Lipkin as CIA Relay:
The Argument and Its Implications
How W. Ian Lipkin was inserted into Proximal Origin — and what that insertion meant for what came after.
Why Lipkin as CIA Relay Is a Likely Conclusion
He arrives on February 9–10 carrying IC-level intelligence — and is added to the authoring group nine days later.
On 9 February 2020, Lipkin contacts Holmes out of nowhere asking him to call back. The next day (~7:11pm UK), he calls and says he is concerned about the Furin Cleavage Site and restriction site — but crucially adds that "higher-ups and intelligence people" share his concern. Holmes's contemporaneous Slack records this exactly:
"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."
This is not a scientific colleague checking in. This is someone delivering a message on behalf of the IC: the intelligence community and "high ups" are watching this paper, and they are concerned about these specific features. The call is the relay. After it, Lipkin is in one-to-one communication with Holmes only: Holmes sends him the February 7 draft on the 10th; Lipkin replies with his questions on the 12th. He does not appear in the full author email thread until 16 February — the very day the author list is being finalised and the paper is being readied for virological.org. He congratulates Holmes that day; the paper posts on the 17th. His insertion into the author group came at the last possible moment, after his only substantive input was already delivered, on the day of publication preparation. His presence gave the IC a channel directly into the P.O. process — and the channel's work was done before he was formally on the paper.
The deposition: he names only the FBI — then his own email contradicts him.
In his April 2023 transcribed 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 the tell — CIA contact was not a forgotten detail. He caught it and tried to land on his feet.
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.