The spy agency intercepted conversations in China and received information from sources.
CIA officials obtained secret information about the high-level laboratory in Wuhan, China, that is located near where the first COVID-19 cases appeared, according to a newly released document.
A CIA employee named Camille Hartman told Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was at the time the head of the National Institutes of Health’s infectious disease institute, during a meeting on June 4, 2021, that the CIA had intercepted conversations in China, according to a copy of Fauci’s diary released by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on July 24, ahead of Fauci’s July 29 appearance before Paul’s committee.
“Her major point was that she feels but [sic] the Chinese have not been transparent about what was going on in their labs since there were no reports publicly of what they found out from intercepts,” Fauci wrote, including the transfer of pangolin viruses from researchers in Beijing to Wuhan.
CIA officials believed that the pangolin viruses were being used in a study involving transgenic mice, Fauci added.
That same day, researchers backed by Fauci were discussing in a private chat the possibility that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) was experimenting with pangolin viruses, according to messages released by Paul earlier in July.
“From the journo [sic] Eddie was talking to – ‘the pangolins WIV was using in [coronavirus] studies,’” Kristian Andersen, one of those researchers, told colleagues. “Wait, what? Do we know about WIV working in pangolin [coronaviruses] in the lab? If so, that’s huge.”
Pangolin samples were collected and stored at the WIV in 2020, according to a 2023 paper from Chinese researchers, and experiments on pangolin coronaviruses may have led to the creation of COVID-19, according to a paper from the Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19, a group that has investigated the origins of COVID-19.
Fauci said in his diary that during the June 4, 2021, meeting, the CIA briefers also conveyed that “they have information from sources that unknown experiments well [sic] conducted by the military in Wu Han [sic].”
Fauci said that the CIA personnel were “naive and uninformed” and that he felt that at one point, he was being questioned, prompting him to wonder whether he should have a lawyer with him.
“There is something very fishy about all of this,” he wrote.
The CIA has not responded to requests for comment. Fauci did not return an inquiry.
