More Egregious Tradecraft Failures By ODNI on Biowarfare

Yesterday I argued the ODNI “biolab” release failed as an intelligence product on its face: not evidence, not classified, not intelligence. I figured I’d be defending that for a week.

I didn’t have to. Last night, at 10:41 PM, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence posted a thread annotating its own slides — apparently to prop up a release that wasn’t landing. In the process it confirmed my critique word for word…and then some. Nothing below is my characterization. It’s theirs.

And it’s a scandal, because the story of COVID is incomplete, it is deadly serious, and trash intelligence tradecraft makes all of this worse, not better.

ODNI Explains Its Slides By Making the Entire Situation That Much More of a Clusterfail

Yesterday’s output from ODNI was the equivalent of “The Holy Roman Empire—neither holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire—discuss.” They touted declassified evidence about biolabs that were neither declassified nor evidence. And the people most excited about their press release and three slides marked Unclassified and one stamped Declassified were…the Russian government.

So they did a follow-up thread on Twitter/X late on a Saturday night, an hour when I used to try to constrain myself to tweeting bass guitar videos and to leave the substantive stuff for Monday. They had no such discipline.

Let’s start with an initial problem: to paraphrase Indiana Jones, intelligence analysts do not deal in truth, they deal in assessments; if you want truth, it’s down the hall with the Philosophy Department.

And writing truth in ALL-CAPS does not even improve the impact of the writing in question. So we’re off to a bad start.

Otherwise, let’s take the claims of the first paragraph:

Dangerous gain-of-function research was funded by the U.S. government around the world, directed and approved by people like Dr Fauci.

None of that is established in the ODNI’s press release and four-slide presentation, certainly not from the vaunted “declassified” “evidence” they promised. The presentation does not discuss the “funding” of “dangerous gain-of-function research” other than insinuating that the U.S. government funded the construction of labs around 2010-2012, which was neither new nor unknown. And as far as “people like Dr. Fauci,” one supposes that the ODNI means “scientists with PhDs,” but then the slide deck mentions not one by name.

Slide 1 was a DRAFT President’s Daily Brief

The ODNI tries to sneak something by us, and it needs to be examined.

A draft President’s Daily Brief, written after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, details threats to Ukraine labs due to dangerous pathogen storage

This would actually need to be declassified. The President’s Daily Brief is indeed a classified product, and not open source. But there’s a major caveat that ODNI tries to slip past us: it was a draft. It may never have made the final cut of PDB—they don’t say. It matters. That which gets cut is either of insufficient confidence or insufficient relevance to merit the President’s attention that day. I want to be clear—something can be high confidence, rock-solid intel, but not be enough of a hot topic that day to merit Presidential attention. But it sometimes gets chopped because there isn’t enough corroboration or quality of the intelligence underlying it.

ODNI tells us, with zero citations, that “Biden officials confirmed this on the record.” Confirmed what? That it was a draft? That there was a veterinary research facility in Kharkiv? That Russia was accusing the United States of conducting biowarfare in the basement lab of a facility?

And confirmed “on the record?” What record? Where? Were they under oath? Besides—a cover-up on the record is a very poor cover-up indeed.

The title we can read of this draft PDB is “Veterinary Research Facility in Kharkiv Ongoing Target for Russian Misinformation, Other Potential Operations.” So the thrust of this PDB is not that the U.S., through Fauci-like-executives funded dangerous gain-of-function research, it’s that the Russians are lying about it.

That the Russians are liars when it comes to covering their invasion of other countries probably wasn’t novel enough to merit inclusion in a PDB.

Slide 2 is what happens when you make a map without the experts from NGA

The U.S. Intelligence Community has an agency most people haven’t heard of that is one of our most important—The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. NGA produces intelligence from satellites and other remote sensors to provide imagery and other information about the battlespace. If you want a map of every biological research lab in Ukraine and the exact type of boot that each security guard is wearing, NGA are your guys, and they’re the best in the world. If you want not just the location of the labs, but an analysis of every kind of plant surrounding the lab and on what date the flowers bloomed, NGA can provide you the most accurate, usable products you can imagine, and most that you can’t.

That’s not what this is. ODNI made this themselves. With “U.S. government data.” They claim they have “the type of research being conducted.” And “if biological weapons were being stored.”

I’m going to go past the already-mocked issue that the capital of the country, Kyiv, is in the wrong part of the country on the map. That’s bad enough, but Twitter is already dunking on it.

First, NGA didn’t make this map, ODNI did. This would be like doing an analysis of pasta and leaving out insights from Italy. Poor form. Inexplicable.

The unclassified headline says “Over 40 Labs Built and Supported.” The map only shows, by my count, 24. So where are the additional 17 facilities that would bring us over 40 total facilities? 18 of these are BSL-2 facilities designed to safely handle moderate-risk infectious agents or toxins that pose a mild to moderate health hazard. And is the implication that they were handling killer viruses in BSL-2 facilities? The slide lists Ebola, Marburg, Lassa, plague — BSL-3 and BSL-4 agents — as the “repository,” while its own legend shows the facilities are mostly BSL-2. A BSL-2 lab cannot be the repository of Marburg. You can run a PCR test on a sample at BSL-2; you cannot be a repository for live Marburg anywhere but BSL-4. So what is actually going on here? Oh yeah, they don’t say.

I guess those are the hazards of building a product on UNCLAS information. To get any kind of decent insights, you would likely need human intelligence, signals intelligence, and geospatial intelligence, not only from the U.S. Intelligence Community, but from allied collection as well. All of that would be classified, and require declassification—which of course was promised by ODNI, but not delivered here.

Slide 3 is the first intelligence product that was just some State Department website open to the public

The lab list with funding figures and pathogen permits — is, per ODNI, “a list of labs and data pulled from the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine website.”

Pulled from a website. A public one. So you just needed the TS-SCI-FIREFOX clearance, or the vaunted TS-GOOGLE-CHROME clearance.

It shows that back in 2010, a U.S. contractor helped Ukraine, an emerging nation, build some scientific facilities.

I think the Jack Ryan screenwriters are going to take a pass on writing a new movie about this part.

Slide 4 is an abuse of the term OSINT

“Data compiled from open source information that was corroborated with U.S. government information including U.S. Embassy in Ukraine data…”

Read the caption ODNI left in plain (U):

“The U.S. paid Ukrainian scientist to study the genome of highly pathogenic avian flu…”

One scientist, apparently — and missing the article, the copy error a coordinated product is built to catch. “Study the genome” means sequence it: reading a virus’s code, the daily work of the CDC, the literal opposite of the gain-of-function they keep yelling about, which edits the code. They dressed up bird-flu sequencing as a conspiracy — and stamped it Unclassified. That is the “declassified evidence.”

Does anyone else wonder if these guys got fired on Friday, still had the password to ODNI’s Twitter account, and now they’re just sending up tweets full of run-on sentences with intelligencey-sounding words? And they threw up a slide from Black & Veatch, a contractor, full of other people’s logos, and thought this would somehow impress someone?

Now hold all of that against what the Director said when she released it: “never before seen intelligence.” Never before seen! Except now we know this was actually, at best, in a draft PDB that didn’t make the chop.

And never before seen…but it was on websites open to anyone with WiFi on earth.

We’re almost done. Here. Enjoy some more intelligencey word salad.

This is embarrassing for a U.S. Government agency. Any agency, much less one that handles America’s secrets. It’s one step away from QAnon-level tradecraft. I feel like I need a hot shower after reading this.

One wonders what the Intelligence Community Inspector General — whose office sits inside ODNI — would make of the analytic tradecraft here.

First published on Game Theory Today (Substack), June 14, 2026.