The Chinese defector who gave info on Covid lab leak

June 18, 2021 10:36

A scientist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology

Chinese vice-minister of State Security, Dong Jingwei, reportedly defected to the United States and gave the information about the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is at the center of coronavirus lab-leak hypothesis.

According to a report in SpyTalk, Chinese-language anti-communist media and Twitter are abuzz with rumours that Dong fled to the US via Hong Kong with his daughter, Dong Yang mid-February. SpyTalk is a newsletter covering US intelligence, defense, and foreign policy, on the Substack platform.

Dong supposedly gave Washington information about the Wuhan Institute of Virology that changed the stance of the Biden Administration concerning the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to Spy Talk, if rumours are true, it would be the highest level-defection in the history of the People's Republic of China.

Dong is, or was, a longtime official in China's Ministry of State Security (MSS), also known as the Guoanbu.

His publicly available background indicates that he was responsible for the Ministry's counterintelligence efforts in China, i.e., spy-catching, since being promoted to vice minister in April 2018.

The issue of Dong's defection was raised by Chinese officials at the Sino-American summit in Alaska, according to Han Lianchao, a former Chinese foreign ministry official who defected after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

In a tweet on Wednesday, Han, citing an unnamed source, alleged that China's foreign minister Wang Yi and Communist Party foreign affairs boss Yang Jiechi demanded that the Americans return Dong, and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken refused.

However, several experts have said that unconfirmed reports of defections surface regularly.

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