Project Clear Vision

Project Clear Vision was a covert investigation of Soviet-built biological bomblets conducted by the Battelle Memorial Institute under contract with the CIA. The legality of this project under the Biological Weapons Convention is highly disputed.

Revelation to the public

The secret Project Clear Vision was revealed to the public in a September 2001 article in The New York Times.^[1] Reporters Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William J. Broad collaborated to write the article.^[1] It is presumed that the reporters had knowledge of the program for at least several months; shortly after the article appeared they published a book that detailed the story further.^[1] The book, Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War, and the article are the only publicly available sources concerning Project Clear Vision and its sister projects, Bacchus and Jefferson.^[1]

Project

The project was completed from 1997–2000,^[1] during the Clinton Administration.^[2] The project's stated goal was to assess agent dissemination characteristics of the bomblets.^[3] However, program has received criticism due to the suspicions of its findings possibly being used in a covert bioweapons program.

Legality

As part of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), the United States committed not to develop bioweapons. Moreover, the United States had not reported the secret projects in its annual confidence-building measure (CBM) declarations.^[3] The United States maintained that the program was fully consistent with the BWC and that the projects were defensive in nature.^[2]

References

Further reading

• Miller, Judith, Engelberg, Stephen and Broad, William J. Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War, (Google Books), Simon and Schuster, 2002, (ISBN 0684871599).