What really happened in.., p.6
What Really Happened In Wuhan, page 6
CHAPTER FIVE
Chinese New Year
JANUARY 25, 2020, WASHINGTON DC
The rhythmic notes of Canadian pianist Glenn Gould’s rendition of Bach were playing in Dimon’s home on January 25, 2020 as guests began to filter through her door for her annual Chinese New Year soiree. For the best part of 30 years, Dimon had thrown an annual Chinese New Year party. There was always a jovial atmosphere, as people who don’t usually socialise would come together: spies from different agencies and countries, government officials, journalists and dissidents all mingled, finding corners for quiet conversations. At the largest one, she’d had 140 guests; her house was heaving and it took weeks to return to normal post celebration. Chinese Lunar New Year in January 2020 would prove to be an auspicious day. It was the day two influential figures in the Trump administration would make startling discoveries relating to the pandemic that was about to sweep the globe: Mike Pompeo’s China advisor Miles Yu and Trump’s Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger.
Dimon was soon to be 70, and preparing food for more than 100 people took a toll behind the scenes. She personally cooked 32 dishes over three days. Kale with tea-smoked bacon, sautéed pork with dried bean curd, sesame chicken, edamame with xuelihong, shrimp wontons, salt and pepper shrimp and Chinese-Russian oxtail stew. And for dessert, tangerine pie, chocolate-covered strawberries, lemon pie, and cold-pressed apple, date and apricot cake with honey. Her tables groaned with mouth-watering plates of food, as her guests ate and mingled throughout the downstairs rooms of her house.
Dimon lives in a red-brick townhouse originally built in 1882, that she renovated to ensure the rooms flow into each other, using her architectural skill to create a space perfectly suited to socialising. When she moved to Washington DC in 1995, people told her to buy in Georgetown, but the homes were twice the price of those in Capitol Hill and there was no parking. South East Capitol Hill was dangerous back then. Now, it’s gentrified. The back room of her townhouse opens out into the garden, but in the chill of January, no one dared go outside.
Dimon’s home is adorned with beautiful, unique artefacts from her travels: Chinese calligraphy on one wall; a large, ornate wall-hanging from an ancestral hall on another; a portrait of her by a famous artist in return for paying his rent; antique peasant bowls from a couple of hundred years ago that Dimon literally, on her hands and knees, dug up from the abandoned islands of Hong Kong.
Her New Year’s party was important this year. It was where she would make sure Matt Pottinger heard first-hand from famous Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng the true state of the virus in Wuhan. And not just the virus, but the virology laboratories and China’s classified research program – all the chilling information she had been carrying around like a heavy burden for weeks. The pair had to speak that night. She would make sure of it.
As she poured drinks and chatted to her guests, Dimon kept glancing at the door to see whether Pottinger had arrived. Naturally, most of her 100 guests had all walked in before he did. It was close to 9pm when Pottinger finally appeared. Dimon immediately took him by the arm and led him through to the back room, where Wei was holding court standing beside the sofa. She left the pair of them to speak, surrounded by other dissidents holding plates of food and eating.
Luckily, Pottinger’s spoken Chinese is very good from his time in Beijing where he worked as a journalist. So much so that he would go on to give an entire speech in Mandarin months later, in May – a speech written with the help of Miles Yu, Pompeo’s advisor.
And so, standing there in Dimon’s Washington home on Lunar New Year, Pottinger heard first-hand from Wei – who came from one of the Communist Party’s founding families – about the contagion and how it was spreading throughout China. It was eye-opening, a revelation. The conversation would change the course of history.
Pottinger knew he had to warn the President. And fast. “I will never forget that dinner,” he said to Dimon afterwards. It was a crucial turning point in how the White House would investigate and understand the nature of the outbreak.
In any other year, Miles Yu would have been at Dimon Liu’s place all night for Chinese New Year. The principal China policy advisor to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had begun life, like Dimon, in rural China, in the Sichuan province, under the communism, cruelty and famine of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. Outspoken and passionate, Yu was a regular at Dimon’s parties over the years.
She lauds his book OSS in China: Prelude to Cold War on the intelligence activities of the Office of Strategic Services in China during World War II, for which he relied upon formerly classified material from the US National Archives. “He didn’t pull any punches,” she says. “I bought 20 copies to give to all my friends. He’s a very good writer.”
But on January 25, 2020, Yu was swamped with work for Pompeo and could only pop in briefly to Dimon’s party. While others were preparing for a glass or two of bubbles that night, Yu, then 57, was in his office in the State Department in front of his two computers – one strictly for classified documents.
Yu looked up at the Chinese-published world map on his wall. It was no ordinary map of the world. This map had China at the centre. The very word China, or Zhongguo, is comprised of the Chinese characters for “middle” and “country”. The Middle Kingdom. Chinese philosophy since at least 1000 BCE holds that their empire is at the centre of the earth, and many maps in Chinese classrooms still place China in that position. This giant map hung on Yu’s wall to remind him on a daily basis of the nature of the tyranny he was facing. It was the first thing anyone noticed when they walked in. He liked it that way. It separated him from the 1600 other employees.
Yu had joined the ranks of the State Department on the Policy Planning team in late 2018. The unit occupies a powerful place on the seventh floor of the State Department headquarters in Washington. For 26 years, Yu had been a professor of modern China and military history at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. At the State Department, he was the only native Chinese-speaker with a devoted academic focus on the CCP, who could read, absorb and analyse documents very quickly. His unique skills would frustrate him at times, as he was overwhelmed with demands from senior figures across the US government for advice and translation requests.
Yu’s story is remarkable. Born in 1962, he moved to the United States in 1985 as a student, where he won awards for excellence at Pennsylvania and California universities. He says his move to the US was prompted by his admiration for President Ronald Reagan, whose speeches he listened to in secret via the Chinese service Voice of America.
“Although I was too young to fully experience the political madness, my childhood innocence was brutally upended by the radical revolution’s violence, absurdity, ideological shriek, destruction of life, social trust and public mores, and utter hatred for anything Western or ‘bourgeois’,” Yu said in a profile piece for The Washington Times, for which he wrote a column called “Inside China” over several years. “Having grown up in communist China and now living my American dream, I think the world should be incalculably grateful to America, because, as Reagan said, America represents ‘the last best hope of man on Earth.’ And I truly believe that.”
In the US, Yu supported the pro-democracy protests that led to the Tiananmen Square massacre, and helped refugees from Tiananmen settle in San Francisco. He gave a voice to Chinese dissidents by hosting a lecture series called the China Forum. Yu doesn’t like to speak about it, and changes the subject when you ask him, but I’m told his suffering at the hands of the CCP was immense. His fight against the Communist Party is deeply personal. Back in his country of birth, Yu was dubbed a “traitor of the Han race” by Chinese government mouthpiece the Global Times for the work he did for Pompeo.
Yu came to Pompeo’s attention very quickly; his perspective grew to be influential and was embraced by the Secretary. The pair often enjoyed one-on-one conversations about the best US policy approach to the CCP, and Yu had accompanied Pompeo to foreign international meets, such as the Quad in Tokyo.
In The Washington Times profile piece, Pompeo said his chief China advisor was “a central part of my team advising me with respect [to] how to ensure that we protect Americans and secure our freedoms in the face of challenges from the CCP.” Former Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs David Stilwell also contributed to the piece, describing Yu as a “national treasure [who] understands the difference between democratic and authoritarian governance and can explain it better than anyone I know.”
On joining the State Department, Yu made his presence felt by holding a China policy boot camp for senior officials with China-related portfolios. He was also given final clearance power for all memos to Pompeo relating to the Asia-Pacific, acting as a gatekeeper. His growing influence sparked internal jealousy and met with some bureaucratic resistance. While his analytical and policy notes could go directly to Pompeo through legitimate Policy Planning channels without anyone’s approval, at times his memos for specific action recommendations were unusually slow to make it to the Secretary. On a couple of occasions, they were even blocked in the chain of command. Yu developed an ally in Pompeo’s right-hand woman, Senior Policy Advisor Mary Kissel, who ensured his papers made it directly onto the Secretary’s desk.
In a policy sense, Yu’s biggest gripe is the misunderstanding in the United States of the true nature of the CCP and President Xi Jinping. “We have unwillingly succumbed to the CCP’s often blistering bluffs,” Yu said in 2020. “For decades, our China policy was carried out based upon an ‘anger management’ mode – that is, we formulated our China policy by calculating how mad the CCP might be at us, not what suits the best to American national interest.”
On January 25, in those very early days of the pandemic, when Yu glanced up at his map, it reminded him the CCP would always put its own interests first – over and above any commitments to international health obligations. It’s like Pompeo had always reminded him. “The best way to deal with the Chinese Communist Party is distrust and verify. You have to have a suspicious mind first, don’t trust them in the first place, and then you try to prove yourself wrong,” Pompeo had told him. “This was Pompeo’s policy and we all follow him,” Yu said.
Pompeo’s phrase is clearly an appropriation of President Ronald Raegan’s attitude to dealing with the Soviet Union towards the end of the Cold War. It was an approach Pompeo would articulate in public six months later when he gave a hard-hitting speech at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library that excoriated America’s “blind engagement” with China.
Yu sat at his desk and thought about the widespread Chinese social media chatter on this new coronavirus while the CCP had kept quiet. He thought about a report he’d read on Chinese media that mentioned every institute and hospital involved in the handling of the virus but strangely omitted the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Knowing how the Communist Party operates, this was suspicious, Yu felt. It set off alarm bells. Turning to his unclassified computer, Yu typed into Google “Wuhan Institute of Virology” and started reading through its entire website. He voraciously devoured its coronavirus research projects, noted its extensive international cooperation, absorbed the staff lists and the official announcements, copying the pages and taking screenshots as he went.
Yu realised the gravity of what he was reading – the world’s premiere coronavirus laboratory was in the same city as the outbreak of a novel coronavirus – and he knew instinctively what it could mean. The very city where the outbreak began is home to a Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) virology laboratory genetically manipulating coronaviruses in a dangerous way. Yu found the Wuhan Institute of Virology was one of only two BSL-4 laboratories in China. The second is the Harbin Institute of Veterinary Research, where work on animal viruses is conducted.
Alarmed by what he was reading, Yu saved essential pages from the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s website. When he opened those same links just a few weeks later, they had all been wiped. Deleted.
Yu whipped up a report with his findings, which included the discovery of a collection of virus-carrying bats by Chinese scientists in Wuhan, and emailed it to the National Security Agency (NSA) and Pottinger at the NSC, who was, generally speaking, on the same page when it came to China policy. Little did he know Pottinger was, at close to that very moment, obtaining equally alarming information from dissidents in Washington.
The next day Yu told Pompeo what he’d found. “I don’t want you to make any public statement yet about any possible connection between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the virus but I’m very suspicious,” Yu said. Pompeo took the matter seriously and asked Yu to keep him informed of any new developments. “Keep an eye on this for me, Miles,” he said.
Over the coming days, Yu continued his research at an intense pace. He investigated Shi Zhengli, the Wuhan Institute of Virology scientist who would become known as “bat-woman”, and a second coronavirus facility near the wet market. He found that the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences claimed in the past 12 years to have discovered 2000 viruses known to mankind, while it had taken the past 200 years for the rest of the world to discover that many.
Aside from Pompeo, Yu was disappointed by the reaction to his crucial discoveries inside the State Department and in other agencies. Some were incredulous at his claim the Wuhan laboratories could be linked to the outbreak. He felt that no serious action was taking place to investigate a potential link. “It was very frustrating to me that I sent the documents out and had no reaction back from the NSC,” Yu says. “Nobody knew what the Wuhan Institute of Virology was.”
Yu suggested to Pompeo, “Before our principals can make any public statement, I would like the NSC to compel the intelligence community to verify this.” Pompeo agreed with him and asked the intelligence agencies to corroborate the information Yu had uncovered.
Pompeo also asked Yu to compile a document on whether there was enough circumstantial evidence that the virus may have emerged from a Wuhan laboratory, in order to launch an official investigation. Yu set to work, night and day, investigating the laboratories, China’s bioweapons programs and the early whistleblowers, and scouring Chinese-language news sites.
“This was a time when everyone was busy responding to the Covid outbreak,” Yu recalls. “Very few people were looking at the reason for the outbreak, let alone to establish the culpability of the CCP on this. I knew we had to find out the origin of this, we had to find out who is responsible for the spread of this virus. The overarching point was, we have to find out if China is responsible enough to keep bio-research safe.”
It would be a several-months-long effort that Yu would finally present to Pompeo in April, with a long list of strong circumstantial evidence against the Wuhan Institute of Virology and an emphasis on the Chinese lab’s substandard and negligent biosafety practices.
And so it was that Miles Yu became the first person in the United States government to sound the alarm on the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But the American public weren’t to learn about the concerning laboratories in Wuhan just yet. It would be another two months before any senior figure in the Trump administration publicly confirmed a suspicion that the coronavirus had originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It would be decried as a conspiracy theory.
CHAPTER SIX
The Last Train to Wuhan
JANUARY 24, 2020: WUHAN
It is a very different Chinese New Year across the other side of the world for young lawyer Chen Qiushi. Standing outside Wuhan station, it’s six degrees Celsius (43 degrees Fahrenheit), light rain is falling and Qiushi shakes in the 10pm chill. His adrenaline is pumping. Wearing his leather jacket and grey skivvy, the handsome lawyer speaks fast and passionately. He knows the gravity of the risk he is taking, but he feels compelled. It is his duty.
The 34-year-old has just caught the train from Beijing, where he works and lives, leaving at 3.20pm for the five and a half hour trip. It is the last train into Wuhan. When he boards, the train driver warns him the service will be suspended for at least the next month and he’ll be hard placed to find accommodation. Roads into the city are blocked; flights are cancelled indefinitely. A citywide lockdown is in place. There is no transport out of Wuhan; no exit route.
“I don’t expect to leave Wuhan in the next month,” Qiushi tells the driver.
When he arrives that night, on January 24, he is nervous about what he is getting himself into. Qiushi didn’t dare tell his parents he was headed to Wuhan, at the centre of a terrifying outbreak. He was aware Chinese authorities were watching him. His WeChat account had been permanently closed a month before, on Christmas Eve, as a result of his reporting on the Hong Kong protests back in August 2019. On the front line of the protests, filming with his phone, he had suffered burns to his skin and been immersed in teargas.
Qiushi was banned from flying to Japan in December. He’d organised a trip for 40 friends and family and had looked forward to taking his mother, a primary school teacher, outside of China for the first time in her life. But as he was about to fly out, on December 10, 2019, Qiushi took a phone call from police summoning him to the station and advising him he was not permitted to leave the country. He farewelled friends and family at the airport, with police watching him closely to ensure he did not board the plane. Qiushi later wrote on Twitter that he knew this wasn’t a legal issue – it was a political one.
Living under police surveillance, Qiushi’s courage was admirable. His public commentary saw him come under pressure at his law firm and his contract was not renewed on December 31, 2019. But he wouldn’t be silenced. On social media he called for a boycott of Huawei after an employee was locked up for 18 months.
