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working on “Project Saaremaa” successfully penetrated the lockdown on information by Chinese authorities and obtained unpublished data and documents from Wuhan, according to the newspapers.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Unpublished theses concerning coronaviruses and their impact on the brain were central to the assessment, the newspapers reported.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.
The papers also allege that Chancellery Chief of Staff Wolfgang Schmidt was briefed by the president of the BND that they had assessed that COVID-19 originated in a lab. In May 2023, Schmidt approached Biden’s Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, who downplayed the findings of U.S. intelligence agencies like the Department of Energy in favor of a lab origin, the newspapers allege.
The German government’s reluctance to make its assessment public may have been influenced by the public assurances of prominent virologists like Charité Center for Global Health Scientific Director Christian Drosten, dubbed in the press to be “Germany’s Anthony Fauci,” that the pandemic had a natural origin, according to the reports. Drosten was briefly involved in private discussions with National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, and then-Wellcome Trust Director Jeremy Farrar about how to handle the speculation swirling about the Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to Slack messages and emails subpoenaed by the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
Drosten, the CIA, the WHO, and the ODNI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Reassessing
The newspapers report that BND began revisiting the evidence alongside outside German scientists including Drosten in monthly sessions since December 2024. Prompted in part by the newspapers’ report, the BND is set to brief the World Health Organization.
The revelation follows news that outgoing National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan tasked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence with assembling a panel to take a renewed look at the pandemic’s origins in the 11th hour of the Biden administration.
In the United Kingdom, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department of Health and Social Care Baroness Merron said in February in response to the CIA’s updated assessment that the government “will continually review our own assessment of the origins of the virus, considering any new intelligence.”
“We will update the House of Commons and the House of Lords as and when there is anything new to say,” she said.
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