THE DARPA LAYER: How Jeffrey Epstein Wired Himself Into the Pentagon's Pandemic Preparedness Machine — Through the Gates Inner Circle

Part 8 of a Series: Inside the overlapping philanthropy, defense research, and biotech relationships revealed in the Epstein Files

Buried in the Epstein files is a seven-year campaign — conducted entirely after his 2008 conviction — to access the Pentagon's most advanced research agency, routed through the same Gates inner circle that designed the financial architecture, ran the intelligence channels, and built the governance apparatus documented in Parts I through VII of this investigation.

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Part 8 in the Epstein Files series.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

• DARPA access through the same Gates orbit that built the financial architecture. Across more than twenty EFTA documents spanning 2009 to 2017, Epstein maintained a sustained, multi-channel campaign to access DARPA — the Pentagon’s flagship research arm — through Gates’ chief science advisor Boris Nikolic, billionaire intermediaries like Tom Pritzker, and scientists who treated defense-research connections as routine conversational currency with a convicted sex offender. He first pursued the woman the documents call “the DARPA lady” — almost certainly Director Regina Dugan — in 2010, the same year she approved the mRNA vaccine program that would ultimately enable the COVID-19 response.

• A DARPA application developed in consultation with Epstein, with acknowledged weapons potential. By April 2015, a prospective DARPA program manager was developing their Biological Technologies Office application in evident consultation with Epstein — attributing their vision statement to him (”Your idea!”) and explicitly acknowledging that “each of these as you know could translate into weapons — some more aggressive than others.” Four emails in three weeks document the progression from a DARPA “Offer” to a completed application with dual-use research proposals.

• January–February 2017: a concentrated convergence of defense research, private governance, and pandemic finance. In a two-month window, a bgC3 workplan listing former DARPA official Geoff Ling “(DARPA)” and a “Strain simulation exercise” deliverable landed on Epstein’s desk — addressed to “JEE” in its confidentiality footer; DARPA launched its Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3); CEPI launched at Davos with $460 million in Gates funding; and a separate Epstein associate listed “pandemic simulation” as a career credential and “parametric trigger” development as professional experience, with Epstein instructing: “Put together your resume… for my submission.”

• The personnel pipeline leads directly into the Gates infrastructure. Dan Wattendorf built DARPA’s $291 million mRNA vaccine program and awarded Moderna its foundational $25 million, then moved to the Gates Foundation in 2016. Geoff Ling founded DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office, then appeared on Epstein’s bgC3 workplan, was proposed as a biotech startup co-founder, and was described as a personal friend — all to Epstein across three separate documents in 2017. The people who built the defense technologies moved into the philanthropic infrastructure where Epstein was already embedded. An FBI confidential source report from 2021 reveals the Bureau was still tracking the DARPA-adjacent investment activities of Boris Nikolic — the man who started the chain — more than two years after Epstein died.

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This is Part 8 of the Epstein Files Series.

IMPORTANT NOTE TO READERS

This is not an advocacy piece. It is a documentary investigation based on primary source documents released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, placed in their institutional and temporal context using publicly verifiable records — all cited with document numbers and links so that journalists, lawmakers, researchers, and other stakeholders can pull the originals and reach their own conclusions. The material is difficult: it describes a convicted sex offender operating inside defense research agencies, philanthropic foundations, and global health governance bodies, and its implications are uncomfortable regardless of political orientation. This work is offered as a public service — an effort to bring rigorous, document-level scrutiny to an unprecedented evidentiary record that is too often reduced to headlines or dismissed as settled, at a moment when the post-EFTA revelations demand not conspiracy theorizing or partisan absorption but accountability, institutional reform, and restorative justice for the systems and people who were failed.

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Parts I through VII of this investigation documented the financial architecture, the governance apparatus, and the intelligence channels through which Jeffrey Epstein embedded himself in the intersection of Bill Gates’ philanthropy, global health policy, and crisis governance. Project Molecule revealed the $150 million blueprint for private biological governance across sovereign borders. The polio intelligence channel showed Gates Foundation field reports reaching Epstein’s personal Gmail over a multi-year period. The Ebola documents captured the week emergency governance was born — with Epstein receiving advance notice of Gates’ presidential meeting and institutional concept papers for permanent health-security institutions in the same days the UN Security Council reclassified disease as a threat to international peace.

Each of those stories raises a question the documents alone cannot answer: why DARPA?

Why did Epstein, from 2010 to 2017, pursue sustained, multi-channel access to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — the Pentagon’s flagship research arm — through the same Gates orbit that ran the financial architecture, the polio intelligence, and the Ebola governance channels?

The answer is not in the EFTA documents. It is in the public record of what DARPA was building during the exact years Epstein was pursuing access to it. In 2010, the year Epstein first instructed Boris Nikolic to “arrange the DARPA lady,” DARPA’s director approved a program called ADEPT — Autonomous Diagnostics to Enable Prevention and Therapeutics — that would invest $291 million over nine years in nucleic acid vaccines, rapid pathogen detection, and biological countermeasures.¹ That program’s early investments included $25 million to a small Cambridge startup called Moderna.² By 2014, DARPA had created an entire new office — the Biological Technologies Office — dedicated to leveraging biological properties for national security.³ By 2017, DARPA launched the Pandemic Prevention Platform, whose stated goal was to develop a medical countermeasure against any pandemic within sixty days using nucleic-acid-based technologies.⁴

The financial and governance architecture documented in Parts I through VI required something to deploy. DARPA was building it. And Epstein was pursuing access to DARPA through the same people, the same office, and the same months in which that architecture was being constructed.

This article documents that pursuit across more than twenty EFTA documents spanning 2009 to 2017. The documents reveal not merely a social relationship with people adjacent to DARPA, but an active effort to engage with the agency’s research agenda — at one point reaching a prospective DARPA program whose vision statement was attributed to Epstein himself, and whose applications were explicitly acknowledged to have weapons potential.

A note on scope: This investigation documents Jeffrey Epstein's efforts to cultivate access to DARPA through intermediaries, billionaire networks, and scientific advisors connected to the Gates orbit. Nothing in this reporting alleges or implies that DARPA employees — including former Director Regina Dugan — broke the law, violated ethics rules, or were aware of Epstein's criminal conduct. DARPA is a public agency whose leadership routinely engages with private-sector figures, philanthropists, and scientific advisors; such engagement is normal and expected. The question this series raises is not whether DARPA officials acted improperly, but whether Epstein and his associates deliberately used legitimate channels of access — and the reputational cover of respected intermediaries — to position a convicted sex offender at the edges of defense research infrastructure. The distinction matters.

The Nikolic Channel: Gates’ Science Advisor as DARPA Conduit

Boris Nikolic occupied a unique position in the worlds of both Bill Gates and Jeffrey Epstein. As Gates’ chief advisor for science and technology, Nikolic had institutional access to the highest levels of defense and health research. He would later be named — to his stated surprise — as a fallback executor in Epstein’s 2019 will. The EFTA documents reveal that Nikolic served as a direct conduit between Epstein and DARPA over at least a year-long period.

The sequence begins in November 2010. Epstein instructs Nikolic to arrange a meeting with the DARPA director and asks whether she visits New York: “Either the week of the 29th or the 14th lets see if we can arrange the DARPA lady,” Epstein wrote, “ask her is she comes to New York.”⁵

The “DARPA lady” almost certainly referred to Regina Dugan, who had been director of DARPA since July 2009 and was the only woman to hold the position during the relevant period. Eight months later, Nikolic would send Epstein an email with the explicit subject line “Regina Dugan,”⁶ making the identification all but certain. And in 2010 — the same year Epstein first pursued access to her — Dugan approved Dan Wattendorf’s proposal for ADEPT, a program to develop nucleic acid vaccines as a rapid pandemic countermeasure.¹ That approval set in motion a chain of investments that would ultimately lay the foundation for the Moderna and Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines. Whether Epstein was aware of ADEPT at this stage is not established in the documents. But the timing means that his pursuit of the “DARPA lady” was a pursuit of the official who had just authorized the most consequential biological defense program in a generation.

Eight months later, in July 2011, Nikolic followed up. He sent Epstein an email with the subject line “Regina Dugan,” attaching a New York Times profile of the DARPA director and a copy of DARPA’s 2011 Congressional testimony. “You would like her a lot!” Nikolic wrote. “We need to schedule a trip to DC sometime soon.”⁶

The attachments are significant. Nikolic was not merely mentioning Dugan’s name in passing. He was sending Epstein briefing materials — a press profile and the agency’s formal Congressional testimony — the kind of preparation one provides before an important meeting. The proposed “trip to DC” was explicitly to facilitate an introduction.

Around the same time, Epstein wrote to a member of his staff with a direct instruction: “remdin me sept, 6 regina, darpa.”⁷ The recipient responded: “ok.” Six weeks later, on September 6, 2011, Epstein’s executive assistant Lesley Groff executed the request, sending him a message reading: ”Reminder: Regina, DARPA.”⁸ The pair of emails establishes that contact with the DARPA director was not an open-ended aspiration. Epstein had set a specific date weeks in advance — around the same period Nikolic was sending him Dugan’s briefing materials — and his personal staff fulfilled the reminder on schedule. Whatever was planned for September 6 — a meeting, a call, a follow-up — it was a fixed item in Epstein’s calendar, managed through the same administrative infrastructure that ran the rest of his life.

This five-document sequence — November 2010, July 2011, July 2011 (staff reminder instruction), September 2011 (Groff execution), November 2011 — describes not merely an effort to reach the DARPA director through Gates’ science advisor but a progression: from Epstein’s initial instruction to arrange a meeting, to Nikolic’s briefing materials and proposed DC trip, to Epstein personally setting a date for “regina, darpa” and his staff executing the reminder on schedule, to Nikolic continuing to report DARPA meetings as a matter of routine.

Four months after the Groff reminder, in November 2011, Nikolic sent Epstein another email — this time a casual update embedded in personal gossip. “Whole day at mtgs...” Nikolic wrote. “Just done with DARPA mtg — since 8am.” He then asked about someone named Mette, adding a joke about her wanting to “carry your kid.” Epstein’s response was to invite Nikolic to his private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands and to ask whether Nikolic had told anyone about “our mette conversation. Marco etc. ygl people?” — a reference to the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders network.⁹

The exchange is revealing on multiple levels. Nikolic reported a full day of DARPA meetings to Epstein as naturally as he shared personal gossip — suggesting this was routine, not exceptional. And Epstein’s response combined an island invitation with a question about information compartmentalization, asking who else knew about a private conversation. The island in question was Little Saint James, now understood to have been central to Epstein’s criminal activities.

Whether Epstein ultimately met Dugan through this channel is not established in the documents. But the trajectory — from pitch to briefing to personally scheduled date to staff execution to ongoing reporting — conducted entirely after his 2008 conviction, demonstrates that the effort advanced well beyond aspiration.

The Nikolic–DARPA connection did not end with Epstein’s death in August 2019. A previously undisclosed FBI document — an FD-1023 confidential human source reporting form, dated November 23, 2021 — reveals that the Bureau’s San Francisco field office was tracking Nikolic’s activities more than two years later.¹⁰ The source reported that Nikolic, identified as Managing Director of bng0 and Biomatics Capital, and noted as “designated executor of Jeffrey Epstein’s estate,” was interested in investing in a U.S.-based artificial intelligence company that was pursuing funding from DARPA and other government sources. The report was filed under case number 272-SJ-3262541 and handled by Squad H1 of the San Francisco division.

The document does not describe the nature or scope of the FBI’s investigation. But its existence establishes that the Bureau considered the Nikolic–DARPA nexus a matter warranting confidential source reporting — and that the intersection of Epstein-connected figures, artificial intelligence investment, and defense research funding remained an active concern for federal investigators well after the principal figure was dead.

The Pritzker Exchange: Real-Time Lobbying Through a Billionaire

On January 10, 2012, Epstein wrote to Tom Pritzker, the executive chairman of Hyatt Hotels Corporation and a billionaire with interests in science and philanthropy. “You are missed,” Epstein said. Pritzker responded from somewhere en route: “By whom? Where are you? On my way to DC.”¹¹

Epstein replied from Paris. And then Pritzker offered an opening: “Shit. I’m seeing Darpa lady tonite.”

Epstein’s response was immediate. Within the exchange, he pivoted from social pleasantries to a specific technical pitch: ”ask her if we can [use] nsa code breaking (signal processing) to work on brain activity and intracellular deception.”*¹

Pritzker asked for clarification. Epstein elaborated: cellular protein communication consists of signals that current science cannot decode; the NSA’s cryptanalytic methods, developed to decode signals across languages and mathematical forms, should be applied to biologically generated signals. “It is very clever,” Epstein wrote, “and I promise a leap in brain understanding.”

Rather than dismissing the idea, Pritzker engaged. He shared his own family’s connection to signals intelligence — a relative who broke Soviet naval codes in Vladivostok after Korea using pattern recognition rather than formal cryptographic training. Epstein extended the concept further: “biology unlike math needs deception to ward off prey... signal intelligence should be able to decipher it.”

The documentary context makes the identification of the “Darpa lady” as Dugan all but certain. Dugan served as DARPA director from July 2009 until March 2012, when she left to lead an advanced technology group at Google. She was the only woman to hold the position during this period. The January 2012 timing, combined with Nikolic’s explicit “Regina Dugan” subject line from the 2011 emails,⁶ makes clear that Dugan was the consistent target. Pritzker’s informal reference — “Darpa lady” — suggests a social acquaintance rather than a formal policy contact.

The Pritzker exchange closes a loop opened by the Nikolic emails. In July 2011, Nikolic pitched Dugan to Epstein, attaching her press profile and Congressional testimony and proposing a DC trip.⁶ By September, “Regina, DARPA” was on Epstein’s calendar.⁸ And by January 2012, a different billionaire in Epstein’s network was sitting down to dinner with the same DARPA director — and Epstein was feeding him questions to ask her.¹¹ Whether the Nikolic and Pritzker channels operated independently or in coordination, their convergence on Dugan in this narrow window demonstrates that Epstein was cultivating multiple simultaneous access points to a single target.

The exchange demonstrates what might be called Epstein’s intermediary function in real time. He did not need direct access to DARPA. He needed friends who had it. When a billionaire casually mentioned a dinner with a DARPA official, Epstein instantly converted the social occasion into a lobbying opportunity, complete with a specific research proposal that bridged classified intelligence methodology and academic neuroscience.

What DARPA Was Building

The documents in Sections I and II establish that Epstein pursued access to DARPA’s director through multiple channels over eighteen months. To understand the significance of that pursuit, the public record of what DARPA was doing during those same months is essential — not as speculation about Epstein’s knowledge, but as context for what the access was worth.

In 2010, Dan Wattendorf, a DARPA program manager, proposed a concept that would prove transformational: using messenger RNA to teach human cells to produce their own vaccines.¹ The idea was that instead of manufacturing traditional vaccines — a slow, expensive process requiring months of production — you could inject synthetic mRNA instructions that would turn the body’s own cellular machinery into a vaccine factory. The application was military: rapid response to engineered bioweapons or emerging pandemics that threatened deployed forces. Dugan approved it. The program was called ADEPT.

Over the next nine years, DARPA invested $291 million through ADEPT and related programs. Among the earliest and most consequential recipients was Moderna, then a startup with a handful of employees. In 2013, DARPA awarded Moderna approximately $25 million to develop its mRNA platform — the foundational investment that enabled the company to scale the technology that would later produce one of the two primary COVID-19 vaccines.² At the time of the award, Moderna had no approved products and minimal revenue. DARPA’s investment was not a bet on a proven pharmaceutical company. It was a defense agency building a biological countermeasure capability from scratch.

In 2014, DARPA created the Biological Technologies Office — the BTO — as a standalone division dedicated to leveraging biological properties for national security applications.³ Its founding director was Geoff Ling, a neurologist and neuropharmacologist who had served as a DARPA program manager since 2002. Ling’s name would later appear, labeled “(DARPA),” on a bgC3 workplan sent to Epstein for editing in February 2017 — a workplan whose confidentiality footer was addressed to “JEE.”²⁰ ²¹

By 2017, DARPA launched the Pandemic Prevention Platform — P3 — building on ADEPT’s mRNA foundation.⁴ The program’s stated goal: develop a medical countermeasure capable of protecting against any pandemic pathogen within sixty days of identification, using nucleic-acid-based technologies. P3’s Proposers Day was held on February 22, 2017 — the same month the bgC3 workplan listing Ling “(DARPA)” as a partner and including a “Strain simulation exercise” deliverable landed on Epstein’s desk.

This timeline is drawn entirely from public sources — Congressional Research Service reports, Nextgov/FCW coverage, the Washington Post, and DARPA’s own published program descriptions. It is not alleged. It is the institutional backdrop against which the EFTA documents must be read.

August 2011: The Convergence

The public timeline reveals a convergence in August 2011 that the EFTA documents alone cannot convey.

In the same weeks that Nikolic was sending Epstein briefing materials on Dugan and Epstein was personally scheduling “regina, darpa” for September 6 — three tracks were running simultaneously through the same network.

On the DARPA side, ADEPT was now operational. Dugan had approved the mRNA vaccine program the year before. Wattendorf was beginning to invest in nucleic acid vaccine platforms. Moderna existed as a startup. The biological defense pipeline that would ultimately produce the COVID-19 vaccines was in its earliest operational phase — and Dugan was the person who had authorized it.

On the financial side, Epstein was in the final weeks of constructing the donor-advised fund architecture that would become Project Molecule. On August 17, he emailed Mary Erdoes describing a fund that would “exist in perpetuity, with succession controls” and be ready ”with an offshore arm — especially for vaccines.”¹²

On August 28, he told Staley and Erdoes that “Bill is terribly frustrated” and that ”additional money for vaccines must be included in the presentation.”¹³ On August 31, Project Molecule Version 13 landed — with $80 million in polio vaccine procurement, $20 million to “finance the surveillance network in Pakistan,” perpetual governance, and offshore entities in “tax neutral jurisdictions.”¹⁴

On the access side, Nikolic — the man sending Epstein the Dugan briefing package — was CC’d on the July 26 DAF email to Staley describing “a silo based proposal that will get Bill more money for vaccines.”¹⁵ The same person brokering Epstein’s access to the DARPA director was copied on the financial architecture that would deploy whatever biological technologies that access yielded.

Three tracks. Same weeks. Same personnel. The financial architecture (Project Molecule), the biological defense capability (ADEPT/mRNA), and the access channel (Nikolic–Dugan) were not parallel developments that happened to coincide. They were running through the same network, in the same month, with the same intermediary — Boris Nikolic — visible in both the financial emails and the DARPA access emails simultaneously. The documents do not establish that these tracks were coordinated as a single strategy. But the degree of temporal and personnel overlap is difficult to attribute to coincidence alone.

As documented in Part II of this series, Project Molecule’s governance structure proposed committees populated by Warren Buffett, George Kaiser, Melinda Gates (chair), Susan Rice, Seth Berkley (CEO of Gavi), Jeffrey Sachs, and Queen Rania of Jordan — a private governance apparatus with no elected officials, no treaty obligations, and no public accountability. Its budget included vaccine procurement across sovereign borders and surveillance infrastructure financed by private capital. The biological technologies that DARPA was building under Dugan’s authority were exactly the category of capability that Project Molecule’s governance was designed to deploy.

“Each of These Could Translate Into Weapons”

On April 27, 2015, a redacted individual sent Epstein an email outlining a prospective position at DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office — the BTO that Geoff Ling had founded just one year earlier.

The path to that email had been building rapidly. On April 6, the same individual wrote to Epstein with the subject line “In town April 30/31.” The message was brief: ”Nyc?? Want to talk about darpa. Offer.”¹⁶ The word “Offer” suggests a formal DARPA position had been extended or was imminent — and that Epstein was the person the sender wanted to discuss it with in person. Three days later, on April 9, they wrote again: “Yes darpa just a question of when.” The sender reported that “both bill and Jim want me to stay connected and advising for some of my time till mid 2017 (end of first term at Bank)” — confirming simultaneous relationships with Bill Gates and another principal referred to as “Jim.” They also reported beginning a clinical appointment at Johns Hopkins, joining the vascular service in a role combining neurology and neurosurgery.¹⁷ The DARPA position, they made clear, was not speculative. It was in progress, and they were arranging their professional commitments around it.

Eighteen days later, the April 27 email arrived. It read like a job application developed in evident consultation with Epstein. The sender outlined the BTO role — program manager — and their planned research theme: “Sensing, detection and modulation.” The vision statement was explicitly attributed: “Turning science fiction into science fact... (Your idea!)”¹⁸

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Three specific programs were proposed. Metabolic sensing, using co-localized imaging technologies to avoid the need for biopsies. Contraception via olfaction, using immune-mediated noninvasive stimuli. And vagal modulation — manipulating the vagus nerve to affect immunity, treat nervous system disease, and modulate cardiac function through selective or transdermal stimulation.

Then came the critical line: ”Each of these as you know could translate into weapons - some more aggressive than others.”¹⁸

The phrase “as you know” is the most important element. It indicates that the dual-use potential of these programs — their capacity for both therapeutic and offensive applications — was not being disclosed for the first time. It was a reference to a prior conversation. The weaponization dimension was, by this point, shared knowledge between the sender and Epstein.

In the same April 27 thread, the sender mentioned being in London “representing Jim” on a panel and wanting to discuss “cool science and DARPA and HOPKINS” when next in New York.¹⁸ The Hopkins reference now had concrete context: the sender had reported receiving clinical credentials there just weeks earlier.¹⁷ “Jim” appeared in both emails — someone the sender represented publicly and who, alongside Gates, wanted to retain the sender’s advisory services. The constellation of Gates, “Jim,” DARPA, and Hopkins formed the institutional scaffold around this individual’s career — and Epstein was the figure to whom all of it was being reported.

This sequence — four emails in three weeks, from April 6 to April 27 — represents the most direct evidence in the EFTA corpus of Epstein’s involvement in the development of a prospective DARPA program application. It is not secondhand. It is not a casual reference. A prospective DARPA program manager was developing their application in evident consultation with Epstein, attributing their guiding philosophy to him, and acknowledging that the proposed research had weapons applications — with the clear implication that this had been discussed before.

Inside Gates’ Private Office

The DARPA thread does not exist in isolation. It is embedded in a broader relationship between Epstein and the institutional world of Bill Gates — specifically, bgC3, Gates’ private strategic advisory office.

As early as August 2011, Epstein had been positioning himself as an architect of Gates’ financial infrastructure. In an email to Mary Erdoes, who led JPMorgan’s asset and wealth management division, Epstein described the purpose of a donor-advised fund he was helping to structure: “In essence this DAF will allow Bill to have access to higher quality people, investment, allocation, governance without upsetting either his marriage or the sensitivities of the current foundation employees.”

The email, which CC’d Jes Staley, then head of JPMorgan’s investment bank, reveals Epstein operating as a strategic intermediary between Gates and Wall Street — constructing parallel governance channels that bypassed the Gates Foundation’s own staff.¹⁹ The workplan that would emerge six years later, with its roster of Nobel laureates and DARPA personnel, was the intellectual counterpart to this financial architecture: a mechanism for routing elite expertise to Gates through Epstein’s curation.

In February 2017, a redacted associate — who internal evidence suggests held a contract with bgC3 — sent Epstein a draft workplan for review. The document listed two focus areas: digital health security (including a “zero knowledge proof based digital system to secure personal health information” and a “complete digital platform for the Strain simulation exercise,” a pandemic preparedness tool) and neurotechnologies and brain science (including a whitepaper on neural substrates for degenerative disease).²⁰

The partners listed were formidable: Nandan Nilekani, architect of India’s Aadhaar biometric system; Geoff Ling, identified parenthetically as “(DARPA)”; Paul Greengard, Nobel laureate at Rockefeller University; Linda Buck, Nobel laureate at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center; Yann LeCun, described as working on “convolutional nets” at Facebook; and Todd Park, former chief technology officer of the United States. Institutional partners included the WEF Global Future Council on Blockchain, the WEF Global Future Council on Neurotechnology and Brain Science, the Lauder Foundation, Mayo Clinic, Kaiser Permanente, Stanford’s Shenoy Lab, and Caltech’s Koch Lab. The resources section specified “Reliance on Gates team expertise wherever relevant.” The document’s confidentiality footer was addressed to “JEE” — Jeffrey E. Epstein.²¹

Epstein did not merely receive this document. He shaped it. When the associate asked whether to frame the workstream as “digital health” or “crypto health,” Epstein pushed for the latter, arguing that “digital health gives larry too much room to make trouble” — a reference to an internal bgC3 gatekeeper the associate was navigating.²² The associate responded with evident frustration about “this extra layer of stupidness and wordsmithing” and noted that “Larry doesn’t want me to do something that is completely ‘off the ranch’ and bill is already big into public health security.”

The dynamic is striking. A person under contract to Bill Gates’ private office was sending draft work products to Epstein for input, treating him as a co-equal principal in the drafting process, and navigating between Epstein’s preferences and internal management constraints. The workplan itself was formally addressed to Epstein in its confidentiality notice. Gates is referred to simply as “bill” — lowercase, familiar.

The February 2017 workplan did not arrive in a vacuum. It arrived in what may be the most concentrated period of convergence in the entire documentary record.

In January 2017 — the month before the workplan — an iMessage thread from Epstein’s phone captured a career-planning session with a separate associate who described themselves as a physician with experience at the UN, WHO, Gates Foundation, and World Bank. Their self-description included: “Also my expertise is public health security. Pandemics (just did pandemic simulation) and threats to US health. That could be big platform.”²³ Their career options spanned Biomatics Capital (”Board partner at Biomatics Capital (Boris)”), Gates’ private office (“BG office (for 6 months max)”), Merck’s vaccine team (“big push for gardasil vaccine/HPV”), Swiss Re’s pandemic reinsurance unit (“Did one for pandemics, helped develop parametric trigger”), and the World Economic Forum (“chief science advisor to Klaus Schwab”). Epstein steered them toward Gates and instructed: “Put together your resume… for my submission.”

That same month — January 2017 — the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations launched at the World Economic Forum in Davos with $460 million in initial funding from the Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and the governments of Norway, Japan, and Germany.²⁴ Gates described the initiative as building vaccine infrastructure “in peace time.”

And the following month — February 2017 — DARPA publicly launched the Pandemic Prevention Platform with Proposers Day on February 22 and March 2.⁴ P3’s goal: develop a medical countermeasure against any pandemic within sixty days using nucleic-acid-based technologies. The program built directly on the ADEPT/mRNA foundation that Dugan had approved seven years earlier.

The bgC3 workplan’s “Strain simulation exercise” and DARPA’s P3 program were structurally parallel — both pandemic response platforms, emerging in the same two-month window, sharing at least one named individual (Ling), with Epstein as active editor of the former and the iMessage associate’s “just did pandemic simulation” credential circulating through his phone simultaneously. The documents do not establish coordination between these efforts. What they establish is a concentration of pandemic-related activity across defense, philanthropic, and private channels in which Epstein was simultaneously present.

Five months later, in July 2017, the same bgC3 associate sent Epstein a more ambitious proposal: a biotech startup concept modeled on Yumanity Therapeutics (which went under in 2022) but focused on neurological disease. The pitch outlined two platforms — endoneuronal biotherapeutics (noting that “mitochondrial transfer is genius”) and endovascular drug delivery including optogenetics — targeting diseases caused by oxidative stress. The fourth point was explicit about personnel: ”With: geoff Ling former darpa md phd in neuropharmacology — and then would find scientific cofounders like this guy did.”**²⁵ Ling had now appeared in two consecutive communications to Epstein: as an advisory partner labeled “(DARPA)” in the February workplan, and as a proposed startup co-founder in July. He would appear again three months later.

In October 2017, the same associate sent Epstein a detailed status report after their bgC3 contract had ended. The subject line referenced an Axios article about “a health DARPA.” The associate introduced the article by writing: “My friend Geoff Ling” — confirming a personal relationship with the former DARPA program manager who had now appeared in three consecutive communications to Epstein across 2017: as a workplan partner in February,²⁰ as a proposed startup co-founder in July,²⁵ and now as a personal friend anchoring a report about DARPA health funding.²⁶ The pattern was not a casual name-drop. It described a sustained relationship between the associate, the former DARPA official, and the broader initiative Epstein was overseeing.

The status report was addressed to Epstein in the manner of an employee reporting to a supervisor. It contained eleven numbered points covering the state of their relationship with Gates (”He asked me to come late last month for a check in”), a meeting at which “Larry joined,” Gates’ enthusiasm for a mitochondrial research idea, subsequent canceled meetings, the expiration of the bgC3 contract on October 25, and the silence that followed. The associate then laid out a $300,000 research budget for mitochondrial transfer experiments across Boston Children’s Hospital, MD Anderson, and the University of Washington, noting: “Could try to ask DARPA for some money but need to have done a few experiments first.”

The associate also reported that Paul Allen’s CEO had expressed interest in hiring them as chief scientist, and that the IFC CEO had proposed a health investment practice role. Epstein’s response was characteristically directive: “why dont you ask to meeet with Paul. no downside.” And earlier in the thread: ”where are we, is bill on board or not?”²⁶

The bgC3 associate was not the only person in Epstein’s orbit pursuing DARPA funding that fall. On November 10, 2017 — less than two weeks after the Health DARPA email exchange — a different contact messaged Epstein directly. The message, recovered from Epstein’s personal Macintosh computer during forensic analysis of his devices (Evidence ID: NYC024365.aff4), reported enthusiastically on a research fellowship: “Am really enjoying my fellowship and the mitochondria transplant idea really taking root. My department rallying behind me and assigned a research coordinator who is helping put together a proposal for the NIH. May try DARPA too. The Harvard team is partnering with us.”²⁷

The message places Epstein at the center of at least two simultaneous DARPA-facing research efforts in late 2017: the bgC3 associate’s mitochondrial transfer experiments across three major medical centers, and this separate Harvard-partnered fellowship pursuing organelle transplantation. Both involved mitochondrial science. Both contemplated DARPA funding. Both reported to Epstein. And the idea itself — mitochondrial transfer — had been described as “genius” by the bgC3 associate months earlier in the July startup pitch,²⁵ suggesting that Epstein may have been the common source seeding the concept across both channels.

The October 2017 exchange is the clearest single document showing Epstein functioning as the primary handler of someone who moved between the Gates, Allen, and DARPA orbits. Research budgets, career decisions, and institutional relationships were being reported to Epstein and shaped by his input. Bill Gates and Paul Allen appear in this correspondence not as principals issuing instructions, but as institutional resources to be managed — with Epstein as the strategist.

The Personnel Pipeline

The EFTA documents show Epstein pursuing access to DARPA. The public record shows where the people inside DARPA went when they left — and the trajectory leads directly into the Gates infrastructure where Epstein was already embedded.

Dan Wattendorf created ADEPT under Dugan’s authority. He managed the program that invested $291 million in mRNA vaccines and awarded Moderna its foundational $25 million.² In 2016, Wattendorf left DARPA. He became Director of Innovative Technology Solutions at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.²⁸ That same year, the Gates Foundation gave Moderna $20 million.²⁹ The man who built the defense side of the mRNA pipeline moved directly into the philanthropic infrastructure that would fund its commercial development — the same infrastructure Epstein had been helping to design since August 2011.

Geoff Ling founded the Biological Technologies Office in 2014 — the DARPA division housing the mRNA work and the BTO program manager position that Epstein’s associate was applying for in April 2015.³ By 2017, Ling appeared on Epstein’s bgC3 workplan as a partner labeled “(DARPA),” was proposed as a biotech startup co-founder with Epstein’s associate, and was described as a personal friend — all reported to Epstein across three separate documents in a single year.²⁰ ²⁵ ²⁶

Regina Dugan approved ADEPT, left DARPA in March 2012, and after positions at Google and Facebook, became CEO of Wellcome Leap in 2020 — a DARPA-style health research entity funded by the Wellcome Trust.³⁰ Dugan and her co-founder explicitly described Wellcome Leap as applying the DARPA model to “human health.” The institutional arc is visible: defense research becomes health innovation, funded by philanthropy, operating outside governmental structures — the same pattern the polio and Ebola articles document from the Gates side.

The office Epstein was targeting was not without its own institutional vulnerabilities. In August 2011 — the same month Nikolic was sending Epstein the Dugan briefing package — the DoD Inspector General initiated an investigation into Dugan for using her DARPA position to advance the interests of RedXDefense, a private company she had founded before becoming Director. The IG later substantiated the allegation, finding that Dugan had briefed senior DoD officials using proprietary materials from her former company and created potential business opportunities for it. Dugan resigned in March 2012 (DoD IG Report 20121204-000984, released via FOIA April 9, 2013).

The Dugan finding stands on its own terms — an ethics violation involving her former company, unrelated to Epstein or the Gates network. But it illustrates the institutional permeability of the office Epstein was targeting. More broadly, the career transitions documented here — Wattendorf to the Gates Foundation, Ling from BTO to bgC3 workplan partner, Dugan from DARPA to Wellcome Leap — are common and often beneficial. No evidence establishes that they were coordinated with or influenced by Epstein. What the evidence establishes is that they placed DARPA-developed expertise inside the infrastructure where he was already operating.

The Broader Network

The core documents — the Nikolic-Dugan sequence, the Pritzker exchange, the BTO application, and the bgC3 correspondence — are supported by a wider web of DARPA-connected communications in the EFTA release.

In September 2013, Neil Gershenfeld, director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, emailed Epstein about modular construction research, mentioning casually: “We’re working with DARPA and aerospace companies on application to automated airframe assembly.” The context was Epstein’s whimsical idea to build an 80-foot chair on his island. Gershenfeld treated DARPA-funded research as natural conversational currency with Epstein.³¹

In April 2016, Epstein sent DARPA’s 2007 “23 Mathematical Challenges” document — a set of research problems the agency considered critical for national security — to Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn; Joi Ito, director of MIT’s Media Lab; and Joscha Bach, a cognitive scientist and AI researcher. The subject line read: “darpa generated, some insights.” Hoffman responded asking whether there had been any notable results or progress.³² The recipient list is itself significant — Epstein was circulating DARPA research frameworks to an audience that simultaneously spanned Silicon Valley capital, MIT institutional leadership, and the frontiers of artificial intelligence research. By this point, such circulation was routine.

Earlier documents push the timeline back further. In October 2009, Dan Dubno, a technology consultant who was also advising the Department of Homeland Security on explosives detection, outlined for Epstein a comprehensive plan for the “Hourglass Initiative” — a biosecurity NGO focused on weapons of mass destruction threats, scientific ethics, and an anonymous whistleblowing platform using TOR and other anonymity tools.³³ Dubno reported that the White House Science advisor had indicated DARPA interest in aspects of the proposal. By 2010, Epstein had funded the initiative, and Dubno was offering to introduce him to contacts at both DARPA and IARPA — the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, the intelligence community’s counterpart to DARPA — as well as ”VERY talented Israelis” operating “at a high level for the government.”³⁴

The Pattern

Across these documents, DARPA does not appear as a passing reference or an aspirational target. It appears as a persistent institutional node in Epstein’s network — referenced, accessed, and engaged through multiple channels simultaneously over at least seven years, with investigative echoes that extend beyond his death.

The channels evolved. In 2010, Epstein instructed Gates’ science advisor to broker a meeting with the DARPA director⁵ — the same year that director approved the mRNA vaccine program that would ultimately enable the COVID-19 response.¹ In 2011, that same advisor sent Epstein briefing materials on the director and proposed a trip to Washington⁶; Epstein personally instructed his staff to remind him on a specific date about “regina, darpa,”⁷ and the reminder was executed on schedule⁸ — while Epstein was simultaneously constructing Project Molecule through JPMorgan,¹⁹ with its $150 million in biological interventions and surveillance infrastructure, and Nikolic was CC’d on both the financial emails and the DARPA access emails in the same month.¹⁵

In 2012, a billionaire intermediary carried Epstein’s research proposal to a dinner with the same DARPA director that Nikolic had been trying to arrange access to, closing a loop opened months earlier through a different channel.¹¹ By 2015, someone simultaneously advising Gates and holding credentials at Johns Hopkins reported a DARPA “Offer” to Epstein,¹⁶ confirmed the position was “just a question of when,”¹⁷ then developed a DARPA program application in evident consultation with Epstein, with weaponization potential treated as shared knowledge¹⁸ — at the BTO that Geoff Ling had founded one year earlier. By 2016, Epstein was circulating DARPA research frameworks to Silicon Valley billionaires, MIT leadership, and AI researchers as a matter of routine³² — while Wattendorf, the man who built DARPA’s mRNA program, moved to the Gates Foundation.²⁸ By 2017, Ling appeared on Epstein’s bgC3 workplan as a partner labeled “(DARPA)” — a workplan whose confidentiality notice was addressed to Epstein and whose resources section specified reliance on the Gates team²⁰ ²¹ — then was named as a proposed co-founder of a biotech startup pitched to Epstein,²⁵ then invoked as a personal friend in a status report about DARPA health funding also addressed to Epstein.²⁶ This was the same period DARPA launched the Pandemic Prevention Platform and CEPI launched at Davos with $460 million in Gates funding⁴ ²⁴ — while a separate Epstein associate listed “pandemic simulation” as a career credential and “parametric trigger” development as experience.²³ A separate researcher was simultaneously pursuing DARPA grants for Harvard-partnered mitochondrial research — also reporting to Epstein, pursuing the same concept the bgC3 associate had called “genius” months earlier.²⁷ And in 2021, two years after Epstein’s death, the FBI was monitoring the DARPA-adjacent investment activities of Boris Nikolic, the man who had started the chain by emailing Epstein about the DARPA director a decade earlier.¹⁰

The documents do not establish that Epstein held a formal role at DARPA or that the agency was aware of his involvement in the activities described. Several of the key individuals are redacted in the EFTA release, and the question of whether the proposed DARPA introductions and programs were ultimately realized remains open.

What the documents do establish — when read alongside the public record and the broader investigation — is that Epstein positioned himself at the intersection where defense research fed into health innovation, health innovation fed into financial architecture, financial architecture fed into governance infrastructure, and governance infrastructure became the standing apparatus through which pandemic response would eventually be conducted. The donor-advised funds documented in Part I required biological technologies to deploy. Project Molecule’s surveillance budgets documented in Part II required the capabilities DARPA was building. The polio intelligence channel documented in Part V ran through the same bgC3 office where DARPA personnel appeared on workplans addressed to Epstein. The Ebola governance proposals documented in Part IV — the Nexus Centre concept papers, the permanent health-security institutions — were the civilian counterpart to what DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office already represented on the defense side: the institutional fusion of biology and security.

DARPA built the technologies. The Gates orbit built the financial and governance infrastructure to deploy them. And Epstein sat at the junction where both streams met — receiving confidential polio intelligence from one direction, editing DARPA-adjacent workplans from the other, through the same office, during overlapping periods, with no public accountability structure at any point in the circuit.

All of this occurred after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting a minor for prostitution, and all of it occurred while he was a registered sex offender. The documents contain internal evidence that participants understood the reputational risk: Dubno, in 2009, offered to consult on charitable initiatives that “won’t blow back”³³; in 2010, he noted that getting DARPA or IARPA contacts to meet with Epstein directly “may be slightly difficult.”³⁴ The solution was not to abandon the effort but to route it through intermediaries — billionaires, advisors, and institutional frameworks that provided layers of separation between Epstein and the defense establishment he sought to reach.

This article is Part 8 of the Epstein Files Investigation Series. Where individuals are redacted in the original documents, their identities are noted as redacted. Identifications of unnamed individuals are based on contextual evidence within the documents and are noted as inferential where applicable.

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ENDNOTES

To look up EFTA documents referenced below, use the DOJ Epstein portal (justice.gov/epstein) and enter the identifier (e.g., EFTA01984564).

1. Congressional Research Service, “Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency: Overview and Issues for Congress,” updated August 19, 2021., https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R45088.

2. Jared Adams, “Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3),” DARPA Program Information, https://www.darpa.mil/program/pandemic-prevention-platform.

3. Troy K. Schneider,“DARPA’s Pandemic Prevention Platform,” Nextgov/FCW, AUGUST 27, 2021 nextgov.com/acquisition/2021/08/darpas-pandemic-prevention-platform/259090/

4. “Biological Technologies Office,” DARPA, accessed February 2026, https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/offices/bto.

5. Jared Adams, “Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3),” DARPA Program Information; DARPA, “Proposers Day: Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3),” February 22, 2017.

6. Epstein Files Transparency Act (EFTA), Document EFTA01984564, Email, Jeffrey Epstein to Boris Nikolic, November 2010.

7. EFTA, Document EFTA01986594, Email, Boris Nikolic to Jeffrey Epstein, subject line “Regina Dugan,” July 2011. Attachment: New York Times profile of Regina Dugan.

8. EFTA, Document EFTA01861548, Email, Jeffrey Epstein to staff member, July 2011.

9. EFTA, Document EFTA02543427, Email, Lesley Groff to Jeffrey Epstein, September 6, 2011.

10. EFTA, Document EFTA00923505, Email, Boris Nikolic to Jeffrey Epstein, November 2011.

11. EFTA, Document EFTA00128843, FBI FD-1023 Confidential Human Source Reporting Form, November 23, 2021, San Francisco Field Office, Case No. 272-SJ-3262541.

12. EFTA, Document EFTA02034297, Email exchange, Jeffrey Epstein and Tom Pritzker, January 10, 2012.

13. EFTA, Document EFTA01256269, Email, Jeffrey Epstein to Mary Erdoes, August 17, 2011.

14. EFTA, Document EFTA01301108, Email, Jeffrey Epstein to Jes Staley and Mary Erdoes, August 28, 2011.

15. EFTA, Documents EFTA01301114–28 / SDNY_GM_00078533 / JPM-SDNY-00001660, “The Gates & J.P. Morgan Charitable Giving Fund” (Project Molecule, Version 13), August 31, 2011, 14-page client proposal.

16. EFTA, Document EFTA01860211, Email, Jeffrey Epstein to Jes Staley, CC Boris Nikolic, July 26, 2011.

17. EFTA, Document EFTA02505180, Email, [redacted] to Jeffrey Epstein, April 6, 2015.

18. EFTA, Document EFTA02505006, Email, [redacted] to Jeffrey Epstein, April 9, 2015.

19. EFTA, Document EFTA01746408, Email, [redacted] to Jeffrey Epstein, April 27, 2015.

20. EFTA, Document EFTA01301106, Email, Jeffrey Epstein to Mary Erdoes, CC Jes Staley, August 2011.

21. EFTA, Document EFTA02658424, Draft workplan, [redacted] bgC3 associate to Jeffrey Epstein, February 2017.

22. EFTA, Document EFTA02658425, Confidentiality footer of bgC3 workplan, addressed to “JEE” — Jeffrey E. Epstein, February 2017.

23. EFTA, Document EFTA02658658, Email, Jeffrey Epstein to [redacted] bgC3 associate, February 2017, re: “crypto health” framing.

24. EFTA, Documents EFTA01208568, iMessage thread recovered from Jeffrey Epstein’s phone, January 20–23, 2017.

25. “CEPI — New Vaccines for a Safer World,” Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, launched January 18, 2017, World Economic Forum, Davos, https://cepi.net/about/whyweexist/.

26. EFTA, Document EFTA02642995, Email, [redacted] bgC3 associate to Jeffrey Epstein, July 2017, re: Yumanity Therapeutics model startup.

27. EFTA, Document EFTA02352454, Email, [redacted] bgC3 associate to Jeffrey Epstein, October 2017, subject line referencing Axios article on “a health DARPA.”

28. EFTA, Document EFTA01210429, Message recovered from Jeffrey Epstein’s personal Macintosh computer (Evidence ID: NYC024365.aff4), [redacted] to Jeffrey Epstein, November 10, 2017.

29. Dan Wattendorf, LinkedIn profile and Gates Foundation biographical note, “Director, Innovative Technology Solutions, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,” 2016–present; see also Megan Molteni, “This Ex–DARPA Head Is Building a Skunk Works for the Wellcome Trust,” Wired, March 18, 2020.

30. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grant database: Moderna, Inc. (2016, $20M); BioNTech SE (2019, $55M).

31. Megan Molteni, “This Ex–DARPA Head Is Building a Skunk Works for the Wellcome Trust,” Wired, March 18, 2020.

32. EFTA, Document EFTA02385659. Email, Jeffrey Epstein to Reid Hoffman, Joi Ito, and Joscha Bach, April 2016, subject line “darpa generated, some insights.”

33. EFTA, Document EFTA00656705. Email, Dan Dubno to Jeffrey Epstein, October 2009, re: Hourglass Initiative.

34. EFTA, Document EFTA00928095. Email, Dan Dubno to Jeffrey Epstein, 2010, re: DARPA and IARPA introductions.