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- [00:04]
David McCloskey
For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad free listening, early access to series first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter and discounted books. Join the Declassified club@the restisclassified.com.
- [00:25]
Gordon Carrera
What did the CIA think caused the Cut COVID pandemic? And did Presidents Trump and Biden influence the intelligence community's assessments? Well, welcome to the Rest is classified. I'm Gordon Carrera.
- [00:38]
David McCloskey
And I'm David McCloskey.
- [00:39]
Gordon Carrera
And David, last time we left off with newly installed President Joe Biden turning to his spooks, to his intelligence community to investigate this question of where the COVID virus had actually come from and whether it had been naturally zoonotic origin, transferring from animals to humans, or whether it had somehow escaped a Chinese lab. The lab leak theory, which initially had been dismissed as a conspiracy theory, but which is going to become increasingly the focus of questions and of work by the intelligence community.
- [01:18]
David McCloskey
And yeah, one thing I should say is I, I had not appreciated this distinction until I got deep into this series, is that the lab leak and the genetically modified virus don't have to go together. Like you could have a virus that actually is a naturally occurring virus that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was looking at, had just collected, had just collected from, you know, a sample from a cave with bats or something, and then it leaks. So that's why just, I bring that up because I think the, the labeling of the conspiracy theory around the lab leak is in part driven by this idea that there was a genetically modified kind of bioweapon that somehow got out, which I, I think is probably not true, but we'll come up. But like the, the idea that you have a, a virus that's actually natural that got out, that was being studied. There is also part of this lab leak theory as well. Trying to get to the bottom of this is hard because there are a lot of, a lot of competing hypotheses. It's actually not just two, it's like two big ones and then, you know, sort of sub options off of lab leak.
- [02:32]
Gordon Carrera
And it's worth saying that there is a lot at stake, particularly at this time when we're in the middle of the pandemic in answering this question. I mean, some of it is about the practicalities of preparing for a future pandemic and detecting it and being able to respond, but it's also about the world and particularly America's relationship with China. Is there some aspect in which China is to blame for this? So the implications of this question are absolutely enormous and politically fraught. Because as we saw last time, you had a certain pressure from Donald Trump then in his first term to suggest that it was perhaps China to blame and perhaps some kind of lab leaks and a caution, I think it's fair to say from the intelligence agencies of being pulled in to politics. But that's to some extent exactly what we're going to see happen. This episode is brought to you by
- [03:34]
David McCloskey
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Gordon Carrera
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David McCloskey
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Gordon Carrera
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David McCloskey
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- [04:40]
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- [05:54]
David McCloskey
You cannot be here. This is A police investigation.
- [05:56]
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- [06:11]
David McCloskey
So the spooks we left off last time, Gordon. With President Biden ordering this intelligence community review on Covid Origins. And I think in part that is driven by, you know, the, the, the tremendous, you know, sort of need to know the answer to this question. I think it's being driven by the uncertainty that's swirling around and the political debate around it. It's also being driven, I think it's fair to say, by some intelligence that the community has gathered up to this point, including this, this very interesting piece of intelligence, to suggest that three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology had become sick enough in November of 2019 that they had to be hospitalized. So, you know, is that, is it a seasonal flu or is it something else? If they're involved in coronavirus research, could this, could this actually be a sign that the pandemic originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology? Now, you have some intel which obviously you need to look deeper into to determine its credibility and all of that, but you've got the politics and then you've got the uncertainty and the important intelligence question. So Biden kicks off this 90 day sprint to try to answer a number of questions around the virus's origins. And basically the idea is, can we answer whether the virus began zoonotically or was it the result of a lab associated incident? There's another question which is, was the virus genetically engineered? And there's a final question. Is it a biological weapon? And I think it's worth thinking about what an intelligence agency would need to have confidence in any of these assessments.
- [07:55]
Gordon Carrera
That is the question I was kind of wondering is how do you, if you're an intelligence community, go about answering that? Because some of it is deep science, which is, can you look at this in enough detail to know if is it genetically engineered or not? Can you tell, you know, can you find the original source of the virus and the trail which led it eventually to humans? But those are fundamentally scientific rather than intelligence questions, aren't they? If you're an intelligence collection agency, you're using your intelligence collection capabilities typically to target maybe organizations, institutions and people to learn what they know. You're stealing secrets, you're stealing secrets. So it relies on there being a set of secrets to steal. In other words, if there is an answer in China, then I guess you can point your intelligence community to finding that answer if you're confident it exists. But then I guess you've got to work out where it might exist, who might hold that secret of the truth, if it exists, and then how you get there, whether it's, I suppose, through different intelligence sources.
- [09:04]
David McCloskey
Yeah, no, you're right, because there's a, there's a lens to this where you could say, well, the intelligence community is, it's not the entity you want assessing the origins of this virus. Like you want it to come from deep scientific research by the, the medical or public health community. Right, that's, that's where you would want it to come from. Because the details on the genomics of the virus, you're not going to get that through clandestine collection. Right. That's, that's not where it's going to come from. But given, I think given the concerns about the way China behaved in the early months of the crisis and the, I guess, apparent cover up that the, that or at least the fact that the Chinese were not being fully open with the international community about, you know, giving access and things like that, raises
- [09:59]
Gordon Carrera
the question, have they got something to hide? Which is a classic intelligence community question.
- [10:03]
David McCloskey
Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So you'd think, okay, well, does the intelligence community, for example, have an intercept of someone from the Wuhan Institute of Virology or some national health institute that's talking about an incident? Or more likely, because you're probably not collecting, if you're using scarce resources, you're probably not training your SIGINT collection on the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Do you have a security official from the mss, let's say, who has himself or herself conducted the investigation of the Wuhan Institute of Virology? Who is talking to a superior who has written a document explaining what's actually happened? Could you, if you're a spy agency, get your hands on that? Would you, as another example, have human intelligence from someone who has access to senior Chinese officials who are receiving reports on a classified internal investigation on the origins of the virus? Would you have human intelligence from someone working inside, you know, China's biological weapons program that links, you know, with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and their research on coronaviruses and in particular on this virus to a weapons program? Right, those are examples of like those would be in the intelligence world, the closest kind of thing you might get to a smoking gun. You never have that in intelligence. But the closest thing you'd get to a really solid answer on the origins of the Virus is basically what we're saying is if the Chinese ran their own investigation, could you have penetrated that and steal their secrets? Right. So that's, that's what you, that's what you'd be looking for. So the intelligence community runs this by today, Sprint, to get to the bottom of this, we'll talk more about some of the detailed, you know, sort of findings that come out of it. They release it in August. The public version that comes out is two pages long. Not. Does not have a lot of information in it.
- [11:57]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah.
- [11:57]
David McCloskey
The more detailed classified report comes out in October. And in the assessment, which is prepared by the National Intelligence Council, there are three broad areas of agreement. One, the virus is not a bioweapon. They consider that to be inconsistent with the available technical information on coronaviruses. And they, they look at the public claims that have been made that the virus is a bioweapon and say these contain a number of technical inaccuracies and they omit key data points. So they, they dismiss the bioweapon thing right off the bat. Now, interestingly, there's no confidence judgment attached to this. It's just we assess. It's not a bioweapon. The second point of broad agreement, it's not genetically engineered, though. This is a low confidence assessment. Policymakers love low confidence assessments because there are ways to make genetically modified viruses appear natural and they can't rule those out.
- [12:54]
Gordon Carrera
I always think if someone says, I have low confidence in this assessment, it basically means I don't really know.
- [12:59]
David McCloskey
It's one step above that.
- [13:01]
Gordon Carrera
I think this is the case, but I don't, I'm not very sure. So the confidence attached to a judgment is really important.
- [13:08]
David McCloskey
The third area of broad agreement is that Chinese officials were unaware of the virus before the pandemic, which again, there's not like a specific piece of intelligence that is declassified to make this point in this, in this paper. But you can imagine that all of the agency's sources who are in China, all of the sigint, the signals intelligence collection that's being trained on different Chinese security and political officials, you're probably seeing, my guess is you're probably seeing a bunch of people saying, where in the hell did this virus come from? Which, which I think would, when you're tying back to the questions you're trying to answer, would strongly suggest that it's not a biological weapon. Because it's. If it was, you presume somebody somewhere might have said, oh, yeah, well, that's, we're actually, there's a weapons program here, and maybe that's part of it. Again, it's a deeply unsatisfying answer because you want to be able to pin this on the Chinese. And if the Chinese themselves are confused about where it came from, it's. That's harder.
- [14:12]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah. Because the idea that, you know, you've got an intercept, say, of a Chinese official going, where the hell did this come from? Or how did this start? Doesn't actually get you to answering whether or not it was lab leak or naturally occurring, does it? Because you could imagine if something leaks from a lab in Wuhan, they are not going to know initially, maybe whether it's leaked or not. They may not want to tell their bosses, they may not want to tell Beijing. So the fact that there's a kind of surprise about it emerging doesn't really get you anywhere. So what you have with that assessment is actually, I mean, the answer that they give is that both hypotheses are plausible. Natural origin and lab leak. But there are some disagreements, and I think this is interesting to tease out, isn't it? There are some disagreements about the level of confidence that different parts of the US Intelligence community have about this assessment.
- [15:05]
David McCloskey
Essentially, you have various analysts at different agencies who kind of can't come to an actual conclusion. So they don't say this directly. But I think you're probably looking at a situation where, for example, some CIA analysts thought that the zoonotic hypothesis was more likely, and some thought that lab leak was more likely. So there's no consensus inside the organization. The FBI winds up being an outlier in having a moderate confidence judgment in the lab associated hypothesis. Right. So the FBI is kind of out there and has a very distinct and higher confidence viewpoint in the lab leak theory right off the bat. Now, I think it's worth looking at the case that's made because this paper presents kind of the argument for each, I think. So if we start with the. The natural origins hypothesis, the analysts basically say, look, we're giving weight to the lack of foreknowledge that we see from Chinese officials, probably from classified sources. Right. But they don't say that they highlight the precedent of past infectious infectious disease outbreaks having zoonotic origins. Right. The wide diversity of animals. We talked in the last episode about that Huanan Seafood wholesale market and the fact that you have this whole menagerie of, you know, the animal trade that's in this really concentrated market in. In Wuhan. They look at the wide diversity of animals that are susceptible to SARS CoV2, which is the virus that causes COVID19 and the range of scenarios of animal trafficking, farming, sale and rescue in China that would enable zoonotic transmission. So they basically say, look, there's a whole bunch of different ways this could happen. And this is kind of. This is how these kinds of pandemics have happened in the past.
- [16:53]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah.
- [16:54]
David McCloskey
They also note that in many previous zoonotic outbreaks, the identification of animal sources has taken years. In some cases, it's never happened. There's also a precedent, I found this fascinating, for viral vectors to travel really, really long distances. And that is a point that basically says it's not diagnostic in any way that the Wuhan Institute of Virology is here, and this is where Covid started. It could have come from elsewhere. It could have come from animals that are being taken in from outlying parts of Hubei Province, brought into Wuhan to this market. Right. Viruses can travel very long distances, and that transmission vector can occur over, in some cases, I think, thousands of kilometers. So. So that's the. That's kind of the case that's being made by these analysts for the natural origins or zoonotic hypothesis, the lab leak theory. Though they place an emphasis on academic articles that are being authored by the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which indicates that scientists there conducted research on other coronaviruses under inadequate biosafety conditions that could have led to a lab leak. They also take into account the genetic epidemiology and that the initial COVID 19 clusters occurred only in Wuhan, and that WIV researchers, the Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers who conducted sampling activity throughout China, provided a node for the virus to enter the city. What the virology researchers are doing is they're going all throughout China and collecting, like, bat samples and samples from, you know, other animal species and bringing those viruses to Wuhan. So they were identified by these analysts as kind of a key node for how the virus could have entered the city. It's also plausible that researchers may have unwittingly exposed themselves to the virus during experiments. And the assessment concludes by noting that the intelligence community will need cooperation from Beijing to determine the origin of. AS the global scientific community doesn't know exactly where or how the first human infection occurred.
- [19:05]
Gordon Carrera
That strikes me as a problem. If you're saying you'll need cooperation from Beijing to determine the origin is. It's fair to say it is absolutely not in Beijing's interest to admit that there is even a possibility of a lab leak. I mean, at one point, I Think China was pushing the idea it had come through imported material, like frozen food. Right.
- [19:26]
David McCloskey
It was like frozen food that had been brought in.
- [19:28]
Gordon Carrera
I mean, there was a theory that, like an American, I think, sports team had come to China and they might have brought it. You know, there were all these kind of theories and it would be part of that politicization was China being accused of covering something up, acting very defensively, perhaps because it's being accused, perhaps because it's got something to hide, but certainly not being opened to a kind of joint investigation or an openness which would help you get that answer. She's immediately got a massive obstacle here, which means that, you know, I guess you're stuck doing spy work to try and get the answer.
- [20:06]
David McCloskey
I think the spy work is never going to give you the answer. And I'm just. This is, this is David McCloskey's hypothesis. But I think that the, the Chinese government. There's no secret investigation that's been ordered, I think for this very reason. I think. If you're Xi Jinping. Do you want an answer to this question?
- [20:27]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah.
- [20:28]
David McCloskey
No.
- [20:28]
Gordon Carrera
Do you want to know that it could be a lab leak?
- [20:30]
David McCloskey
No, you don't want to know. Because as soon as you know, you have a trail of paper and people who have that secret and it can be leaked to journalists or it could be collected by the CIA or maybe even, maybe even MI6, Gordon, you know, so, like, you don't, you don't want that to exist at all.
- [20:51]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah. So you don't ask.
- [20:52]
David McCloskey
So you don't ask. You don't ask.
- [20:54]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah. You just give out the order which says move on, nothing to see here. Which is exactly what, exactly what we get.
- [21:02]
David McCloskey
My theory is that, like, you're never going to get an answer to this because the Chinese have basically said we're not even going to create the secret that could be leaked or collected. Right.
- [21:12]
Gordon Carrera
That could be stolen.
- [21:13]
David McCloskey
And ultimately the, you know, the report, the first, this first intelligence community report that comes out in or is kind of broadly declassified in October of 2021 basically says that to confirm the natural outbreak, you're, you're going to need to get to the first cases, which the Chinese government's not going to do, to confirm the natural origins hypothesis. And then to confirm the lab incident, you'd have to either get cooperation from the Chinese or. And they don't say it exactly this way, but they basically say we're going to have to steal information that will yield new insights. And that information would probably come from China's own investigations into the COVID 19 outbreak, which I think is not going to happen. So this is a conundrum and you get to this point where I really think this is a great case study. And how when the intelligence community, when the spies basically say, we don't know, which I think is more or less what this thing is, we don't know. There's no consensus. When you have the FBI saying moderate confidence. But it's a mess of a intelligence assessment from a policymaker standpoint, I think it's a vortex politics fillet. Right. Because it's a hugely politically contentious question.
- [22:32]
Gordon Carrera
People want an answer. People want an answer. The public and politicians want an answer. And politically it may be useful for some politicians to have a particular answer. There's an answer which it seems some politicians might prefer or want, which also add to the pressures in this case. So I guess this is where we get into the politics of this and where politics and intelligence meet, don't we?
- [22:55]
David McCloskey
I think it's worth setting up a key character in the rest of this drama, which is John Ratcliffe, who was the Director of National Intelligence under Trump in 2020 and 2021. So for much of the pandemic, he is now the CIA director. And that'll be important as we get to the end of this episode. So Ratcliffe, he's a lawyer and former small town mayor. He was the mayor of Heath, Texas, population 12,000.
- [23:21]
Gordon Carrera
Is that near you? Where's that?
- [23:22]
David McCloskey
It's pretty close. It's just east of Dallas on, on a lake called Rockwall. So it's little like Little Township. I, I have never been to Heath, Texas, but if we have anyone listening
- [23:36]
Gordon Carrera
from Heath, Texas, you know, hello, Heath.
- [23:37]
David McCloskey
Much love, Much love to Heath. So Ratcliffe, after being the mayor of Heath, Texas, becomes the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Texas, gets a reputation as a hardliner, particularly on immigration. In 2014, he's elected to Congress. He'll wind up on the Intelligence, the Judiciary and the Homeland Security Committee. Those are different committees. Only spent a year on the Intelligence Committee, though. He's a China hawk, big China hawk and a major Trump ally through the kind of rocky impeachment years. And he is named the DNI in 2020.
- [24:18]
Gordon Carrera
Director of National Intelligence.
- [24:19]
David McCloskey
Yeah, exactly. Now, Radcliffe's name had been floated back in 2019, but he withdrew after five days about, you know, questions about his experience and qualifications. A point that we're having right now with the acting DNI, Bill Pulte mortgage man and it's interesting because past DNIs had typically been drawn from military roles, you know, or had national security experience. Ratcliffe kind of doesn't. Right. I mean, yeah, he's a political guy. Right. And as a result, the Senate confirms him on a 49, 44, like party line vote, which is in sharp contrast to Trump's first DNI during that term, a guy named Dan Coats, who was confirmed 85 to 12. Right. And Coates had national security experience as an ambassador and, and, you know, a long tenure as a senator. Anyhow, Ratcliffe is big on China. He's a China hawk and thus big on the lab leak theory. And in August of 2021. So when he's no longer the DNI, when he's kind of out of office, Biden is now. Yeah, Biden is now president. Ratcliffe writes an op ed for Fox News where he writes that the lab leak theory was not just a possibility, but closer to a probability or near certainty.
- [25:45]
Commercial Announcer
Wow.
- [25:46]
David McCloskey
And notes that he had seen no evidence during his tenure as DNI of natural spillover, very strong opinions. And he was a kind of controversial DNI. I mean, he had focused during his tenure on CIA analysis of Chinese intervention in the 2020 US election. There had been a kind of nasty back and forth with the, the intelligence community's analytic ombudsman that looked at this assessment and basically said that, you know, Ratcliffe head and the analysts said this, that Ratcliffe had outrageously misrepresented their analysis on China just because he disagreed with the analytic line that the analysts had put out there and kind of put his own warning in at the last minute. So he's got a, you know, he's got a bit of a China hawk mentality that is going to feed into the lab leak theory.
- [26:42]
Gordon Carrera
And it's interesting. So if we think about it politically at this point, he was in office, so he's seen the intelligence. He's now out of office. And it's fair to say that he and some other Republican hawks are certainly going to push the lab leak hypothesis and also start to suggest the idea that maybe even not just a cover up in China, but even a cover up in Washington, that Washington has been trying to avoid pinning the blame on the Chinese government for a lab leak and that the intelligence community's assessments have somehow been pushed, pressured, emphasized away from coming to that conclusion. So this is now becoming a political weapon with which to beat the Biden administration to say, you are not being tough enough on China. You are not willing to face the facts that there is evidence for lab leak that's what's kind of going on politically, isn't there at this point?
- [27:36]
David McCloskey
I mean, at this point you don't have the scientific answer to the question. You don't have the intelligence community standing up and saying, we have the answer to the question. So you have this massive gap, this void. Right. And the politics need to fill it. So very soon you have Congress getting into the fray. So House Republicans on what's called hipc, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, so it is the House Oversight Committee, decide that they need their own document. And they put out a report in 2022 that basically says that the intelligence community's document ignored important information and suppressed the lab leak hypothesis for political purposes. So this hipsy document makes the politicization claim running the other way. So it's the politicians and their staffers who accuse the intelligence community of actually playing politics. Which again reminds me of, of. Of the claims we investigated in our Russian election interference series on the CIA or the intelligence community kind of playing politics with Trump Russia connections to allegedly help Hillary. So it's a kind of similar argument that you have these really politicized kind of deep state elements inside the intelligence community who are suppressing the truth. And the, the Hypsey Report, I don't think we need to get into all of the evidence here, but they make a circumstantial case that The COVID virus, SARS CoV2, may have been tied to China's biological weapons research program and could have escaped during a lab incident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
- [29:27]
Gordon Carrera
So that's putting them at, you know, we talked about the different theories within lab leak. I mean, here they are going to, if you like, the more extreme end, which is that this is actually linked to biological weapons research. So not just that it was getting gain of function for health research, but that actually this was a kind of COVID secret program by the People's Liberation army which was somehow working out of this institute. And they present, I think, all kinds of bits of evidence for it. I mean, that's a pretty extreme end claim, isn't it?
- [30:00]
David McCloskey
It is. And look, I mean, it's worth maybe just setting a couple pieces of the evidence they present because, for example, they look and they say there's a 2015 book that was edited by PLA affiliated scientists. No, that's the Chinese military that discussed weaponizing engineered coronaviruses and the supposed advantages of deniability there. And the congressional report that we're talking about says, look, the intelligence community's public assessment never Mentions this book. This is a key piece of circumstantial evidence for that case. Why is it not mentioned?
- [30:34]
Gordon Carrera
Pretty circumstantial.
- [30:36]
David McCloskey
It is very circumstantial. And, and, and look, the language that the congressional Republicans use in the overall assessment, I think is quite soft. They don't say definitively that it's a lab engineered bioweapon. They say there are indications that the virus, quote, may have been tied to China's biological weapons research program and could have escaped during a lab incident. But that report is very helpful politically because they claim, they then go into some detail to say, look, the intelligence community's declassified assessment is misleading. They say that the intelligence community reported confidence levels for nearly every judgment except the claim that the virus was not developed as a biological weapon. So they say, why is that the case? The congressional report says that omission let the public assume that the question was more settled than the underlying intelligence warranted. They also say that the classified version dismissed or omitted relevant intelligence. It kind of reminds me a little bit when we were, when we did our series on Iraq WMD and the Vice President's office would put together reports and they would, they would weight different pieces of intelligence differently than the CIA would, for example. And so they'd have to, you know, come over and sit down and go through these reams of information to see, well, okay, who's, how are you racking and stacking the different little bits of, of intelligence? And I think in this case, you know, the Congressional Republicans are basically saying we want to take these pieces of circumstantial evidence and give them more weight than the intelligence community gave them. They also charge, the Congressional Republicans charge that the intelligence community refused to tell Congress which outside scientific experts, the ic, the intelligence community consulted on that assessment because obviously this is a scientific intelligence question. And it's not just like the China political analysts who are answering these questions. There's, there's scientific experts the IC brought in to help with the drafting of that assessment.
- [32:37]
Gordon Carrera
And we should say what they're doing here is not so much. Well, they're partly attacking the intelligence community and they're partly attacking the Biden era leaders of that intelligence community, particularly Avril Haynes, who was the Director of National Intelligence. So it's a kind of dual attack almost, isn't it, on the intelligence community deep state, but really on the Biden administration having failed to, you know, be honest and open up about, about, you know, scientists and about the level of evidence.
- [33:04]
David McCloskey
So maybe there, Gordon, with the intelligence politics in full swing. Let's take a break and when we come back, we'll see how a new CIA director finally compels the CIA to take a position on Covid. We'll see whether that's correcting the record on a politically driven assessment or creating one all itself.
- [33:23]
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- [34:24]
David McCloskey
So good, so good, so good.
- [34:26]
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- [34:55]
Gordon Carrera
Well. Welcome back. So this question of where COVID 19 came from is becoming increasingly political and increasingly fraught. And we're going to get report after report, aren't we, David, which is basically trying to score political points off this.
- [35:12]
David McCloskey
Well, that's right. The intelligence community will wade back into the Fray again in 2023 when the office of the Director of National Intelligence releases a paper looking at the links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the origin of the pandemic. Now this report had been mandated by a Congressional act in 2023 which had called for the intelligence community to declassify all information it had related to potential links between that Wuhan Institute and the origin of the pandemic. So the report goes deep into web safety practices, links to the Chinese military and security establishment, but it says all agencies continue to assess that both HYPOTHESES the natural origins, and the lab leak remain plausible.
- [36:02]
Gordon Carrera
Disappointing, right?
- [36:03]
David McCloskey
It's just, it's disappointing. It's, it's. Yet another disappointing piece of paper that's come out of the intelligence community. The Department of Energy has updated its assessment, you'll be pleased to know, Gordon, to a low confidence, one that it was a lab mishap. But the underlying intelligence that assessment was based on was never released. But the FBI still has moderate confidence and all the other agencies are divided.
- [36:28]
Gordon Carrera
I'm slightly struggling to understand why the Department of Energy is offering its intelligence assessment. I know they deal, they have some roles in nuclear weapons.
- [36:37]
David McCloskey
Well, they're tied in with all the national labs.
- [36:40]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, and all the national labs. Okay.
- [36:42]
David McCloskey
Everybody's got an intelligence agency. You don't have 18 intelligence agencies, Gordon.
- [36:47]
Gordon Carrera
This is America. No, we don't. And all with different levels of confidence and all arguing with each other about how confident they are in changing it. It basically gives you, gives everyone room to say, well, there's no answer, but hey, you know, someone agrees with me and someone less so, but who cares? Well, it's a mess. It's a mess.
- [37:06]
David McCloskey
It's a mess. And let's make it even worse because do you remember that piece of intelligence that we talked about at the start of this episode? Those three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology who had gotten ill in like November of 2019. And on the face of it, that seems to lean toward a lab leak hypothesis. Right? Because it would suggest that it's not the market that's the source of the virus. It's the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the market is probably a super spreader event. It's not the source. Right. So those three researchers who got sick, the DNI report goes deeper into that and it says the IC continues to assess that this information neither supports nor refutes either hypothesis of the pandemic's origins because the symptoms could have been caused by a number of diseases and some of the symptoms were not consistent with COVID 19. We have no indications that any of these researchers were hospitalized because of the symptoms consistent with COVID 19. One researcher may have been hospitalized in this timeframe for treatment of a non respiratory medical condition.
- [38:08]
Gordon Carrera
Again, I say disappointing. It's disappointing. So we're stuck, aren't we, at this point?
- [38:14]
David McCloskey
Well, so the report, interestingly, the way it's been used as a political football since the report gives a little bit of grist to lab leak proponents because you now have an intelligence community document that Comments on the Wuhan Institute of virology safety procedures, the genetic engineering capabilities that it had, and its connections to the Chinese military. Again, it's all circumstantial. It has, it doesn't make the case that it's a lab leak around this virus, but it can gives, frankly, it gives politicians something to point to, to say, well, look at these guys, you know, they've got this, they've got this institute lacks safety, their genetically engineering virus is there, they're linked in with the military establishment. Right. Again, doesn't make the case, but politically it's very helpful. So I think that DNI report, it's certainly not conclusive. It's frustrating as you've identified. I mean, there's a little bit more there for lab leak proponents because you now have an intelligence community document that says some negative things about the WIB's safety procedures, its genetic engineering capabilities, its connections to the Chinese military establishment. But again, we still don't have a satisfying intelligence community assessment on Covid origins. But in late 2023, a whistleblower appears.
- [39:34]
Gordon Carrera
Love a whistleblower.
- [39:36]
David McCloskey
Gotta love a whistleblower, don't you? The leaders of two House committees send a letter to then CIA director Bill Burns, friend of the pod, publicizing testimony that they had received from this individual. They describe him as a multi decade senior CIA officer. And the whistleblower claims that the CIA had a seven person team, although some of the reports have a different number, but a, you know, a relatively small team sometimes called the COVID Discovery team. And these were officers that had significant scientific expertise and they were tasked with assessing the pandemic's origin. Now, according to this whistleblower, six of the seven members concluded that the virus most likely originated from a lab only the most senior officer, favoring the natural origins hypothesis. But then explosively, he claims that the CIA is said to have offered those six scientists a monetary incentive to change their position to favor natural origins. And of course this gets framed in much of the kind of, you know, more right wing media, you know, environment as the CIA having bribed its officers. So it's a big claim. Yeah, very big. I will note, spoiler alert, the whistleblower is later going to change his tune on the bribery piece of this in particular. It's a totally preposterous claim, Gordon. I have to say, as you doubtless be surprised to hear me say that, that I find that no one at
- [41:09]
Gordon Carrera
the CIA would be capable of.
- [41:11]
David McCloskey
No one at the C. Who would be capable of bribery at such an institution.
- [41:15]
Gordon Carrera
But It's Go Bars. Sorry. Anyway, that's a different story.
- [41:20]
David McCloskey
This doesn't. This doesn't ring. This just. I don't know, this for me, doesn't pass the stiff test. The gold bars passes the stiff test. Ironically, that you have a really, you know, sort of crooked operations officer who set up his own classified intelligence program and is using it to embezzle tens of millions of dollars.
- [41:37]
Gordon Carrera
That makes more sense, more plausible than this.
- [41:40]
David McCloskey
That is more plausible to me than. Than this. The CIA, unsurprisingly, strongly rejects the whistleblower's claim in a statement that it releases within hours, says it's bogus. A number of virologists publicly doubt the story's plausibility as well. You know, one of the committee chairs who'd actually released this testimony or made pieces of it public acknowledges the limits of this, says, look, these are just allegations. But Ratcliffe, John Ratcliffe picks up the claim in an op ed that he writes for the Wall Street Journal that ends up with the title, although, you know, they don't write the titles right, but the title ends up being the CIA Politicizes Intelligence on China. And Covid. And Ratcliffe is careful in that op ed. He doesn't. He does not directly endorse the claims, but he gives them a lot of space. And in that op ed, he makes the broader point that there's a trend inside CIA to politicize intelligence on China and that the suppression of the lab leak theory is just one example. And he wrote, you know, when we pushed to declassify intelligence, exposing some of what the US Government knew about the virus's origins and the Communist Party's initial cover up, we faced constant opposition, particularly from Langley. And he says that every shred of intelligence pointed to the likelihood of a lab leak.
- [43:01]
Gordon Carrera
Every shred. Wow.
- [43:02]
Commercial Announcer
Okay.
- [43:02]
Gordon Carrera
Every shred.
- [43:03]
David McCloskey
So you have, you know, again, you have John Ratcliffe, who at this point is not back in government, who's out, I believe he was doing a fellowship at the Heritage foundation, among some other things, is really, you know, this lab league theory and the back and forth, the politics and the intelligence around it is a very live issue going into 2023 and 2024, which of course we
- [43:28]
Gordon Carrera
should say is also an election year.
- [43:30]
David McCloskey
Another election year.
- [43:31]
Gordon Carrera
And then in 2024, we get another report, don't we, from the.
- [43:35]
David McCloskey
More reports.
- [43:37]
Gordon Carrera
Because we love a report from the House Select Committee, but this is the Republican, a Republican led committee. So again, it's pushing the politics of it, isn't it? And the idea of Lab leaks. Right.
- [43:50]
David McCloskey
Because Republicans are now in the majority and there's this big select subcommittee report on the pandemic and they deliver their final report. And by the way, if you're listening to this episode and you're confused about the number of reports, I think that the, the number of different investigative committees is, is actually directly related to the fact that the intelligence community's assessment was so uncertain and ambiguous. Right. The. And into that uncertainty step the politics. And you have a desire and need by, you know, Congressional Republicans in this case to, to have official documents that back up the lab leak theory.
- [44:34]
Gordon Carrera
And this document really does push the lab leak theory, doesn't it? I mean, it's pretty clear that it thinks it's a lab leak. I mean, likely emerged from a laboratory or research related incident. The weight of evidence increasingly supports the lab leak hypothesis. I find it so interesting because the language, as a journalist, you're trained to look at this language pretty carefully and they're pushing people towards the lab leak. But they're also careful to say, we still don't know for sure. You know, it's interesting, isn't it? It's still caveated, but trying to really kind of push that argument.
- [45:08]
David McCloskey
And it is an interesting little case study in how the intelligence community's assessments are used in these political documents because they pull information from the ODNI report on the Wuhan Institute of Virology that came out in 2023, and they kind of strip away the caveats and the uncertainty. They ignore the principal finding that both the lab leak and natural origins hypothesis are plausible. And this report from House Republicans actually has testimony from John Ratcliffe who says, you know, that his bottom line up front was that his informed assessment as a person with as much access as anyone to our government's intelligence during the initial year of the pandemic has been and continues to be that a lab leak is the only explanation credibly supported by our intelligence, by science, and by common sense. From a view inside the ic, the intelligence community, if our intelligence and evidence supporting a lab leak theory was placed side by side with our intelligence and evidence pointed to a natural origins or spillover theory, which by the way, is what the IC assessments have been trying to do. The lab leak side of the ledger, Ratcliffe says, would be long, convincing, even overwhelming, while the spillover side would be nearly empty and tenuous.
- [46:31]
Gordon Carrera
It's so interesting that Ratcliffe's testimony is being used. You know, as someone who says he saw the intelligence because he was on the inside, his judgment is being used as one of the kind of key basis for this report's judgment. So it's still, you know, kind of compounding this political pressure to come to the lab leak hypothesis.
- [46:51]
David McCloskey
We talked in the first episode about this Trump statement about how, you know, in the early days of the pandemic where, okay, it came out of a lab in Wuhan, and I've seen intelligence on that, but I can't share it with you. And he's saying that at the same time as the ic, the intelligence community is putting out a statement saying we don't know where it came from, really, we're investigating all options. Ratcliffe is basically saying he's almost proving the point that many tried to raise in the spring of 2020, that the intelligence community was sitting on intelligence suppressing the intelligence that would make the lab leak case plausible. Ratcliffe is actually making that argument in his testimony here.
- [47:33]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, yeah. And then we get a, we get another review, don't we, by, by the end of 2020. Let's get another review because that's what we needed. No more answers, but more reviews, please.
- [47:44]
David McCloskey
Well, I find this one to be fascinating and frankly, a bit of a political miscalculation because in December of 2024, so after Biden's lost the election, it's his last month in office, he authorizes yet another review of the available intelligence on Covid origins. And this is done under the auspices of Bill Burns, who's the CIA director at the time. And I think this is a massive backfire because the bottom line from this new assessment is that the CIA assesses with low confidence that a research related origin of the COVID 19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin based on the available body of reporting. They continue to assess both hypotheses are plausible, but they've bumped up from basically we're not making a call to, or making a call with low confidence. And the reason I think this is a backfire or ends up backfiring, frankly, on the Biden administration is that, you know, I think the intentions are good, which is we've got this logjam in the intelligence community around the COVID Origins assessment. Let's have another look at it and see if we get a different answer or get a better answer or we get the answer. And yet it backfires. Because as the CIA increases its assessment to low confidence, you can you as a policymaker who is perhaps a little bit politically oriented now have ammunition to release the assessment, strip aside the confidence statement, and claim that the Biden administration has been sitting on this the whole time. That's the ammunition you're given. And as we'll see, that's exactly how it gets used.
- [49:29]
Gordon Carrera
But it is a big deal because in the one hand they're saying, yeah, it's low confidence, but a research related origin.
- [49:35]
David McCloskey
They've changed it. Yeah.
- [49:36]
Gordon Carrera
Is more likely than the natural origin. I mean, but with low confidence. So it's like the most frustrating situation, but it is a shift, but just with low confidence. But you're right, that provides the ammunition for the new incoming Trump administration to basically be able to go, well, the CIA were hiding the fact that they actually did think it might be something that came out of a lab.
- [50:01]
David McCloskey
You know, when you dig into, like, why did the assessment change? The conclusion was not based on fresh intelligence, that's clear. But it was based on analysis of the spread of the virus, its scientific properties, and the working conditions of China's virology labs. So again, there's not a, it wouldn't be low confidence if there were really, really. If there was really good scientific information or if there actually had been a Chinese investigation in secret into the origins of the virus that somehow CIA got access to, you'd probably have higher than low confidence.
- [50:37]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah.
- [50:38]
David McCloskey
So again, it's, this is, this is very unsatisfying. But, but it, as I said earlier, this is enough because it is declassified and released on the first day of the new Trump administration by incoming CIA Director John Radcliffe.
- [50:52]
Gordon Carrera
None other than John Ratcliffe.
- [50:54]
David McCloskey
None other than John Radcliffe. And Ratcliffe said he released this because he wanted CIA off the sidelines. His words at the origins debate and the release of the assessment, I thought this was fascinating. Was meant to restore Americans trust in our own institutions. So I think that is a strong implication that the CIA, the intelligence community more broadly, had been covering something up.
- [51:17]
Gordon Carrera
So. Which fits in with the new Trump administration deep state narrative of intelligence community, which under Biden had been turned into a political tool and had not been willing to confront the truth about things. So, you know, the politicization is absolutely there. One thing we should, we should talk about is the whistleblower, because you tease that we'll hear a bit more about him. We do learn who he is, don't we? And what actually was the situation with him?
- [51:46]
David McCloskey
We do, because, I mean, as recently as last month, so May of 2026, the whistleblower, whose name is James Erdman III, has been submitting testimony to a congressional committee that's being chaired by Rand Paul. And Erdman, he's a career CIA operations officer, I think he joined in 2013, who from March of 2025 to April of 2026 had been on an assignment to the Directors Initiatives Group Group, which is this task force that Tulsi Gabbard was running over at the DNI and had been stood up to kind of look at the implementation of a number of Trump's executive orders on declassification, the JFK assassination. And one of them was Covid Origins. And this whistleblower, James Erdman, his core claim was that the CIA's scientific analysts repeatedly concluded that a lab leak was the most likely origin. And that manager is none of whom were scientific subject matter experts overrode them. And he says that the agency had an effort ongoing in 2022 and 2023 to do a relook at the findings from that initial Biden era. 90 day sprint team gets assigned. He says it's seven technical experts and three generalist analysts and that eight of the 10 had supported the lab leak at low confidence, one at medium. But that when a draft that was looking like it was going to head toward a lab leak assessment reached the front office, it got changed that managers changed the analytic line to something like we may never precisely know the origin of the virus. And Erdman says that the changes were made at 1:53am with track changes that don't show who made them and that the precisely wording was chosen to discourage further inquiry.
- [53:43]
Gordon Carrera
And it's like a kind of Agatha Christie mystery. Who was in the office at 1:53am who with with anonymously changed a document to alter the conclusions. Can we find the suspect? You need Poirot or someone to, to do it. And what about the bribery claims? He claimed. He walks those claimed about bribery. He walks them back.
- [54:02]
David McCloskey
Okay, he walks those back. And, and actually, you know, as when I was first reading the accounts of the bribery claims, I thought that he was probably referring to exceptional Performance Awards, which are things you get, you know, if you're on a task force that does something important, everyone you know, could get a. It used to be that they gave you gift certificates to restaurants actually, and those were really highly prized. But they stopped doing that and now they have, you know, these, these awards, it's like a mini, mini bonus. And his account, which again he changes his tune on this, says that the lab leak analyst received a $1,500 exceptional performance award. Well, one non specialist who actually favored the natural origins theory received four times that amount. So that claim kind of falls apart and he basically documents it's similar to the congressional report, kind of the congressional oversight reports that have come out, because he basically highlights some instances where information, some of it circumstantial, that leans toward the lab leak hypothesis was not included in intelligence reports. So I mean, one of them he mentioned was that, you know, there was a national lab report done by the Department of Energy back in May of 2020 that, for example, found all of the preconditions for a lab leak existed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And he says this didn't make it into any intelligence community products in 2020. So why is that right? Open question.
- [55:36]
Gordon Carrera
It's interesting though, because as well, back to politics, Erdman, this whistleblower also seems to have a political viewpoint. Is that fair to say?
- [55:47]
David McCloskey
I think that's fair to say. He's the. He's the co founder of Feds for Freedom, which is we will love freedom. We do love freedom. It's a group of federal employees built around opposing COVID vaccine mandates. He's also a very vocal Dr. Anthony Fauci critic. I think maybe even more important than his political leanings are that most of his testimony is secondhand and is cited to other unnamed whistleblowers. So he's. We have a sort of chain of custody in this information that you may not have confidence in because you can't get to the ultimate source, which is a problem in the intelligence world.
- [56:28]
Gordon Carrera
And you're back to politics because, you know, as you said, he. I mean, we know whether he's got a political agenda. We can't kind of impute that. But he's linked to groups which, you know, oppose vaccines and perhaps do have an agenda and certainly is his. His views are being used as politics. So once again, you just have this feeling that politics has kind of soured all of the relationships and all of the discussions at the heart of this subject, increasingly.
- [56:58]
David McCloskey
So it's, it's an unsatisfying. I find this to be a very unsatisfying conclusion because the whole thing is just an absolute mess.
- [57:07]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah.
- [57:08]
David McCloskey
But for me, this is a great case study in how difficult it can be what you are. I mean, like us now, we're sitting outside of the intelligence community. We don't have firsthand access to this information because the key question is, well, who politicized it? Do we think it was the politicians or do we think it was people inside the intelligence community with a political agenda? You know, that's the war over. This question comes down to that. And I find there's no, there's not going to be diagnostic, very clear information that comes out, which I think is part of the point. You know, I think it's part of the political war around this is you make it very hard to get to the bottom of this and create a swirl of information and additional reports that have all kinds of, you know, high to low quality of information. You throw this stuff in, put it out there, and make it really hard for people to know what actually happened or what the truth might be.
- [58:12]
Gordon Carrera
I do think that moment where Donald Trump, President Trump initially, when Covid starts says, I think this is lab leak, and starts to push the direction, immediately injects a level of politics into it. And I remember what was so interesting as a journalist covering it was that then everyone went, well, he's only saying that because he wants to bash China, because that's what he does, and we don't always believe what he says. But then the frustration of what's the evidence, the lack of evidence, the fact that there was evidence but it wasn't being seen properly just creates this confusion where it becomes impossible to see this through anything but a political lens. It feels like, you know, it feels like you've got to take sides, like with so many of these questions. And if you take sides, you're taking a view on whether you agree with Donald Trump or disagree with Donald Trump, or whether you think there's a deep state or not, or whether you think China is good or bad. And immediately, rather than kind of looking at it objectively, you end up having to take a side in a polarized debate. And I think it's that way in which intelligence and politics have got mixed and polarized, which is the problem. And I think this is a perfect example of that. And this debate about that where you, you end up with two camps opposing each other and, and, and, and looking for evidence which supports their position. And I don't know which one is true, but I know that's not. All I know is that that's not a healthy camp thing.
- [59:49]
David McCloskey
You know, if I were to put my, you know, more conspiratorial hat on for a second and say, well, how, how would we know if there had actually been an effort inside the CIA or any other element of the intelligence community to kind of, to suppress a lab leak theory? Politicization is really hard to see. It's, it, it, it, it's, it's hard to confirm. It's very hard to pin down. So, you know, they're going, what this whistleblower said like, that would be a pretty stark. Even that can't really be proven, but that would be a stark example of, you know, a manager twisting the arm of six, seven analysts to say, change your tune. It could be what to an outsider looks like politicization, saying, oh, why didn't you include this report or that report in some kind of official assessment? Can also be the natural outgrowth of a bureaucratic process and an intelligence process to like, make sense of a really complicated world and try to weight information appropriately. And to an outsider, it's like it could look, the outcome could look sort of, it could look political, but in fact, the process itself was, was anything but. So it's not, it's not the kind of question we're ever going to get an answer to, but probably much like Covid Origins itself. But I think that this has been a good case study in how intelligence and politics are, how they interact with each other. And I think, frankly, something that we're likely to see a lot more of in the future over really important intelligence questions like the nature of COVID which
- [61:35]
Gordon Carrera
I think does not necessarily bode well. And I'm afraid if you were hoping for an answer to the origins of COVID I don't think we've got one. I'm not sure we'll ever get one. That's, that's also, I just think, you know, if there was an answer somewhere in China, I think it's been well suppressed. I don't think it's in their interest, as you said, to discover it. So I think it's going to continue to be a mystery rather than a secret that can be uncovered and as a result, I think, open to politics and more politicization, you know, which is a bit of a tragedy when it is, you know, Covid was something which really important.
- [62:12]
David McCloskey
It's a really important.
- [62:13]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah. And we may never get to the bottom of it.
- [62:16]
David McCloskey
Yeah, well, we, we hope you've enjoyed this deep dive into the different theories around Covid's origins, the intelligence story around it. You know, as always, you don't have to wait to get these series. You know, you can just go to the restisclassified.com, sign up for the Declassified Club there. All sorts of goodies. Hope you've enjoyed this one and we will. See you next time.
- [62:38]
Gordon Carrera
See you next time.
- [62:44]
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