Lipkin as CIA Relay:
The Argument and Its Implications
Why Lipkin as CIA Relay Is a Likely Conclusion
The particular circumstances of his parachuting into the Proximal Origin email discussions.
On 9 February 2020, Ian Lipkin contacts Eddy Holmes out of nowhere, asking him to call back. The next day (~7:11pm UK), he talks to Holmes, who then messages in the Slack group with his Proximal Origin co-drafter, that Lipkin was concerned about the Furin Cleavage Site and some restriction site in the Sars-VoV-2 genome, and that "high ups", including intelligence people, shared his concern
"Ian Lipkin just called - very worried about the furin cleavage site and says that high ups are as well, inc. intel. Also saw the restriction site."
Soon after that call, still on 10 February, Holmes sends Lipkin the P.O. draft from 7 February. Lipkin replies with a few questions on 12 February. Lipkin never joins the active Slack channel where Holmes, Andersen, Garry and Rambaut actively discuss the drafting of P.O. Nor does he ever discusses anything else by emails about P.O. with Holmes. Lipkin eventully join the P.O. drafting email chain on 16 February — the very day the the paper is being readied for virological.org, as list to which Lipkin is added - despite his monor contribution - but Farrar (who made many changes and drove the drafting process) is not. The latest P.O. version is then posted on 17 February on virological.org, at the request of Farrar.
For some important context, Holmes was in charge of the P.O. drafting effort - which was initially conceived as a quiet side-check of the possible GoF origin for the MI5 - via Farrar, who sought guidance from his colleague Eliza Manningham-Buller, Chair of the Wellcome Trust’s Board of Governors and ex MI5 Director General (2002-2007). In his transcript, Lipkin gives an explanation for contacting Holmes (Lipkin Transcript, p. 36):
"After coming back from China [3 February] and finding out that, in fact, the wild animal markets I had been told had been shut were not shut, I wrote an article calling on China to shut all wildlife markets and saying that this was a risk that we couldn't bear. And I offered Eddie Holmes co-authorship on that paper. We sent it around, and then we were never able to get it published."
The interview he gave for CGTN before leaving China is interesting:
Insummary, on 10 February, one week after comming back from China and most likely sharing notes with these 'high ups' who expressed some concerns, Ian Lipkin asked Holmes to be shown the draft of Proximal Origin. Holmes obliged, but did not include Lipkin in the Slack conversation, ond would include him in he email chains only in 16 February, just as the draft was being polished for immediate release on virological.org. Their whole interaction was a one-time request to share the draft, and some immediate feedback with open questions (13 February). Given that this was supposed to be a one-off peek + questions, there was indeed no reason for Holmes to include Lipkin in the Slack or email conversation.
The deposition: he names only the FBI — then his own email contradicts him.
In his interview with the House Select Subcommittee (Lipkin Transcript, pp. 109–110), Lipkin is asked directly whether he worked with any intelligence agencies. He names only the FBI. The questioner then produces Exhibit 25: an email Lipkin himself wrote to Holmes on 7 April 2022, stating he had been questioned by "the FBI, the CIA, the DOD." Confronted with his own words, Lipkin begins to reply — and the word that comes out is "obviously."
He stops himself mid-word on "C—", then retreats to "well, if I wrote this, then it must've been the case." The word "obviously" is key; Lipkin caught it and tried to land on his feet.
In the same deposition, he describes — in his own words — exactly this kind of arrangement, and names the CIA unprompted.
Earlier in the same 6 April 2023 interview, Lipkin is asked what a 31 December 2019 voicemail from George Gao, then director of the Chinese CDC, actually said. He asks to go off the record twice before answering — and when he does, he explains, unprompted, the logic that governs how he operates abroad:
"My ability to operate and actually protect you, honestly, and work around the world is no different than a journalist who has to protect sources. So if I tell you what I heard and you control it in that fashion, it will not prevent me from being able to work in China."
He goes further, explaining why his own access has to be protected:
"I am your best link to China. You don't want to lose me there. So it's very important that this not go beyond this room or I won't be able to operate, and then we'll have no visibility into China."
A few pages later, describing his working relationship with US government science and health agencies, he names the CIA directly — not in response to a question about intelligence contacts, but as a passing example of how his fieldwork usually functions:
"And I did the same thing in Saudi Arabia for CDC, NIH, and WHO. I was able to go into Saudi Arabia and get information that I fed back then to the CDC and NIH — and the CIA as well — about what was happening in Saudi Arabia. So I've done this many times."
In these two sentences, Lipkin described, under oath and voluntarily, a standing arrangement: travel under cover of scientific collaboration, gather information, report it back to US government agencies including the CIA, on a recurring basis — "I've done this many times." He confirms earlier in the same interview that he carried a specific list of questions from Fauci and CDC contacts when he went to China from 29 January 2020 to 3 February.
A witness who has just told a congressional committee, in his own words, that this is exactly how he operates is not a hard case to read when the identical pattern — an undisclosed call, a message relayed on behalf of "high-ups... inc. intel," insertion into a sensitive scientific process at precisely the critical moment — surfaces two weeks into the *Proximal Origin* drafting. (Lipkin Transcript, pp. 32–35.)
Near the end of the same interview, asked in general terms whether origins inquiry should be guided by scientific principles, Lipkin volunteers the clearest statement in the whole transcript of how he actually sees the relationship between science and intelligence work — not as a conflict to be managed, but as a model to be endorsed:
"I believe that I am limited in the types of evidence that I'm able to consider. And I think that the intelligence community has different ways of looking at evidence that are also valid. So I think this really should be a partnership between subject matter experts."
That latest extract shows direct experience of working with the intelligence community and of the value he may add, whereby science and intelligence assessment ought to function as one integrated practice. This reframes everything above: the February 2020 call was prceisley that "partnership" at work. (Lipkin Transcript, p. 88.)
He contributed essentially nothing to the manuscript — and was not in the Slack channel.
Lipkin first appears in the full P.O. author email thread on 16 February — more than two weeks after the core group (Holmes, Rambaut, Andersen, Garry) had formed around the February 1 Farrar call, and on the very day the paper is being readied for virological.org and the author list finalised. His entire editorial input to the paper is a single email, dated 12 February 2020, written in response to the February 7 draft that Holmes had forwarded to him on February 10 — the same day as the IC-relay call.
Three items: two observations about market transmission and viral circulation, and one closing question — "Are we suggesting that the furin cleavage site evolved from de novo mutations or through recombination?" That is his full contribution. The one scientific question he raises is the FCS: the exact feature his handlers had flagged two days earlier, and the exact question that Baric — the world's leading expert on coronavirus spike proteins, present on the February 1 Farrar call as a silent, unannounced listener — would have asked. The February 12 email is not a scientific contribution. It is a relay of questions from the IC and from Baric, checking how the paper intends to handle the feature that most implicates a laboratory origin.
The Slack record (subpoenaed by the House Select Subcommittee) confirms that the other P.O. authors did not want him. The exchange speaks for itself:
He pushed his way in — but the authority behind the push was the IC concern he had just relayed. Holmes could hardly refuse the man who had told him the intelligence community and "high ups" were watching. After the February 12 email, he was on the group email chain but contributed nothing further to the manuscript. His remaining communications are two messages in the final days.
The February 12 email is science-adjacent. The February 17 note to Farrar is a relay: Lipkin passing Chinese narrative intelligence to Farrar on publication day, with Farrar already drawing from the same picture on the US side.
The parallel with Baric is worth dwelling on. Baric listened silently on the February 1 Farrar call without being announced or introduced — present but not official, informed but contributing nothing to the drafting. Lipkin's role in the editing process is structurally identical: on the author list, absent from the Slack channel, contributing nothing beyond that single relay email. Two US scientists with deep IC relationships, each inserted into a critical moment in the P.O. process in a role that was observer rather than contributor. The similarity of function points to a similarity of mission.
Farrar's own IC entanglement runs in parallel.
Farrar's contacts with British intelligence during this period were not casual. Wellcome's board chair was Eliza Manningham-Buller — former MI5 Director General (2002–2007) — and Farrar maintained a close working relationship with her throughout his Wellcome directorship. MI5's current Director General, Parker, visited Wellcome in early 2020 specifically to consult Manningham-Buller about the Wuhan outbreak and its possible origins. Farrar's reported communications with UK intelligence went further: handler-type contact, including the use of different phones and avoided email channels, as Manningham-Buller herself advised him (documented in Farrar's own memoir Spike).
The CIA's interest in having real-time visibility into the group Farrar was orchestrating makes the Lipkin placement structurally coherent: a UK IC connection on the Farrar side, a US IC connection embedded in the author team.
Implications
The CIA knew what Proximal Origin was — because they had a relay inside it.
If Lipkin was their relay, the CIA had real-time visibility into P.O.'s construction: the coordination with Farrar, the February 1 call, the deliberate writing toward a conclusion, the progressive exclusion of the passaging hypothesis under reviewer pressure. They were not deceived by P.O. They endorsed it from the inside. Their calculation in February 2020 was the same as the IC email released by Gabbard states explicitly: trade a natural-origin consensus for access to China. Lipkin's presence in the team was how they stayed informed, not how they were manipulated.
Lipkin's absence from the Critical Review is operational, not scientific.
By July 2021, the CIA's posture had shifted — its Weapons and Counterproliferation Mission Center had assembled its own intercept picture, and the agency was no longer aligned with the natural-origin narrative it had helped build. Having their relay co-sign a political paper designed to steer the Biden 90-day review served no purpose, and would have complicated things badly if the CIA's internal reassessment ever became visible. Lipkin stays off the Critical Review, and off Worobey et al. and Pekar et al. thereafter. His falling-out with Holmes over the Vanity Fair interview — where Lipkin declined to walk back his openness to a lab-related incident — is the public story. The structural reason is that by 2021, the CIA and the natural-origin narrative were no longer aligned.
The CIA's discomfort at the June 4 briefing reads differently in this light.
When the CIA briefed Fauci on June 4, 2021 and Fauci found something "very fishy," the fishiness ran in the opposite direction from what he implied. The CIA knew the whole P.O. story from the inside. The analysts in the room were not naive about what they were looking at — they were the institutional heirs of the team that had placed Lipkin there. Their growing skepticism was not about being misled by P.O.; it was about the fact that their earlier accommodation had been leveraged into a political instrument that now sat beyond their control.
Fauci was invited to read the near-final assessment he had helped bend.
On 25 August 2021 — two days before Haines released the public IC assessment on 27 August — Cameron invited Fauci to the White House to read "a very interesting report" on "the same topic as before," noting that "Dr. Lander has also reviewed." Fauci forwarded the invitation to his staff that evening with the note "This is important. Let us discuss my going down to the White House to review the report," and replied to Cameron that he would arrange a visit "as soon as is feasible." The released documents show no confirmed appointment — unlike the July 7 visit, which had an explicit room and time locked in — so whether he made it before Haines published on August 27 is not established.
The invitation itself is the point. The man who had shaped the P.O. narrative, forwarded the Critical Review to the IC, recommended the Critical Review's own authors as independent experts to the same IC study, and been set aside as a "potential customer" with a conflict of interest — was offered a last look at the near-final intelligence product two days before public release. The IC assessment he had spent months bending was being brought to him for review.
Another Intel Asset in Wuhan in January 2020: Callahan
Lipkin was not the only one sent into China. In the same window, Callahan was on the ground in Wuhan itself, while Lipkin flew to Guangzhou and Beijing and met Chen Zhu — that is the key parallel, not a contrast. Same modus operandi: professional access used as cover, information relayed to government contacts as routine rather than exception. Same readiness: both deployed on short notice, in person, when the situation called for it. Same background: two decades inside DTRA and Cooperative Threat Reduction missions, the same biodefense-intelligence apparatus traced throughout this report. Same absence: neither man has a public or social-media presence.
His exit from Wuhan, and his tasking on return, read like an intelligence file.
Callahan spent nearly a week in Wuhan helping keep a hospital functioning and tracking what drugs doctors were using against the virus. As Chinese officials tightened the quarantine toward a full lockdown, he crossed the river by boat — "the black-market way" — to Nanjing, where he kept a video link into two Wuhan ICUs. He knew he needed to report what he was seeing to his contacts in the US government.
Within days, Robert Kadlec — then HHS Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response — signed him to a six-month assignment "to provide virus intelligence by way of his Chinese connections and advise on how to respond to the virus inside the United States." The statement of work itself:
"His physical location and meetings will be determined by the ASPR. He will be expected to respond on ICS [Incident Command System] timelines (24/7 mobile access: 2hr to airport; autonomous resources). He will not [be] official U.S. Government, will not represent U.S. Government opinions, will not communicate to media or social media and will presume all information is [Sensitive but Unclassified / Not Releasable to Foreign Nationals]."
"Virus intelligence by way of his Chinese connections" is collection through a personal foreign network, stated plainly. "Will not [be] official U.S. Government" is deniability. "His physical location and meetings will be determined by the ASPR" is a sponsor directing an asset's movements, not a department scheduling a contractor. The 24/7, two-hour-to-airport posture is a deployable operative's readiness, not a consultant's. SBU/NOFORN handling plus a ban on media and social media closes off exactly the disclosure that would let outsiders reconstruct what he was doing. (Brendan Borrell, First Shots, excerpted in Rolling Stone, 2021.)
Two decades inside the same Track II network this report traces elsewhere.
In 2002 Callahan was appointed clinical director for Cooperative Threat Reduction work — the Nunn-Lugar programme, co-authored by NTI co-founder Sam Nunn — across six former Soviet bioweapons facilities, including Vector and the Institute of Highly Pure Biopreparations; by his own Congressional testimony, across "14" such facilities. He carried that into DARPA in 2005 as director of the agency's biodefense therapeutics portfolio, where he created PROPHECY, a predictive early-warning programme that funnelled $19.6 million to Harvard, and built a research partnership with Thai bat-coronavirus specialist Dr. Supaporn Wacharapluesadee, whose USAID PREDICT-funded lab went on to publish with Peter Daszak.
This is the identical Nunn/NTI/CTR/PREDICT lattice documented elsewhere in this report — the same architecture behind Farrar's NTI board seat, Baric's BSEG relationship, and the EcoHealth funding pipeline into the WIV. Callahan is a career node in that network, not a bystander who happened to be in the wrong city. (Raul Diego, "DARPA's Man in Wuhan," Silicon Icarus, 31 July 2020, research contribution credited to Whitney Webb.)
A fellow scientist has already said the quiet part on the record: "there's a CIA agent... named Michael Callahan."
Robert Malone — who co-published with Callahan and worked with him "through prior outbreaks" — was asked on The Joe Rogan Experience (episode 1757, recorded 30 December 2021) how his own COVID story began:
"There's a CIA agent that I've co-published with in the past named Michael Callahan. He was in Wuhan in the fourth quarter of 2019. He called me from Wuhan on January 4th... and he told me, 'Robert, you got to get your team spun up because we got a problem with this new virus.'"
That call came a week before China released the genome sequence. Malone's later conduct fits the same pattern he ascribes to Callahan: obtaining China's treatment protocol in late February 2020 and sending it to "my buddies at the CIA and at DTRA" and the ASPR — the possessive, unbothered register of a standing relationship, not a one-off. (The Joe Rogan Experience #1757, 30 December 2021, transcript pp. 5, 7.)
Malone's timeline and the Callahan-sourced timeline in Borrell's First Shots do not agree, and this report does not resolve which is correct. Malone has repeated the same account since 2020, including a tweet dated 18 July 2021: "He was under cover in Wuhan during Q4 2019." Borrell's book, written with Callahan's cooperation, instead has him reaching Nanjing on 17 January and Wuhan only around 22 January. A contemporaneous July 2020 reconstruction of Callahan's career independently corroborates the 4 January call date, and records that Malone corrected an earlier draft of that story: the call was an outbreak warning, not — as first reported — a tip about a specific drug treatment.
On the same Red Dawn distribution list as Baric and Kadlec.
Back in the US, Callahan sat on the "Red Dawn" list: the interagency chain of physicians, biodefense officials, and former NSC staff tracking the outbreak from late January 2020. Duane Caneva's 16 February restart of the thread lists Callahan alongside Kadlec and Baric, whose own CIA/BSEG contacts are documented elsewhere in this report. All three remain on the list through dozens of subsequent emails into March.
A November 2003 CIA planning document, released as part of the Senate's 2026 Fauci intelligence package, proposed exactly this: a "living sensor web" of scientists embedded in conferences, labs, and informal networks to flag intelligence-relevant developments. Men who function as sensors are not the ones you'd expect to find building a following on Twitter.