CIA hacked servers at Wuhan Institute that worked on coronavirus

Sergey Kron

According to CNN, having gained access to the database, specialists began to analyze the information received. To interpret such a large amount of raw data, intelligence typically uses supercomputers in the US Department of Energy's national laboratories. However, it seems this time the intelligence has encountered difficulties in finding scientists who will decipher Chinese characters: they are required not only to access classified information, but also to know the Mandarin dialect of the Chinese language in which the database is written.

“Obviously, there are scientists in the United States who have passed the security screening. But this is a very limited circle of people. We need not just scientists, but also those who specialize in biology. So you can imagine how quickly we will have difficulties, ”said a source on the channel with access to intelligence.

Prior to that, this version was considered marginal in the United States and was mainly popular with supporters of conspiracy theories.

Indeed, after the outbreak of SARS in 2002-2003 caused by the SARS-CoV coronavirus, scientists at the Wuhan Institute have been collecting and studying bat coronaviruses, as well as conducting experiments to transform coronaviruses. But in Beijing they made no big secret of this. According to Live Science, there are 59 BSL-4 laboratories in 23 countries worldwide.

Former US President Donald Trump a year ago, at the suggestion of the CIA, said that the COVID-19 pandemic began with an outbreak in Wuhan. And then it seemed convincing to many. Including, apparently, the current head of the White House, Joe Biden. In any case, in May he instructed the special services to redouble their efforts to obtain the information necessary for this.

By the way, a group of WHO experts previously visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology and published a report in which they called the version of the virus leak from this laboratory "extremely unlikely". The United States and its European allies were critical of the report and pushed WHO to acknowledge that a laboratory version of the coronavirus was ruled out too early.

The Chinese must have taken offense. At the end of July, the PRC refused WHO to conduct the second stage of studying the origin of COVID-19 in Chinese territory. According to CNN, this further increased the suspicion of the Americans.

It is not difficult to predict the Chinese reaction to the hacking of the servers of the Wuhan Institute. Moreover, earlier all newspapers in the Celestial Empire published reports that the Chinese intelligence had concrete facts against the United States, which indicate that it was there that the COVID-19 virus first leaked out. It turned out, for example, that scientists from the Global Coronavirus Research Center, which is located at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, deliberately created bat coronaviruses. From January 2015 to June 2020, UNC reported 28 laboratory incidents involving genetically engineered organisms to security personnel at the US National Institutes of Health, according to the documents.