Book Excerpt: How Coronavirus Could Be Part Of China’s Biological Attack Programme

In October 2002, the Chinese delegation to the International Biological Weapons Convention made assurances that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was not carrying out military-purpose biological research, was not manufacturing bioweapons, and was not stockpiling dual-purpose biological materiel. Yet the People's Liberation Army’s command structure in Wuhan suggests the opposite. That city is home to China’s largest network of civil-military hybrid organizations specialized in biology; thanks to the SARS and H5N1 avian flu epidemics, Wuhan has become a military scientific hub in the fields of virology, epidemiology, bacteriology and other biological research. 

With the 2016 reorganization of the PLA, Xi Jinping set up “decentralized” joint-army command structures, and one of them came to Wuhan: the general headquarters of the PLA’s Joint-Army Logistical Support Force (Lianqin Baozhang Budui), which oversees both the PLA health department and the Academy of Military Medical Sciences. The latter, being a PLA academy, also answers to the defence ministry—but in late January 2020, as the academy stepped in to take control of Wuhan’s BSL-4 lab under General Chen Wei, it was reporting directly to the Logistical Support Force that had set up shop in the city four years previously.

This very public takeover by Chen was misleading, however; the lab was already under military control, as it has been ever since its foundation. It’s not worth us going over the details of the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s purchase of the lab from France; but we should remember that the French security services had even been uneasy about the prior sales of lower-security BSL-3 labs, because orders placed with the French biotech firm Labover were coming down jointly from “the Chinese health ministry and the Chinese defence ministry”.

In France and China: Dangerous Liaisons, the journalist Antoine Izambard explains that the construction of the Wuhan lab fell to a PLA company, though fifteen French businesses were also involved. Izambard was one of the few able to visit the site, and his prescient book, published just a few months before coronavirus struck in late 2019, described the lab’s security deficiencies. In April 2020, he wrote a piece in the French business weekly Challenges, underlining the French authorities’ quiet suspicions about China’s opacity in relation to the facility.

These concerns, raised by the French and US intelligence services, are backed by very strong suspicions of the existence of a Chinese biological attack programme. Such a programme is made possible by the PLA’s hold over every BSL-3 lab in China (handling less dangerous pathogens than BSL-4 labs), and by China’s lack of transparency about measures put in place domestically to prevent a lab leak of biological agents. In June 2004, four months before the signature of an international agreement, [French foreign intelligence] informed the authorities that China was seemingly planning the construction of five Covid-19 more BSL-4 labs (three civilian, two military). At the same time as France’s spies were sounding the alarm about this, several French businesses indeed found themselves being wooed by China to construct BSL-4 labs separate from the one at Wuhan.

That year, 2004, the French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin authorized the export of four mobile BSL-3 labs to China; the BSL-4 facility would be constructed via the same arrangement. But twelve years later, in 2016, France’s interdepartmental commission on dual purpose goods blocked exports to the Wuhan lab of spacesuits adapted for researchers in low-oxygen environments. This was meant to be a simple upgrade of the version of the suits that had been delivered in 2010; but the quantities ordered made clear that this batch was intended for other, undeclared sites.

It’s understandable that Western intelligence is trying to identify these phantom labs. Everyone wants to know whether the novel coronavirus is of simple “natural” origin, transmitted to humans from an animal reservoir, or if it started life as an “enhanced” virus, created in a lab for civil or military research purposes, before escaping into the community. The risk of such an accident was a real cause for concern prior to the pandemic, including for the Chinese themselves, given the number of different biological research sites now in operation in Wuhan. This network of organizations is made vulnerable by its complexity. There is:

• The Wuhan Institute of Biological Products (CanSino Biologics), which has been involved in the development of Covid vaccines alongside the groups Sinopharm and Sinovac. 
• The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which has links to both the PLA and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
• The WIV’s BSL-4 lab, run by two French-speakers: Professor Yuan Zhiming, and Dr Shi Zhengli (said to have first identified SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19). 
• The BSL-3 lab at the Central Hospital of Wuhan, whose Emergency Department director Ai Fen was one of the first to sound the alarm about Covid-19, before “disappearing”.
• The BSL-3 lab linked to the WIV, close to the Wuchang university campus—a 200-metre walk from the food market where pangolins have been identified as the source of the Covid epidemic. 
• The BSL-3 lab attached to the university, where security issues have been flagged in the handling of samples.
• The BSL-4 lab linked to Hubei province’s Center for Disease Control, which is known to have sent Tian Junhua and a team of bat-hunters to collect samples of novel viruses the bats may carry.
• A more recent BSL-3 facility, based on the French BSL-4 lab, within Wuhan’s technological park (12 kilometres from the city centre), working in partnership with a monkey-supplier—the ambiguity here of the Level 3/4 distinction has posed security problems, and French intelligence has detected a growing “consumption” of test animals, suggesting that research is ramping up. 
• And, finally, these “phantom” mobile BSL-3 labs. The Western intelligence services are trying to work out if they are the same as the rest—whether they have been supplied with test animals, and whether they are permanently based in Wuhan. (The French foreign intelligence agency has even raised concerns that at least one of them might in fact be located beyond China’s borders, in an allied country such as Pakistan).

The Harbin lab, the Taiwanese theory and the Covid hackers

In early 2020, the Taiwanese secret services went in search of intelligence on the BSL-4 lab in Harbin in Northeast China, which is linked to the veterinary research institute there. The result was a press conference given by Chiu Kuo-cheng, head of the National Security Bureau, confirming that there was evidence of a Level-4 lab being “cloned” in the northern Chinese city. Taipei’s spies are the best informed in the world when it comes to activity inside mainland China, and Fang Chi-tai, an epidemiologist at National Taiwan University, knows it. In February 2020, he went public with a worrying question: did the Wuhan lab have samples of the novel coronavirus, since it is known to have been stockpiling a collection of lethal pathogens that might spread SARS or Ebola into human populations?

Whatever the truth, the CIA and European intelligence agencies are digging into the workings of at least three other BSL-4 labs copied from the Wuhan facility, as well as the mobile labs. These investigations may soon discover where the coronavirus really came from—either from a secret agent still on the ground in China, or else from a defector (the Dong Jingwei scenario). But states are not the only ones on the hunt for information related to Covid-19. The pandemic has provoked a global medical intelligence drive among civilian and military agencies alike, not only in terms of interceptions of confidential data, but also in terms of the theft of pathogens.

In July 2020, for instance, the FBI’s cyber division accused two Chinese individuals of infiltrating the IT systems of biotech companies working on anti-Covid research, and infecting them with ransomware. These alleged hackers were acting for their own financial gain—but they were also working for the Guoanbu. According to the Justice Department’s indictment, Li Xiaoyu, 34, and Dong Jizhi, 33, carried out their operations for the Guoanbu station in Guangzhou, using the China Institute of International Studies as a cover. The Guoanbu boss in Guangdong, Zhou Yingshi, made a similar cover claim when he took office in 2016, saying that he was part of the United Front Work Department.

The indictment alleged that Li and Dong had managed to hack into systems relating to various areas, including Covid-19
On or about January 25 and 27, 2020, LI searched for vulnerabilities at a Maryland biotech firm. That firm had announced less than a week earlier that it was researching a potential COVID-19 vaccine. 

On or about January 27, 2020, LI conducted reconnaissance on the computer network of a Massachusetts biotech firm publicly known to be researching a potential COVID-19 vaccine. […] 

On or about February 1, 2020, LI searched for vulnerabilities in the network of a California biotech firm that had announced one day earlier that it was researching antiviral drugs to treat COVID-19.

Excerpted from Chinese Spies: From Chairman Mao to Xi Jinping, by Roger Faligot (p614, Rs 699), with permission from HarperCollins India 

(Roger Faligot is an investigative journalist and author of many books on European and Asian intelligence, including The Chinese Mafia in Europe and La Piscine, the first history of France’s secret services.)