US intelligence agencies' notorious record

Photo taken on May 28, 2021 shows the U.S. Capitol building behind a traffic sign in Washington, D.C., the United States. (Xinhua/Liu Jie)

The report on tracing the origin of COVID-19 published by the US intelligence community on Aug. 27 was neither based on science nor can it be said to have any credibility, serving instead as a tool of Washington, D.C. to cover up its domestic failures in dealing with the disease by passing the buck to China.

It is science not intelligence that is needed in order to trace the origins of the virus. Why did the Biden administration order the intelligence community to do what should have been done by scientists? A retrospective of the Americans' notorious record in destabilizing the whole world will tell you that the US intelligence community has been a backbone force in the US government's history of stirring up chaos in other countries.

Cooking up lies and instigating wars around the world

The US intelligence community is good at making excuses for Washington's interference and invasions in other countries.

In 1964, the National Security Agency of the US deliberately skewed the evidence passed on to Washington, D.C. to falsely suggest that Vietnamese ships had attacked American destroyers in the "Gulf of Tonkin" incident, leading to America's full engagement in and precipitation of the Vietnam War. In 1965, the then-US President Lyndon B. Johnson admitted that "For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there."

In 2003, at a meeting of the UN Security Council, the then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell presented a vial of white powder obtained by US intelligence agencies as evidence that Iraq was manufacturing chemical weapons. Using this as a pretext, Washington declared war against Iraq, which caused hundreds of thousands of deaths. However, up until today, the US has yet to provide any persuasive evidence as to the allegation that Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction, and the powder has since been likened to nothing but "washing powder" by the international community.

In 2014, US intelligence agencies ordered American-funded White Helmets, a civil defense group in Syria, to feature a video that later served as evidence behind the allegation that there were "chemical weapons violations" in Syria. Based on this allegation, the US government launched airstrikes in Syria, turning the latter into a war-torn country down to this day.

Stirring up chaos and intervening in the domestic affairs of other countries

In addition to perpetuating lies as ready-made excuses for US military intervention and invasions in other countries, the US intelligence community has also remained skillful in its attempts to intervene in the domestic affairs of other countries through cultural infiltration, as well as the export of chaos and turmoil, the manipulation of elections, and subversion of state power in a host of countries around the world.

In August 2018, Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to former US Secretary of State Colin Powell said at the Ron Paul Institute that the CIA would want to destabilize China, and that would be the best way to do it, to foment unrest and join with anti-China forces in undermining Beijing from within rather than externally.

In 2019, during the disturbance over proposed legislative amendments in Hong Kong, the CIA provided covert support for the National Endowment for Democracy to sponsor, instigate and even command anti-China, destabilizing forces in Hong Kong to launch vandalizing, looting and arson attacks, and storm the Legislative Council building in the name of fighting for democracy and freedom in an attempt to spark a "color revolution" in Hong Kong.

In June 2020, The Diplomat magazine published an article revealing how the CIA had secretly intervened in the elections in Italy in 1948. In addition to Italy, the CIA has intervened in the elections of other countries, including Chile, Guyana, and Salvador, through the manipulation of votes and public opinion, attempting to exert American influence on election results.

The US has been recognized as an empire of cyberspace hacking

The US has been recognized as the world's biggest source country for cyber attacks, with the CIA carrying out most of the country's spying activities.

In a leak of nearly 9,000 documents by WikiLeaks in 2017, the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI) was revealed to have over 5,000 registered users, who had produced more than 1,000 hacking systems, Trojans, viruses, and other "weaponized" malware.

China has suffered a large number of cyber attacks from the US under the command of US intelligence agencies. China's Qihoo 360 has discovered and revealed cyber-attacks by a CIA hacking group (APT-C-39) which lasted for a duration of 11 years against Chinese firms and government agencies.

The US spied on its own allies as well. In 2015, a report by WikiLeaks revealed that the NSA had spied on leaders of the European Union and targeted 125 phone numbers of German officials in a long-term surveillance program. In May 2021, Danish public service broadcaster, the Danish Broadcasting Corporation, said that Denmark's secret service had helped the US to spy on the German chancellor, as well as other European politicians from France, Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands.

The US has also installed surveillance equipment in its nearly 100 embassies and consulates overseas to spy on other countries under its "Stateroom" code-named surveillance program.

Another case in point is the Crypto AG scandal. The Swiss company, founded more than half a century ago and specializing in communications and information security, was a puppet of the CIA, and the devices it sold to over 120 countries were rigged so that the CIA could easily break the codes that countries used to send encrypted messages.

US intelligence agencies engage in scapegoating and cooking up false charges

US intelligence agencies have unscrupulously collected intelligence by forcing journalists to spy for them, lodging false accusations against scientists of Chinese origin, and smearing the Chinese government. The lies they've fabricated are too numerous to count.

Under "Operation Mockingbird" launched in the 1940s, the CIA recruited media and other related institutions and forced foreign journalists to spy for them through the use of various means, including through bribery, manipulation and exploitation.

In 1999, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the New York Times published a report which claimed that Wen Ho Lee, an American nuclear weapons expert of Chinese origin was a spy sent by China to the US. The FBI lodged 59 allegations against Lee, inducing him to admit his guilt on less severe charges so that he wouldn't have to face harsher ones. Under such pressure, one year and a half later, Lee, who was innocent, reached an agreement with the US government under which he confessed his guilt in return to a less severe charge.

In 2018, the FBI accused Professor Anming Hu, who is of Chinese descent, of being a spy for China, which caused him to be put on a federal no-fly list and led to two years of surveillance on him and his son. After the trial opened earlier in 2021, the FBI agent who had led the public to believe that Hu was a spy admitted that he had falsely accused Hu, and all other allegations against Hu had proven to be fabricated as well.

"We lied, we cheated, we stole. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment," the then-US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, ex-CIA director, was quoted shamelessly as saying in 2019.

Pompeo's "confession" is only a glimpse of the US intelligence system's inglorious record. Today, the US has ordered its intelligence community to conduct a so-called investigation into the origins of COVID-19, which has only served to further hinder global anti-pandemic efforts. We advise the US to stop politicizing the virus, value the health and lives of its own citizens and people from all over the world, and get back on the right track towards tracing the origins of COVID-19 on a scientific basis as soon as possible.