concern in the bioweapons space. The country inherited the Soviet Biological Weapons Program, “which was the largest program of its kind in the world.” He said the Russians have maintained at least three top-secret military facilities involved their offensive biological weapons program.
“They’ve been actually modernizing their biological weapons program and their chemical weapons program for the last several years,” he said. They even started building a new BSL-4 lab, the highest level of biological containment, at the Sergiyev Posad site — after launching their full-scale invasion of Ukraine. (We also spoke about GRU unit 29155, the hit squad behind a slew of poisonings and which reportedly created the biolab disinformation theme.)
And fourth, there has been a recent and notable development regarding chemical weapons used in Syria, where Gabbard flew and met with Bashar al-Assad back in 2017. Before Assad fled to Moscow, of course. Gabbard just could not believe that Assad had used chemical weapons on his own people.
Earlier this month, Greg said, the Syrians “uncovered this stockpile of chemical weapons that the Assad regime had been hiding from the Organization for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. And this stockpile included chemical bombs…. precursors for the nerve agent sarin, including hexamine, which is a key stabilizer the Syrians used but the denialists claim was not part of the program. Including mixing equipment to actually mix these chemicals into the bombs to use them. So, pretty much everything a dictator needs to gas his people was found.”
Paid subscribers, who truly make my reporting possible, can scroll down and watch us go deeper. We talk about France’s impending trial on Assad’s use of chemical weapons, which could lead to revelations on what French intel service DGSE has been collecting. Russia’s use of banned riot control agents on the battlefield in Ukraine. How Americans should be thinking about North Korea and, potentially, Iran. The “dual-use dilemma” of China. And how he believes the stain of Gabbard’s release will long tarnish the U.S. intelligence community.
