Project Clear Vision was a covert examination of Soviet-made biological bomblets conducted by the Battelle Memorial Institute under contract with the CIA. The legality of this project under the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) of 1972 is disputed.[where?]
Project Clear Vision was conducted between 1997 and 2000,[1] during the Clinton Administration.[2] The project's stated goal was to assess the efficacy of bio-agent dissemination from bomblets.[3] The program received criticism due to suspicions that its findings could possibly be used in a covert US bioweapons program.[citation needed]
The secret project was disclosed 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] Shortly after the article appeared, the authors published a book that further elaborated the story.[1] The 2001 book, Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War, and the article are the only publicly available sources[citation needed] concerning Project Clear Vision and its sister projects, Bacchus and Jefferson.[1]
As signatory to the BWC, the United States is committed to refrain from development of bioweapons. Moreover, the US did not disclose the secret project in its annual confidence-building measure (CBM) declarations.[3] The US maintains that the program was fully consistent with the BWC because the project was defensive in nature.[2]