Beijing release photo of Chinese 'defector' who 'fled to US with Wuhan lab secrets' in 'Shanghai'

Further mystery surrounds a high-ranking Chinese spy-chief who is rumoured to have defected to the United States and given Washington evidence on the Wuhan lab after Beijing released a photo claiming to show him in Shanghai.  

Chinese officials have published an image purporting to show Dong Jingwei attending the 16th meeting of the Security Council Secretaries of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Member States on June 23. 

But the photograph has prompted claims that China have photoshopped the image to make it look like Dong attended the meeting to dispel the rumours he defected to the US.    

Solomon Yue, an American-Chinese businessman and member of the Republican National Convention in the US, has claimed the picture was edited and even photoshopped his own face into the picture to show how it can be done.

Solomon, who fronts a group he says is called the RNC Republican National Conservative Caucus & Conservative Steering Committee, wrote on Twitter: ‘DIA [US Defense Intelligence Agency] still has #DongJingwei in its protective custody & he is still singing to celebrate #CCP [Chinese Communist Party] 100th birthday. This photo is photoshopped.’ 

Referring to the image where he had photoshopped his own face to make it look like he attending to the meeting, Solomon added: ‘Now I was told that I was there too.’ 

Solomon, the vice chair of US lobbying group Republican Overseas, added in another tweet: ‘Now on each time there is a story on what #DongJingwei told DIA, we should expect him to attend an online meeting in Beijing.’

The claims that the image released by Beijing have been edited have not been independently verified and it has still not been officially confirmed where Dong is.     

Dong is believed to have fled to the US with his daughter Dong Yang on February 10, according to Spy Talk. 

He made a name in China’s secret service, known as Guoanbu, and was head of counter-intelligence, or spy-catching, after being promoted to the post of vice minister in April 2018.

If the reports are true, Dong is the highest-level defector in the history of the People’s Republic of China.

It is claimed that he informed US officials about the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where Covid-19 may have emerged, causing President Joe Biden to look seriously at the lab leak theory – long-derided as an erroneous fascination of the Trump administration. 

Dong has been pictured online, and though not all of the pictures match up, one that continues to crop up was posted by Dr Han Lianchao, a former Chinese foreign ministry official who defected after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

Han, described by US officials as a ‘straight-shooter,’ claims that Beijing dispatched envoys to meet with US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken in March to discuss handing Dong back to them. 

Han claims the Communist Party’s top brass demanded Dong be returned to them at the highly-contentious meeting in Alaska.

Blinken refused, Han said.   

‘He worked closely with Zhang Yue, who’s now serving 15 years imprisonment for corruption,’ Han said. 

‘Zhang was a confidant of Ma Jian, former MSS executive vice minister, who is also in prison for corruption.’

Dong ‘was last seen in public in September 2020,’ Han claimed. 

His photos have been deleted by the Chinese search engine Baidu, according to some Chinese language news reports abroad. 

Han’s claim was impossible to verify, but he was known as ‘a straight shooter, not known to exaggerate in any way or form, trusted for his integrity,’ according to Nicholas Eftimiades, a former Pentagon, State Department and CIA expert.

But Eftimiades, a Nonresident Senior Fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, warned that the report should be seen for ‘exactly what it is, a rumor.’

He added that such rumors ‘happen all the time’. 

Mollie Saltskog, a senior intelligence analyst with The Soufan Group, agreed, saying that unconfirmed reports of defections surface regularly.  

‘While significant and certainly useful for our intelligence efforts, one high-level defection will not drastically change our understanding or approach to China,’ she told Spy Talk. 

‘In short, if true, this is potentially significant but not a game-changer.’

The conservative website Red State reported that the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency had received information from him that Beijing is covering up biological warfare research at the Wuhan lab. 

Dr Anthony Fauci, Biden’s chief medical advisor and a current target of Republican fury, has defended investing U.S. funds in the Wuhan lab, insisting that their research into coronaviruses was essential and it would be ‘a dereliction of duty’ not to support their work. 

Red State reported that Dong’s defection pushed U.S. officials to question Fauci’s approach. 

‘Sources say the level of confidence in the defector’s information is what has led to a sudden crisis of confidence in Dr. Anthony Fauci, adding that U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) personnel detailed to DIA have corroborated very technical details of information provided by the defector,’ it said.

Spy Talk also quoted the Paris-based newsletter Intelligence Online as reporting that Dong is ‘close to’ Xi Jinping, the Chinese president. 

‘He previously headed the Guoanbu (security ministry) in the region of Hebei, which has produced many of Xi’s securocrats,’ the publication reported in 2018.   

Dong’s defection, if it happened, may never be confirmed.

But it does come as the Biden administration, following scientific consensus, makes a notable shift in its thinking about the ‘lab leak’ theory.

Last year scientists were downplaying the theory, insisting that it was far more likely that the COVID-19 virus passed from animals to humans.

Now scientists believe that it may indeed be true.

On January 15 the State Department published a fact sheet about COVID-19, which said that ‘circumstantial’ evidence suggested a lab leak theory was possible. 

Biden on May 26 ordered intelligence agencies to investigate the two competing ideas about the origins of the pandemic – evolved naturally and passed from animals to humans, or released from a laboratory. He gave them 90 days to report back.

Blinken has urged China to be more transparent about what they knew, when.

‘What the government didn’t do in the early days and still hasn’t done is given us the transparency we need,’ Blinken said on June 7, in an interview with Axios. 

The White House has also accused China of obstructing investigations into the source of the pandemic.

The World Health Organization (WHO) sent a team to the Wuhan lab in late January, but the investigators were only allowed in for three hours, and were not granted access to all the documentation they required.

Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the WHO, said their visit was inconclusive and upbraided China for being uncooperative.  

Fauci, the nation’s top public health expert, is now facing scrutiny over what he knew, when – and whether he was always straight with the public.

His critics, mainly Republicans, accuse him of downplaying the ‘lab leak’ theory because it was promoted heavily by Donald Trump.

The critics also argue that Fauci did not want to admit at the time that U.S. taxpayers’ money was spent on the Wuhan lab. 

He has since confirmed that $820,000 was given to the lab, over six years, to fund their research into coronaviruses.

Fauci justified the spending when quizzed on it before Congress last month, insisting that it was vital to understand coronaviruses coming from bats, and the bats were in China.  

He said it would have been a dereliction of duty not to support the scientific research.

Fauci also insisted that the grants were not being used on ‘gain of function’ research, whereby viruses are made more transmissible or deadly, to understand their capabilities. 

He said the scientific studies published thanks to U.S. funding bore no evidence of ‘gain of function’ research.

But he admitted that he had no way of knowing if the Wuhan lab was carrying out experiments in secret. 

Meanwhile, the former head of the Food and Drug Administration, Scott Gottlieb, has said Fauci told world leaders in the spring of 2020 that the coronavirus may have escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China.  

U.S. researchers around that time still were considering whether the virus came from a lab break, and Fauci told the health leaders gathered that the newly identified strain of the coronavirus ‘looked unusual,’ according to Gottlieb.

The disclosure from the former FDA chief comes as an increasing number of mainstream scientists and media figures no longer are parroting the line from the Chinese Communist Party that the virus came from a bat.  

Now, Gottlieb says Fauci last year at least considered that COVID-19 could have come from a lab – before closing ranks around the idea that it occurred naturally. 

Gottlieb, who served under Trump, said a former senior member of the Trump administration told him at the time of Fauci’s 2020 talk. 

Gottlieb said he’d recently reconfirmed with that person that Fauci had given the talk. 

‘I think early on, when they looked at the strain, they had suspicions,’ Gottlieb recalled on CBS Face the Nation, speaking of U.S. scientists. 

‘And it takes time to do that analysis, and that dispelled some of those suspicions,’ he added. 

Additionally, Gottlieb said it was a mistake to only look at the virus from a scientific perspective: It also needs to be examined from a national security lens, he said. 

‘A scientific mindset looks at the virus and the virus’ behavior and draws a conclusion,’ he said. 

‘A national security assessment looks at that and then looks at the behavior of the Chinese government, the behavior of the lab, other evidence around the lab – including the infections we now know took place – and that changes the overall assessment,’ he said.