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CIA will not use vaccination schemes for spying, says White House official CIA will not use vaccination schemes for spying, says White House official
(about 11 hours later)
A White House official has pledged that the CIA will no longer use vaccination programmes as cover for spying operations. The agency used the ruse in targeting Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011. A top White House official has promised that the Central Intelligence Agency will never again use vaccination programs as a cover for spying, three years after the agency set up a fake immunisation program in Pakistan in its hunt for Osama bin Laden.
Lisa Monaco, Barack Obama's leading counter-terrorism adviser, wrote to the deans of 13 prominent public health schools last week saying that the CIA had agreed it would no longer use vaccination programmes or workers for intelligence purposes. The agency also agreed not to use genetic materials obtained through such programmes. Lisa Monaco, a senior counterterrorism and homeland security adviser to President Obama, wrote in a letter addressed to the leaders of several prominent public health schools that the CIA would not use immunisation programs – or workers – as a means to collect intelligence. Such programs have prompted attacks on medical workers in Pakistan.
Dr Shakil Afridi offered a programme of hepatitis vaccinations in Abbottabad as cover for his CIA-backed effort to obtain DNA samples from children at a compound where Bin Laden was later killed during a 2011 raid by US navy Seals. "The Director of the Central Intelligence Agency directed in August 2013 that the agency make no operational use of vaccination programs, which includes vaccination workers," Monaco wrote in the letter, which was first obtained by Yahoo News.
Afridi was convicted and sentenced by a Pakistani court to 33 years in prison for treason. The sentence was later overturned and Afridi faces a retrial. "Similarly, the agency will not seek to obtain or exploit DNA or other genetic material acquired through such programs. This CIA policy applies worldwide and to US and non-US persons alike."
The health school deans were among a group of medical authorities who publicly criticised the CIA's use of the vaccination programme after it was disclosed by media accounts and Pakistan's arrest of Afridi as a CIA operative. The letter was written in response to a January 2013 letter signed by the deans of 12 public health schools that sharply criticised the CIA's use of a vaccination campaign ruse to target Bin Laden.
In her letter dated 16 May, Monaco said the US "strongly supports the global polio eradication initiative and efforts to end the spread of the polio virus forever". In the months leading up to the May 2011 raid that killed the al-Qaida leader, the CIA enlisted the help of Pakistani doctor Shakil Afridi, who would give hepatitis B vaccinations in an attempt to pinpoint Bin Laden's whereabouts. The failed plot aimed to obtain DNA samples from Bin Laden's children that could be compared with samples from his late sister, which would prove the family was living in the compound. Afridi was arrested by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) for working with American intelligence agents and remains in jail in Pakistan.
She said the CIA director, John Brennan, committed in August 2013 to "make no operational use of vaccination programmes, which includes vaccination workers". Monaco said the CIA policy "applied worldwide and to US and non-US persons alike," and that no DNA or genetic material would be used from such programmes. Since the ploy was made public, anti-polio campaigns have become targets for deadly attacks by militants in Pakistan, where the vaccine was already controversial. The BBC reports that more than 60 polio workers and security personnel were killed between December 2012 and April 2014.
The CIA spokesman Dean Boyd said Brennan "took seriously the concerns raised by the public health community, examined them closely and took decisive action". In 2012, two militant commanders banned anti-polio health teams from carrying out their work in retaliation for the CIA's lethal drone strikes. The threats were effective, and in the region some parents refused to have their children vaccinated against the disease. Parents who defy the Taliban and vaccinate their children against polio must do so in secret.
Monaco's letter and the CIA statement did not acknowledge any error in the decision to use the Pakistan vaccine programme as a spying cover. The letter was first disclosed in a report by Yahoo News. Earlier this month, the World Health Organisation (WHO) warned that polio has re-emerged as a public health emergency in Pakistan. The virus currently affects 10 countries worldwide, with Pakistan among only three countries in the world where polio remains endemic.
The public health deans warned last year that the CIA's use of a vaccination programme had played a role in the shootings of several health workers in Pakistan and could hamper anti-polio efforts. "Public health programmes should not be used as cover for covert operations," they said. Since the beginning of the year, 77 cases of polio have been reported – 61 of them in Pakistan, according to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, an organisation spearheaded by the WHO that aims to end the spread of polio. In 2013, a total of 416 cases of polio were reported, 93 of them in Pakistan.
Last week, Pakistan's health ministry announced it would require all travellers leaving the country to first get a polio vaccination. The World Health Organisation has declared that polio's spread is an international public health emergency, and identified Pakistan, Syria and Cameroon as nations that have allowed polio to spread beyond their borders. Polio is a crippling disease that can be fatal. Although there is no cure, the polio vaccine has helped eradicate the virus in most parts of the world.
Pakistan was the only country with reported endemic polio that saw a rise in new cases in 2012, the WHO reported. Pakistan accounted for more than a fifth of all polio cases identified around the world in 2013. The WHO has called for international travel restrictions on people coming from Pakistan, as well as Cameroon and Syria, and recommends that residents and long-term visitors of these countries receive polio vaccines before international travel.
The CIA's use of a polio vaccine programme to spy on Bin Laden's compound undercut Obama's high-profile speech to the Muslim world in 2009 in which he touted US efforts to slow the growth of polio in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria. With Obama administration assurances, Muslim scholars in two international groups issued religious decrees urging parents to vaccinate their children.