House Committee Bemoans Lack of US Spying on Chinese Health Figures During Covid’s Earliest Days
© AP Photo / Andy Wong
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A new report by the House Intelligence Committee says the US should have done more to gather “harder to obtain information” during the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020. However, it seems to fault the IC for then-US President Donald Trump’s lackluster response, while basing its conclusion on a presumed duplicity by Beijing.
If the US had spied on Chinese health officials more in January and February 2020, it might have been able to convince Trump to take the novel coronavirus outbreak more seriously, House Intelligence Committee chair Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) argues in a new report.
“At the outset, it is important to note that the first warning signs of an emerging novel disease will almost always come from public health authorities and their unclassified reporting,” the report says.
“At that point, intelligence can be a necessary and valuable complement, providing additional context about the potential threat once health authorities have detected it. The unique capabilities of the IC can be trained to focus on gaining specific insights unavailable to the broader public, especially when a host government wishes to conceal the true extent of the danger to its own citizens or the rest of the world. But while the IC is capable of doing so, our committee found that the IC was poorly positioned to collect uniquely valuable intelligence in support of a crisis response.”
US leaders have repeatedly accused or implied that the Chinese government tried to conceal information about the COVID-19 outbreak, up to and including baseless claims that the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, either as a bioweapon or careless handling of a wild virus under study. Especially as the outbreak in the US worsened and the death toll rose, US leaders, including US President Donald Trump and his successor, Joe Biden, doubled down on the claims in an effort to redirect popular fury elsewhere.
However, not only did the World Health Organization (WHO) all but reject the lab leak theory after sharing data with Chinese researchers, but so did Biden’s own Intelligence Community. In August 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) published a report commissioned by Biden earlier that year containing its conclusions about the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes the COVID-19 illness. That probe said the virus was naturally occurring and not a bioweapon.
The WHO research team that traveled to Wuhan has also repeatedly fought back against claims China had withheld data from them, saying that while not all data was shared, that which was withheld contained personal information and there wasn’t time to go through the necessary procedures to get its release approved, which they found reasonable.
It’s not clear what additional information the House Intel Committee hoped US spies would obtain. Chinese medical authorities were forthcoming with their information about the handful of cases of a mysterious flu-like disease in Wuhan in late December 2019 and early January 2020.
The WHO put itself on emergency footing on January 1, 2020, a day after being notified by the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission of the outbreak, according to a WHO timeline. On January 11, China publicly released the genetic sequence of the virus, confirming it was not SARS CoV-1, but a new kind of coronavirus, which was dubbed 2019-nCoV before being renamed SARS CoV-2, or simply COVID-19, several weeks later.
Of course, the Trump administration also repeatedly claimed the WHO was under China's control, and complicit in the supposed "coverup," and began pulling the US out of the organization.
Indeed, the House committee report acknowledges the “myriad policy failures” by the Trump administration, and points out that while Trump’s daily briefings contained regular warnings about the outbreak’s severity, he continued to downplay the dangers.
“The IC’s alarms to the White House and the former president were clear and unmistakable,” it says. “And yet, in public messaging and in preparation for the impending impact, COVID was downplayed and steps that could have been taken to save lives were ignored.”
Indeed, the only intelligence agency that did provide “unique insights” was the National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), which is part of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and had no direct avenue to the ODNI or the National Security Council.
US espionage efforts in China have struggled for years, ever since their spy network was decimated by a highly effective counterintelligence operation in the years after 2009. After Iranian experts discovered a network of websites used by the CIA to contact informants, it shared the data with Beijing, and the two nations successfully hounded out and killed dozens of US operatives.
