U.S. spymasters have warned for years, mostly in private, that one of the most critical components of their information-gathering effort – known in spy parlance as human intelligence or "humint" – has been decimated by Beijing’s aggressive efforts to shut down these networks.
https://twitter.com/USATODAY/status/1400822900450545666
The CIA also hasn’t devoted enough resources to rebuilding the networks by recruiting Chinese turncoats who can pry secrets from Communist Party officials, scientists and others, acc to intvws with current/former U.S. natsec officials, congressional testimony and other sources.
The result is that the nation’s premiere spy agency is all but flying blind when it comes to cracking one of the most confounding and urgent global security mysteries of our time – whether Covid-19 originated in the wild or from a Wuhan laboratory studying similar coronaviruses.
“We should have Wuhan wired six ways from Sunday,” said Charles Faddis, former chief of the CIA’s Weapons of Mass Destruction directorate. “And yet 18 months into this, we're still trying to figure out what happened.” @USATODAY
A recently retired top CIA China spy expressed similar concerns to USA TODAY: “We don’t have good humint in China. And that is going to be a problem” in getting Biden what he’s asking for. @USATODAY
And while this "intelligence deficit" has stayed largely in the shadows, Biden thrust the problem to center stage last week by giving the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community 90 days to nail down the origin of the virus.
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