CIA bribed its own COVID-19 origin team to reject lab-leak theory, anonymous whistleblower claims

An unnamed CIA whistleblower has made the dramatic allegation that six analysts there were bribed to reject the theory that COVID-19 resulted from a research-related leak of a new coronavirus, according to a press release today from the office of the Republican leading a congressional investigation into the pandemic. The allegation was strongly rejected in a CIA statement released hours later.

A majority of U.S. intelligence agencies has so far concluded that the COVID-19 pandemic mostly likely started when SARS-CoV-2 jumped from an infected animal host into people; a wildlife market in Wuhan, China, has received intense attention from researchers as the potential source. But the Department of Energy and FBI so far have favored the so-called lab-leak hypothesis, even though none of the agencies has expressed high confidence in their conclusions on COVID-19’s origin. CIA, for example, had reportedly said it was “unable to determine” whether SARS-CoV-2 made a direct jump from animals to humans—or came from a lab.

Now, Representative Brad Wenstrup (R–OH), who chairs the House of Representatives’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, says his panel and the House’s Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence have heard testimony from a whistleblower “who presents as a highly credible senior-level CIA officer.” According to the press release, the whistleblower testified that only the most senior analyst of a seven-member CIA team investigating the origin of COVID-19 supported the zoonotic transmission theory. The whistleblower alleged the other six team members supporting the lab origin then received “a significant monetary incentive to change their position,” wrote Wenstrup and Representative Mike Turner (R–OH), who chairs the intelligence panel.

In response to emailed questions from Science, CIA Director of Public Affairs Tammy Kupperman Thorp challenged the whistleblower’s account: “At CIA we are committed to the highest standards of analytic rigor, integrity, and objectivity. We do not pay analysts to reach specific conclusions. We take these allegations extremely seriously and are looking into them. We will keep our Congressional oversight committees appropriately informed,” she wrote in the agency’s statement.

Wenstrup and Turner sent a letter to CIA Director William Burns, requesting documents and communications about the agency’s COVID Discovery Team, including its interactions with several other branches of the government and the pay and bonus histories of its members. A letter to Andrew Makridis, chief operating officer at CIA during the pandemic, asked him to testify in a voluntary interview on 26 September, the deadline given for supplying the documents.

The U.S. intelligence community has been reluctant to detail how its agencies have come to their tentative and conflicting conclusions about the origin of COVID-19, recently releasing only minimal information on their analyses in response to a law demanding the declassification of all relevant material. This limited release has frustrated supporters of the lab-leak hypothesis as well as those who felt that greater transparency would have justified why many infectious disease researchers and virologists still favor a natural origin for the pandemic.

A few researchers have revealed how they cooperated with some of the intelligence agencies. Evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research and virologist Robert Garry of Tulane University, who have co-authored studies supporting the zoonotic origin and testified before Wenstrup’s committee, both met with CIA agents probing the COVID-19 origin over the past few years. Andersen said that “several scientists were part of their team and they knew their stuff.” He asserts that the new whistleblower allegation “obviously is bullshit.”

Garry similarly says it sounds “ludicrous,” noting that the CIA agent who interviewed him “had a solid grasp of all the molecular biology” and didn’t give him any sense of leaning in either direction. “This keeps getting stranger,” Garry adds.