The current biased pressure about the coronavirus and the Wuhan lab has multiple costs. It is likely to impede public understanding of what is known and unknown about the origins of the pandemic. It is an additional needless complication in U.S. relations with China, especially if the hypothesis about the lab’s role turns out to be wrong.
Donald
Trump’s disdain for the U.S. intelligence community has been much in evidence
ever since his first full day in office when he used the solemn setting of the
CIA’s memorial to fallen officers to attack the press and brag about the size
of his inauguration crowd. Reminders of that disdain have included his public
siding with the president of Russia against the conclusions of his own
intelligence agencies regarding Russian election interference. A more recent
reminder is press reporting that frequent warnings about the coronavirus that
appeared in Trump’s daily intelligence briefings throughout January and
February didn’t sink in because Trump simply doesn’t bother to pay much
attention to those briefings.
The purge of intelligence professionals and
installation of Trump loyalists who are otherwise unqualified for the senior
positions they have been given at the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence are part of the same pattern. Clearly, Trump does not look to U.S.
intelligence to perform its proper function of providing objective facts and
analysis about overseas events. He instead sees it as just one more element of
government to be pressed into supporting his own assertions.
It thus
is unsurprising that now, as Trump is endeavoring to deflect attention from his
own performance during the coronavirus pandemic and to direct blame
elsewhere—including at China—he is trying to make intelligence part of that
effort. The New York Times reports that senior administration officials “have
pushed American spy agencies to hunt for evidence to support an unsubstantiated
theory that a government laboratory in Wuhan, China, was the origin of the
coronavirus outbreak.”
The
origins of the pandemic, including the possible involvement of that Chinese
lab, are legitimate targets for reporting and analysis by U.S. intelligence,
and the reported push may seem at first glance to be legitimate as well. But
there is a big difference between calling for a concerted effort to find the
most accurate possible answer to a question (“How did the outbreak begin?”) and
calling for material to support one possible answer to the question (“Give us
everything you can that would suggest the Wuhan lab was the origin”). As with
any other situation that starts with a conclusion and tries to find support for
it, the latter approach involves bias.
Intelligence
agencies will never have the resources to investigate endlessly every possible
answer to all of the important questions that come their way. In an
unpoliticized environment, they will focus their collection and analytical
capabilities in the directions that, based on logic and whatever early
information they have, are the most promising avenues for getting at the truth.
They will refine and revise their priorities as some investigative avenues bear
fruit and others turn out to be dead ends.
When
senior members of the incumbent administration exert pressure regarding a
specific topic, that immediately moves to the top of the agencies’ priority
list. So concentrated work surely is taking place now to dig up any scrap that
might suggest the Wuhan lab was the source of the virus. Almost certainly some
such scraps will be found—not necessarily because they get closer to the truth
than alternative possibilities about the origin of the pandemic, but simply
because that’s where the most concentrated digging took place.
The
intelligence agencies may, amid continued uncertainties, remain agnostic about
the question of the pandemic’s origin. An intelligence community statement
indicates they are agnostic now, unlike Trump’s contrary assertion that he has
a “high degree of confidence” the virus came from the Wuhan lab. Meanwhile, the
agencies will have delivered the scraps to the White House, which can freely
and selectively use them publicly to support the favored hypothesis while
ignoring any information that might point in a different direction.
The
administration has already displayed, in other aspects of the coronavirus
pandemic, a proclivity for running with fragmentary, scrap-like information
when pushing a favored hypothesis. This was true of the supposed curative
effects of hydroxychloroquine, until Trump and his co-promoters at Fox News
quietly dropped their promotion when too much information came to light showing
that this was a medical dead end.
The
pressure being exerted on the intelligence agencies about the Wuhan lab is
reminiscent of pressures that earlier administrations exerted to hunt for
material in support of their favored hypotheses, including hypotheses used to
sell wars. One such episode was the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, in which
the Johnson administration promoted the idea of a second, open-ocean attack by
North Vietnam on U.S. warships—an attack which almost certainly never
occurred—as a basis for mustering public support for what became the Vietnam
War. The push, not for the truth, but for material to support the
administration’s hypothesis was made explicit in a directive sent out to
military units in the area: “An urgent requirement exists for proof and
evidence of the second attack by DRV [North Vietnam] naval units . . . Material
must be of a type which will convince United Nations Organization that the
attack did in fact occur.”
Also,
similar was the push to sell the offensive war in Iraq by the George W. Bush
administration, which pressed the intelligence agencies again and again for
anything they could find that might suggest an alliance between the Iraqi
regime and Al Qaeda. The administration used the resulting scraps to spin a
tale of such an alliance—contrary both to the truth and to the intelligence
agencies’ own conclusions.
The
current biased pressure about the coronavirus and the Wuhan lab has multiple
costs. It is likely to impede public understanding of what is known and unknown
about the origins of the pandemic. It is an additional needless complication in
U.S. relations with China, especially if the hypothesis about the lab’s role
turns out to be wrong. It also undermines the important role the intelligence
agencies play in national security—in the short term by distorting the
allocation of intelligence resources, and in the longer term by ensnaring the
agencies in a politicized blame-deflecting effort.
*More:
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/paul-pillar/trump-administration%E2%80%99s-politicization-coronavirus-intelligence-150816
***Paul
Pillar retired in 2005 from a twenty-eight-year career in the U.S. intelligence
community, in which his last position was National Intelligence Officer for the
Near East and South Asia. Earlier he served in a variety of analytical and
managerial positions, including as chief of analytic units at the CIA covering
portions of the Near East, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia. Professor Pillar
also served in the National Intelligence Council as one of the original members
of its Analytic Group. He is also a Contributing Editor for this
publication.