Mike Pompeo backs probe into what US knew of Wuhan Covid-19 lab leak

Mike Pompeo has backed a review into America’s intelligence agencies to examine what they knew about the emerging coronavirus outbreak in late 2019.

Former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo. Picture: AFP

Former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo has backed a review into America’s intelligence agencies to examine what they knew about the emerging coronavirus outbreak in late 2019.

His comments follow revelations in The Australian that warnings about the outbreak went unheeded in November 2019.

“I think we always could go back and should go back and look at how we collected and what we knew and why … that didn’t send the ­signal up the line in a way that would have led to a better outcome,” Mr Pompeo said. “We’ll have to go back and take a look to see what was known. We should also always remind ourselves that when you are dealing with the (Chinese Communist Party), the best place to go is to the dark side.”

A failure to analyse and properly process the vast amounts of intelligence coming into the possession of the US network has ­concerned Mr Pompeo for years, even as he presided over America’s foremost foreign intelligence agency.

“As the former director of the CIA, I was always worried that we were collecting information but we weren’t able to process it sufficiently timely and get that information to the right places,” Mr Pompeo told What Really Happened In Wuhan, a Sky News documentary airing on Monday.

“There are multiple missions, right? When you have information, you not only need the info and the capacity to take it in, but you need to be able to process it and get it analysed and to the ­decision-makers. I always worried any time I was leading an organisation that I was getting this processed information.”

The Australian this week revealed that the father of China’s democracy movement, Wei Jingsheng, first heard about the new coronavirus afflicting Wuhan in October 2019 and desperately tried to convince American intelligence to take it seriously.

Mr Wei’s story exposes the intelligence agencies to allegations that they could have acted sooner to prevent the spread of the virus.

Asked if he had any sense the intelligence agencies were taking seriously his intelligence about a new virus in Wuhan, Mr Wei, 70, said: “I felt they were not as heavily concerned as I was so I tried my best to provide more detailed information.

“They may not believe there is (a) government of a country that would do something like that (cover up a virus). So I kept repeating myself in an effort to try to ­persuade them.” Mr Wei said he was “very worried because … I felt that the West is not prepared”. His comments come amid claims the intelligence about the sick Wuhan Institute of Virology workers being hospitalised with Covid-like symptoms first came into the US government’s possession in late 2019. But this was only unearthed by a State Department team investigating the origins of the virus in late 2020, led by weapons expert David Asher.

Mr Asher said the US government and agencies could have known in November 2019 that there was a “disaster occurring ­inside Wuhan – inside their most important biological facilities related to coronavirus research.

“The whole world could have been different. It would have been like stopping 9/11 before it happened,” Mr Asher told Sky News.

The documentary puts to Mr Pompeo the question of whether the pandemic could have been prevented if intelligence agencies had paid closer attention to information coming forward.

“We’ll have to go back and look at what was actually in the possession (of the agencies),” he said. “What was the complexity of the information? What was the certainty of that information? What were the other pieces that were in front of them?

“It’s too simple to say, ‘Oh, they had this in their hands and therefore we could have stopped this pandemic’. I have no reason to conclude that’s the case.

“It could be that we had small data points. It could be that we had fracktiles of information in 2019. From January 1st, 2020 we were shut down completely.”

But there were other warnings about the activities in Wuhan. Cables sent from US consulate ­officials based in Beijing, who ­visited the Wuhan lab in 2018, documented a lack of trained technicians and poor safety protocols. This should have raised alarms, given this laboratory was developing a virus database of the world’s most deadly pathogens.

Another red flag was when the French, who built the BSL-4 laboratory alongside the Chinese government, were kicked out of the joint venture at the moment of the project’s completion.

Mr Pompeo specifically cited this warning as something that should have been taken more ­seriously. “When they kicked out the French they should have ­immediately gone on high alert,” Mr Pompeo said. The former ­director of national intelligence during the Trump administration, John Ratcliffe, who oversaw a total of 18 intelligence agencies including the CIA and FBI, said he did not know whether Mr Wei’s warning was taken seriously.

“I don’t have specific intelligence and I wouldn’t share it if I did because it likely has not been declassified,” he said. “But what I can and will say is that we knew there was some sort of an outbreak or a problem in late 2019.”

Speaking in defence of the ­intelligence community, Mr Ratcliffe said they did gather evidence that showed there was a problem in Wuhan at that time.

“The intelligence community I think really did an appropriate job at the time of gathering and drilling down on intelligence,” he said.

“The one concern that I had when I came in was, were they giving too much credit to the scientific community and not ­focused as much on what the intelligence was saying?”

Mr Ratcliffe said there was still top-secret material that supports the theory the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology that has not yet been declassified.

He revealed that he and Mr Pompeo had discussed what to declassify and what was the most important intelligence to release without compromising the safety of human sources.

“You have to remember at the end of the day, after Covid, that we need eyes and ears into the Chinese Communist Party and the bad things they are doing around the world,” he said.

“When you declassify intelligence you risk the potential human sources or signals intelligence where your eyes and ears into their actions are coming from … we put out as much as we felt we could safely,” he said.

Order your copy of What Really Happened in Wuhan by Sharri Markson here