Reluctant to release conclusions because of ‘public assurances of prominent virologists’ that virus was ‘natural’ in origin
By Emily Kopp, Daily Caller News Foundation
The German government for years concealed an assessment by its Foreign Intelligence Service that a lab origin of COVID-19 was overwhelmingly likely, according to a Tuesday investigative report by two German newspapers.
The investigation, published jointly by Die Zeit and Sueddeutscher Zeitung, claims that German intelligence (BND) met in Berlin within weeks of the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in early 2020 for a mission dubbed “Project Saaremaa” — named after an Estonian Baltic Sea island.
Agents working on “Project Saaremaa” successfully penetrated the lockdown on information by Chinese authorities and obtained unpublished data and documents from Wuhan, according to the newspapers. The news outlets report that this information was shared with the BND’s scientists. A team of BND scientists led by a virologist combined the secret intelligence with the public scientific literature coming out of Wuhan, including out of Shi Zhengli’s lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Their final analysis, likely completed sometime in 2020, estimated the probability of a lab origin of the pandemic to be around 80 to 95% likely.
Unpublished theses concerning coronaviruses and their impact on the brain were central to the assessment, the newspapers reported. New findings may have emerged in the fall of 2021 to convince the BND further.
The investigation suggests the German intelligence may have informed the Central Intelligence Agency’s change in assessment in January. The CIA updated its public assessment from undecided to a lab origin with low confidence on January 25, 2025, after prompting by CIA Director John Ratcliffe, though the agency had privately updated its assessment earlier, according to the New York Times.
Ratcliffe has accused the CIA of being unduly swayed by politics on this question. Similarly, the newspapers report that the German government was intimidated by the possibility of seismic geopolitical reverberations if the BND assessment were made public.