The report by Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee raises questions about how well prepared spy agencies are for future global health crises.
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A coronavirus testing site in Orlando, Fla., in June 2020. The report by Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee said U.S. intelligence gatherers did not adequately use their capabilities early in the pandemic.
WASHINGTON — When the first reports of a novel coronavirus emerged in late 2019 amid efforts by the Chinese government to conceal the seriousness of the outbreak, American intelligence agencies failed to immediately train their spies on collecting information about the new threat, according to a new report by the Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee.
The report found that the intelligence officials who gather secrets around the world did not adequately use America’s capabilities to learn enough about the disease that would quickly develop into a pandemic. The report does not describe, and investigators declined to elaborate on, what kind of intelligence collection could have been employed, but the United States uses electronic surveillance to eavesdrop on foreign nations as well as networks of human informants.
Committee investigators said intelligence specialists should have moved more quickly to focus on the coronavirus’s spread and what Chinese officials knew about it. Had the intelligence agencies pivoted more quickly, according to committee investigators, perhaps more would have been learned from clandestine sources, such as what local authorities or the central Chinese government knew about the threat.
“What our review found was that in 2020, the intelligence community was not well positioned or prepared to provide early warning and unique insights on the pandemic,” Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, wrote in an introduction to the report.
Nevertheless, the report did find that intelligence analysts — the people charged with making predictions based on both public and secret information — quickly focused on the emerging threat in January and February 2020. These analysts provided useful insights for policymakers and provided more effective and earlier warnings than public health officials, according to the report.
Committee investigators said that unlike public health officials, who are hesitant to make bold predictions based on incomplete information, intelligence analysts are trained to make predictions with the available information, no matter how imperfect it might be.
That allowed analysts to deliver advance warnings to the White House in early 2020. By late January, the National Center for Medical Intelligence said there was a chance of a pandemic, even though the World Health Organization did not declare one until March.
The Intelligence Committee did not review articles in the President’s Daily Brief, but reviewed other intelligence documents to get a sense of what the White House was being told.
Although the report did not focus on the origins of the coronavirus, which remain hotly debated, it said that resolving that issue would not help to prepare for the next outbreak. “Wherever this pandemic came from, the next pandemic could come from a lab accident or natural transmission,” it concluded.
The report by committee Democrats was, unsurprisingly, critical of former President Donald J. Trump, saying the escalating alarms by intelligence analysts had failed to move him.
During the early stages of the pandemic, Mr. Trump said the intelligence briefings he received on the coronavirus were inadequate. But the report found that while intelligence agencies could have performed better, by February they had “amply warned the White House in time for it to act to protect the country.” Mr. Trump’s public statements, the report found, did not reflect the stark warnings that he had received from the intelligence community.
“By juxtaposing the private intelligence warnings with the administration’s public disavowal of the seriousness of the virus, the report makes clear where responsibility for our poor outcomes lie, and where it does not,” Mr. Schiff wrote.
A spokeswoman for Avril D. Haines, the director of national intelligence, declined to comment. But in her public comments, including her confirmation hearings when she assumed the post in 2021, Ms. Haines has said she was putting new resources into better tracking of public health emergencies, to better position intelligence agencies to warn about emerging pandemics and other threats.
Traditionally, public health and pandemics have been the responsibility of fairly small agencies, like the National Center for Medical Intelligence, but the Biden administration has begun looking to expand the expertise to larger intelligence operations. Ms. Haines’s office has, for example, appointed an epidemiologist to be the director of global health security at the National Intelligence Council and named a senior adviser for global health.
The Democrats’ report said that while those steps were a start, they did not “signal a sustained, long-term investment.” The fiscal 2022 budget submitted to Congress cut funding for the National Center for Medical Intelligence, it noted.
The report took issue with material released by the State Department at the end of the Trump administration. That material cited workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China who had become sick in the fall of 2019. That information, the report said, did not strengthen either the theory that the virus was part of China’s biological weapons research program and spilled over to the human population during a lab-related incident at the Wuhan institute, or the theory that it emerged naturally.
Intelligence officials have said there is simply not enough information to draw a conclusion on the origins of the pandemic, but they do not believe the coronavirus was a bioengineered weapon.
But the Democrats’ findings came in contrast with a report released on Wednesday by Republicans on the Intelligence Committee. In their report, the Republicans said there were indications that the coronavirus could have been tied to a lab leak at Wuhan.
But the Republican report said the declassified version of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s report on the origins of the virus had omitted key information that “skewed the public’s understanding of key issues.”
Source: nytimes.com
