EXCLUSIVE: US intelligence officials say origin of coronavirus will remain elusive
WASHINGTON (SBG) — Top Trump administration officials do not expect the U.S. intelligence community will ever learn the true origins of the coronavirus, sources said this week.
A senior intelligence official, speaking to Sinclair on condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardize an ongoing investigation, cited two main factors that U.S. spies see preventing them from accomplishing the task: the difficulty of intelligence collection in China, a determined adversary with a well-funded, global spy apparatus of its own, including a sophisticated counter-intelligence capability; and the nature of infectious diseases, an area of focus largely unfamiliar to America's teams of covert and analytical officers.
“China is a hard target to begin with,” one well placed intelligence official said. “We’ll certainly keep looking at whatever we find. But even with our best people on it, it’s not as if we’re going to be able to say, ‘Here’s the witness we need,’ or ‘Here’s the document we need.’ It’s a waste of time. We’re not going to get there.”
This pessimism that prevails at the top echelons of the intelligence community about its ability to nail down the precise time, place, and manner when the coronavirus infected its first human victim surfaced publicly just as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the nation's top intelligence directorate, was issuing a rare statement, Thursday afternoon, in which the intelligence community was said to be "surging resources" to this very task. The statement made no mention of the sense among agency leaders that they will not succeed in meeting it.
Rather, the ODNI said the intelligence community "will continue to rigorously examine emerging information...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."
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The statement stated flatly that the virus "originated in China," as is widely known, while ruling out that it was "manmade or genetically modified." That conclusion consigned to the realm of conspiracy theory the notion, propagated by some, that the novel coronavirus could have originated as the result of a deliberate attempt at weaponization by Chinese scientists.
“The Chinese are not going to be transparent. We're never going to get to the bottom, or get close to who, indeed, or what was Patient — Patient Zero,” Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas, said. “That still doesn't mean that we shouldn't be trying and collecting on it. And how do we make sure that we're building broad networks? How are we improving partnerships with our allies?”
A separate report by the New York Times on Thursday had alleged that senior Trump aides have been “pressuring” intelligence analysts to deliver an assessment that the virus originated in a laboratory setting in China, either at the controversial Wuhan Institute of Virology or the less-publicized Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
The officials who spoke with Sinclair dismissed the Times report, without elaboration, as untrue. Separately, a senior official at the State Department, when contacted by Sinclair, also refuted the premise of the Times story, denying that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has applied pressure to intelligence analysts to deliver a particular assessment on the origins of the coronavirus.
The idea that the coronavirus may have emerged from a laboratory setting gained traction last month, after the Washington Postreported that State Department officials had warned, in cables sent in 2018, about unsafe conditions at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the facility where Chinese researchers have worked with bats to study infectious diseases.
Until the disclosure of the cables, most senior U.S. officials – notably Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases – had ventured publicly that the likeliest origin point for the coronavirus was the network of wet markets in Wuhan, where live animals have been sold.
“My guess is that we have few, if any, assets who would be able to get into the Wuhan virology labs, or to get information from inside the Chinese government to find out what they knew,” said Fred Fleitz with the Center for Security Policy.
On April 17, however, three days after the Post disclosed the State Department cables, Secretary Pompeo told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, without elaborating on his source of information: “We know that the Chinese Communist Party, when it began to evaluate what to do inside of Wuhan, considered whether the W.I.V. was, in fact, the place where this came from.”
The intelligence officials who spoke with Sinclair confirmed that they had reviewed the State Department cables as part of their effort to learn more about the origins of the virus.
“We’ve got all the stuff,” one official said dourly, suggesting that the presence of a large body of documentation for intelligence analysts to review – typically an advantage in the development of a preliminary assessment – was not, in this instance, expected to provide decisive value.