The United States is the “collateral damage” of Chinese communist officials’ lies about the extent of the novel coronavirus outbreak within their country, a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) station chief told Breitbart News.

During the latest edition of the satellite radio show Breitbart News Saturday, Daniel Hoffman, a former Chief of Station with the CIA, told host Matt Boyle the deadly and highly contagious coronavirus that spilled over into the world from China is dictator Xi Jinping’s “Chernobyl.”

Hoffman declared:

I’ve called the coronavirus pandemic China’s Xi Jinping’s Chernobyl because you’ve got the same kind of troubles — obsequious bureaucrats who aren’t telling the truth, an opaque bureaucracy that was slow to respond. This, you know, George Orwell 1984, try to shape the facts to fit Chinese propaganda.

Chernobyl refers to the 1980’s nuclear disaster in Russia attributed to negligence at the hands of Soviet officials who refused to acknowledge the spread of dangerous levels of radiation across Europe stemming from the meltdown of an atomic power plant in Ukraine.

“The Chinese are lying. They’ve lied right from the very beginning about the severity of this health crisis and they did it because they were afraid of their own people. Now, we were collateral damage in that,” Hoffman, who has a combined 30 years of distinguished government service in the CIA and other federal entities, told Breitbart News Saturday, echoing U.S. officials and the American intelligence community.

Hoffman went on to note that there is a role for the U.S. intelligence community to play in lifting the veil on what is taking place in China with the coronavirus.

“We need our intelligence community to mount a full-court press to determine how bad it is in China,” he said. “How fast it’s spreading. What they’re doing about it. This has implications for China’s own stability.”

Anonymous members of the U.S. intelligence community allegedly agree that Beijing has been hiding the severity of the viral outbreak in China, Bloomberg reported this week.

Several U.S. officials – including Vice President Mike Pence, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force – have questioned the legitimacy of China’s official coronavirus death toll and infection rate.

Beijing has vehemently denied distorting the facts about coronavirus cases in China, calling the outbreak “the U.S. and Europe’s New Chernobyl” although the pandemic began within its borders.

However, several news reports show that Beijing hid the severity of the outbreak during the early stages of the epidemic in China, muzzling and jailing whistleblowers and critics in a move that U.S. officials say allowed the disease to gain a firm foothold across the world.

Breitbart News Saturday airs on Sirius XM Patriot Radio Channel 125 from 10:00 A.M. to 1:00 P.M. Eastern.