U.S. Intelligence Review Of Origins of Covid-19 Masked Deep Divisions

A car and driver had been readied to whisk Jason Bannan from FBI headquarters early one morning in August 2021 to brief the White House on a novel virus that was killing hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens and had stopped the world in its tracks.

- MICHAEL R. GORDON AND WARREN P. STROBEL

Bannan had been told by his superiors to be on hand in case the Federal Bureau of Investigation was asked to join a top intelligence community briefing for the president. But the White House summons never came.

Bannan, a Ph.D. in microbiology, had joined the bureau after the September 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington when the agency bulked up its expertise to deal with the threat of germ weapons, toxins and other weapons of mass destruction.

But for more than a year he had spent most of his waking hours on the Covid-19 virus that had seeped out of China in 2019.

Frustrated by China's stonewalling, President Biden had ordered an urgent assessment by the U.S. intelligence agencies and national laboratories on whether the virus had leapt from an animal to a human or had escaped from a Chinese lab that had been doing extensive work on coronaviruses.

The dominant view within the intelligence community was clear when Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, and a couple of her senior analysts, briefed Biden and his top aides on Aug. 24. The National Intelligence Council, a body of senior intelligence officers who reported to Haines and that organized the the intelligence review, had concluded with "low confidence" that Covid-19 had emerged when the virus leapt from an animal to a human. So did four intelligence agencies.

At the time, the FBI was the only agency that concluded a lab leak was likely, a judgment it had rendered with "moderate confidence." But neither Bannan nor any other FBI officials were at the briefing to make their case first hand to the president.