The top U.S. spy office confirmed that the intelligence community is investigating the origins of the coronavirus in China, including the theory of an accidental lab escape from a Wuhan laboratory.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees and coordinates the 17 different U.S. spy offices and agencies, weighed in with the U.S. intelligence community’s official position on Thursday, noting that “the entire Intelligence Community has been consistently providing critical support to U.S. policymakers and those responding to the COVID-19 virus, which originated in China.”
The top spy office, led by Richard Grenell, the acting head of ODNI and the current ambassador to Germany, added that “the Intelligence Community also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified.”
The intelligence community statement made it clear that the spy agencies have not yet reached a conclusion on whether the novel coronavirus originated in a wet market or through an inadvertent infection or an accidental escape from the Wuhan Institute of Virology or another nearby lab.
“As we do in all crises, the Community’s experts respond by surging resources and producing critical intelligence on issues vital to U.S. national security,” the intelligence community statement said. “The IC will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.”
The rare statement from the intelligence community came after the New York Times reported that senior Trump administration officials have pushed spy agencies to investigate whether the coronavirus originated in a Wuhan lab. The piece cited anonymous intelligence analysts who are “concerned that the pressure from administration officials will distort assessments about the virus and that they could be used as a political weapon in an intensifying battle with China.” The article said, “[M]ost intelligence agencies remain skeptical that conclusive evidence of a link to a lab can be found.”
An intelligence community official told the Washington Examiner last week, “We are actively and vigorously tracking down every piece of information we get on this topic, and we are writing frequently to update policymakers.” The official also noted that “the IC has not collectively agreed on any one theory.”
Earlier this week, the Washington Post reported that U.S. intelligence agencies warned Trump about the coronavirus in more than a dozen classified reports in the President’s Daily Brief in January and February. The piece said the PDBs “traced the virus’s spread around the globe, made clear that China was suppressing information about the contagion’s transmissibility and lethal toll, and raised the prospect of dire political and economic consequences. … But the alarms appear to have failed to register with the president.”
An ODNI official told the Washington Examiner that details in that report “are not true,” but decline to comment further due to the sensitive nature of the PDB.
Grenell tweeted about the issue twice, first telling a Washington Post reporter: “This isn’t true. And we told you this before you wrote. And you put the DNI denial of your premise in paragraph 9.” He followed up by criticizing another article on it, saying, “Vanity Fair is now repeating the false Washington Post narrative. As we have said multiple times, this story is not true.”
Hogan Gidley, the White House deputy press secretary, told the Washington Examiner that “it’s a disgusting joke for the media to claim the president wasn’t taking the virus seriously, when all the Democrats and the media did was criticize President Trump for his early, bold, aggressive actions — and you can’t have it both ways.”
Earlier this month, Fox News reported that U.S. spy agencies were especially focused on the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which researches infectious diseases, including coronaviruses from bats. Sources stated that analysts are working to determine what the ruling Chinese Communist Party knew and when it knew it for the purposes of “creating an accurate picture of what happened.”
The report said the inquiry was expected to finish shortly, and that its conclusions would then be presented to Trump so that the administration could figure out the true depth of China’s role in what has become a global pandemic.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo confirmed the U.S. government was taking seriously the possibility that the coronavirus escaped from a Wuhan lab.
“We don’t know the answer to the question about the precise origination point, but we do know this: We know that the first sightings of this occurred within miles of the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Pompeo said on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show. “We know that this: the history of the facility, the first [Biosafety Level Four] lab, where there’s high-end virus research being conducted, took place at that site. We know that the Chinese Communist Party, when it began to evaluate what to do inside of Wuhan, considered whether the WIV was, in fact, the place where this came from.”
Pompeo also stressed, “most importantly” that “they’ve not permitted the world’s scientists to go into that laboratory to evaluate what took place there, what’s happening there even as we speak.” The secretary of state further noted: “We still have not had Western access to that facility so that we can properly evaluate what really has taken off all across the world and how that began.”
There is well-documented evidence that China tried to cover up the spread of the coronavirus, muzzled whistleblowers, intimidated doctors, misled the World Health Organization, and blocked outside health experts. At least one study indicated that if the Chinese government had acted more quickly, the coronavirus’s global spread would have been greatly reduced.
The U.S. intelligence community reportedly believes the Chinese Communist Party downplayed the severity of the initial coronavirus outbreak and that China continues to mislead about the infection rate and death toll inside the country. Beijing has denied orchestrating a cover-up of its coronavirus response.
