The embassy in Canberra declined to comment on a report in the Nine newspapers on Thursday of suspicions within senior ranks of the government and the intelligence community about a staffer’s possible role.
The deputy chair of the Australian parliament’s intelligence and security committee, Anthony Byrne, has been angered by the reported dossier, fearing the episode was reminiscent of the saga surrounding intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003.
Guardian Australia understands Byrne, a Labor MP, has been in regular contact with the intelligence community and senior members of the government to support them in pushing back against US government claims.
In those conversations, he has argued that the dossier publicised in a weekend newspaper report was a crude attempt to influence Australia to act against its national interest on the basis of intelligence that didn’t exist.
The tensions flow from a report in News Corp’s Daily Telegraph last Saturday that the 15-page “dossier prepared by concerned Western governments” included a raft of criticisms of China’s “assault on international transparency’’ and concerns about practices at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The dossier cited a research team’s work discovering samples of coronavirus from a cave with genetic similarity to Covid-19, along with the synthesising of a bat-derived coronavirus that could not be treated, the Telegraph reported.
The same article reported agencies within the Five Eyes intelligence alliance – the US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the UK – were investigating the matter.
However, Guardian Australia has learnt that Australia has determined the report is not a Five Eyes intelligence document. It is not believed to include original intelligence from human sources or electronic intercepts.
Instead, the document appears to be a compilation of open-source material – reports and studies that were publicly available. The identity of the author remains unclear.
It is further understood that Australian intelligence agencies are not backing up the line promoted by Trump and Pompeo, who said on Sunday there was “enormous evidence” that the virus began in the lab.
Pompeo appeared to soften his comments on Wednesday when he conceded that “we don’t have certainty about whether it began in the lab or whether it began someplace else”.
Concerns the pandemic may have been triggered by a possible lab accident in Wuhan have been present in Australian policy discussion since the outset of the crisis, but there has never been enough evidence to support the contention.
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