Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has an unhelpfully antagonistic relationship with the media. Still, Pompeo has a legitimate Intelligence Community foundation for his assertions that a quarantine control failure at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was responsible for the coronavirus outbreak.
That bears noting in light of the media criticism Pompeo is receiving for his comment that there is “enormous evidence” to suggest that the Wuhan lab is the outbreak’s source. Pompeo reaffirmed that sentiment on Wednesday, stating that “people share data sets and come to different levels of confidence,” adding that there is “significant evidence” a lab control failure is responsible.
Pompeo is correct on the top line here: There is significant evidence of a lab-related failure.
Driven by National Security Agency collection efforts, the U.S. Intelligence Community has excellent “big data” and other discipline analysis offering high confidence of Beijing’s significant effort to hide evidence of the lab’s research activity, personnel movement, and general operation prior to, during, and after the immediate aftermath of the virus outbreak in December 2019. Big data analysis focuses on identifying behavior on the basis of data patterns, however, is not yet sufficient to offer a multi-agency intelligence community high confidence assessment that the lab is the source of the outbreak.
There’s another important point to note here: evidence of covering up lab-related activity does not necessarily evince that the lab was the outbreak site per se. Pompeo is leaning on the former as the foundation for his statements on the latter. Still, that the Chinese have tried to cover up and are continuing to cover up the lab’s operations in a very significant way is striking. It strongly suggests they have something important to hide.
Others disagree. CNN reported on Tuesday that the U.S.-led “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance — Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand — disagree with Pompeo’s assessment. An unnamed “Western diplomat” told CNN, “We think it’s highly unlikely” that a lab “accident” was responsible. They believe the virus occurred by animal-to-human interaction at a Wuhan wet market. That diplomat says the Five Eyes “are coalescing around this assessment.” CNN reports that a Five Eyes diplomat agrees with the first diplomat’s statement.
My sourcing suggests that this is not entirely accurate.
While it is true that Pompeo is going further than others, certain Five Eye allies agree that the evidence for a lab cover is very compelling. Even, that is, if they’re not jumping to Pompeo’s secondary conclusion that this proves the lab is the coronavirus source. Equally important here is that the United States has not shared the entirety of its lab-related intelligence with its allies, or, possibly, even with all executive branch policymakers. That is to protect keystone sources and to gather more corroborating intelligence that can earn allied confidence in a way that protects the source concern.
In short, Pompeo is leaning forward but not without a legitimate intelligence foundation. The intelligence process is continuing to work this issue, and this story is far from over.
