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 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.
Intelligence briefing summaries of Fauci’s June 2021 meeting with officials, made public earlier this year, said that Fauci promoted the idea that COVID-19 came from nature.
Fauci advised officials to take a look at a paper that outlined two lineages from two separate markets, and to remember that it took 12 years to link SARS to a bat, according to those summaries. He also recommended they speak to researchers who had publicly favored a natural origin, including Andersen.
Andersen and several others wrote a paper published in March 2020 that said a laboratory construct was implausible, even as they said in private messages that they doubted that conclusion.
Second Meeting
About four weeks after hearing from the CIA, Fauci met with National Security Council officials, including Beth Cameron.
“Beth wanted me to have an official briefing because of the catastrophic briefing that the amateurs from the CIA gave me several weeks ago,” Fauci wrote in his diary.
“There were no new surprises for me in the briefing except that it became clear that the FBI has no idea what they’re talking about since they are convinced that the origin of COVID-19 is from a laboratory leak.”
Fauci did not detail the reasons behind the FBI’s position but said that the reasons “do not make any sense” and wrote about urging officials to consult Andersen and other authors of the March 2020 paper.
“I also explained to them the multiple reasons epidemiologically and molecularly why it is almost certain that the virus evolved naturally from a species jump, even though I emphasized that I keep an open mind about the possibility of a lab leak,” Fauci said. “However, in this regard, I emphasized that just because two alternatives are possible that does not mean that they are equally probable. I believe that they understood where I was coming from and that it turned out to be a very good meeting.”
CIA, FBI Positions on COVID-19 Origins
CIA analysts as early as 2020 assessed that the most likely origin of COVID-19 was the Wuhan Lab, a senior officer told Paul and other lawmakers in May.
The CIA was considering formally describing the origin as a lab leak in 2021, but abruptly shifted away from that stance, an unidentified officer said in documents released in June.
Intelligence officials said in a declassified assessment based on information through August 2021 that only one agency—which was not identified—favored a lab origin for COVID-19. An updated assessment released in mid-2023 said the FBI, along with the Department of Energy, found a lab incident was the most likely origin of COVID-19.
The CIA and an unnamed second agency were unable to determine the origins of COVID-19 because both origin theories “rely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting reporting.” And five other agencies supported a natural origin.
In 2025, the CIA gave an update stating that a lab origin was the “more likely” explanation.
