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Also odd is that ATI told NPR that, at the time they were awarding these secretive vaccine contracts, it was never explicitly told by the Department of Defense that these contracts were part of Operation Warp Speed, with a former ATI executive describing that key fact as "invisible" to the company.
Spooks and SkunkworksAdvanced Technology International (ATI) is a nonprofit company that organizes consortia of public, private, and academic organizations that perform research and development (R&D) on behalf of the US government. ATI mostly manages R&D consortia for the Department of Defense for things like weapons manufacturing, metal casting and forging, ship production, and technology aimed at countering so-called weapons of mass destruction. They also manage the Border Security Technology Consortium (BSTC) for the Department of Homeland Security, primarily surveillance technology companies, among other DHS research projects.
ATI only currently manages two consortia that have any relationship to health care, the Medical Technology Enterprise Consortium (MTEC) and the Medical CBRN Defense Consortium (MCDC). The MTEC, operating on behalf of the US Army Medical Research and Development Command, aims to "accelerate the development of revolutionary medical solutions," which include gene editing, nanotechnology, "telehealth solutions," artificial limbs, and brain implants. They are also currently developing a wearable device that would diagnose individuals with Covid-19 before symptoms appear.
The other ATI-managed "health-care" consortia, the MCDC, is focused on "advanced development efforts to support the Department of Defense's (DoD) medical pharmaceutical and diagnostic requirements to counter Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) threat agents."
They are specifically involved in "enabling prototype technologies for therapeutic medical countermeasures targeting viral, bacterial and biological toxin targets of interest to the DoD," including the development of vaccines. ATI told NPR that they were contacted by the DoD sometime between March and April, before Warp Speed was announced in May, and asked to issue requests for proposals related to Covid-19 from MCDC members.
MCDC members include Emergent Biosolutions as well as DoD/CIA contractor Battelle Memorial Institute, with both of those companies having unsettling ties to the 2001 anthrax attacks. Another member of the MCDC is CIA/NSA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton and weapons manufacturer General Dynamics. MCDC's membership has expanded significantly following ATI's acquisition by Analytic Services Inc. (ANSER), the principal sponsor of the Dark Winter bioterror simulation, with eighteen new members added just three months after the acquisition had concluded.
In addition, there is considerable overlap between the MCDC and the vaccine companies that have been awarded secretive contracts through ATI as part of Operation Warp Speed. Sanofi, Novavax, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson are all MCDC members as well as recipients of Warp Speed vaccine contracts. In addition, Emergent Biosolutions, another MCDC member, was awarded a major Warp Speed contract to manufacture Covid-19 vaccines, but that contract was awarded through HHS Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), not ATI.
ANSER's Rise, Its Fall, and Its Saving GraceIn February 2017, ATI was acquired by Analytic Services Inc. ANSER, like ATI, manages R&D projects for the federal government, historically for DHS, with ANSER being the long-time manager of one of the two DHS federally funded research and development centers. However, ANSER also provides services to the DoD, NASA, the State Department, and the US intelligence community.
ANSER was originally founded as a spin-off from the RAND Corporation in the late 1950s, but it became a much larger part of government operations, particularly in the realm of Homeland Security, after Ruth David became its president and CEO in 1998. Prior to becoming ANSER's CEO, David had been the deputy director for science and technology at the CIA, where, among other things, she laid the groundwork for what would become In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital arm responsible for the rise of several Silicon Valley behemoths such as Google and Palantir. David led ANSER until 2015. After David took charge, ANSER became an early leader in promoting the use of biometric and facial recognition software by US law enforcement agencies and became a key driver in pivoting the government toward "homeland defense" and "homeland security" in the years leading up to the events of September 11, 2001.
As journalist Margie Burns noted in a 2002 article, the rise of "homeland defense" as a centerpiece of US government policy, including the push to create a new "homeland security" agency, began with former State Department official Richard Armitage's alleged coining of the term in 1997 in a National Defense Policy document. In the years that followed, this pivot toward seeing the American homeland as a future battlefield was heavily promoted by a web of media outlets owned by South Korean cult leader and CIA asset Sun Myong Moon, including the Washington Times, Insight Magazine, and UPI. All published numerous articles either penned by ANSER analysts or that heavily cited ANSER reports and employees regarding the need for a greatly expanded "homeland security" apparatus.
In October 1999, at David's behest, ANSER created the Institute for Homeland Security (ANSER-IHS). Though fully funded and established at that time, but for reasons still unclear, the ANSER-IHS was not formally launched until April 2001. The Institute's first director was Randall Larsen, who was at that time and still is today a close associate of current HHS ASPR Robert Kadlec. Though ANSER has never explained the reason behind the lengthy delay in officially launching ANSER-IHS, it is possible that the timing was related to the introduction of H.R.1158 in March 2001. That bill called for the creation of the National Homeland Security Agency, which was the foundation of the later Department of Homeland Security.
One month after ANSER-IHS was created, Insight Magazine published an article in May 2001 entitled "Preparing for the Next Pearl Harbor," which heavily cited ANSER and its Institute for Homeland Security as being among "the nation's top experts" in warning that a terrorist attack on the US mainland was imminent. It also stated that "the first responders on tomorrow's battlefield won't be soldiers, but city ambulance workers and small-town firefighters."
The following month, ANSER-IHS cohosted the Dark Winter exercise, with two top ANSER-IHS officials, Mark DeMier and Randall Larsen, cowriting the exercise with Tara O'Toole and Thomas Inglesby of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies (now the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security). O'Toole, at the time, was on the ANSER-IHS board of advisers.
As previously detailed in the Engineering Contagion series, several of those involved in Dark Winter had foreknowledge of the 2001 anthrax attacks, and Dark Winter itself originated what became the initial, yet false, narrative for those attacks that Iraq and Al Qaeda were working together to conduct acts of bioterrorism on US soil. However, the anthrax used in the attacks was quickly determined to have either originated from a US military lab or a US defense contractor.
ANSER's convenient gamble that the US government would imminently pivot toward homeland security soon after April 2001 paid off tremendously. Thanks largely to the fear stoked by 9/11 and the 2001 anthrax attacks, the Department of Homeland Security was created, and ANSER-IHS quickly became the first government think tank, that is, federally funded research and development center.
Not long after its formal creation as an agency, DHS established its Science and Technology (S & T) Directorate in 2003 with the mission "to protect the homeland by providing . . . officials with state-of-the-art technology." DHS later announced in 2004 that it had "selected [ANSER] to operate the Homeland Security Institute . . . [f]ollowing a full and open competition procurement process conducted by [DHS] Science and Technology." This is despite this very institute having already been funded and established by ANSER in 1999 and then launched in 2001.
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