NEW: Our deep dive into how the national security machine is staring down coronavirus, with new details about the intel community's role—it's extensive—and how NSC is managing the crisis without a global health security directorate, eliminated by Bolton: politico.com/news/2020/03/1…
CIA and ODNI have been providing daily coronavirus updates and briefings to the Senate and House Intel Committees, and are coordinating with NSC, focused primarily on whether other countries are truthfully reporting the number of coronavirus cases to the WHO.
The IC’s role is arguably more urgent now--with the epicenters of coronavirus in high-priority counterintelligence targets like China and Iran--than it was during the Ebola outbreak, where countries were generally transparent and welcoming of foreign help.
The spy agencies also almost certainly see an opportunity to exploit the crisis to recruit new human sources in China and Iran in particular, intel veterans said, particularly given the bubbling anger in those societies over their governments' mishandling of the epidemic.
But the intel community's tasking on this issue will come from NSC—& of the roughly 115 policy specialists there, there are currently just 2 people who specialize in pandemics, although both have doctorates, with at least one in virology. Both are housed w/in the WMD directorate.
