He spent 26 years with the CIA before retiring but Marc Polymeropoulos, 50, has some sage ideas about what should have been done to gather information about the Coronavirus.

He told Kathimerini the first step would be checking whether the scientific data being reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) by China, was accurate.

To do that, the agency would “recruit whistleblowers, tap communications between civil servants, and mine information from open sources,” he said, to assess the difference between government reports and what's in the field.

For agents, he said that, “their second mission is to evaluate whether the spread of the virus and the reactions of the public in the places that are being hit the hardest are affecting the stability of their governments,” he said, citing the example of Iran.

The goal is to access the results of the latest scientific research for developing a COVID-19 vaccine. “There’s billions involved for whichever country discovers it first,” said Polymeropoulos. His job would have been to bring the information in a report for President Trump, who doesn't read them.