TRUMP'S FIRST COVID MISTAKEDespite early human intelligence about the virus in Wuhan, the president was slow to act
This is a story about the very early days of what would become a worldwide pandemic that led to more than 7 million deaths and put the United States, and the entire world, on hold for months. It was a crisis that was mismanaged by President Donald Trump in ways not known at the time because the president and his senior aides chose not to listen to the unwanted facts that the American health and intelligence communities had obtained. I learned this week that a US intelligence asset at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, where the Covid virus was first observed, is safe and out of danger. The asset, highly regarded within the CIA, was recruited while in graduate school in the United States and provided early warning of a laboratory accident at Wuhan that led to a series of infections that was quickly spreading and initially seemed immune to treatment. As is the case today, many senior US officials were reluctant to tell the president what he did not want to hear. But early studies dealing with how to mitigate the oncoming plague, based on information from the Chinese health ministry about the lethal new virus, were completed late in 2019 by experts from America’s National Institutes of Health and other research agencies. Despite their warnings, a series of preventative actions were not taken until the United States was flooded with cases of the virus. All of these studies, I have been told, have been expunged from the official internal records in Washington, including any mention of the CIA's source inside the Chinese laboratory. It was a cover-up to protect a president who did not do the right thing. I had initially learned of the asset in the spring of 2020, with the understanding that I would not report on it until it was safe to do so. The issue arose again for me and some in the intelligence community last weekend because John Ratcliffe, Trump’s recently appointed CIA director, chose to declassify a new CIA study stating that the virus originated in a Chinese laboratory leak. Ratcliffe told the right-wing Breitbart News Network that the agency “will get off the sidelines.” Senator Tom Cotton, the conservative Republican from Arkansas who is now chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, echoed Ratcliffe’s anti-China sentiments, saying that now is the time “to make China pay for “unleashing a plague on the world.” The New York Times reported that the study was authorized in the last weeks of the Biden administration by National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. Ratcliffe’s point was that the CIA had been protecting the Biden administration by not revealing all of the information it had on the origins of the virus. China has for some time been the leading source of international students at US universities, many of them seeking advanced degrees. By the end of 2019 there were more than 372,000 Chinese students in schools here. (The number now is 277,000.) Many were seeking doctoral degrees in virology and related areas. Between 2002 and 2004, the SARS virus, which was believed to have jumped to humans from animals, as the related Covid virus was later suspected of doing, led to nearly 800 deaths, the vast majority of them in China. (There were no SARS deaths in the United States.) There was concern in the American intelligence community that one aspect of China’s interest in encouraging students to get advanced degrees in virology was related to research in biological warfare. The focus was on the lab in Wuhan, a city of eight million and the capital of Hubei province in central China. It was known that similar work was being done at Fort Detrick, Maryland, home of America’s main biological warfare research center. One goal of the CIA, I was told five years ago, was to find Chinese graduate students who were planning to return to the Wuhan research laboratories after earning their doctoral degrees. They would be recruited as US assets. One American intelligence official unabashedly told me that the entreaties were both vulgar and seductive: “We’d tell a possible recruit that we could eventually get him to the National Institutes of Health and dangle a crested Rolex and resettlement in a Pacific Heights condo.” He made it clear that recruiting a medical intellectual with no chance of earning the kind of money and prestige in China that could be had in America was often done. The official told me that in late 2019 “the agency had a source in the laboratory at Wuhan” who reported—long before any official statement from Chinese authorities—that “China was doing both offensive and defensive work” with possible SARS pathogens and there had been a laboratory accident that left one researcher infected. The illness quickly spread. I further learned then that the CIA’s source was being paid by arrangement with the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland, which was one of many American institutions, including universities, funding the Wuhan laboratory’s research programs. The official went on: “Wuhan had a white and black side. We [American scientists] deal in the white with known pathogens, [American] scientists don’t know anything about intelligence. They just look at credentials that can be easily faked.” All of these factors made the laboratory at Wuhan a target for American espionage. By late November of 2019, I was told, “the American intelligence community knew that a virus had escaped. We also knew that they”—the Chinese bureaucrats in Wuhan and Beijing—“knew how to cover up a report.” At some point, the senior staff of the Senate and House intelligence committees had to be briefed. China was not talking and there was still no public awareness of the coming threat. “The Congressional briefing generated more questions and the need for more analyses,” I was told. There was also pressure in December to begin taking some public steps, without increasing panic, to warn the aged in nursing homes and retirement homes to begin doing all they could to protect the most vulnerable from the coming threat. “None of this was talked about in the bureaucracy. We were all hiding under the desk. We should have gone right away to nursing homes to take care of the elderly. The Chinese went right away to the elderly.” The potential risk of a biological nightmare was known to some members of the American and scientific community, but those concerns were not shared by the White House. During these weeks of impending crisis, I was told, Trump and his staff were ignoring the warnings about the serious health crisis in China and were busily arranging for a number of groups, in and out of the government, to do a study of the possible effects of a major trade deal with China. On December 13—the same day that the House Judiciary Committee approved two articles of impeachment against Trump—the White House issued a fact sheet announcing that Trump “had secured a Historic Phase One Trade Agreement with China.” As the trade deal was being worked out, I was told that the Chinese scientists had shared a study with American health experts dealing with the risk to the elderly from the coming epidemic. There was disappointment among those dealing with America’s real crisis, I was further told, because the early studies provided “no correlation between the number or people who got the virus and the number who died from it.” Was it going to be little more than a bad flu or something worse? With the American public still given little guidance, the medical and scientific bureaucracy, with input from the CIA’s inside sources, had put together an extensive study on the perils of the coming epidemic before Christmas that included an eight-page executive summary for the president with an annex containing more than one hundred pages of background data. An Oval Office meeting was scheduled. It was a disaster. “Trump went bananas,” I was told, when it was his turn to be briefed. “He thought he would get it. It was his worst nightmare. The economy would crash. He panicked. “The agency was horrified by the Trump response” and also disturbed by the fact that the early information about the virus, from the asset in the Wuhan lab, was still so highly classified that senior officials, including many who worked for the government’s major health agencies, “were not cleared” for the steady flow of agency analysis about the coming threat. None of the much needed warnings to nursing homes, whose elderly and often ill patients would be more susceptible to the Covid, took place. “We could have at least taken care of the elderly,” the intelligence official told me, with much bitterness, many months later. “Trump collected twelve groups as the Covid plague was becoming more and more alarming—on restoring the economy. “We should have at least gone to the nursing homes right away. The agency got information from the Chinese health ministry about the most vulnerable groups, notably who were more likely to lack good health care and often lived in close quarters.” In America, the official told me, the high risks would include blacks and Hispanics who, in major cities, tended to live in cramped housing. The key document that was made available during the crisis was the one-hundred-page annex to the executive report handed to Trump late in December of 2019. It was clear then, as the attachment pointed out, that limiting the vulnerability of elderly and poor Americans was key to limiting the spread of the virus. Those involved inside the agency on the issue, the official told me once again, were horrified by the president’s lack of response. But the official had held his tongue about Trump’s failures in the Covid crisis until he learned of John Ratcliffe’s effort to rewrite history because of the well-known fact inside the American intelligence community that the virus had originated in a Chinese laboratory. The official’s message was this: “Yes, Mr. Ratcliffe, China was slow to tell its people—and the world—about a laboratory accident. But there is also the question of why America, despite advance warning by a CIA asset in the right place and the right time—who is now safe—was especially vulnerable to the virus. Because of a president who was simply unable, and thus repeatedly refused, to deal with the issue” when it mattered. Invite your friends and earn rewardsIf you enjoy Seymour Hersh, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe. |