A flurry of recent media reports suggest that the U.S. government might be harboring a top Chinese official who is reportedly “close to” Chinese President Xi Jinping.
The reports suggest that Dong Jingwei, a longtime official in China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), defected to the United States to turn over information about the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.
“Chinese-language anti-communist media and Twitter are abuzz this week with rumors that a vice minister of State Security, Dong Jingwei defected in mid-February, flying from Hong Kong to the United States with his daughter, Dong Yang,” The Daily Beast reported. “Dong Jingwei supposedly gave the U.S. information about the Wuhan Institute of Virology that changed the stance of the Biden administration concerning the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The report repeatedly cautioned that various intelligence experts have cautioned that the information is nothing more than a rumor at this point and that it could very well be false.
Former Fox News correspondent Adam Housley said at the start of the month that the recent pressure on China from the Biden administration was “due to a defector with intimate knowledge” about “Wuhan.”
The Daily Beast report continued:
[Dong’s] 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. If the stories are true, Dong would be the highest-level defector in the history of the People’s Republic of China.
Dong’s defection was raised by Chinese officials last March at the Sino-American summit in Alaska, according to Dr. Han Lianchao, a former Chinese foreign ministry official before defecting after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. In a Wednesday tweet, 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 U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken refused.
RedState, which broke bombshell allegations that led to then-Rep. Katie Hill (D-CA) resigning from Congress in 2019, reported earlier this month that sources inside the intelligence community said that it had a Chinese defector who had “knowledge of special weapons programs in China, including bioweapons programs.” RedState said that Chinese defector had been providing information to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) for months.
In September 2020, Washington Times reporter Bill Gertz reported that a Chinese defector had fled to Europe and provided information that reached the United States.
The report said:
U.S. intelligence agencies recently increased their knowledge of China’s covert biological weapons program with the help of a defector from the People’s Liberation Army, according to people familiar with the incident.
The defector escaped from China and traveled to Europe, where he is under the protection of a European government security service, according to the sources. The PLA defector believes that Chinese intelligence has penetrated the U.S. government and is therefore wary of cooperating with the CIA and other Western spy agencies.
Still, the defector has provided some information about China’s biological arms program that has reached the U.S. government. No other details of the defection could be learned.