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Washington Post, March 20, 2020
U.S. intelligence reports from January and February warned about a
likely pandemic
By Shane Harris, Greg Miller, Josh Dawsey and Ellen Nakashima
U.S. intelligence agencies were issuing ominous, classified warnings in
January and February about the global danger posed by the coronavirus
while President Trump and lawmakers played down the threat and failed to
take action that might have slowed the spread of the pathogen, according
to U.S. officials familiar with spy agency reporting.
The intelligence reports didn’t predict when the virus might land on
U.S. shores or recommend particular steps that public health officials
should take, issues outside the purview of the intelligence agencies.
But they did track the spread of the virus in China, and later in other
countries, and warned that Chinese officials appeared to be minimizing
the severity of the outbreak.
Taken together, the reports and warnings painted an early picture of a
virus that showed the characteristics of a globe-encircling pandemic
that could require governments to take swift actions to contain it. But
despite that constant flow of reporting, Trump continued publicly and
privately to play down the threat the virus posed to Americans.
Lawmakers, too, did not grapple with the virus in earnest until this
month, as officials scrambled to keep citizens in their homes and
hospitals braced for a surge in patients suffering from covid-19, the
disease caused by the coronavirus.
Intelligence agencies “have been warning on this since January,” said a
U.S. official who had access to intelligence reporting that was
disseminated to members of Congress and their staffs as well as to
officials in the Trump administration, and who, along with others, spoke
on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive information.
“Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other
people in the government were — they just couldn’t get him to do
anything about it,” this official said. “The system was blinking red.”
Spokespeople for the CIA and the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence declined to comment, and a White House spokesman rebutted
criticism of Trump’s response.
“President Trump has taken historic, aggressive measures to protect the
health, wealth and safety of the American people — and did so, while the
media and Democrats chose to only focus on the stupid politics of a sham
illegitimate impeachment,” Hogan Gidley said in a statement. “It’s more
than disgusting, despicable and disgraceful for cowardly unnamed sources
to attempt to rewrite history — it’s a clear threat to this great country.”
Public health experts have criticized China for being slow to respond to
the coronavirus outbreak, which originated in Wuhan, and have said
precious time was lost in the effort to slow the spread. At a White
House briefing Friday, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar
said officials had been alerted to the initial reports of the virus by
discussions that the director of the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention had with Chinese colleagues on Jan. 3.
The warnings from U.S. intelligence agencies increased in volume toward
the end of January and into early February, said officials familiar with
the reports. By then, a majority of the intelligence reporting included
in daily briefing papers and digests from the Office of the Director of
National Intelligence and the CIA was about covid-19, said officials who
have read the reports.
The surge in warnings coincided with a move by Sen. Richard Burr
(R-N.C.) to sell dozens of stocks worth between $628,033 and $1.72
million. As chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Burr was
privy to virtually all of the highly classified reporting on the
coronavirus. Burr issued a statement Friday defending his sell-off,
saying he sold based entirely on publicly available information, and he
called for the Senate Ethics Committee to investigate.
A key task for analysts during disease outbreaks is to determine whether
foreign officials are trying to minimize the effects of an outbreak or
take steps to hide a public health crisis, according to current and
former officials familiar with the process.
At the State Department, personnel had been nervously tracking early
reports about the virus. One official noted that it was discussed at a
meeting in the third week of January, around the time that cable traffic
showed that U.S. diplomats in Wuhan were being brought home on chartered
planes — a sign that the public health risk was significant. A colleague
at the White House mentioned how concerned he was about the
transmissibility of the virus.
“In January, there was obviously a lot of chatter,” the official said.
Inside the White House, Trump’s advisers struggled to get him to take
the virus seriously, according to multiple officials with knowledge of
meetings among those advisers and with the president.
Azar couldn’t get through to Trump to speak with him about the virus
until Jan. 18, according to two senior administration officials. When he
reached Trump by phone, the president interjected to ask about vaping
and when flavored vaping products would be back on the market, the
senior administration officials said.
On Jan. 27, White House aides huddled with then-acting chief of staff
Mick Mulvaney in his office, trying to get senior officials to pay more
attention to the virus, according to people briefed on the meeting. Joe
Grogan, the head of the White House Domestic Policy Council, argued that
the administration needed to take the virus seriously or it could cost
the president his reelection, and that dealing with the virus was likely
to dominate life in the United States for many months.
Mulvaney then began convening more regular meetings. In early briefings,
however, officials said Trump was dismissive because he did not believe
that the virus had spread widely throughout the United States.
By early February, Grogan and others worried that there weren’t enough
tests to determine the rate of infection, according to people who spoke
directly to Grogan. Other officials, including Matthew Pottinger, the
president’s deputy national security adviser, began calling for a more
forceful response, according to people briefed on White House meetings.
But Trump resisted and continued to assure Americans that the
coronavirus would never run rampant as it had in other countries.
“I think it’s going to work out fine,” Trump said on Feb. 19. “I think
when we get into April, in the warmer weather, that has a very negative
effect on that and that type of a virus.”
“The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA,” Trump tweeted
five days later. “Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”
But earlier that month, a senior official in the Department of Health
and Human Services delivered a starkly different message to the Senate
Intelligence Committee, in a classified briefing that four U.S.
officials said covered the coronavirus and its global health implications.
Robert Kadlec, the assistant secretary for preparedness and response —
who was joined by intelligence officials, including from the CIA — told
committee members that the virus posed a “serious” threat, one of those
officials said.
Kadlec didn’t provide specific recommendations, but he said that to get
ahead of the virus and blunt its effects, Americans would need to take
actions that could disrupt their daily lives, the official said. “It was
very alarming.”
Trump’s insistence on the contrary seemed to rest in his relationship
with China’s President Xi Jingping, whom Trump believed was providing
him with reliable information about how the virus was spreading in
China, despite reports from intelligence agencies that Chinese officials
were not being candid about the true scale of the crisis.
Some of Trump’s advisers told him that Beijing was not providing
accurate numbers of people who were infected or who had died, according
to administration officials. Rather than press China to be more
forthcoming, Trump publicly praised its response.
“China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus,” Trump
tweeted Jan. 24. “The United States greatly appreciates their efforts
and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of
the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”
Some of Trump’s advisers encouraged him to be tougher on China over its
decision not to allow teams from the CDC into the country,
administration officials said.
In one February meeting, the president said that if he struck a tougher
tone against Xi, the Chinese would be less willing to give the Americans
information about how they were tackling the outbreak.
Trump on Feb. 3 banned foreigners who had been in China in the previous
14 days from entering the United States, a step he often credits for
helping to protect Americans against the virus. He has also said
publicly that the Chinese weren’t honest about the effects of the virus.
But that travel ban wasn’t accompanied by additional significant steps
to prepare for when the virus eventually infected people in the United
States in great numbers.
As the disease spread beyond China, U.S. spy agencies tracked outbreaks
in Iran, South Korea, Taiwan, Italy and elsewhere in Europe, the
officials familiar with those reports said. The majority of the
information came from public sources, including news reports and
official statements, but a significant portion also came from classified
intelligence sources. As new cases popped up, the volume of reporting
spiked.
As the first cases of infection were confirmed in the United States,
Trump continued to insist that the risk to Americans was small.
“I think the virus is going to be — it’s going to be fine,” he said on
Feb. 10.
“We have a very small number of people in the country, right now, with
it,” he said four days later. “It’s like around 12. Many of them are
getting better. Some are fully recovered already. So we’re in very good
shape.”
On Feb. 25, Nancy Messonnier, a senior CDC official, sounded perhaps the
most significant public alarm to that point, when she told reporters
that the coronavirus was likely to spread within communities in the
United States and that disruptions to daily life could be “severe.”
Trump called Azar on his way back from a trip to India and complained
that Messonnier was scaring the stock markets, according to two senior
administration officials.
Trump eventually changed his tone after being shown statistical models
about the spread of the virus from other countries and hearing directly
from Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House coronavirus task
force, as well as from chief executives last week rattled by a plunge in
the stock market, said people familiar with Trump’s conversations.
But by then, the signs pointing to a major outbreak in the United States
were everywhere.
Yasmeen Abutaleb contributed to this report.
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