The webinar featured a discussion between Michael Morell, Schar School Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy, and International Security, and former Acting Director and Deputy Director of the CIA; and Glenn Gerstell, former General Counsel of the National Security Agency. The conversation was moderated by sponsoring unit Hayden Center’s director, Larry Pfeiffer. Schar School Dean Mark J. Rozell hosted.
By Dixie Downing and Buzz McClain
Despite news reports that the White House had been briefed on a novel coronavirus outbreak in China weeks before it was declared a pandemic, Morell insisted that the Intelligence Community shouldn’t be the entity to raise the alarm for such events.
“That is the [Center for Disease Control’s] job,” he said. “But the Intelligence Community should inform the CDC with the intelligence to make the call.”
Gerstell, a cyber and technology threat expert, agreed, adding, “The Intelligence Community does not have the experts in epidemiology or technology to study pandemics, and we’re not postured to identify these threats. We do a terrific job understanding political and military threats and the leadership intentions of some of our adversaries. But we’re lagging and clearly need to move the Intelligence Community into fields that impact national wellbeing.”
“I think we are postured to provide analysis to what governments are doing,” Morell said. “Are they being honest about what they are doing in their country? Clearly, some of the decisions made by the Chinese government were for their own domestic politics, but projecting that a virus in Wuhan would become a global pandemic is not our role.”
That, of course, would require resources, which neither speaker could assure would be forthcoming.
The speakers expanded on an op-ed they co-authored in the April 7 Washington Post, enumerating “four ways U.S. intelligence efforts should change in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.”
They also discussed the use of open-source information—"Our [Intelligence Community] was set up to find secrets, but it was not set up to look for information available publicly,” Morell observed—and the use of disinformation and the politicization of intelligence, including the White House’s effort to link the coronavirus to labs in Wuhan despite intelligence reports saying otherwise.
“The U.S. government’s [National Institutes of Health] was providing funding to the Wuhan labs,” Morell said, “and we know through the State Department that there were safety concerns at that lab.
“If it did escape, we’re all in this together.”