From the Wall Street Journal via MSN Dec 26:
A car and driver had been readied to whisk Jason Bannan from FBI headquarters early one morning in August 2021 to brief the White House on a novel virus that was killing hundreds of thousands of Americans and had stopped the world in its tracks.
Bannan had been told by his superiors to be on hand in case the Federal Bureau of Investigation was asked to join a top intelligence community briefing for the president. But the White House summons never came.
Bannan, a Ph.D. in microbiology, had joined the bureau after the September 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington when the agency bulked up its expertise to deal with the threat of germ weapons, toxins and other weapons of mass destruction.
But for more than a year he had spent most of his waking hours on the Covid-19 virus that had seeped out of China in 2019.
Frustrated by China’s stonewalling, President Biden had ordered an urgent assessment by the U.S. intelligence agencies and national laboratories on whether the virus had leapt from an animal to a human or had escaped from a Chinese lab that had been doing extensive work on coronaviruses.
The dominant view within the intelligence community was clear when Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, and a couple of her senior analysts, briefed Biden and his top aides on Aug. 24. The National Intelligence Council, a body of senior intelligence officers who reported to Haines and that organized the intelligence review, had concluded with “low confidence” that Covid-19 had emerged when the virus leapt from an animal to a human. So did four intelligence agencies.At the time, the FBI was the only agency that concluded a lab leak was likely, a judgment it had rendered with “moderate confidence.” But neither Bannan nor any other FBI officials were at the briefing to make their case first hand to the president.
“Being the only agency that assessed that a laboratory origin was more likely, and the agency that expressed the highest level of confidence in its analysis of the source of the pandemic, we anticipated the FBI would be asked to attend the briefing,” Bannan recalled in his first on-the-record interview on the subject. “I find it surprising that the White House didn’t ask.”
A spokeswoman for the Director of National Intelligence’s office said that it wasn’t standard practice to invite representatives from individual agencies to briefings for the president and that divergent views within the intelligence community were fairly represented.
“The Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Intelligence Council’s work on Covid-19 origins complied with all of the Intelligence Community’s analytic standards, including objectivity,” the spokeswoman said.
But an investigation by The Wall Street Journal shows that the disagreements among intelligence experts over what should be included in the report ran deeper than is publicly known. Nor were the FBI scientists the only ones who believed that the intelligence directorate’s review didn’t tell the whole story.
Three scientists at the National Center for Medical Intelligence, part of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, conducted a scientific study that concluded that Covid-19 was manipulated in a laboratory in a risky research effort. But that analysis was at odds with the assessment of their parent agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and wasn’t incorporated in the report presented to Biden.
The DIA Inspector General’s office opened an inquiry in the spring into whether the scientists’ assessment was mishandled or suppressed, people familiar with the matter said. A spokesman for the agency declined to comment on whether this inquiry was continuing, had been completed and what it might have included.
Five years after Covid-19 first emerged, the origin of the virus that killed more than 1.2 million Americans and over seven million worldwide has yet to be established. The pace of U.S. intelligence investigation has slackened, as many intelligence analysts who were assigned to the crash effort have shifted to other priorities.
Congressional efforts to establish a national task force to investigate the origin and response to Covid-19 that would be styled after the 9/11 Commission floundered, a victim of political infighting. Senate and House committees that dug into the pandemic unearthed some significant leads but their work often became mired in partisan attacks.
Now some current and former officials say a fresh look is needed, including at the analysis that wasn’t included in the 2021 intelligence report.
‘The sprint’
The U.S. was deep in the grip of the pandemic in May 2021 when Biden ordered an urgent study by the intelligence community into Covid’s origins, which he said should be completed in 90 days. The effort became known as the “90-day sprint.”
At that point, the question of the virus’s origins was dividing the scientific community. The debate came down to two prominent theories. The zoonotic theory held that the Covid virus, like other deadly pathogens before it, had jumped to humans from an infected animal, possibly as a result of China’s extensive wildlife animal trade. The other scenario, known as “lab leak,” was based on the idea that the virus had escaped from a research facility, such as the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which conducted coronavirus research.
The debate over the virus’s origins was politically divisive. Then-President Trump said in May 2020 that he had evidence that the virus had emerged from a Chinese lab, but insisted the information was too sensitive to disclose. Trump’s critics said the White House was trying to divert attention from its management of the response to the pandemic.
Those two theories have also divided the scientific community. In February 2020, more than two dozen scientists published a statement in the medical journal Lancet, calling the lab leak hypothesis a conspiracy theory that would jeopardize global cooperation in the struggle against the virus. One of the authors was Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that has worked extensively on coronavirus research with the Wuhan institute.
That statement was followed a month later by a March 2020 paper on the “proximal origins” of Covid-19, in which Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute and four other scientists argued that the virus wasn’t “purposefully manipulated” in the laboratory and had almost certainly had natural origins.
But the lab theory has gained credibility. Ralph Baric, a professor at the University of North Carolina who had done pioneering work on coronaviruses with Shi Zhengli, the Wuhan institute’s leading bat coronavirus expert, told Congress earlier this year that the facility’s procedures for carrying research on bat viruses was “irresponsible” since it was done in a laboratory with inadequate precautions for containing biological agents.
By the time Biden ordered his review in 2021, two U.S. intelligence organizations supported the zoonotic theory, and one, the FBI, suspected a lab mishap. Other intelligence agencies said at the time they didn’t have enough information to render a judgment.
The intelligence agencies that drilled into the issue brought a range of capabilities, from the National Security Agency, which intercepts foreign communications, to the FBI, which has a cadre of experts, including some who worked in the National Bioforensic Analysis Center, a laboratory for handling biological agents at Fort Detrick, Md.
One of those experts was Bannan, who had a doctorate from the University of Arizona. He was serving as a senior scientist in an agency lab in Quantico, Va., when he got a call from a superior who wanted to know if he was prepared to come to work at the bureau’s headquarters for the directorate for weapons of mass destruction....
....MUCH MORE
There are a lot of secrets just waiting to be exposed.
