PURCHASE, N.Y. - Once again, with critical global interests at stake, the Bush administration has blocked action by the rest of the world - this time on a vital treaty to monitor the ban on biological weapons. 

After nearly seven years of negotiations in Geneva, what was intended to be the final session to complete the treaty ended Aug. 17 in disarray. The administration decision reverses a bipartisan drive since the Nixon era to augment international biological weapon controls. The reversal comes at a particularly critical time - when biotechnology is unleashing powerful discoveries that could be misused to tailor new diseases for deliberate spread as weapons. 

There are 143 countries involved in negotiating a treaty to monitor compliance with the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972, which outlaws development and possession of such weapons but has no verification provisions. Rejection of the biological weapons treaty follows an administration pattern of arrogance in conducting foreign policy that seems almost designed to create antagonism. 

To avoid another publicity fiasco like the one that followed its rejection of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, the White House announced that the U.S. delegation would remain after rejecting the biological weapons treaty until the negotiating session disbanded in order to prevent other nations from reaching a biological weapons agreement among themselves.

The reasons given for rejecting the treaty are disingenuous and intended for a public audience that lacks sufficient technical information to evaluate them. The administration insists that the treaty is too weak even though its weak points reflect concessions insisted upon earlier by the United States.  It objects that the treaty would not catch cheaters with certainty, although the chief U.S. negotiator, Ambassador Donald Mahley, has testified in Congress that it would "complicate the efforts of countries to cheat."  And the administration claims that the treaty would threaten confidential national security and commercial proprietary information even though the treaty has greater confidentiality safeguards and is less intrusive than the Chemical Weapons Convention, signed by President Bush's father in 1993 and ratified by the Senate.

The administration's true motivation has been amply demonstrated since it took office: a philosophical aversion to the restrictions imposed by any treaty. 

Provisions for safeguarding confidential bio-defense and business information are necessary, of course, and their adequacy in the draft treaty is attested by the strong support of every U.S. ally and all of Europe, Latin America, Japan and many other countries.

During the drafting of the treaty, our allies consulted with and had the support of their biotech and pharmaceutical industries, many of them multinational corporations with headquarters or affiliates in the United States.  Americans will be a prime target if these weapons are ever used either strategically or as an instrument of terror. Even if they are never used, the proliferation of biological weapons could lead to the escape of deadly genetically engineered germs from laboratories and the permanent establishment of new and uncontrollable diseases in the biosphere.

There are no weapons that can "take out" an epidemic, nor are there any defensive measures for protecting the public from biological weapons. 

Although preparations for limiting or responding to a biological attack are important, we can't afford to turn down any measure that would contribute to prevention. Unilateral actions alone won't do it. 

Refusing to join the rest of the world may turn out to be a costly U.S. mistake. 

Barbara Hatch Rosenberg is chairwoman of the Federation of American Scientists' Working Group on Biological Weapons and a research professor of natural science at the State University of New York at Purchase.

NBC worker infection prompts fears media target of mail attack; 
Scares nationwide; 
Incident doesn't seem tied to Fla., FBI says

By Tom Pelton and Scott Shane
Sun Staff

October 13, 2001

An NBC News employee in New York became yesterday the fourth American to be discovered with a rare anthrax bacterium, raising fears that media companies may have been targeted for a biological attack through the mail.

The possibility that the anthrax cases in Florida and New York are part of a coordinated bioterrorism attack sent a chill across the nation yesterday. Buildings were evacuated, and top federal officials warned against opening suspicious mail. Scares involving spilled powder and unusual letters were reported all over the United States and Europe.

As an intensive investigation continued into three anthrax cases at a tabloid newspaper chain in Florida, federal officials evacuated NBC's third floor offices at 30 Rockefeller Center yesterday morning. Experts were analyzing powder found in a suspicious letter that the employee opened before a rash erupted on her skin.

The woman, an assistant to NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, is in good condition with a form of the disease that is less deadly than the inhaled variety that killed a photographer at the Boca Raton, Fla., tabloid last week.

The FBI said it had no evidence linking the New York and Florida anthrax cases or tying them to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.  But Vice President Dick Cheney said, "The only responsible thing for us to do is proceed on the basis that it could be linked."

"We know that [terrorist leader Osama bin Laden] has over the years tried to acquire weapons of mass destruction, both biological and chemical weapons," Cheney said in an interview with PBS. "We know that he's trained people in his camps in Afghanistan - we have copies of the manuals that they've actually used to train people with respect to how to deploy and use these kinds of substances."

Medical experts said the sudden appearance in office buildings of a rare disease associated with livestock points toward criminal intentions. The similarity of targets and methods in New York and Florida has heightened suspicions.

The New York Times briefly evacuated its Manhattan offices after Judith Miller, a reporter who has written on bin Laden and bioterrorism, opened an envelope containing a white powder. Like the letter sent to NBC, the envelope sent to Miller was postmarked in St. Petersburg, Fla., the FBI said. Initial tests for anthrax were negative.

A similar scare occurred at the Columbus Dispatch in Ohio, where the newspaper building was evacuated when a Halloween card was opened and found to contain powder, which proved to be harmless. Other false alarms were reported from a suburban Denver hospital, the State Department's Foreign Service Institute in Arlington, Va., a Burbank, Calif., television station and a Microsoft office in Reno, Nev.

During a Washington news conference yesterday, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft called the possibility of bioterrorism "a threat that continues to darken our country." But he warned against panic.

"If individuals receive mail of which they are suspicious, they should not open it, they should not shake it," Ashcroft said. "They should leave the area of the mail and call the local law enforcement and health authorities so that the mail can be appropriately dealt with."

Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson stressed again that anthrax is not transmitted from person to person and urged Americans not to become overwhelmed with fear. "Don't be intimidated. The terrorists want to scare us, and they want to affect our daily life and see us living in fear," Thompson said. "We cannot let them succeed. We need to live our lives and just be more aware as we go about our business."

At post offices in Baltimore and nationwide, security measures in place since Sept. 11 were heightened yesterday. They're inspecting packages and letters before they're delivered, focusing particularly on high-profile companies and individuals.

"Up until this time, we have not ever seen an incident where actual biological hazards have been transmitted through the United States mails," said Ken Newman, deputy chief of the U.S. postal inspector's office. He said fraudulent threats and hoaxes will be investigated and prosecuted.

In the New York case, NBC News reported that a letter addressed to Brokaw and containing white powder was opened Sept. 25 by his assistant.

Three days later, the woman developed a low-grade fever and a rash. She went to see a doctor, who gave her an antibiotic, Cipro. Yesterday morning, biopsy results showed that she had the cutaneous, or skin, form of anthrax, New York Mayor Rudolph Guiliani said at a news conference.

Although early tests of the powder did not reveal any anthrax, those tests may have been inadequate because the sample was so small. More testing is under way, and federal officials said they believe the letter was the likely source of the woman's infection.

After learning of the biopsy results, officials sealed off NBC's third-floor offices. About 200 employees, including Brokaw, are being tested for anthrax and given antibiotics as a precaution, said an NBC spokesman.

Thirty-five investigators with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta were sent to New York to take samples from NBC offices and conduct interviews, authorities said.

Blocks away, at The New York Times offices, Miller opened a letter, spilling a white powder, said a reporter who was nearby. Colleagues said the substance smelled like baby powder. Soon after, Miller's work area was sealed off and three men in hazardous-materials suits and a man with a gas mask arrived. The newsroom was evacuated for 2 1/2 hours.

In Boca Raton, Fla., yesterday, where test results have come back for 965 employees and visitors to the American Media Inc. building, no new anthrax cases were reported. One employee, Robert Stevens, died of inhaled anthrax last week, and two others have been exposed. Because traces of anthrax were found in a mailroom receptacle, investigators said yesterday that they are testing postal workers who sort mail for the tabloid newspapers.

Hoax letters and packages containing harmless powder have become frequent in recent years. Gary W. Long, a biologist formerly at the Naval Medical Research Center, said he and his colleagues tested nearly 500 suspicious envelopes containing powder for the FBI, the Secret Service and other agencies in the late 1990s. None contained anthrax, he said.

Anthrax is a bacterial disease that has been found in cattle and sheep for centuries. It is usually transferred when animals eat dirt that has bacteria in it left from the decay of another infected animal.

Anthrax among humans occasionally pops up among farm workers and others who handle wool and hides, but it is extremely rare in the United States. The last case of cutaneous anthrax was in a 67-year-old North Dakota man last year who had handled the carcasses of infected cows.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, said it would be relatively easy for a potential terrorist to obtain the anthrax bacteria from the carcass of an infected animal or from one of several labs around the country.

Until the mid-1990s, any laboratory scientist interested in a sample of the bacteria for research purposes could write to the American Type Culture Collection in Rockville, Md., and receive a culture. Dozens of labs around the country had the cultures, which were not kept under lock and key.

Because of fear of terrorism, the federal government tightened control of anthrax and other dangerous pathogens in 1996, limiting access to licensed laboratories. But controls are more lax in many other countries.

According to a 1999 report, 17 countries have bioweapons programs, most of which are likely to involve anthrax.

"Years ago, there were almost no restrictions on anthrax for laboratory purposes," Fauci said. "But now it's a high-security item."

If a terrorist were to obtain a petri dish with the bacteria growing in it, he could starve the bacteria and the anthrax would revert to a spore form that would look like a powder, Fauci said. This powder would be potentially deadly, Fauci said.

In its purest form, the powder would be white, odorless and hard to see when blown into the air, said Calvin Chue, a research scientist with the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies.

People touching the powder could become infected through small cuts in their skin, Fauci said. This cutaneous infection would create skin lesions that would turn into black scabs.

Such infections are rarely fatal, though if left untreated about 20 percent of cases lead to a deadly blood infection.

But the inhaled form of anthrax is far more dangerous. The act of ripping open a letter with anthrax in it could stir up enough spores to infect the lungs, said Fauci.

Within two to 60 days, a victim would develop flu-like symptoms, including fever, cough and chest pains. About 80 percent of people who contract the inhaled form die within days.

Only 18 cases of inhaled anthrax have been reported in the United States this century. The last one before the Florida photographer was in 1976, according to the CDC.

Sun staff writers Gady Epstein, Michael James and Michael Stroh contributed to this article.

Letters to NBC, Microsoft subsidiary tested positive; 
5 more in Fla. exposed; 
Still no evidence incidents are linked; reports spread panic

By Michael Stroh
Sun Staff

October 14, 2001

Two suspicious letters - one delivered in New York and another in Nevada - have been found to contain anthrax, while five more employees of a Florida tabloid publisher have tested positive for exposure to the rare and deadly bacteria, officials announced yesterday.

FBI and health officials, who say they still have no evidence that the incidents in the three states are linked to the Sept. 11 terrorists or to one another, lead a criminal investigation that is rapidly widening in scope and complexity.

At a New York news conference yesterday, officials said a threatening letter addressed to NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw and postmarked Sept. 18 from Trenton, N.J., was the likely source of the anthrax that sickened an aide to the news anchor.

Initially, authorities had focused on a suspicious powder-filled letter sent from St. Petersburg, Fla., to NBC. But that letter - along with a similar one sent to The New York Times - tested negative for anthrax spores.

In Nevada, meanwhile, a letter sent to Microsoft Licensing Inc., a Reno subsidiary of the software giant, was found to be contaminated with anthrax, Gov. Kenny Guinn said yesterday. The letter, which contained a check from Microsoft to a vendor in Malaysia and pornographic pictures, had been tested twice before. Results had been inconclusive or negative.

Thus far, none of the six people who touched the envelope or were nearby when it was opened Friday are known to be infected or showing signs of illness, Guinn said. The letter is being sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta for analysis.

"This is a very, very low risk to public health," Guinn said.

As criminal investigations in New York and Nevada get under way, federal agents in Florida continue piecing together how anthrax was introduced into the headquarters of American Media Inc., the Boca Raton publisher of the National Enquirer and other supermarket tabloids.

Investigators suspect that the deadly pathogen might have arrived in a letter or package because traces of anthrax were found in the company's mailroom and two mailroom workers were found to have been exposed to the bacteria.

The only other place anthrax was located in the building was on the computer keyboard of Robert Stevens, a photo editor who died Oct. 5 of inhaled anthrax, the most serious form of the disease.

Yesterday, the tabloid company learned from the CDC that five more employees had been exposed to anthrax, said spokesman Gerald McKelvey.

More than 1,000 employees and visitors to the American Media building have been given nasal tests for anthrax in the past week.

As a precautionary measure, CDC officials are also testing about 20 mail sorters who work at three post offices that serve American Media

In New York, officials are closely watching a second NBC employee who is exhibiting a fever, rash and other symptoms of anthrax. The employee, who has not been identified, is being treated with antibiotics while officials await test results.

About 200 NBC employees, including Brokaw, are being tested for exposure to anthrax since Brokaw's aide, Erin M. O'Connor, was found Friday to have developed the cutaneous, or skin, anthrax, a less serious form of the disease.

O'Connor developed a rash on her chest several weeks ago, health officials said. When it worsened, she consulted a doctor Oct. 1, who prescribed the antibiotic Cipro. Health officials learned Friday from skin biopsy results that she had anthrax.

O'Connor was one of several NBC employees thought to have handled the tainted letter, which contained a sand-like substance.

There was some confusion about why investigators in New York only learned about the Trenton letter yesterday, while the St. Petersburg letter sent to NBC Studios was turned over to the FBI on Sept. 26, the day after it was received.

NBC Chairman Bob Wright explained at a news conference that the Trenton letter was accidentally filed in a folder where the company keeps other threatening letters. Wright added that it was not unusual for employees to get such letters.

But after learning of the anthrax case Friday, FBI officials evacuated some NBC offices at their Rockefeller Center headquarters and began a criminal investigation. That's when they discovered the Trenton letter, which had no return address and contained threats that authorities would not specify. It is not clear when the Trenton letter arrived at NBC.

The discovery of the source of exposure provided some relief to nervous NBC employees. "Now we have identified the missing link, so to speak, the actual cause of the anthrax that created this whole situation," said Wright. "So we are no longer dealing with an unknown time, date and place and that is very important."

The New York Times briefly evacuated its Manhattan offices for several hours Friday after reporter Judith Miller opened an envelope containing a white powder. Like the letter sent to NBC, the envelope sent to Miller was postmarked in St. Petersburg, Fla.

The preliminary tests conducted on The New York Times letter by the New York City Department of Health were negative. Results from additional tests by the CDC were not expected until Tuesday, said Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis.

The anthrax mail attacks in New York and Florida - and now Nevada - have continued to fuel fears across the country. Law enforcement agencies continued to be inundated by panic calls about suspicious mail and powdery substances.

A US Airways flight from Charlotte, N.C., to Denver was diverted yesterday to Indianapolis after a flight attendant found a powdery substance on the plane. Tests by the state health department found the substance to be harmless.

In Maryland, the New Market Post Office was temporarily closed yesterday when a postal employee noticed a suspicious letter addressed to the White House. The letter leaked a powdery substance and was "stained, had no postmark and no return address other than 'England,'" said Inspector Eric Kocay.

Frederick County sheriff's deputies were dispatched to the post office, along with FBI agents and members of the Secret Service. But the substance appeared to be nothing dangerous, according to the sheriff's office.

"We're answering some of the strangest calls we've ever received," said a Frederick County Sheriff's deputy. "One woman overheard two people not speaking English on her cell phone - and she wanted us to do something about it."

Another suspicious-envelope incident forced the evacuation of T. Rowe Price's Building Four at its investor center in Owings Mills yesterday around 10 a.m. Fire officials said an employee called police shortly before 10 a.m. and reported an envelope, in the mail room, with a "white powder" inside. The substance has yet been identified.

Hazardous materials crews arrived at the scene and turned over the envelope to the FBI for analysis. No injuries or symptoms were reported, fire officials said.

Federal officials warned yesterday that anyone caught perpetrating a hoax would be prosecuted.

Sun staff writer Michael Scarcella and wire reports contributed to this article.

Small-scale success with anthrax assault

By Scott Shane
Sun Staff

October 18, 2001

To turn anthrax from an animal disease into a bioterror weapon capable of killing large numbers of people is a demanding scientific task that requires some knowledge of microbiology and lab equipment, according to experts and scientific reports.

The still-incomplete information released about the anthrax mailed to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle's office in Washington, as well as to news media offices in New York and Florida, shows only that the attackers mastered the steps necessary to mount a small-scale biological assault.

Their most significant achievement was to grind anthrax spore to the size at which it quickly disperses in the air, specialists say.

But officials do not know whether the attackers have access to large quantities of anthrax spores or a delivery system capable of infecting large numbers of people.

Confusion was widespread yesterday after news media reports that the anthrax delivered to Capitol Hill was "high-grade" or "professional."

Such terms are imprecise, and experts said yesterday that it is impossible to know what they mean until detailed results of tests done on the anthrax samples are made public.

A top Army biodefense official, Maj. Gen. John Parker, said yesterday that the anthrax from Daschle's office consisted of "pure spore." He said the anthrax strain had not been fully identified but was not resistant to antibiotics.

The letters sent to Daschle and NBC News, which the Associated Press said included advice to take medication, seemed designed to sow panic, not to kill, according to several experts. Nor was the tiny quantity of anthrax that can be delivered by letter capable of mass killing.

"With a letter, you're not going to infect a lot of people," said David R. Franz, a veterinarian who spent 23 years as a top official in the U.S. Army's biological defense program at Fort Detrick. "And it's not covert. It gives you a chance to treat people."

David Siegrist, who studies biological terrorism at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, agreed. "It doesn't appear these guys' concern was to infect as many people as possible," he said.

Dangerous particle size

But both men said that if the anthrax spores delivered to Daschle's office lodged in the nasal passages of 34 Capitol Hill employees, as tests indicated yesterday, the attackers have achieved a particle size that is very dangerous.

"A little bit of perturbation caused by opening the envelope was enough to put the particles into the air," said Franz, who is now at the private Southern Research Institute in Frederick.

He cautioned, however, that a person with detectable particles in his nose would not necessarily have inhaled enough anthrax spores into the lungs to cause a full-blown case of the disease. In any case, the Senate employees exposed to the bacteria are taking antibiotics and should not get sick, he said.

"Weaponizing" anthrax - turning it into a form that can be used to kill - is a multistep process that begins with the acquisition of bacteria. Some natural strains of anthrax are far more virulent than others, so a terrorist might seek a particularly deadly strain.

But the seed bacteria could be obtained with relative ease - stolen from a lab, purchased from a microbiological supply house abroad, diverted from a nation's bioweapons program or collected at the site of an animal anthrax outbreak.

A sick animal's blood is loaded with bacteria, and living anthrax spores can be dug from the ground where infected animals were buried, even after a century has passed.

The bacteria might be exposed to one or more antibiotics and bred to make it resistant to treatment. That would make the anthrax more dangerous, but might also interfere with its virulence and other characteristics, said Franz, so a terrorist might not attempt it.

The next step would be to increase the volume of bacteria by growing more. To produce a relatively small amount, anthrax could be grown in a lab on a common growth medium such as blood agar, a substance made from ocean algae enriched with blood. A single plate could produce enough anthrax to put poison in many envelopes.

To make enough germs to kill thousands of people, terrorists would need a much larger, more sophisticated fermentation tank, carefully controlling temperature, nutrients, oxygen and carbon dioxide.

Such tanks were built for past U.S., British, Soviet and Iraqi weapons programs, and they were capable of producing hundreds of gallons of anthrax slurry.

"It's not like you just pour all the ingredients into a blender and turn it on," Franz said. "It's not only a science. It's an art."

Preserved by drying

Whether prepared on a small plate or in a big tank, the anthrax would then be dried by freezing it or warming it. "Anthrax is easier to dry than some things because it's so stable," Franz said. "It can take a little heat."

Exposure to air and deprivation of nutrients also converts the bacteria to the spore state - an extremely hardy form designed to survive drought and age.

"That's the way it survives. It's like a plant making seeds," says Dr. William M. Nelson, a former government scientist and now president of Tetracore Inc., a Gaithersburg company that makes anthrax test strips.

But the dried spore mixture contains large grains and clumps. So it must be "milled," or ground into particles. For a weapon designed to produce inhalation anthrax, the ideal particle size is about 1 to 5 microns. A micron is one thousandth of a millimeter; a typical human hair is 50 microns wide.

"If it's too big, your nose filters it out. If it's too small, it may just go in and go back out without lodging in the lung," Nelson said.

Anthrax is considered one of the most dangerous biological agents partly because, once the spores are dried and milled, they can be placed in a sealed container and transported from one country to another. As long as they are protected from heat and light, they will live for weeks or months.

Delivery is unpredictable

Most experts consider the final step - delivery - to be the most difficult. To kill on a large scale, the anthrax powder must be released in such a way that an aerosol cloud of a certain density settles onto crowds of people.

And to get a fatal dose, each person would have to inhale roughly 5,000 to 10,000 spores deep into his lungs.

The spores could be poured from the roof of a tall city building, sprayed from a hand-held sprayer, released in a subway or delivered from a crop-dusting plane equipped with special nozzles. But the results would be highly unpredictable and much would depend on the weather.

"Meteorology is everything," Franz said. On a windy, sunny day, the sun could kill much of the anthrax and the wind dilute it to levels that would not infect anyone. But under certain weather conditions, the particles could become an invisible, odorless aerosol, spreading at just the right density to kill on a frightening scale.

A 1993 report by the U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment estimated that the release of 100 kilograms (about 220 pounds) of anthrax spores upwind of Washington could kill 130,000 to 3 million people.

That is the catastrophe scientists fear could lie at the end of the road that started this month with a few envelopes of suspicious powder.

Investigators note similarity to those Brokaw, Daschle got; More spores found in D.C.

From Staff And Wire Reports

October 21, 2001

A letter mailed to the New York Post has tested positive for anthrax and is similar to anthrax-laced letters sent to NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw and Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, police said late yesterday.

The letter addressed to "Editor" was postmarked Sept. 18 - as was a contaminated letter sent to Brokaw - and bore a Trenton, N.J., postmark like the letters to Brokaw and Daschle. The letter to Daschle was postmarked Oct. 9.

The handwriting on the Post letter is similar to that found on the two other letters, according to statement released by New York police and the FBI.

Police found the unopened envelope late Friday night during an investigation launched after a Post employee tested positive for the bacteria. The letter, which contained a small amount of a powdery substance, has been sent to Maryland for testing.

Meanwhile, anthrax was found in the mailroom of a House office building yesterday, while a man who works at a Washington post office that processes letters bound for Congress was hospitalized with a possible anthrax infection.

Investigators who began testing House and Senate offices earlier this week after an anthrax-laced letter arrived at Daschle's office in the Hart Senate building found anthrax on a mail-bundling machine at the Gerald R. Ford House Annex, Capitol police said yesterday.

The annex handles mail for the Longworth House Office Building, where more than 100 lawmakers have their offices. The annex also houses the Congressional Budget Office and a child care center, but no anthrax was found outside the mailroom.

The unidentified postal employee worked at Washington's central post office, which had handled the Daschle letter. Mail headed for lawmakers' offices passes through the post office on Brentwood Avenue in Northeast Washington before being routed to either the House or Senate.

Washington Health Commissioner Ivan Walks declined to identify the man, but said his symptoms were "suspicious" and that he was being tested for anthrax while under treatment at Fairfax Hospital.

Officials said it was too early to draw any links between the sick postal worker, the anthrax finding at the Ford building and the letter that arrived at Daschle's office. Twenty-eight people who worked in or near the office tested positive for anthrax exposure and were placed on antibiotics.

The developments, however, raised the possibility that a second letter contaminated with anthrax was sent to Congress - this one passing through the Ford Annex before making its way to a House office. Officials, however, said one letter could have contaminated others while passing through mail-handling equipment.

Dr. John Eisold, a physician for the Capitol, said employees in the Ford mailroom will be tested and treated if necessary.

Eight people in the United States are known to have contracted the disease, including a man in Florida who died. The others are on antibiotics and are expected to recover.

The discovery of anthrax in the Ford building seemed to validate the decision by Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, an Illinois Republican, to adjourn the House on Wednesday and order its office buildings cleared. The Senate - its members saying they didn't want to send signals of panic - remained in session until Thursday afternoon, though its offices were closed.

Rep. Peter T. King, a New York Republican, told CNN yesterday that the Senate's action was "pompous, posturing windbagging."

House and Senate office buildings were closed Wednesday to allow for environmental testing. Work was to continue through the weekend, but it was unclear yesterday whether the houses would go back into session Tuesday as planned.

In Trenton, FBI agents and other investigators interviewed residents and swabbed mailboxes for clues to the source of anthrax-laden letters sent Brokaw and Daschle.

Residents in Ewing Township were shown photos of the letters and asked whether they recognized the handwriting, whether they had noticed anything suspicious lately, seen any cars with out-of-state licenses or knew any chemists living among them.

Some were asked whether they routinely left outgoing mail in their personal mailboxes for their letter carriers to pick up or typically dropped it in a public box.

"It stops you in your tracks," said Charlotte Kaplan-Piepszak, 48, who pointed to a double-bagged bundle of mail that she picked up at the post office last week but will keep on her back porch until she is sure its safe. "When the planes hit the World Trade Center in New York, New York being 70 miles away, that's close. This is in our own back yard."

Investigators swarmed over the neighborhood after skin anthrax was diagnosed in a mail carrier, a prompt, friendly, pony-tailed woman residents knew as "Terry." Agents hope to trace the sources of two contaminated letters she may have handled, sent to Brokaw and Daschle. They have seized several mailboxes in the past few days.

On Friday, officials said a second New Jersey postal worker has developed skin anthrax - a 35-year-old postal worker from Levittown, Pa., who worked at the regional distribution facility in nearbyHamilton Township, N.J. He was in stable condition yesterday and was responding well to antibiotic treatment, a hospital spokeswoman said. Test results were pending on a third postal worker, a maintenance employee who worked on mail-sorting machines at the Hamilton facility.

Employees at the West Trenton post office in Ewing Township and at a regional processing center in Hamilton Township, 20 miles away, began a seven-day regimen of antibiotics yesterday as recommended by the state health department.

Yesterday, President Bush said there remained no evidence that the anthrax letters were linked to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. But he vowed to fight whoever is behind them. 

By Michael Stroh
Sun Staff

October 26, 2001

Investigators offered new details about the anthrax used in the deadly mail attacks yesterday, as the bacteria sickened a State Department mail worker and federal officials widened the hunt for contamination to hundreds of mailrooms and post offices along the East Coast.

Test results from the spores mailed to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle "confirmed our worst suspicions," Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge said yesterday. The bacteria were the most concentrated and highly refined of the samples linked to the attacks in Washington, New York and Florida. Spores found in a New York Post letter, in contrast, were as chunky as "Purina dog chow" under the microscope, one expert said.

"Clearly, we are up against a shadow enemy," Ridge said at a White House briefing, "people who have no regard for human life who are determined to murder innocent people."

The toxic trail of bacteria leading from a contaminated Washington mail facility expanded yesterday to a new area postal facility. A State Department employee who works at an off-site mailroom in Sterling, Va., has inhaled anthrax, the most lethal form of the disease, Washington Mayor Anthony A. Williams said yesterday.

The 59-year-old man, who worked on the receiving dock, is being treated at Winchester Hospital in Winchester, Va.

Also, a test for anthrax in a mailroom in the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Silver Spring came back positive yesterday, said Charles Dasey, spokesman for U.S. Army Medical Research and Material Command. The institute, which doesn't care for patients, is three miles from the hospital at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Dasey said the mailroom at Fort Detrick in Frederick which exchanges mail with the institute, also was being tested.

Like many government mailrooms in the Washington area, the Sterling station receives its mail from the now-quarantined Brentwood sorting facility. After learning of the employee's illness yesterday, the State Department shut down mail deliveries as a precaution. Testing and treatment of workers were under way.

The number of Americans examined or prescribed antibiotics for anthrax exposure since the attacks began last month reached about 10,000 yesterday. Three people have died, all from the inhaled form of the disease, and 12 other cases of both inhaled and less serious cutaneous anthrax have been confirmed.

With so many hospitals and agencies involved, and some places using different definitions for suspected cases, the human casualties of the attack have proven difficult to track. At hospitals in Maryland, Washington, D.C., and Virginia, dozens of patients have been evaluated for suspicion of anthrax. Ten have suspicious symptoms, while another 23 have a clinical illness, but their conditions are most likely not related to anthrax, according to Washington officials.

In Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Hospital admitted a truck driver who has a skin lesion that suggests anthrax. GBMC discharged two patients yesterday and admitted another, a 51-year-old male postal worker.

Doctors treating the rare disease were given new guidelines yesterday. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised physicians to treat inhaled anthrax with a cocktail of up to three antibiotics, including Cipro. Previously, treatment consisted of only a single antibiotic.

As Washington leaders moved to reassure a shaken city by reopening two Capitol Hill office buildings, public health officials were struggling to determine how widely anthrax had spread through the U.S. postal system.

Federal officials announced yesterday that they were expanding testing for contamination to all government mailrooms in Washington, additional private area businesses that receive bulk mail and 200 post offices from Washington to New York.

It was unclear if testing would be performed in the Baltimore area. Postal officials said Tuesday that environmental testing was planned at the Fayette Street post office, the Calvert Street annex and a Frederick facility. But officials said yesterday that they knew of no plans for those stations. In New York, anthrax was found yesterday on four mail-sorting machines at a Manhattan processing station that handles millions of parcels daily, the Postal Service said.

Other anthrax hot spots turned up in Washington yesterday. Anthrax spores were found in several new areas of the Hart office building on Capitol Hill, including an air conditioning filter, a stairwell and a freight elevator. Daschle announced that one wing of the building would be sealed off indefinitely, a move expected to affect at least a dozen or so of the 100 senators with offices there.

The challenge to public health officials is figuring out how to seal off the contaminated area while enabling staffers to safely occupy the rest. Anthrax spores in Daschle's letter were a little more than a micron wide, a size that would allow them to slip through most standard filters. There are 25,000 microns in an inch.

"I am very confident that we will be able to seal it," Daschle said of the affected area.

The anthrax-filled letter that passed through Brentwood, killing two workers and sickening two workers, is the suspected source of contamination at three congressional office buildings and a remote White House mail facility at Bolling Air Force Base. As of yesterday, 300 employees and visitors to that facility have all tested negative for anthrax exposure, according to Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman.

The continuing spread of anthrax is worrying public health officials, who are struggling to understand how the spores might have traveled. The infection of a State Department mail clerk only deepens the mystery. Officials said the clerk, who was in guarded condition, did not come into contact with the Brentwood station or the Daschle letter.

That raises the possibility that more than one tainted letter had been sent to the nation's capital -- or that the Daschle mail had somehow tainted another letter. "We cannot say that it was just one letter," said Chris Murray, an FBI spokesman.

Behind the scenes, government scientists at Fort Detrick and other laboratories admit they are struggling to tease clues from the minuscule quantities of anthrax recovered from the toxic letters.

So far they have determined that samples from Florida, New York, New Jersey and Capitol Hill are all the so-called Ames strain. The scientists know that the anthrax sent to Daschle was more concentrated and highly pure, suggesting a more advanced knowledge of biological weapons. The tiny particles make it more likely the bacteria could be dispersed in the air and inhaled more readily.

"When we look at these spores under the microscope, they are highly concentrated and very light. If given some energy from wind or clapping or motion in the room, they will drift in the air," said Maj. Gen John Parker of the U.S. Army's Medical Research and Material Command, which is analyzing the material.

The letter sent to the New York Post, one of three recovered by investigators that bear a Trenton, N.J. postmark and held anthrax, contained spores that were "clumpy" and less concentrated, officials said. A similar letter sent to NBC in New York had too little anthrax to be analyzed, Ridge said. Investigators haven't turned up the letter presumed to have delivered anthrax to Florida tabloid publisher American Media Inc., the site of the first fatal anthrax attack.

On the positive side, none of the anthrax DNA from the letters has been altered to render it immune to antibiotics. "The good news is this strain is susceptible to all the antibiotics we have in the U.S.," said Parker.

Despite these insights, the investigation appears to be characterized more by what government scientists don't know than what they do. Does the difference in quality of anthrax in the letters suggest more than one perpetrator? Does the fact that the strains of anthrax have matched prove there is only one?

"We don't have the answers," Ridge said.

Of the 1,200 or so known anthrax strains, Ames might be among the least useful to investigators trying to narrow down their list of suspects. The strain, experts say, is common in laboratories and animal populations across the United States and Europe.

Lawmakers who have received classified briefings said investigators do not know where the anthrax in the letter attacks came from.

"I know that there has been a great deal of speculation about Iraqi involvement," said Sen. Bob Graham, a Florida Democrat and chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. "As of this point, there has not been a clear identification of an Iraqi role either in the Sept. 11 attacks or in the anthrax issue."

A report yesterday in The Washington Post said only Russia, Iraq and the United States are known to be capable of producing the sophisticated anthrax of the kind linked to the Daschle letter.

While the wait for answers might be anguishing to a nervous public, the White House is trying to emphasize that there can be no timeline for test results.

Sun staff writers Diana Sugg, Allison Klein, Gail Gibson, Frank D. Roylance and wire services contributed to this article.

Bioterror: Organisms made at a military laboratory in Utah are genetically identical to those mailed to members of Congress.

By Scott Shane
Sun Staff
Originally published December 12, 2001

For nearly a decade, U.S. Army scientists at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah have made small quantities of weapons-grade anthrax that is virtually identical to the powdery spores used in the mail attacks that have killed five people, government sources say.

Until the anthrax attacks led to tighter security measures, anthrax grown at Dugway was regularly sent by Federal Express to the Army's biodefense center at Fort Detrick, in Frederick, where the bacteria were killed using gamma radiation before being returned to Dugway for experiments.

The anthrax was shipped in the form of a coarse paste, not in the far more dangerous finely milled form, according to one government official.

Most anthrax testing at Dugway, in a barren Utah desert 87 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, is done using the killed spores to reduce the chance of accidental exposure of workers there.

But some experiments require live anthrax, milled to the tiny particle size expected on a battlefield, to test both decontamination techniques and biological agent detection systems, the sources say.

Anthrax is also grown at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, where it is used chiefly to test the effectiveness of vaccines in animals.

But that medical program uses a wet aerosol fog of anthrax rather than the dry powder used in the attacks and at Dugway, according to interviews and medical journal articles based on the research.

The wet anthrax, while still capable of killing people, is safer for laboratory workers to handle, scientists say.

Dugway's production of weapons-grade anthrax, which has never before been publicly revealed, is apparently the first by the U.S. government since President Richard M. Nixon ordered the U.S. offensive biowarfare program closed in 1969.

Scientists familiar with the anthrax program at Dugway described it to The Sun on the condition that they not be named.

The offensive program made hundreds of kilograms of anthrax for bombs designed to kill enemy troops over hundreds of square miles.

Dugway's Life Sciences Division makes the deadly spores in far, far smaller quantities, rarely accumulating more than 10 grams at a time, according to one Army official.

Scientists estimate that the letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle originally contained about 2 grams of anthrax, about one-sixteenth of an ounce, or the weight of a dime.

But its extraordinary concentration - in the range of 1 trillion spores per gram - meant that the letter could have contained 200 million times the average dose necessary to kill a person.

Dugway's weapons-grade anthrax has been milled to achieve a similar concentration, according to one person familiar with the program.

The concentration exceeds that of weapons anthrax produced by the old U.S. offensive program or the Soviet biowarfare program, according to Dr. Richard O. Spertzel, who worked at Detrick for 18 years and later served as a United Nations bioweapons inspector in Iraq.

Lab security measures

No evidence linking the Dugway anthrax to the attacks has been made public, and there might well be none. Army officials say the anthrax there and at Fort Detrick has long been protected by multiple security measures.

The FBI has extensively questioned Dugway employees who have had access to anthrax, according to people familiar with the investigation.

Agents also have questioned people at Fort Detrick and other government and university laboratories that have used the Ames strain of anthrax found in the letters.

Still, the analysis of the genetic and physical properties of the anthrax mailed to Daschle and Sen. Patrick J. Leahy has caused investigators to take a hard look at Dugway's anthrax program.

First, the genetic fingerprint of the mailed anthrax is indistinguishable from that of the Ames "reference strain," which is the strain used most often at Fort Detrick and Dugway, according to a scientist familiar with the genetic work.

Researchers led by Paul Keim at Northern Arizona University have compared the two samples and found them identical at 50 genetic markers - the most sensitive genetic identification method available.

That does not mean the mailed anthrax necessarily originated from an Army program, because Ames anthrax has been widely used at government and university laboratories in the United States and overseas.

Shipped without records

While some sources have estimated Ames might have been used in as few as 20 labs, one scientist who has worked with anthrax said the total cannot be known exactly, but is probably closer to 50.

"Until the last few years, a graduate student would call up a friend at another lab and say, 'Send me Ames,' and they'd do it," the scientist said. "There wouldn't necessarily be any records kept."

Ames is similar to but distinct from the Vollum1B strain of anthrax used in the old U.S. offensive biological weapons program.

The genetic testing proves the mailed anthrax was not left over from the old program, most scientists agree.

Even more provocative than the genetics are the physical properties of the mailed anthrax. While some scientists disagree, many bioterrorism experts argue that the quality of the mailed anthrax is such that it could have been produced only in a weapons program or using information from such a program.

Link to Dugway base

If true, that would greatly limit the field, increasing the likelihood of a link to the only site in the United States where weapons-grade anthrax has been made in recent years.

Dugway, which is larger than Rhode Island, has been a military testing ground since World War II, when military officials selected it for its remote location in Utah's Great Salt Lake Desert.

The Dugway anthrax program was launched in the early 1990s, shortly after the Persian Gulf war reawakened U.S. military commanders to the threat from biological weapons.

Iraq is known to have built a major bioweapons program that included anthrax in its potential arsenal.

According to Dugway's Web site, the proving ground's Life Sciences Division has an aerosol technology branch and a biotechnology branch, both of which use a Biosafety Level 3 laboratory designed to contain pathogens.

Anthrax and other dangerous germs at Dugway are guarded by video cameras, intrusion alarms, double locks and a buddy system that does not permit workers to handle the agents alone, according to one scientist.

But Dugway does not have a gamma radiation machine, which is why its anthrax has been shipped to Detrick for irradiation.

Dr. David L. Huxsoll, who headed Detrick's biodefense program in the 1980s, said vaccines and detection systems must be tested against aerosolized anthrax if troops are to be prepared for biological attacks.

                    "When you're building a program to defend against biological weapons on the battlefield, you have to be prepared for an aerosol exposure," he said.

Not a treaty violation

Milton Leitenberg, an expert on bioweapons at the University of Maryland, said he was not aware of the Dugway anthrax production.

But he said making a few grams of weapons-grade anthrax for testing defensive equipment would not violate the international convention on biological weapons.

The treaty bans the production of bioagents "of types and in quantities that have no justification for prophylactic, protective and other peaceful purposes."

"There's no specific limit in grams or micrograms," Leitenberg said. "But if you got up in the hundreds of grams, people would be very, very skeptical."

The FBI's investigation, called Amerithrax, has focused on the possibility that the anthrax terrorist might be a loner in this country with some scientific training.

The Sun reported Sunday that in two months, none of the hundreds of FBI agents on the case had contacted the Army retirees who produced anthrax in the 1950s and 1960s.

Yesterday, one of those anthrax veterans, Orley R. Bourland Jr. of Walkersville, got a call from the White House Office of Homeland Security seeking information.

The FBI had not made contact with several veterans interviewed yesterday. 

Copyright © 2002, The Baltimore Sun

Military laboratory in Utah says powder is all accounted for

By Scott Shane
Sun Staff

December 13, 2001

The U.S. Army's Dugway Proving Ground confirmed last night that it has produced dry anthrax powder in recent years but said the anthrax has been "well-protected" and is all accounted for.

The Dugway statement was issued in response to an article in The Sun yesterday revealing that the Army facility in the Utah desert has produced weapons-grade anthrax identical in important respects to the anthrax used in the postal attacks.

The statement is the first admission that any U.S. government program has produced the lethal dry
powder since the offensive biological weapons program was closed in 1969.

"This is very significant," said Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a molecular biologist who heads a working group on biological weapons at the Federation of American Scientists. "There's never been an acknowledgment that any U.S. facility had weaponized anthrax."

Rosenberg, who has theorized that the anthrax in the letters might have come from a U.S. government program or contractor, said Dugway's assurances about security do not necessarily rule out leakage of the tiny amounts used in the bioterrorist attacks.

"The question is, could someone have gotten hold of a very small amount and used it in the letters?" said Rosenberg, of the State University of New York.

5 deaths since October

The term "weapons-grade" means that the anthrax particles are tiny enough - 1 to 5 microns - to be readily inhaled and deposited in the lungs.

A sufficient dose produces inhalation anthrax, which is blamed for killing five people since October.

Some of the anthrax produced by Dugway has matched the fine particle size and extraordinary concentration of the powder mailed to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, estimated at close to 1 trillion spores per gram, according to a government scientist.

In addition, the mailed anthrax is genetically indistinguishable from the Ames strain used by the Army, the most sophisticated test methods show.

Neither the physical nor the genetic match proves that the terrorist used anthrax from Dugway.

Ames-strain anthrax has been used in numerous laboratories, and a person with microbiology training and access to the right equipment might have been able to concoct the deadly powder.

But many experts think it more likely that the attacks are linked to a government program, either in the United States or another country.

Staff questioned by FBI

The FBI appears to be taking seriously the possibility of a link to Dugway. Personnel working with anthrax, all of whom have been vaccinated against the bacteria, have been questioned at length by investigators.

A government official familiar with the Dugway program said about a half-dozen scientists there have the expertise to make dry anthrax. No one with such expertise has left the program in recent years, the official said.

The unsigned, two-page Dugway statement e-mailed to reporters last night says scientists there "routinely" make anthrax to test decontamination methods and equipment designed to detect biological agents. It confirms The Sun's report that most experiments use simulants or anthrax spores inactivated by radiation, but certain tests "must be performed with live agents."

It gives no details about the strain, production methods or physical qualities of the anthrax made at Dugway for aerosol testing.

'Rigorous tracking'

The statement confirms that anthrax in the form of a paste has been shipped for irradiation to the Army's biodefense center at Fort Detrick in Frederick. It says the shipments followed "stringent federal regulations" and never involved dry anthrax powder.

"All anthrax used at Dugway has been accounted for," the statement says. "There is a rigorous tracking and inventory program to follow the production, receipt and destruction of all select agents. The facility is well-protected with robust physical and personnel security systems."

The statement says the Army is cooperating with the FBI and "will not comment further on any aspect of its bio testing program" until the investigation concludes.

The Environmental Impact Statement prepared in 1992 for the Life Sciences Test Facility at Dugway, where much of the work is done, lists some of the biological agents to be used there. They include not only anthrax but also the bacteria that cause the diseases tularemia and Q fever, as well as the virus that causes Venezuelan equine encephalitis.

3 ounces at a time

For bacteria such as anthrax, the facility is limited to growing 100 milliliters, or 3 fluid ounces, at a time. The maximum concentration of spores would be 10 billion per milliliter, according to the Environmental Impact Statement.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have confirmed 18 cases of anthrax since October, including 11 inhalation and seven cutaneous, or skin, cases. No new case has been reported since that of 94-year-old Ottilie Lundgren, a Connecticut woman who died Nov. 21. 

Ex-scientists detail Detrick experiments

By Scott Shane
Sun Staff
Originally published December 23, 2001

In an attempt to make America's biological arsenal more lethal during the Cold War, the Army collected anthrax from the bodies or blood of workers at Fort Detrick who were accidentally infected with the bacteria, veterans of the biowarfare program say.

The experiments, during the 1950s and '60s, were based on long experience with animals showing that anthrax often becomes more virulent after infecting an animal and growing in its body, according to experts on the bacteria and scientific studies published at the time.

Former Army scientists say the anthrax strain used to make weapons was replaced at least once, and possibly three times, with more potent anthrax that had grown in the workers' bodies. But some of the key scientists who did the work more than four decades ago are dead, and records are classified, contradictory or nonexistent, so it is difficult to establish with certainty the details of what happened.

The use of human accident victims to boost the killing power of the nation's germ arsenal is a macabre footnote to a top-secret program designed to destroy enemy troops with such exotic weapons as botulism, smallpox, plague and paralytic shellfish poison.

The offensive bioweapons program was launched during World War II and ended by President Richard M. Nixon in 1969.

Today, after a few grams of mailed anthrax have killed five people, sickened 13 others and disrupted the postal system and government, the old program's gruesome potential for destruction seems unimaginable. But at the time, fearing correctly that the Soviet Union had an even larger bioweapons program, Army scientists were driven to come up with more and more lethal disease strains.

"Any deadly diseases, anywhere in the world, we'd go and collect a sample," said Bill Walter, 76, who worked in the weapons program from 1951 until it closed.

Walter was involved in anthrax production from selection of seed stock to the dry, deadly spore powder ready to be loaded into a bomb; his final job was as "principal investigator" in a lab that studied anthrax and other powder weapons.

Walter believes the original weapons strain of anthrax, a variety called Vollum after the British scientist who isolated it, was upgraded with bacteria collected from three Detrick workers who were accidentally infected. Two of them died.

His recollection is supported by another veteran of the anthrax program, 84-year-old James R.E. Smith. A third bioweapons veteran, William C. Patrick III, confirms two of the cases but says he is not sure about the third.

"Anthrax gets stronger as it goes through a human host," said Walter, now retired in Florida. "So we got pulmonary [lung] spores from Bill Boyles and Joel Willard. And finally we got it from Lefty Kreh's finger."

William A. Boyles, a 46-year-old microbiologist, inhaled anthrax spores on the job in 1951 and died a few days later. Seven years after that, Joel E. Willard, 53, an electrician who worked in the "hot" areas where animals were dosed with deadly germs, died of the same inhalational form of the disease.

The third anthrax victim, Bernard "Lefty" Kreh, was a plant operator who spent night shifts in a biohazard suit, breathing air from a tube on the wall, using a kitchen spatula to scrape the anthrax "mud" off the inside of a centrifuge. One day in the late '50s or early '60s, his finger swelled to the size of a sausage with a cutaneous, or skin, anthrax infection.

Kreh went on to become a nationally known outdoors writer and expert on fly fishing. He did not know that the bacteria that had put him in Fort Detrick's hospital for a month had gone on to another life, too - as a sub-strain of anthrax bearing his initials.

"We called it 'LK' - that's what we'd put on the log sheets for each run," Walter said. A "run" was an 1,800-gallon batch of anthrax mixture, grown in one of the 40-foot- high fermenters inside Building 470, which stands empty at Detrick, its demolition planned.

"Lefty's strain was rather easy to detect," Walter said. When a colony of bacteria grew on growth medium, he recalled, "it came out like a little comma, perfectly spherical."

Surprised by his role

Orley R. Bourland Jr., 75, who worked as a plant manager, said anthrax from Kreh's finger was isolated and designated "BVK-1," for Bernard Victor Kreh.

Walter said he assumes the initials in the log sheets were shortened by someone who knew the source of the new sub-strain of anthrax never went by his formal name. Yet in the secret, compartmented biological program, Kreh himself does not recall ever being informed of the use to which his government put his illness.

"You're kidding," Kreh said. "I'll have to tell my wife." He doesn't remember which finger it was, he said, but he does remember that his wife, Evelyn, could see him only through a glass barrier designed to keep any dangerous microbes contained during treatment.

At 77, Kreh, who lives in Cockeysville, lives the full life of a fishing celebrity, writing magazine articles, taking VIPs on fly-fishing expeditions and endorsing products. A former outdoors columnist for The Sun, he credits his 19 years at Fort Detrick with giving him time to develop his expertise. Because of the rotating night-shift work, he said, "Two out of three weeks I could hunt and fish all day long."

The available evidence confirming the use of bacteria from the two men who died, Boyles and Willard, is less complete. W. Irving Jones Jr., 80, of Frederick, a biochemist, remembers his supervisor, Dr. Ralph E. Lincoln, giving him an unusual request some months after the electrician's death.

"Dr. Lincoln had me pull a sample of Willard's dried blood," Jones said. "We were able to grow [the anthrax bacteria] right up. And it was deadly," a determination he made by testing it on animals.

Jones said he cannot confirm the recollection of others that Willard's sub-strain of anthrax was used for a new weapons strain. That might well have happened, he said, if animal tests showed it to be more virulent than the existing weapons strain, the only means of checking potency at the time. But like any secret program, the Army's biowarfare operation was run on a "need-to-know" basis, and weapons development was not his bailiwick, Jones said.

Contradictory evidence

The evidence on Boyles is contradictory. Patrick, who joined the bioweapons program in 1951, the year the microbiologist died of anthrax, said unequivocally that the Vollum weapons strain was altered by passage through Boyles' body and became Vollum 1B.

"That's where Vollum 1B came from," said Patrick, of Frederick, who eventually headed Detrick's product development division. "It's 1-Boyles."

A review of scientific papers on anthrax published by Fort Detrick scientists in the 1940s and '50s offers indirect support for Patrick's contention. The Vollum strain found in the early Detrick papers is first replaced by a Vollum sub-strain called "M36," produced by the British biological weapons program by passing the Vollum strain through a series of monkeys to increase its virulence.

Then, in the late 1950s, references to the M36 variant of Vollum give way to references to "the highly virulent Vollum 1B strain." No 1A strain seems to have existed. Nor is there an explanation of the 1B sub-strain's origin - a break with the standard practice in describing sub-strains derived from passage through animals.

On the other hand, a medical report prepared by the Army 18 years after Boyles' death states that live anthrax bacteria "could not be (and never was) cultivated from blood, sputum, nose and throat, or skin at any time during the illness, not from tissue and fluids taken at autopsy."

The cause of death was confirmed by an autopsy finding of bacteria resembling anthrax in the brain.

The absence of live bacteria may have a simple explanation. Doctors say a person with inhalation anthrax who is given intravenous antibiotics might soon show no live bacteria, even though the person might still die of toxin produced earlier by the bacteria. But if the medical report is accurate, it appears to rule out the possibility that the weapons strain included bacteria collected during or after Boyles' illness.

It is possible that after Boyles' death, blood taken early in his illness was found to contain anthrax. Or, anthrax spores, which are not killed by antibiotics, might have been found in his lungs after death.

Scientists say it is possible, but not certain, that one pass through a human host would boost the virulence of anthrax. Repeated passes through a particular species usually increase the bacteria's lethality toward that species, said David L. Huxsoll, who oversaw anthrax vaccine tests as commander of the Army's biodefense center in the 1980s.

"If you pass it through a rabbit repeatedly, it will kill rabbits, but it won't kill a cow," Huxsoll said. In humans, "you could have a switch toward more virulence on one passage, but it wouldn't necessarily happen."

Officials of the biological defense program at Fort Detrick, where Vollum 1B is still used to test vaccines, do not know of any connection to the accidental human infections, said Caree Vander Linden, spokeswoman for the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. One account passed down by a former staff member was that Vollum 1B was produced by passage of the Vollum strain through rabbits, she said.

If the "B" actually stands for Boyles, it's news to William Boyles' family. Natalie Boyles said Friday that her husband, Charles M. Boyles, William's son, had never heard of such a thing.

Kenneth E. Willard, Joel Willard's son, said the same. "Shock would be my first feeling," Willard said on hearing the evidence described in this article. "Second would be that my mother or I should have been made aware of it, if it happened. We should have been given more information all along."

But secrecy governed everything in the program, including the deaths, because the American bioweapons makers had a keen awareness of the threat from their counterparts in the Soviet Union, occasionally supplemented by detailed information.

"We used to get intelligence reports telling me what my Russian counterpart was doing," Walter said. "Our rate and the Russian rate was the same - about 7 kilograms of dry anthrax a week."

Another parallel exists. If the United States took advantage of tragic accidents to make its anthrax deadlier, those experiments were mirrored at least once in the Soviet program. Far larger than the U.S. effort, the Soviet biowarfare program was also secretly continued after 1972, when the nations signed a treaty banning such work.

According to Ken Alibek, a former deputy chief of the Soviet program who defected to the United States in 1992, a scientist named Nikolai Ustinov accidentally pricked himself while injecting a guinea pig with Marburg virus in 1988. He died an agonizing death two weeks later.

"No one needed to debate the next step," Alibek wrote in his 1999 book Biohazard. "Orders went out immediately to replace the old strain with the new, which was called, in a move the wry Ustinov might have appreciated, 'Variant U.'"

Copyright © 2001, The Baltimore Sun

Bioterrorism riddle, $1.25 million reward stimulate interest

By Scott Shane
Sun Staff

January 6, 2002

Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a molecular biologist at the State University of New York, thinks she has figured out a great deal about the person who mailed the anthrax that killed five people last fall.

"He had to be an insider in the U.S. biological defense program," she says. Not only that: He is a microbiologist. He probably lives near Washington. And for those who want details, she has laid her reasoning out on the Internet.

To Richard M. Smith, a computer security expert in Massachusetts, the nine-digit ZIP codes on the anthrax letters could be a crucial clue - as well as the ersatz return address, a made-up elementary school. If the attacker used the Internet to collect his information, Smith says, he might have left an electronic trail.

Orley R. Bourland Jr., a Fort Detrick retiree who once made anthrax for the Army, has hunted the Web to see whether the equipment needed to make the powder is widely available (yes) and consulted with colleagues to judge whether a person working alone could physically have performed the necessary tasks to do so (probably not).

In the absence of visible progress in the three-month FBI hunt for the anthrax-mailing terrorist, an informal army of detectives has joined the quest. Among them are distinguished scientists, eager amateurs, bounty hunters and conspiracy theorists of every stripe. Solving the mystery has become a game that anyone can play.

For encouragement, there's the $1.25 million reward offered jointly by the FBI and U.S. Postal Service for solving the case.  Government sources say the prize will soon be upped to $2 million, a possible sign that investigators are stuck.

But the people who have become enthralled by the anthrax whodunit don't seem to have the money first in their minds.

A 'fascinating' mystery

"When this anthrax thing came up, I found it just fascinating," says Ed Lakeof Racine, Wis., a 64-year-old retired computer system designer who writes screenplays. "All these facts were scattered all over the place. But no one was putting them together."

So Lake took on that job himself, putting together an extensive anthrax investigation Web site, which he updates and corrects as new evidence is reported.

"There are so many clues out there - so many odd things," Lake says. "It's 7 o'clock in the morning and I'm getting up, and suddenly an idea will hit me."

Rosenberg, 63, who has headed a biological weapons working group for the Federation of American Scientists since 1989, says she joined the chase partly because of her deep concern about the danger of biological terror.

"If news coverage and public awareness just fade away because they never catch the person responsible, I think that would be regrettable," she says. But that's just part of her motivation: "It really is interesting to try to put the clues together."

Getting the public involved

If there has been an onslaught of unofficial investigation, that might be partly because the FBI encouraged it. From early on, it solicited help from the public, adding a red button labeled "Submit a Tip" to the elaborate Web site it has dedicated to the
"Amerithrax" investigation.

Along with a flag--draped logo, photos of the anthrax letters and sound files of FBI experts discussing the case, the Web site includes a lengthy handwriting and behavioral analysis of the perpetrator.

The proposed suspect is an adult male loner with scientific training, it says, who "is a non-confrontational person, at least in his public life. He lacks the personal skills necessary to confront others. ... He may hold grudges for a long time, vowing that he will
get even with 'them' one day."

Never before has the FBI made public such extensive material on an unsolved case, spokeswoman Tracey Silberling said Friday. That is partly because of the new technical possibilities offered by the Internet, but mostly because of the nature of the anthrax probe, she said.

"In the interest of public safety and educating the public about the threat, we've made as much information as possible available," Silberling said. "We're also seeking the public's assistance by making information available that might ring a bell with someone."

Silberling said the bureau has received "hundreds of tips" from the public, but declined to say whether any have proved useful.

Flawed reporting

If the FBI's lack of evident progress has drawn criticism, so has the media coverage of the case, which has often been erratic.

Even the most respected news organizations have reported details about the mailed anthrax or the investigation that quickly proved unfounded.

On Dec. 19, for instance, ABC's World News Tonight led its broadcast with a story saying the FBI was investigating a scientist who had been fired twice by Battelle Memorial Institute, an Ohio-based government contractor. The story was picked up by wire services and printed in many newspapers, including The Sun.

But the next day the story was denied by U.S. officials, who noted that the accurate part - that a man twice fired by Battelle had made anthrax threats - had been published two months earlier in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The FBI determined that the man had no connection to the mailings, officials said.

ZIP code clues

With the FBI mostly mum and no certainty from the news media, citizens have felt emboldened to do their own work, invariably using the World Wide Web. Some have shown quite a knack.

One such sleuth is Smith, 48, who has earned a reputation in the computer world for helping to track down people who have loosed certain damaging computer viruses on the Internet.

In the anthrax case, in addition to analyzing the nine-digit ZIP codes, he has dissected the return address on the bacteria-laced letters mailed to Sens. Tom Daschle and Patrick J. Leahy: "4th GRADE, GREENDALE SCHOOL, FRANKLIN PARK, NJ 08852."

Smith found that while the school doesn't exist, the elements of the invented address all suggest familiarity with three adjacent small towns in New Jersey.

In addition to his own research, Smith has created "The Anthrax Conspiracy Theories Page," including links to the work of fellow detectives.

Interestingly, the most active unofficial investigators, including Rosenberg, Smith and Lake, have independently reached similar conclusions as to the motive behind the attacks.

'Bioevangelist' theory

They say the perpetrator is most likely someone with experience in the bioweapons arena who believed the U.S. government and public were oblivious to the magnitude of the potential threat from bioterrorists.

The person mailed the letters in the belief that only an actual attack would sound the necessary alarm, they say.

Such a scenario - call it "the bioevangelist theory" - would account for two pieces of evidence: the attacker's expertise about anthrax and the vague notes included in the letters vowing "Death to America" and declaring "Allah is Great."

Some Islamic scholars say that message was most likely written not by a Muslim militant, but by someone trying to sound like a Muslim militant.

That would fit the theory perfectly: A misguided American bioweapons expert trying to arouse the public might want to direct the blame at al-Qaida-style terrorists, who he believes pose the real threat.

"Somebody in the know says, 'This stuff is so dangerous, and we're not treating it with the right amount of concern,'" Smith says. "'So why don't I give a demonstration?'"

Rosenberg says such a notion was occasionally aired jokingly in the small circle of those  who worried about biological terror prior to Sept. 11.

"There have been a number of occasions when we've said in frustration, 'What we need is a biological weapons attack to wake the country up,'" she says.

The public evidence - that the mailed anthrax was the Ames strain used in U.S. biodefense research, and that it was prepared with great expertise - points to a U.S. military or government contractor program, Rosenberg says.

"I think it's somebody who's got a screw loose," Rosenberg says. "But I think the existence of the U.S. [biodefense] program made it possible."

A wider conspiracy

Inevitably, among those outside the FBI at work on the anthrax case are some who believe the mailings are only a tiny part of a far, far broader conspiracy.

One vague theory that has been bandied about on the Web links the anthrax attacks to the recent deaths of five microbiologists, including a Harvard scientist who had worked with Ebola and other viruses and a defector from the Soviet biological weapons program.

But the Web postings do not even speculate as to how the deaths might be related.

"The problem is, people connect the dots too easily," says Smith, the ZIP code investigator. "There are maybe 100,000 microbiologists out there, so some of them are dying all the time."

A more detailed conspiracy has been outlined by Dr. Leonard G. Horowitz, a dentist who runs a small publishing company, Tetrahedron Publishing Group, in Sandpoint, Idaho.

Horowitz has bombarded reporters and government officials for weeks with lengthy e-mails that propose a financial motive for the attacks, such as sale of drugs and vaccines.

Among his favored culprits are Battelle, the defense and CIA contractor, and Bayer AG, the maker of Cipro, the antibiotic widely used to treat or prevent anthrax infection. (Both companies deny any connection to the attacks.)

Noting recent media reports discussing Battelle's anthrax research and speculating about a financial motive for the letters, Horowitz believes he is making progress.

"We've gotten a sense in our office that even though no one gives us credit, we are making a huge difference," he says.

Still, reports in what he calls the "slow-as-a-tortoise mainstream news media" have a long way to go to catch up with the spidery plot diagrammed on his Web site, which ties the anthrax as well as "AIDS genocide" and vaccines for smallpox and West Nile virus to a score of government and corporate conspirators.

Horowitz's anthrax theories might have been neglected by the media because he presents them on the same Web site where he hawks software for "computer-generated prayer" and numerous alternative cures, including "Body Oxygen" and "Clustered
Water," which it calls "probably the greatest breakthrough in health science produce development this century."

Determined to be heard 

But Horowitz, 49, who often notes his Harvard University master's degree in public health, says he will not be deterred until he exposes the "military-pharmaceutical industrialists."

"Even if I hadn't committed my whole life to saving lives through public health, it's my duty as an American," he says.

Copyright © 2002, The Baltimore Sun

Biodefense funding creates quandary
Increase designed to fight terror also raises risk of attack

By Scott Shane, Sun Staff

Even as the FBI investigates a possible link between U.S. biodefense programs and last fall's anthrax attacks, a flood of new funding for bioterrorism research promises to increase rapidly the number of labs and people with access to such lethal pathogens. 

Some scientists say that without new limits and tougher regulations, the law of unintended consequences could come into play. The biodefense research boom could lead to diversions of organisms or expertise for new terrorist attacks, making Americans less safe rather than safer.

"Each one of these labs in essence becomes a full-service shopping center for someone who wants to get hold of a lethal agent for nefarious purposes," says Richard H. Ebright, a Rutgers University chemist who helped spark a debate among scientists with a letter he co-wrote last month to the journal Nature calling for new restrictions. He says the number of laboratories approved to work with potential bioterrorist pathogens should be "fewer than five nationally," a drastic decrease from the scores of labs doing such work.

He acknowledges that, with the federal government budgeting $2.4 billion in new money for bioterrorism preparedness, scientists aren't rallying to support him.

"No one wants to say anything that is likely to decrease funding," he says. "This money is going to attract applications from institutions that have no experience with these pathogens and no previous interest in them." 

"It's a sticky problem," says Michael Mair, a molecular biologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies. "The question is how to provide for security while not putting shackles on scientists. Science works best when there's a free flow of ideas."

The problem is illustrated by the situation of Ebright's co-author on the letter to Nature. Nancy D. Connell, director of the Center for Biodefense at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, is calling for tighter regulations even as she prepares her lab in Newark to handle dangerous organisms in bioterrorism research. The first supplies of such microbes, including the Bacillus anthracis bacteria that cause anthrax, are expected to arrive next month, she says.

In preparing her lab for the new work, Connell has voluntarily contacted local law enforcement agencies and imposed strict security rules. A "buddy system" will ensure that no scientist is left alone with the dangerous agents, and advance approval will be required for night and weekend work, she says. 

But most of those precautions are not required by law. They should be, Connell says.

Connell, an associate professor of microbiology and molecular genetics, says she believes research on bioterrorism agents is important. She knows some colleagues may see her as trying to slam the door to bioterrorism research just after her lab has gotten approval from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta to ship and receive dangerous pathogens. 

But unless rules are tightened, "we're concerned that the increased research could actually decrease security," she says. 

As a possible model, scientists point to the far stricter regulation of radioactive materials by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and state agencies. NRC inspectors, for example, conduct surprise inspections of university laboratories, showing up unannounced to check inventories and record-keeping. 

"Universities know exactly how much they have of every radioisotope and where it is," Ebright says. That's not the case with biological agents. After the anthrax attacks, some universities discovered poorly secured anthrax samples with few records of where they had come from or how they had been used. 

That's because handling of deadly biological pathogens was not regulated until 1997, when an anti-terrorism act required labs that wished to ship or receive certain "select agents" to go through a demanding registration process with the CDC. The select agents are a nightmarish arsenal including 13 viruses, 12 toxins, seven kinds of bacteria and four other organisms. 

There are a little more than 250 labs nationally that are registered to receive the select agents, and the number is growing at about one lab a week, says Jonathan V. Richmond, director of the CDC's office of health and safety. Since 1997, more than 1,500 shipments of such organisms have been reported to the CDC, he said. 

But the regulation has many holes, scientists say. Labs that were using select agents in research before 1997 do not have to register, and the CDC can't keep up with the required lab inspections, they say. Bills pending in Congress would close some of the loopholes and tighten oversight.

Richmond says the CDC may not be the right agency to police the burgeoning bioterror field. "CDC's whole mission in life is to be part of the scientific effort, to be collegial with the people we work with," he says. "If CDC pushes the regulatory side too hard, that collegial element could dry up." 

He suggests that the Food and Drug Administration, the Office of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice might be better suited to regulate labs.

Some scientists are skeptical about the need for more regulation. Steven M. Block, a biophysicist at Stanford University, notes that many of the lethal agents can be obtained from natural sources -- notably Bacillus anthracis, which infects cattle and other animals in dozens of countries.

"Anyone bent on obtaining anthrax doesn't have to raid Fort Detrick or a university lab," Block says. A natural source for the anthrax used in last fall's attacks can't be ruled out, though the FBI appears to be aggressively pursuing a possible connection to Army labs at Fort Detrick in Frederick or Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. 

Block says he is worried about the possibility of attacks -- but that's why he wants to see more work on drugs, vaccines and defenses against genetically altered organisms. "I think we should encourage research on these pathogens, not discourage it," he says.

Mair, at the Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies, says regulation of radioactive materials may not offer a precise model for bioagents.

For one thing, a radioactive isotope is always decaying -- left alone, it becomes less of a problem over time. But biological agents can grow. A gram of Bacillus anthracis recorded in January may be a kilogram by March. 

Inspections, too, are far harder. Radiation experts can use a Geiger counter to check a lab, determining instantly where radioactive substances are stored. But biological agents, stored in test tubes inside freezers, usually don't have a distinctive appearance. "If a vial is intentionally mislabeled, there's no way to know what it is without actually culturing it," Mair says.

Elisa D. Harris, a bioweapons expert at the University of Maryland and former National Security Council official, is helping lead a project at the university's Center for International and Security Studies to design an oversight system for bioagents. 

"I'm afraid of an enormous increase in classified research in U.S. government and even university labs," she said. "That would stimulate concerns in other countries about whether we're really doing the work for defensive purposes." 

Staff at Fort Detrick, records at Dugway draw new interest; 25 sites have had spores 

By Scott Shane
Sun Staff
Originally published February 22, 2002

In recent weeks, FBI agents investigating the anthrax attacks that killed five people last fall have questioned a dozen biodefense scientists at Fort Detrick about former colleagues who have come under suspicion, according to employees of the Army's research institute in Frederick.

At the same time, agents were poring over entry records to the high-security laboratory at the Army's Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, the only U.S. facility known to produce the kind of dry, fine-particle anthrax powder like that used in the mail attacks.

But even as investigators pursued possible links between military research and the anthrax-laced letters, they were learning of more laboratories that have had the Ames strain of anthrax used in the attacks. At last count, 25 such labs were identified, including facilities in at least five foreign countries - and investigators think there are more, said sources familiar with the work.

Five months after a terrorist turned the daily mail into a deadly biological weapon, one of the most extensive murder investigations in U.S history seems to be moving in two directions at once. While agents are aggressively following up on tips about suspicious people, the FBI is also casting a national net for clues and even pursuing leads overseas.

Just days before the FBI interviews at Fort Detrick, which set off fevered speculation among scientists who study the world's most dangerous germs, officials had doubled the reward in the anthrax case to $2.5 million. Investigators had distributed thousands of fliers near Trenton, N.J., where the anthrax letters were mailed. They had requested help from the American Society for Microbiology, telling its 40,000 members in an e-mail, "It is very likely that one or more of you know this individual."

And the FBI is adding to its list of labs and researchers that have handled anthrax. On Jan. 30, a grand jury subpoena went to a lab at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, demanding records of all anthrax at the lab and people with access to it for the past 10 years - or 20 years for dry, powdered anthrax, said Nancy D. Connell, director of the university's Center for Biodefense, where anthrax work is planned but none has taken place.

The FBI will say little about the investigation it has dubbed "Amerithrax." "The FBI is vigorously investigating the mailing of anthrax letters and hoax letters," bureau spokeswoman Tracey Silberling said yesterday. She added only that the FBI has not identified a leading suspect.

Still, a picture can be pieced together from people familiar with the bureau's actions, most of whom will speak only on condition of anonymity.

Biodefense experts at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Frederick have been consulted regularly by the FBI about the anthrax spore powder that sickened at least 13 people in addition to killing two Maryland postal workers, a tabloid photo editor in Florida, a hospital worker in New York City and an elderly woman in Connecticut.

But late last month, when a team of agents from the FBI's Washington, Baltimore and New York field offices arrived at Fort Detrick, the agents clearly had a different mission. They asked "pointed questions" about a few people they appeared to consider potential suspects, said several employees.

Among others, the agents asked about a former Fort Detrick scientist who returned a few years ago and took discarded biological safety cabinets, used for work with dangerous pathogens. Like some other military lab workers, the scientist has expertise on weaponizing anthrax and has been vaccinated against it, sources say.

Reached by The Sun at his job with a government contractor, the scientist volunteered that he had been questioned by the FBI. He said he considered the questioning to be part of a routine effort to eliminate people with the knowledge to mount such an attack.

"I think they had a profile," the scientist said. "They had a bunch of people on the list. They have to rule people out. ... I certainly didn't appreciate getting called in. No one likes that. I'm one of the good guys."

The scientist acknowledged that several years ago, with Army permission, he took three biosafety cabinets that were being discarded at Fort Detrick, but he said they were for use in a classified Defense Department project that he could not discuss.

The FBI's attention to possible perpetrators with ties to U.S. biodefense laboratories has set off water-cooler gossip at Detrick and Dugway. Scientists discuss present and former colleagues they consider secretive, eccentric or vengeful.  Some recall statements or actions that have come to seem suspicious only in retrospect.

The FBI's focus reflects a paradox at the heart of the case: Most of the Americans with the technical knowledge to create a bioweapon that by all accounts was prepared with diabolical skill are those whose job is to defend the country against such weapons.

The FBI has turned to those same biodefense experts to find clues in the powder.

One government official says that despite the extraordinary concentration and purity of the powder, with an estimated 1 trillion spores per gram, chemical analysis has not pointed to a specific source. Scientists have not been able to rule out the possibility that the powder might have been diverted from Dugway, the official says.

Genetic analysis, conducted at Northern Arizona University and the Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville, at first established that the mailed anthrax has almost the same genetic fingerprint as the Army's Ames strain, acquired in 1981 from a heifer that died in Texas. (The "Ames" designation came from a researcher's mistaken belief that the sample came from Ames, Iowa.)

Now researchers led by Paul Keim at Northern Arizona are trying to find tiny variations among different labs' samples of Ames anthrax.  Keim said at a Las Vegas meeting last week that he has had some success. But the work is not complete, and it remains to be seen whether it will help pinpoint a source.

Part of the challenge is collecting Ames samples from the 25 or more labs that got the strain directly or indirectly from the Army. Government experts doubt it is possible to identify every place with Ames stocks - particularly overseas, where investigators know five countries had samples but believe the real number is higher.

Some outside scientists, frustrated that the FBI has reported little progress, have raised questions about the pace or direction of the investigation.

Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a microbiologist who heads a working group on bioweapons for the Federation of American Scientists, has claimed on the federation Web site and in a talk at Princeton University on Monday that the FBI long ago identified a former government scientist as a "prime suspect." Agents haven't taken action, she says, because the suspect did secret bioweapons work the U.S. government does not want revealed.

Wrong, said Silberling, the FBI spokeswoman. "It is not accurate that the FBI has identified a prime suspect in the case," she said.

Other outsiders, by contrast, fear the bureau focused prematurely on a U.S. source for the anthrax attacks. Richard O. Spertzel, a longtime Fort Detrick scientist who later worked as a United Nations biological weapons inspector in Iraq, argues that he has seen no scientific evidence to rule out a foreign source.

"There's nothing concrete at all pointing to a domestic source," Spertzel said. He said he believes a connection to Iraq's germ-weapons program is more plausible, citing highly technical manufacturing details. He also finds intriguing a cryptic September article in a newspaper run by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's son Uday about a "virus" that would "attack the raven," which he calls a common Iraqi symbol for the United States.

Though White House officials have said the FBI is focusing on a domestic source, one law enforcement official insisted that no scenario, domestic or foreign, has been ruled out. Some FBI agents are working overseas, guided by CIA intelligence, officials say.

No one would be happier to find a foreign source than the U.S. biodefense establishment. Officials at Dugway and Detrick - where infighting and lax security in the early 1990s have been aired recently in an age-discrimination lawsuit - say their records show no missing anthrax.

But the very nature of such biological organisms makes it impossible to be certain. The anthrax letters collectively contained less than half an ounce of powder, experts say, which could have been grown from a few microscopic spores. A glass vial containing either prepared powder or seed spores could have been smuggled out of even the highest-security lab, scientists say.

"Unless you're going to strip search everybody every day," Spertzel said, "you can't prevent it." 

Copyright © 2002, The Baltimore Sun

Agency denies focusing on former scientist at Fort Detrick lab

By Scott Shane
Sun Staff
Originally published February 26, 2002

The FBI said yesterday that it has not identified a leading suspect in its 5-month-old anthrax investigation, denying a published report.

"In our investigation we have interviewed hundreds of persons, in some instances more than once," said FBI spokeswoman Tracey Silberling.  "It is not accurate, however, to say the FBI has identified a prime suspect."

She spoke in response to an article in The Washington Times yesterday, which reported that the FBI has "focused on" a scientist who previously worked at the U.S. Army Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in Frederick.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said the Times article had been "overreaching," adding that "unfortunately, there are still several suspects."

A law enforcement official who asked not to be named later said Fleischer's statement was not meant to imply that the field of possible suspects has been narrowed to a small number of people.

"The names and numbers are constantly changing," the official said.  "People come up on the radar screen and they're checked out and they go off the radar screen."

The Sun reported Friday that in late January and early February, a team of FBI agents from the Washington, Baltimore and New York field offices spent several days at USAMRIID, the U.S. government top biodefense research center. They asked scientists about former colleagues who have come under suspicion in the search for the person who mailed anthrax-laced letters that killed five people and sickened 13 others last fall.

For example, at Fort Detrick, the FBI asked about a former scientist who returned a few years ago to take three biosafety cabinets that were being discarded. Such cabinets are used to work with dangerous germs, and some colleagues found the request unusual.

But the scientist told The Sun last week that the cabinets were for use in a classified Defense Department project. Yesterday, Fort Detrick spokesman Chuck Dasey confirmed that, saying the cabinets were "old and nonfunctional" and went to the Army's Special Forces Command to help train soldiers to recognize equipment that might be found in a bioweapons facility.

Even as agents have pursued specific tips about individuals, the bureau has continued to cast a wide net for tips. Last month the FBI and U.S. Postal Service distributed fliers in the area around Trenton, N.J., where the anthrax letters were mailed and appealed for information in an e-mail to 40,000 microbiologists.

The e-mail and fliers imply that the FBI is looking for an American with knowledge of anthrax, and Fleischer said yesterday, "All indications are that the source of the anthrax is domestic."

But the law enforcement official said no possibility, including a possible foreign source, has been ruled out. 

Copyright © 2002, The Baltimore Sun

U.S. official cautions against linking anthrax and Sept. 11 attacks

By Scott Shane
Sun Staff

March 24, 2002

A top federal bioterrorism official said yesterday that he found "awfully suspicious" the fact that a Sept. 11 hijacker sought treatment for a lesion resembling cutaneous anthrax.

Dr. Donald A. Henderson, commenting on a report in The New York Times yesterday, cautioned that there isn't necessarily a connection between the hijackers and the anthrax-laced letters that killed five people last fall.

He said there's no way of proving that hijacker Ahmed Alhaznawi was suffering from anthrax in June when he visited an emergency room in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., because no culture was taken.

But Henderson, director of the office of public health preparedness at the Department of Health and Human Services, noted other evidence that the hijackers might have been preparing for a biological or chemical attack. Another hijacker, Mohamed Atta, explored the availability of crop-dusting aircraft and visited a Florida pharmacy seeking help for his red, irritated hands, conceivably caused by use of disinfectants.

Still, most or all of the anthrax-laced letters were mailed from New Jersey on Sept. 18 and Oct. 9, after the hijackers were dead. And there are other reasons to believe the attacker was an American, he said.

"The letters and their targets don't fit very well with politically unsophisticated foreigners," said Henderson. "Are these just weird coincidences? They could be."

The revelation that Alhaznawi was seen for an anthrax-like lesion only deepens the mystery around the anthrax attacks, which remain unsolved after nearly six months of investigation by hundreds of FBI agents and U.S. postal inspectors. The Times reported Alhaznawi's treatment yesterday, as well as the fact that U.S. officials had discovered an uncompleted laboratory in Afghanistan believed to be an al-Qaida biological agent production facility.

The lab, near Kandahar, was abandoned while under construction. But the Times reported that U.S. military officials concluded that the building had been designed to produce anthrax.

There is extensive evidence that the al-Qaida terrorist network has sought biological weapons. Gen. Tommy Franks, head of the U.S. Central Command, reiterated that yesterday.

At the lab near Kandahar, "there was evidence of the attempt, by [Osama] bin Laden, to get his hands on weapons of mass destruction, anthrax, or a variety of others," Franks said in an NBC interview taped yesterday for broadcast today on Meet the Press. The network provided an excerpt to the Associated Press.

But neither at the newly discovered laboratory nor anywhere else has proof been found that the group obtained such weapons.

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III told Congress this month that despite reports the bureau has focused on U.S. military labs in its anthrax investigation, "we have not excluded any possibility at this point," and agents have also been "looking overseas."

Still, in a statement issued in response to the report of Alhaznawi's treatment in Florida, the FBI seemed skeptical about a connection between the hijackers and the anthrax attacks.

"This was fully investigated and widely vetted among multiple agencies several months ago," the statement said. "Exhaustive testing did not support that anthrax was present anywhere the hijackers had been. While we always welcome new information, nothing new has in fact developed."

In recent weeks, FBI agents have repeatedly visited the Army's biodefense center at Fort Detrick in Frederick, one of more than 20 laboratories in the United States and several foreign countries that have the Ames strain of anthrax used in the mail attacks. The agents have given polygraph exams to employees with access to anthrax and have studied records of the bacteria, said workers at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.

The institute is preparing a room to receive samples of Ames anthrax subpoenaed last month from labs around the country. But the room is not yet fully equipped to receive the samples, so the labs have been given extensions to comply with the subpoenas, institute spokeswoman Caree Vander Linden said last week.

Henderson, who said the FBI does not share investigative information with him, said he was puzzled that the bureau has taken so long to collect the samples, which are to be compared scientifically with the mailed anthrax.

"You'd think they would have done that in the first couple of weeks," Henderson said. "It's given anyone a chance to get rid of any evidence that may have existed."

An FBI spokesman declined to comment yesterday on the pace of the investigation, referring a reporter to previous statements discussing the need to collect evidence carefully so that it could stand up in court.

According to the Times account and other sources, Ahaznawi, a 20-year-old believed to be a Saudi national, came to Holy Cross Hospital to seek treatment for a lesion on his leg, described as nearly an inch wide, blackish, with raised red edges. He was accompanied by a man authorities believe to be Ziad Jarrahi, who died with Alhaznawi when United Airlines Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania.

Dr. Christos Tsonas cleaned the wound, prescribed the antibiotic Keflex and thought nothing more of it until October, when the FBI had him review notes of his treatment of Alhaznawi. "I said, 'Oh, my God, my written description is consistent with cutaneous anthrax.' I was surprised," Tsonas told the Times.

The incident was reviewed more recently by the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies in Baltimore. Dr. Thomas Inglesby and Dr. Tara O'Toole, who replaced Henderson as the center's director last fall, wrote a brief report for government officials that concluded anthrax was "the most probable and coherent interpretation of the data available."

Henderson said a lesion of the sort described is relatively rare. "The probability of someone this age having such an ulcer, if he's not an addict and doesn't have diabetes or something like that, is very low. ... It certainly makes one awfully suspicious," he said.

In another incident that raised suspicions, hijackers Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi visited a pharmacy in Delray Beach, Fla., last summer seeking medication for Atta's irritated hands.

Pharmacist Gregg Chatterton said yesterday that the two men entered the store and stood in an aisle so long that he became suspicious they might be robbers and approached them. The man later identified as Atta spoke, saying, "My hands - my hands burn, they are itching," Chatterton recalled.

Chatterton asked Atta whether he worked with concrete or harsh cleansers or did gardening, but Atta's answers seemed arrogant and evasive. Chatterton suggested a cream, Acid Mantle, which Atta bought, along with a cough medication for al-Shehhi.

Two other hijackers also frequented the pharmacy while living in Florida, said Chatterton, who recognized their faces when the FBI made the hijackers' photographs public.

The pharmacy is not far from the tabloid newspaper publishing company in Boca Raton where the first anthrax victims worked, and some hijackers had rented an apartment from the wife of an editor at The Sun, one of American Media Inc.'s publications.

Investigators decided the landlord link was probably just a coincidence. No anthrax-laced letter was recovered from American Media, but the FBI concluded such a letter was mailed to one of the company's tabloids, just as similar letters were mailed to other media outlets and two U.S. senators. 

Copyright © 2002, The Baltimore Sun

Noticing a toxic similarity

Probes: Experts see parallels between the 1982 Tylenol cyanide poisonings and the anthrax mailings. One, they fear, may be never finding a solution.

Sun Journal

April 29, 2002

First there was a child with a cold. Twelve-year-old Mary Kellerman took a pain reliever early on a Wednesday morning in 1982 in her home in Elk Grove Village, Ill. Minutes later, she lay dying on the bathroom floor. 

Doctors thought she might have suffered a stroke. But within two days, six more people in the Chicago area had died, and the murder weapon was identified as Tylenol capsules whose burnt-almond smell revealed they had been opened and packed with cyanide. 

The investigation that followed was one of the biggest in U.S. history, involving hundreds of agents from the FBI, the Illinois State Police, and police departments in Chicago and a half-dozen suburbs. But 20 years later, no one has ever been charged with the killings. 

Now, with the anthrax investigation at seven months old, some investigators and scientists who have followed its progress say Americans must consider the possibility that this one could end the same way. 

"There are lots of parallels," says Lawrence G. Foster, a former corporate vice president at Johnson & Johnson who oversaw the company's widely admired public relations response to the poisonings. "The thought goes through your mind: 'Will they ever find out who sent the anthrax when they never solved the Tylenol murders?'" 

Richard J. Brzeczek, who was police superintendent of Chicago at the time of the poisonings, recalls setting off a furor six months into the Tylenol investigation by saying publicly he believed the case would never be solved. "I guess history has proven me correct," he says. 

It's hard to know whether the FBI has made progress in finding the person whose anthrax letters killed five people and sickened at least 13 others last fall, because the bureau is revealing little. Agents have interviewed dozens of scientists at U.S. labs, notably the Army's biodefense lab at Fort Detrick in Frederick. But last month, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III told a congressional committee that investigators had "not excluded any possibility at this point," including foreign terrorists. 

That's not a good sign, Brzeczek says. "When someone comes forward and says, 'We're not ruling anything out,' that's often a euphemism for 'We don't have anything to go on,'" he says. "Maybe it's time for them to start saying whatever novenas they say and hope for a lucky break." 

There are striking similarities between the current case and the hunt two decades ago for the person the media called the "Tylenol terrorist." 

In both cases, a small number of poisoning deaths transfixed the nation and caused huge economic disruption. This time the U.S. Postal Service watched revenues plummet while incurring huge expenses to decontaminate mail sorting centers. In 1982, Johnson & Johnson made the costly decision to pull from the shelves 31 million containers of the nation's best-selling pain remedy. 

Both cases, too, prompted radical measures to prevent a recurrence. The Postal Service is paying millions to irradiate mail, while the government spends billions more to prepare for future bioterror attacks. Tylenol's maker took the lead in placing safety seals on all medications - an expensive measure to combat a rare, but devastating, problem. 

"It triggered a whole revolution in packaging," says Foster, the former Johnson & Johnson executive. 

The damage to Americans' feeling of security in both cases was far-reaching. Tylenol was a trusted, familiar remedy; two victims popped Tylenol in the stressful hours after the sudden death of a relative - who they didn't realize had been poisoned by capsules from the same jar. In the weeks after the seven deaths, another 250 deaths were initially suspected - and often announced in the media - to have been linked to Tylenol, because such pills are often present at the bedside of the dying. 

The mail, with its daily arrival at every home in America, was an even more insidious choice of weapons. "In both cases, it's what you least suspect will be dangerous," Foster observes. "You think if you're in your home and the doors are locked, you're pretty safe." 

In both cases, investigators tried to use scientific analysis to trace the poison. But Illinois police were never able to find the source of the cyanide. In the current investigation, genetic and chemical analysis of the anthrax has so far not come close to the investigators' goal of pinpointing the laboratory it came from, government scientists say. 

Some sense a resemblance between the criminal minds involved. Dr. Robert A. Reifman, who in 1982 headed the Chicago courts' psychiatric service, says that when the anthrax story broke, he thought immediately of the earlier case. 

"I'd be inclined to feel the two perpetrators may be rather similar," he says. 

Reifman profiled the Tylenol killer as a male loner of above-average intelligence whose goal was in part to produce intensive media coverage. The FBI, in a similarly vague portrait, says the anthrax mailer is likely a male loner with special expertise who displays "an organized, rational thought process." And the choice of media figures and U.S. senators as targets appears to have been dictated chiefly by a desire to generate publicity. 

There is a key difference: The Tylenol poisoner's targets were random, and his intent clearly was to kill. By contrast, the anthrax mailer addressed particular people and included notes warning recipients to take antibiotics, indicating he did not necessarily want anyone to die. 

The anthrax attacker demonstrated far rarer scientific and technical expertise, but both criminals showed meticulous care. The Tylenol poisoner returned the spiked jars to the stores where he got them - calculating, evidently, that a bottle moved to a different store might have a bar code that would raise questions at checkout. The anthrax mailer appears to have taken precautions to avoid incriminating fingerprints, traceable handwriting or - by using pre-stamped envelopes - DNA in the form of saliva on a stamp. 

Like the current investigation, the Tylenol probe was marked by media speculation about possible suspects, with names occasionally mentioned. 

One suspect, Roger Arnold, was convicted of shooting to death a man he mistakenly believed had implicated him. 

An accountant named James W. Lewis, who wrote a letter to Johnson & Johnson a week after the first death demanding $1 million "to stop the killing," served 10 years for extortion. Investigators split over whether he might have been the poisoner; Lewis denied that he was. (Lewis, who was freed in 1995, did not return a call seeking comment.) 

One disturbing thing investigators learned in the Tylenol investigation is how many potential perpetrators of such a horrible crime were out there, says James B. Zagel, who headed the Illinois State Police then. 

"You'd come across certain suspects, and it would turn out they didn't do it - but they were actually very sorry they hadn't thought of it," says Zagel, now a federal judge. "There are people out there who will commit terrible crimes, keep themselves hidden and just enjoy the uproar they cause." 

Copyright © 2002, The Baltimore Sun

Journal article stressing risks of low dose written by JHU biodefense expert

By Scott Shane
Sun Staff

May 1, 2002

In an assessment of scientific lessons from last fall's anthrax attacks, a panel of doctors has warned that it might take only a few microscopic anthrax spores to cause fatal disease in some especially vulnerable people.

That conclusion, published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association by experts from the Johns Hopkins University and elsewhere, stands in marked contrast to statements made by some public officials and bioterrorism experts last year suggesting that the necessary dose to cause infection was 8,000 to 10,000 spores.

That figure was the estimated number of spores required to kill half of people exposed, but it was often misunderstood as the minimum dose to cause disease.

The article's emphasis on the danger of small doses is prompted in part by the fact that no obvious source of exposure has been found for two of the five people who died.

Investigators concluded that Kathy T. Nguyen, 61, a New York City hospital worker, and Ottilie Lundgren, 94, who lived alone in Oxford, Conn., were most likely infected by spores picked up by letters passing through contaminated postal machines.

"We don't know what dose any of the victims got," said Dr. Thomas V. Inglesby, deputy director of Hopkins' Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies and lead author of the report. "But we can assume the people in New York and Connecticut got a very low dose."

The other three fatalities were two postal workers at a Washington facility where the anthrax-laced letters were processed and a photo editor for a Florida tabloid who is believed to have opened one of the terrorist's letters.

The journal article cites a recent analysis of data on monkeys exposed to anthrax suggesting that the lethal dose for the most vulnerable 1 percent of monkeys might be just one to three spores.

The monkey experiments - carried out in the 1950s and '60s by Army scientists developing deadly biological weapons at Fort Detrick - are still the best source of hard data on the dangers of anthrax. But the experiments were initially classified, and only a small part of the data was ever published.

The article draws on a new analysis of the monkey data published in February in The Lancet by Dr. C.J. Peters, a former Detrick researchers now at the University of Texas.

"I was sort of embarrassed to write that letter to Lancet, because all the data are more than 20 years old," he said. "But no one was paying attention to it."

Peters' analysis confirms statements to The Sun last fall by Joseph V. Jemski and Edgar W. Larson, the long-retired Army scientists who performed the monkey research work, that some people might be infected by a small number of spores.

The new consensus statement on anthrax, updating one published by the same doctors in 1999, underscores the insidious nature of anthrax, whose hardy spores have proven very difficult to clear from contaminated offices and postal facilities.

Last week, Connecticut officials revealed that spores had been found in three spots on the ceiling of a Wallingford, Conn., mail processing center months after it was decontaminated.

Health officials also revealed that 3 million anthrax spores were found last fall beneath one of the mail-sorting machines at the center - all evidently deposited by cross-contaminated mail, since none of the attacker's letters is believed to have passed through the sorting center.

Three million spores is a minuscule fraction of the anthrax in each of the terrorist's letters - about one seven-hundred-thousandth of the spores in the letter to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, for example. But if made airborne and inhaled, they could kill many people.

The oft-cited figure of 8,000 to 10,000 spores is an estimate, based on the monkey data, of what scientists call the LD-50 for humans - the lethal dose for 50 percent of people exposed. But susceptibility can vary widely, depending on age, underlying health conditions and genetic factors.

In the crisis atmosphere that followed the attacks, Inglesby said, "People read the LD-50 and took it as the minimum infective dose. But the floor [for infection] is far below, and it may be just a few spores."

Other important lessons from the attacks, the Hopkins researcher said, are the crucial role community doctors and nurses are likely to play in identifying any future biological attack and treating its victims. An alert physician in Florida was the first to recognize his patient had inhalation anthrax, an extremely rare disease in the United States.

Also, the experience last fall disproved the belief that inhalation anthrax is almost always fatal once symptoms appear, Inglesby noted. Six of the 11 people who contracted inhalation anthrax survived.

"Early diagnosis is possible, and it matters," Inglesby said. The consensus statement describes the symptoms and tests most useful to identify anthrax.

Among the 16 authors of the statement on anthrax are Dr. Tara O'Toole, director of the JHU biodefense center; Dr. D.A. Henderson, its founder and now the top bioterrorism preparedness official in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; Drs. John G. Bartlett and Trish M. Perl of the center; and experts from the Army's biodefense center at Fort Detrick and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Copyright © 2002, The Baltimore Sun 

Up to 200 employees at Fort Detrick, Dugway could face lie detectors

By Scott Shane
Sun Staff

May 21, 2002

The FBI will soon begin giving polygraph exams to scores of employees at the Army's bio- defense center at Fort Detrick in Frederick and at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah to see if a government insider mailed the anthrax that killed five people last fall, an FBI official confirmed last night.

In the course of the eight-month investigation, lie- detector tests have been given to a small number of scientists who had access to anthrax, including about 10 people at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick.

But the new polygraph initiative, first reported last night by ABC News, would go much further. It might cover up to 200 current and former employees of the two Army research facilities, the FBI official said.

Fort Detrick sources say that about 80 current employees have had access in recent years to the Ames strain of anthrax used in the attacks.

The number of people with access to anthrax at Dugway Proving Ground is probably considerably smaller. But scientists at Dugway, unlike Fort Detrick, have manufactured for research purposes small quantities of fine-grained, weapons-quality anthrax resembling the powder in the envelopes sent to news organizations and two U.S. senators last fall.

Experts inside and outside the government said last night that the planned polygraph campaign might indicate that investigators are out of leads and casting a wide net in hopes of tripping up the perpetrator.

"It looks to me like desperation," said a scientist at Fort Detrick. "The trail has kind of gone cold."

Several Fort Detrick employees said the FBI, whose agents spent months interviewing workers and reviewing records, has not been active on the military base lately.

But some nongovernment scientists said the FBI polygraphs may be designed to probe new leads that could narrow the field of possible suspects.

A third possibility is that investigators have a suspect or suspects at Fort Detrick or Dugway but are planning to polygraph a large number of people to keep from tipping their hand. They may fear that the perpetrator could flee or attack again.

"Maybe they really have one or two specific people and they're covering it with a large number of polygraphs," said Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a molecular biologist at the State University of New York who has followed the investigation closely.

Rosenberg believes the anthrax attacker probably worked at Fort Detrick and welcomes the polygraph program. "It's about time," she said.

But Fort Detrick employees - many of whom have put in long hours to do technical work backing the FBI investigation - already feel targeted by the bureau and the press, and more polygraphs won't help, one worker said.

"I think there's going to be resentment," he said. "People feel we're getting beaten up already."

News of the new polygraphs comes as Fort Detrick officials are reviewing a Defense Department proposal to drastically increase security measures around the dangerous pathogens they study.

By one estimate, simply to build the new fences and other physical security measures proposed would cost $10 million to $15 million. Other proposed changes would sharply limit the number of foreign nationals allowed to work with biological agents, possibly including visiting scientists from friendly countries such as Great Britain.

Genetic research published in Science magazine showed that the anthrax used in the attacks is derived from a sample from a dead cow in Texas that was sent to scientists at Fort Detrick in 1981. But that strain, labeled "Ames," was widely shared with other laboratories - at least 25 in the United States and other countries.

Genetic testing could narrow the number of possible sources for the anthrax but is unlikely to prove it came from a particular lab, scientists say.

It could not be learned last night whether the new polygraph initiative will be expanded beyond Fort Detrick and Dugway to other government and university labs that have had anthrax.

John E. Collingwood, an assistant FBI director, recently wrote in a letter to The New York Times that despite allegations of "bureaucratic bungling," the investigation "represents a case study in cooperation between the scientific community and government agencies."

He denied that the FBI is convinced that the perpetrator is an American, saying: "In fact, we have not precluded any category of suspect, motive or theory." 

Copyright © 2002, The Baltimore Sun

Scientists who worked there are questioned; individual singled out

By Dave Altimari and Jack Dolan
Special To The Sun

June 13, 2002

The FBI is investigating whether the anthrax used in last fall's attacks could have been grown secretly inside an Army lab and taken elsewhere to be converted into a weapon, according to three sources familiar with the investigation.

A former government microbiologist, who was interviewed in recent days by the FBI, said agents focused their questioning on the logistics of how someone with access to the U.S. Army's biodefense labs at Fort Detrick, in Frederick County, might carry out the scheme. The microbiologist, who once worked at Fort Detrick, said the agents did not indicate whether they had evidence that such an incident had occurred.

"They asked me, if I wanted to grow something I wasn't supposed to, would there be somebody asking me about it and could I have taken it out of the lab," said the scientist, who did not want to be identified. "I told them no one checked, and it was far easier to get something out of Fort Detrick than into it."

A second bioterrorism scientist who also has been questioned by the FBI said the agents' "operating theory" appeared to be that the Fort Detrick labs were the source of the anthrax and that spores were somehow removed covertly. This scientist also did not want to be identified.

The scientists' accounts are among several developments that suggest the FBI is seriously exploring the possibility that a Fort Detrick insider could have clandestinely produced and removed anthrax spores to a private location, where they could be refined into the lethal powder sent through the mail last fall.

That premise also is at the center of a new assessment of the investigation by a prominent bioweapons expert, who says five biodefense experts have given the FBI the name of a former Fort Detrick scientist who had access to "a remote location" that could have been used to refine anthrax spores into a weapons form.

In her assessment - scheduled to be posted today on the Federation of American Scientists' Web site - Barbara Hatch Rosenberg all but names the scientist and provides details about his background. The Hartford, Conn., Courant obtained an advance copy of the six-page paper written by Rosenberg, who is chairwoman of the federation's working group on biological weapons.

She says, in her assessment, that the unidentified scientist suffered a career setback last summer that "left him angry and depressed" and that the FBI, with his consent, searched his home and computer.

The unidentified scientist has declined interview requests, but in a voice-mail message left for a Courant reporter last month he denied that he was a suspect.
 

Dave Altimari and Jack Dolan are reporters with The Courant, a Tribune Publishing newspaper. 

Copyright © 2002, The Baltimore Sun

Investigators remove property from apartment; man not called a suspect

By Scott Shane
Sun Staff

June 26, 2002

The FBI searched the apartment yesterday of a biological weapons scientist in Frederick as part of the continuing investigation into the mailing of anthrax-laced letters that killed five people last fall.

An FBI car and Ryder rental truck were parked yesterday evening outside Detrick Plaza apartments, and agents were carrying out large trash bags filled with unknown materials collected inside, a witness said. The low-rise apartments are just outside the main gate to Fort Detrick.

The scientist agreed to the search in the hope that it would remove his name from the list of possible suspects in the investigation, one law enforcement official said.

Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, 48, has not been charged or identified by the FBI as a suspect. He worked at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, the top military bioterrorism research facility, for about two years in the late 1990s.

Hatfill, who has an M.D. and a Ph.D. in molecular cell biology, has conducted scientific research and training in the field of bioterrorism, including training for emergency personnel and U.S. special forces troops.

Like other researchers in the field, he has been vaccinated against anthrax, has had access to labs where it is stored and has some knowledge of its use as a weapon, according to former colleagues. Those factors brought his name to the attention of the FBI several months ago.

He could not be reached for comment last night.

He was interviewed by FBI agents and given a polygraph test early this year, which he passed, he said in an interview with The Sun in February.

Reached at his job with a government contractor, Hatfill said then that he considered the questioning to be part of a routine effort to eliminate people with the knowledge to mount an anthrax attack.

In the February interview, he explicitly denied having anything to do with the attacks.

"I think they had a profile," the scientist said. "They had a bunch of people on the list. They have to rule people out. ... I certainly didn't appreciate getting called in. No one likes that. I'm one of the good guys."

Hatfill has worked in recent years for the McLean, Va., office of Science Applications International Corp., a large defense contractor. But the government lifted his security clearance in July 2001, according to SAIC officials.

After waiting to see whether the clearance would be restored, SAIC dismissed Hatfill in March, the officials said.

In 1997, Hatfill told a Washington Times columnist it would not be hard to mount a biological attack. "Dr. Hatfill, who is familiar with such things, showed me how to culture bacteria with supplies that can be bought at Safeway," wrote columnist Fred Reed.

The next year Hatfill, then at the National Institutes of Health, was photographed for Insight magazine demonstrating "how a determined terrorist could cook up a batch of plague in his or her own kitchen, using common household ingredients and protective equipment from the supermarket."

Last night, another law enforcement source suggested that the search of Hatfill's home was only one among many that have been or will be conducted.

The FBI has been administering voluntary polygraph tests to workers at Fort Detrick and at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, where the Army conducts tests of equipment designed to detect biological weapons and decontamination methods.

Dugway is the only U.S. facility known to have manufactured small quantities of dry, weapons-style anthrax powder in recent years for use in tests.

At Detrick, researchers have used only wet anthrax mixtures. 

Copyright © 2002, The Baltimore Sun

By Scott Shane
Sun Staff
Originally published June 27, 2002

Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, the former Fort Detrick biodefense researcher whose Frederick apartment was searched Tuesday by the FBI, commissioned a 1999 study that described a fictional terrorist attack in which an envelope containing weapons-grade anthrax is opened in an office.

The study, written by a veteran of the old U.S. bioweapons program, was submitted to Hatfill and a colleague at Science Applications International Corp., the McLean, Va., defense contractor where he then worked.

It discusses the danger of anthrax spores spreading through the air and the requirements for decontamination after various kinds of attacks. The author, William C. Patrick III, describes placing 2.5 grams of Bacillus globigii, an anthrax simulant, in a standard business envelope - slightly more than the estimated amount of anthrax in each of the letters that killed five people last fall.

The study, portions of which were read to The Sun by a person who has a copy, illustrates the central paradox of the FBI's nine-month quest for the anthrax mailer: The perpetrator could be a respected American scientist in the biodefense field, where he acquired the skills he then used to kill.

The study discussing the mail attack, for instance, was written as a scientific exercise to draw on Patrick's expertise and help improve defenses against bioterrorism. But the FBI must consider the possibility that such a document could have planted the seed for a terrorist plot.

The traits of a top-notch specialist in biodefense are the same as those of the likely perpetrator of the mail attacks: knowledge of anthrax and how it can be turned into a potent weapon; access to a lab where anthrax is stored; vaccination against anthrax; even very strong views about the threat of bioterrorism.

Hatfill, 48, is a colorful character with all those traits and more. He has said in interviews that his background naturally drew the FBI's attention. Attempts to reach him yesterday were unsuccessful, and the manager of his apartment complex told reporters he was traveling overseas. Hatfill has adamantly denied having anything to do with the anthrax mailings.

A physician and Ph.D. who completed Army Special Forces training, Hatfill is a pilot and has special training in aviation and submarine medicine. He spent 14 months as a doctor and researcher in Antarctica. More recently, he told his college alumni magazine that he has trained with the United Nations to become a bioweapons inspector in Iraq if the regime agrees.

Hatfill, raised in Mattoon, Ill., attended medical school in Zimbabwe, then Rhodesia, and has described witnessing in 1979-1980 the largest outbreak of human anthrax - an estimated 10,000 cases, most of them cutaneous. Experts still debate whether the Zimbabwe outbreak occurred naturally or was a tactic in the civil war then raging between the white government and black guerrillas.

In recent years, while working at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick as well as at the National Institutes of Health, Hatfill has spoken frequently on the bioterrorist threat, stressing how easy it would be for a terrorist to brew a deadly bioagent in his kitchen. While at SAIC, where he worked from 1999 until March, he helped create a mock bioterror laboratory for use in a training exercise in Guam for soldiers of the U.S. Special Operations Command.

Hatfill is a friend and protege of Patrick, 75, a bioweapons legend who has himself experienced the dual status of expert and possible suspect.

Recently, Patrick underwent a three-hour FBI polygraph examination. When he passed, the FBI invited him to join the inner circle of technical advisers to the investigation, Patrick said.

Another anthrax expert, Martin Hugh-Jones of Louisiana State University, said he, too, has been questioned repeatedly by the FBI, both as a scientist and as a possible perpetrator.

"Sometimes it's one and sometimes it's the other," he said. He doesn't like being grilled, but he accepts it. "I think they would have been derelict if they hadn't questioned me."

In the case of Hatfill, it is unclear why FBI agents waited at least six months after they first questioned him to conduct a thorough search of his home. One possibility: a briefing last week for Senate staffers by biologist Barbara Hatch Rosenberg.

Rosenberg, who heads a biological weapons working group at the Federation of American Scientists, has repeatedly criticized the bureau for failing to aggressively pursue a "likely suspect" whom she has not named but who closely resembles Hatfill. Her Senate briefing was attended by Van Harp, who heads the anthrax investigation as assistant FBI director in charge of the Washington field office, and three other FBI agents.

FBI officials, speaking on background, say that Hatfill is only one of many scientists who have come under scrutiny, that he agreed to the search and that they found nothing incriminating, though tests for anthrax spores are not complete.

Yet neighbors and television viewers will not soon forget the daylong spectacle of FBI agents, some in protective gear, carrying equipment in and out of Hatfill's apartment just outside the gates to Fort Detrick.

In March, in a telephone message to The Sun, Hatfill complained that his very dedication to the cause of biological defense had brought him under suspicion. He said he had just been fired from his job at SAIC, the defense contractor, and blamed news media inquiries.

"I've been in this field for a number of years, working until 3 o'clock in the morning, trying to counter this type of weapon of mass destruction, and, sir, my career is over at this time," Hatfill said. "There was a lot of hysteria. A lot of us got polygraphed over this incident as part of the screening process."

However, SAIC officials said Hatfill was dismissed because his security clearance had been suspended by the Defense Department on Aug. 23, 2001, and had not been restored more than six months later. Company officials said they were not told the reason for the suspension. Press inquiries about Hatfill had nothing do to with his firing, they said.

A few other details of the FBI's scrutiny of Hatfill emerged yesterday. Investigators have learned that while in Rhodesia, Hatfill lived a few miles from a Greendale School, according to a report on ABC News, confirmed yesterday by a Rhodesian medical school classmate. The return address on some of the anthrax letters was "Greendale School" with a fictitious address in New Jersey.

The Associated Press reported that agents have searched a public storage facility Hatfill rented in Ocala, Fla. Hatfill's parents, Norman and Shirley Hatfill, own a thoroughbred farm in Ocala called Mekamy Oaks that he has occasionally listed as his address.

The current FBI and media scrutiny of Hatfill is only a more intense version of the attention that has bedeviled the Army's premier biological defense centers at Fort Detrick and Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. Scientists who have devoted their careers to protecting the country from a bioterrorist enemy have been angered and frustrated to suddenly be seen as possible enemies themselves.

"Everybody's under suspicion," said Gigi Kwik, a fellow at the John Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies who did post-doctoral research at Fort Detrick last year and has kept in touch with colleagues there. "It's a terrible atmosphere."

Work habits that ordinarily win bosses' praise have become suspect, as FBI agents check lab access records and ask which scientists worked late at night. "I routinely was there until midnight," Kwik says. "That was expected of me as a post-doc."

David R. Franz, commander of USAMRIID at Fort Detrick from 1995 to 1998, said he fears the suspicion that has focused on the biodefense research center may do it serious harm.

He noted that USAMRIID scientists worked long hours to test suspected anthrax powder last fall and have provided extensive technical assistance to the FBI. Yet dozens of the same workers are now being given polygraph tests, and the institute is repeatedly named in the news media as a possible source of the mailed anthrax.

"To see them dragged through the mud is what hurts me," Franz said.

Nonetheless, he says, it is critical that the FBI solve the case.

"It's so important for this nation that we find this person or persons and show that you don't do this to us," he said. "If we don't catch them, we'll be inviting others to try it again."

Copyright C 2002, The Baltimore Sun
 

CORRECTION

Jun 28 2002

A headline accompanying an article in The Sun yesterday about Dr. Steven
J. Hatfill, a former Fort Detrick researcher whose apartment was searched in the anthrax investigation, may have implied that Hatfill wrote a 1999 study that included a description of a mail anthrax attack.  Hatfill commissioned the study but did not write it. 

He was exposed to spores on the job, but tests fail to show he has anthrax

By Scott Shane
Sun Staff

July 15, 2002

Bill Paliscak has a cross-shaped scar on his chin: a horizontal cut opened some years back by a hockey puck, and a vertical scar made later by a hockey stick.

It's a symbol of the ferociously healthy life he left behind in October, when he spent several days working around anthrax-contaminated mail-sorting equipment in Washington. His exposure was swiftly followed by a devastating, debilitating illness that has never been officially diagnosed and has never been cured.

Before he got sick, says Paliscak, a 38-year-old criminal investigator for the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, he played ice hockey twice a week with fellow federal agents. He lifted weights three times a week. He ran in races. He missed three days' work in nine years.

"I didn't have a doctor," says Paliscak, who sports a tattoo on his bicep from his four years in the Marine Corps. "We didn't even have a thermometer in the house. My theory was to sweat an illness out -- sweat it out playing hockey."

But as he describes this previous life, he is lying in a sixth-floor room at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, his home for nearly four of the past nine months, as doctors have struggled to find out what is wrong with him.

He has been on two or three antibiotics since October. He's on anti-inflammatory drugs and powerful painkillers for intense pain caused by pleurisy, inflammation of the membrane around the lungs. He's on steroids for glandular dysfunction that has left him dizzy, unsteady on his feet and occasionally halting in his speech and erratic in short-term memory.

His face and body appear swollen, and he walks like a man twice his age.

An oxygen tube clipped beneath his nose makes up for low blood oxygen, which doctors can measure but not explain. The bouts of breathlessness -- that is the worst thing of all, he says.

"It's like someone's holding you under water," he says. "They let you up for a second and push you down again."

There is little doubt that Paliscak breathed in large numbers of spores of Bacillus anthracis, spilled in the Brentwood mail processing center from a still-unidentified terrorist's letters to two U.S. senators. He remembers dust showering down on him as he removed a filter above a mail-sorting machine that was later found to be grossly contaminated with anthrax.

There is no doubt that he got very sick a few days later, that some of his symptoms resemble the symptoms of inhalation anthrax and that his illness is not psychosomatic. Objective lab tests show several organ systems are out of whack.

But sophisticated testing for anthrax by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta failed to detect either anthrax bacteria or antibodies to the bacteria or toxin in Paliscak's blood, according to a CDC spokesman.

"I think we've exhausted anything we can possibly do in this case," said the spokesman, Llelwyn Grant. He said CDC doctors -- who recently issued a report saying that eight deaths of Brentwood postal workers since last fall were unrelated to anthrax -- were unwilling to discuss Paliscak's case or the reliability of the anthrax tests with a reporter.

Paliscak's physicians at Sinai, Dr. Gary Kerkvliet and Dr. Tyler Cymet, can't say he has anthrax because the tests don't show it. But after hundreds of tests ruling out everything from Legionnaire's disease to AIDS, they can find no explanation for his relentless illness other than exposure to anthrax.

"I wanted to find another reason," says Kerkvliet, an internal medicine specialist and assistant professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University. "I said, 'Bill, I can't say this is anthrax.' But to my mind, more than ever, it's related to his exposure to anthrax.

"I've come as close as I can to saying anthrax caused the illness. But I don't have the organism."

The doctors wrote his case up for a medical journal in January, hoping to find other cases of inexplicable illness in people exposed to anthrax spores. They found no one like him, although they are intrigued that several of the people who survived confirmed cases of inhalation anthrax last fall have reported continuing health problems, including severe fatigue.

"Bill Paliscak is in a class by himself at this point," says Cymet, an osteopathic physician who heads family medicine at Sinai and is also on Hopkins' faculty.

Kerkvliet and Cymet are reluctant to criticize the CDC, which has been under intense pressure since five people died of anthrax in the mail attacks last fall. CDC specialists did visit Paliscak briefly in December.

But despite the serious implications for public health if anthrax can cause severe disease that is not identifiable with existing tests, there has been no sustained attempt by anyone other than Paliscak's doctors to analyze his illness.

"It would seem to me [the CDC] would be interested in studying his case more closely," Kerkvliet says simply.

While anthrax has long been studied in animals, few cases of inhalation anthrax in humans have occurred in the developed world in recent decades. In the United States, the scientific literature is based chiefly on studies of a few woolen-mill workers conducted in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as on the still-emerging data from the attacks in the fall.

Cymet, who has been consulting the doctors treating the anthrax survivors, says scientists still have much to learn about the anthrax bacterium and the toxin it produces. "I definitely think we need better test methods," he says.

On June 3, after several months of battling by Paliscak, his family and the Postal Inspection Service, the U.S. Labor Department reversed itself and accepted his illness as work-related. The department approved three diagnoses: disease of the pericardium, the sac that encloses the heart; partial collapse of the lung; and pleurisy.

It also approved a grim quintet of medical problems for coverage under workers' compensation: swelling of both legs with fluid, low blood oxygen, coughing up of blood, chest pain and abnormally low blood pressure.

Kerkvliet immediately wrote back to tell the Labor Department that he considered its ruling "very narrow" and to list a dozen more of Paliscak's "myriad symptoms," saying "his condition continues to defy definitive diagnosis by me and a host of consultants."

"It is not entirely clear to me that the [Labor Department] is acknowledging my patient's exposure to an agent of bioterrorism [anthrax]," he wrote. "This agent of bioterrorism has killed other patients and has seriously compromised my patient's health."

Paliscak's fellow postal inspectors have rallied around him, visiting him at the hospital and at the house on the water he shares with his wife, Allison, in Edgewater near Annapolis.

Once last winter, he mentioned to his colleagues that he'd run out of firewood. "About 12 guys [from work] got up early one Saturday -- some from Virginia, some from Pennsylvania. They cut two cords of wood and delivered it and stacked it," he says, marveling at the generosity.

That's partly because of Paliscak's work ethic, says Shaun M. O'Hara, assistant inspector in charge of the Postal Inspection Service's Washington metropolitan division.

"Bill's always been a dependable, hard-working, tenacious investigator with good judgment," O'Hara says. "A day doesn't go by that you don't hear someone ask how Bill's doing. We're all very distraught. We just want to see him get better."

Paliscak acknowledges being deeply frustrated by the severity of his illness, its unpredictability and the reluctance of medical authorities to acknowledge that it was caused by anthrax.

"All I want to do is get better and go back to fighting crime," he says. "I miss my job. I miss my co-workers. I'm begging the CDC to help me get better."

Awaiting possible exploratory surgery this week to find a cause for his diminished lung capacity, Paliscak finds it hard to be hopeful. But he knows some of his colleagues are working with the FBI to find the anthrax mailer, and if they succeed, he has an idea.

"I'd like to get better in time to make the arrest," he says. "I'd just love to slap the bracelets on the guy who did this."

Copyright © 2002, The Baltimore Sun 

FBI agents searched bioweapons expert's Frederick home in June

By Scott Shane
Sun Staff

July 18, 2002

Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, whose Frederick apartment was searched June 25 in the anthrax investigation, has a new employer who says the FBI told him the bioweapons expert is "not a suspect and not on any list" of suspects in the case.

Hatfill started July 1 as associate director of Louisiana State University's National Center for Biomedical Research and Training, which is supported by grants from the Justice Department to train emergency personnel to handle bioterrorist attacks.

Stephen L. Guillot Jr., director of the center, said he was contacted by the FBI a few days after agents searched Hatfill's apartment near Fort Detrick and a storage unit he had rented in Ocala, Fla.

"They told me Steve was not a suspect and was not on any list," Guillot said. He said he was satisfied that Hatfill had been cleared of any role in the anthrax mailings.

Hatfill is one of a number of scientists whose knowledge of and access to anthrax brought him to the attention of the FBI in its 9-month-old investigation of the anthrax-laced letters, which killed five people last fall.

He was first questioned and given a polygraph exam by FBI agents about six months ago, when a brief search of his apartment was conducted. After that, investigators appeared to lose interest in Hatfill until they showed up last month with a rented truck and several cars and spent hours carrying items out of his apartment.

The search was carried out with Hatfill's permission and without a warrant. An acquaintance of Hatfill said yesterday he had been assured by the FBI that the search would be done discreetly, but the agents quickly drew the attention of neighbors, who alerted news organizations. Television crews rushed to the scene and circled the site in helicopters.

Chris Murray, a spokesman for the FBI's Washington Field Office, which is heading the anthrax investigation, refused to comment on Hatfill's status or to confirm Guillot's statements.

Guillot declined to provide Hatfill's phone number, and he could not be reached for comment yesterday. His lawyer, Thomas C. Carter, of Alexandria, Va., did not return repeated phone calls.

Hatfill, who was raised in Illinois and earned medical and doctoral degrees in Zimbabwe and South Africa, worked with Ebola and other viruses at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick from 1997 to 1999. He did not work with anthrax but had access to labs containing the Ames strain of anthrax used in the attacks, according to former
colleagues.

In 1999, he was granted a "secret" clearance by the Defense Department and went to work for Science Applications International Corp., a large defense and intelligence contractor. He spoke widely on bioterrorism, trained medical and police "first responders" who deal with emergencies and helped create a mock bioterrorist laboratory for the U.S. Special Operations Command.

In August 2001, Hatfill's security clearance was suspended by the Defense Department, according to sources at Science Applications International Corp. who said the company was not told the reason. In March, because the clearance had not been restored, the company dismissed Hatfill, the sources said.

Guillot said he does not know why the clearance was suspended. "He's not working on any secure programs for us," he said.

Guillot called Hatfill "a patriot. ... He's a guy who will go out of his way to make sure the lives of first responders are protected." He noted that Hatfill is one of many American biodefense experts who have been questioned and polygraphed by the FBI, but "he's the only one that got blasted in the news."

LSU officials said Hatfill's salary is $150,000 a year. He has not yet relocated to its Baton Rouge campus but is working on developing courses for first responders, they said.

In a 1999 resume that may have drawn the FBI's attention, Hatfill stated that he had "working knowledge" of "wet and dry BW [biological warfare] agents," as well as of how to produce Bacillus globigii, a nontoxic anthrax simulant.

While at SAIC, he commissioned a study by biodefense veteran William C. Patrick III that included a scenario of an anthrax-laced envelope being opened in an office. While most of the report did not deal with mail attacks, it described an experiment to test how much Bacillus globigii powder could fit in an envelope.

Copyright © 2002, The Baltimore Sun

Hatfill's Md. apartment searched again Thursday in FBI anthrax probe

By Scott Shane
Sun Staff

August 3, 2002

Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, whose Frederick apartment was searched again Thursday in the FBI's anthrax investigation, was placed on leave yesterday from his new $150,000-a-year job at Louisiana State University.

In a statement released yesterday, LSU said that "in view of current circumstances," the university has placed Hatfill on "paid administrative leave" for 30 days. "His status will be reevaluated at the end of that period."

Hatfill, 48, was hired July 1 as associate director of the university's National Center for Biomedical Research and Training, which is supported by a Department of Justice grant to train emergency personnel to handle bioterrorist attacks.

Hatfill has been teaching classes that include FBI agents even as other agents appear to be intensifying their scrutiny of him as a potential suspect in last fall's anthrax mailings, which killed five people. He has vehemently denied any involvement in the attacks.

Hatfill, who worked at the Army's biodefense research center at Fort Detrick from 1997 to 1999, is a physician and Ph.D. biologist who has lectured widely on the bioterrorist threat. He is among a few dozen scientists whose expertise and access to laboratory supplies of the Ames strain of anthrax led the FBI to interview and polygraph him.

Hatfill's boss at LSU, Stephen L. Guillot Jr., said two weeks ago that FBI officials assured him after a search June 25 that Hatfill was "not a suspect and was not on any list" of possible suspects. But on Thursday, a team of FBI agents and postal inspectors returned to the scientist's apartment near Fort Detrick with a search warrant and spent nine hours examining the apartment and large trash bins outside.

Meanwhile yesterday, an attorney for Hatfill protested the circumstances of Thursday's search to federal prosecutors, saying FBI agents conducted the search without notice after ignoring Hatfill's promise of continuing cooperation.

In a letter to Assistant U.S. Attorney Kenneth C. Kohl, who is overseeing the case, lawyer Victor M. Glasberg questioned whether "improper decisions" are being made in the continuing scrutiny of Hatfill. Glasberg asserted that the FBI failed to respond to his offer to make Hatfill available for more interviews or to facilitate searches by going ahead with the search, which drew intensive media coverage.

Glasberg released his letter to Kohl yesterday along with a statement saying he has been "working with Dr. Hatfill on how to address a flurry of defamatory publicity about him which has appeared in the press, on TV and on the Internet." He said that "on advice of counsel, Dr. Hatfill will not be speaking with the press."

Also yesterday, Hatfill retained another lawyer, who practices criminal law, to represent him. The lawyer, Jonathan Shapiro of Alexandria, Va., has handled a number of high-profile cases and represents Brian P. Regan, a retired Air Force master sergeant accused of trying to sell U.S. secrets to Iraq, Libya and China.

Shapiro contacted prosecutors yesterday to say he represents Hatfill, said people familiar with the case. Reached last night, Shapiro said, "I'm not going to comment right now." 

Copyright © 2002, The Baltimore Sun 

Anthrax: Errors in his file suggest a researcher was hired and given access to deadly materials without effective scrutiny.

By Scott Shane
Sun Staff

August 8, 2002

Contrary to claims he made on his resume, Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, now under scrutiny in the FBI's anthrax investigation, did not earn a doctoral degree and never served in the U.S. Army Special Forces, according to academic and military officials and records. 

But the apparent fabrications did not prevent him from getting hired in 1995 by the National Institutes of Health and in 1997 by the Army's biological defense research center at Fort Detrick. The Defense Department also apparently failed to check his credentials thoroughly before granting him "secret" security clearance in 1999. 

Because no one discovered the problems, Hatfill was granted access to the world's deadliest pathogens in his research at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, where he worked from 1997 to 1999. While at the institute, and afterward at Science Applications International Corp., a defense contractor, Hatfill briefed officials at the CIA, FBI and the Pentagon about bioterrorism. 

The job history of Hatfill, 48, raises questions about the federal government's hiring procedures for sensitive jobs, particularly in the field of biological defense. 

"Obviously, if this is true, he was not adequately vetted by the U.S. government to work with dangerous pathogens," said Elisa D. Harris, a senior research scholar at the University of Maryland who is studying how to regulate biological programs, including possible licensing of scientists to work with dangerous organisms. 

The revelations about Hatfill's resume shed no light on whether he had anything to do with the anthrax mailings that killed five people last fall. He and his attorneys have adamantly denied any connection, saying that only his expertise placed him, with other scientists, on the list of potential suspects. 

One of his attorneys, Victor M. Glasberg, yesterday declined to comment about the resume. 

In the resume obtained by The Sun that appears to date from 1997 and in documents submitted to NIH, Hatfill claimed he earned a doctorate in "Molecular Cell Biology/Biochemistry" from Rhodes University in South Africa. 

In fact, according to Rhodes University Registrar Stephen Fourie, he was registered as a doctoral candidate from 1992 to 1994 and submitted a thesis, but he was never given the degree. 

An NIH official, who declined to be named, said last night the agency has what appears to be a photocopy of a doctoral degree from Rhodes bearing Hatfill's name, certified as authentic by a British law firm. In a 1999 resume, the reference has changed from "Ph.D. Degree" to "Ph.D. Thesis." 

In the 1997 resume, Hatfill states that he "served with U.S. Army Special Forces" and that he was a member of 7th Special Forces Group. 

Army records show he began special forces training at Fort Bragg on Jan. 23, 1976, but was "academically dropped" a month later and never completed the training, said Walt Sokalski, an Army spokesman. Without completing the training, he could not have joined the 7th Special Forces Group, Sokalski said, and his military record shows no such service. 

In the 1999 resume, Hatfill dropped the reference to the 7th Special Forces Group, saying only that he had "served with the U.S. Army Institute for Military Assistance" - the name of the training school at Fort Bragg where he flunked out. 

While Hatfill was first questioned by the FBI at least seven months ago, he drew wide news media coverage when search teams visited his apartment in Frederick on June 25 with his permission and again Aug. 1, this time with a search warrant. The FBI, which has given Hatfill a polygraph test, is not known to have found any evidence linking him to the mailings. 

In the meantime, Hatfill has drawn attention from publications and broadcast news shows around the world, and he has been placed on leave from his job doing bioterrorism training for Louisiana State University under a Justice Department grant. The latest report came from Newsweek, which reported this week that the FBI used bloodhounds to sniff out an alleged connection between him and the anthrax letters. 

According to Newsweek, bloodhounds trained to recognize the scent of the decontaminated anthrax envelopes reacted strongly to Hatfill's apartment, his girlfriend's apartment and a Denny's restaurant in Louisiana where he had eaten. 

But there are doubts about the significance of the report, and the possibility exists that the story was a leak calculated to put pressure on Hatfill. 

Three veteran bloodhound handlers interviewed by The Sun were skeptical that a useful scent of the anthrax mailer would have remained on the letters months after they were mailed, rubbed against other letters and then decontaminated to kill the anthrax. 

"Anything is possible," said Weldon L. Wood, a retired Maryland law officer and former president of the National Police Bloodhound Association. "But is it feasible, after this length of time and what the letters have been through? I would doubt it." 

Managers at the 12 Denny's in Louisiana said they have not been visited by federal agents with bloodhounds. 

Investigators and news media organizations have not forgotten the story of Richard Jewell, the man wrongly targeted as a suspect in the bombing at the 1996 Summer Olympics, in which two people died in Atlanta. 

Jewell, a security guard who noticed the knapsack containing the bomb and warned people away from it, spent 88 days under intense public scrutiny as the FBI searched his mother's home and the media reported alleged personal quirks. Authorities cleared him, and NBC, CNN and other news organizations paid an estimated $2 million to settle his libel claims. 

"The problem in the Jewell case had mostly to do with the tone and proportion of the coverage," said Robert M. Steele, who teaches journalistic ethics at the Poynter Institute in Florida. "Individuals may be heavily scrutinized by law enforcement officials, but that does not indicate they're guilty." 

The attention to Hatfill follows a long dearth of information on progress in the anthrax investigation. FBI officials have revealed little, but investigators are under intense pressure to solve the case. 

Into the vacuum of information has fallen the colorful history of Hatfill. Raised in Illinois and educated at a small Kansas college, he lived in southern Africa for 16 years, completing medical training in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) and doing a medical residency and conducting research in South Africa. He also has claimed he served with two special forces units of the white Rhodesian government in its civil war against black rebels in the late 1970s. 

After leaving South Africa in 1994, he spent a year doing research at Oxford University before coming to the National Institutes of Health. He then moved to Fort Detrick, where he worked on such organisms as Ebola and Marburg viruses before joining the contractor. 

His security clearance, granted by the Defense Department in January 1999, was suspended in August last year for reasons that were never explained to Science Applications International. The company dismissed him in March because the clearance had not been restored, officials say. 

Hatfill was hired July 1 by the National Center for Biomedical Research and Training at LSU, but after last week's search in Frederick, LSU put him on leave. Stephen L. Guillot Jr., Hatfill's boss at LSU, declined to comment on Hatfill's resume. 

Chuck Dasey, a spokesman for the Army's Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, said Hatfill was a National Research Council fellow, and that primary responsibility for checking his credentials rested with the NRC, part of the National Academy of Sciences. An NRC spokesman could not be reached for comment last night. 

Copyright © 2002, The Baltimore Sun

Bioterror expert accuses FBI, media of running campaign of lies, leaks; Life has become a 'wasteland'

By Scott Shane
Sun Staff

August 12, 2002

ALEXANDRIA, Va. - Calling himself a "fall guy" in the anthrax investigation, Dr. Steven J. Hatfill vehemently denied yesterday he had anything to do with the mail attacks and accused the FBI and the news media of a campaign of "character assassination" that he said has severely damaged his career.

"I am a loyal American and I love my country," Hatfill, wearing a U.S. flag pin, told several dozen reporters and photographers gathered outside his lawyer's office. "I had nothing to do with the anthrax letters, and it is extremely wrong for anyone to contend or suggest that I have."

Hatfill and his attorney, Victor M. Glasberg, said government investigators had smeared him with a series of leaks, tipping off reporters to planned searches of Hatfill's Frederick apartment and giving Newsweek what Glasberg called a "bogus" account of bloodhounds tying him to the anthrax letters. Glasberg also said he had just been told that ABC News had been leaked the text of a bioterrorism novel that Hatfill wrote and stored on his computer, which was seized by the FBI.

In a strongly worded and emotional statement that took about 10 minutes to read, Hatfill, 48, a physician and bioterrorism expert who previously worked at the Army's biodefense center at Fort Detrick, said his life has become a "wasteland" as a result of the public scrutiny.

He was particularly outspoken in decrying FBI agents' conduct this month in searching the Washington home of his girlfriend, whom he did not name.

"She was manhandled by the FBI," he said. "Her apartment was wrecked. The agents screamed at her that I had killed five people and that her life would never be the same."

FBI spokesman Paul Bresson said the bureau would have no immediate comments in response to the allegations from Hatfill and Glasberg, who said the bureau had ignored his offer of complete cooperation.

The news conference, set up by Pat Clawson, a former CNN and NBC reporter who is a friend of Hatfill's, was the scientist's first major counteroffensive in answer to a flood of media coverage set off by FBI searches of his Frederick apartment and rented storage lockers in Florida June 25 and Aug. 1. The attention intensified when it was reported that agents had obtained a criminal warrant for the second search.

When he gave consent for the first search, Hatfill said, "the FBI agents promised me that the search would be quiet, private and very low-key." In fact, he said, "within minutes of my signing the release ... television cameras, satellite TV trucks, overhead helicopters were all swarming around my apartment block."

Hatfill said he was given a polygraph test months ago by FBI anthrax investigators and told he had passed. Glasberg said Hatfill would not agree to take another polygraph, because his emotional reaction to the public scrutiny focused on him might skew the results.

Pointing to published reports, Hatfill suggested that the FBI's search in June resulted from a briefing of U.S. Senate staff members and FBI agents by Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a molecular biologist who has posted her theories about the anthrax attacks on the Internet.

"I am at a complete loss to explain her reported hostility and accusations. I don't know this woman at all," he said.

Rosenberg, a professor at the State University of New York, denied that she had given Hatfill's name to anyone.

"I've never mentioned any names to anyone - not publicly, not privately to the Senate committee staff or anyone else," she said. "The FBI has gone out of its way to make one suspect's name public. I presume the FBI had some good reason for doing so. If they did not, I think it was reprehensible to do so."

Neither Hatfill nor Glasberg would answer questions about Hatfill's past, including false claims made on his 1997 resume that he held a Ph.D. and had served in a U.S. Army Special Forces unit.

Glasberg also declined to comment on why the Defense Department suspended Hatfill's security clearance in August 2001. He said he did not know where Hatfill was on the days the anthrax letters were mailed last fall.

In his statement, Hatfill did refer to mistakes in his past, saying "there are things I would do or say differently than I did 10, 20 or more years ago." He may have been referring to published reports of extreme right-wing political views and claimed service in military units of the former white government of Zimbabwe, then Rhodesia. Hatfill lived abroad from 1978 to 1995, attending medical school in Zimbabwe and conducting medical research in South Africa and England.

"After eight months of one of the most intensive public and private investigations in American history, no one - no one - has come up with a shred of evidence that I had anything to do with the anthrax letters," he said. "As a substitute, the press and now the public have been offered events from my past, going back 20 or more years, as if this were critical to the matter at hand."

Glasberg dismissed reports linking the fake return address on the anthrax letters, a non-existent "Greendale School," to a Zimbabwe suburb called Greendale a few miles from where Hatfill lived two decades ago. "I think there are several hundred or 1,000 Greendales in the United States," he said.

In an apparent reference to a Sun reporter, Hatfill described a call from a reporter in February "all but accusing me of mailing the anthrax letters" and improperly seeking information on a classified project. He said the reporter later called his employer, Science Applications International Corp., a defense and CIA contractor. He suggested that might be the reason SAIC dismissed him in March.

The Sun reporter called Hatfill to ask about reports from his former colleagues at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases that he had taken from Fort Detrick discarded biological safety cabinets. U.S. military officials later confirmed that Hatfill took the cabinets for an SAIC contract to create a mock bioterrorist lab for a training exercise.

SAIC officials have said calls from reporters played no role in the decision to dismiss Hatfill. They say the company gave him six months after his security clearance was suspended to get it restored. When the clearance was not restored, the company dismissed him, the officials said.

Yesterday, Hatfill said he has been asked by SAIC to help with several projects he had started. He said SAIC has contracted for his services through Louisiana State University, where he was hired July 1 as associate director of a bioterrorism training center. He was placed on paid leave by LSU Aug. 2, after the second FBI search.

Hatfill said his work at Fort Detrick from 1997 to 1999 involved viruses, not bacteria such as anthrax. He said that although he was vaccinated against anthrax at that time, he has not received the annual booster shot since 1999 and has therefore been susceptible to anthrax infection since December 2000.

"I've never worked with anthrax," he said.

In a 1999 resume, Hatfill claimed to have "working knowledge" of "large scale production of bacterial, rickettsial and viral BW [biological warfare] pathogens." It also said he was principal architect of a study of "decontamination following threats with Bacillus anthracis," the bacterium that causes anthrax.

Also in 1999, while working for SAIC, Hatfill commissioned a study that included a description of a letter containing anthrax being opened in an office.

Copyright © 2002, The Baltimore Sun

Bureau denies leaking Hatfill's name to reporters, alerting them to searches

By Scott Shane
Sun Staff

August 13, 2002

The FBI denied yesterday that anthrax investigators have smeared a former Army bioterrorism expert with leaks to the news media but said it would look into some allegations of misconduct made by Dr. Steven J. Hatfill.

FBI spokesman Chris Murray said agents did not reveal Hatfill's identity to reporters or tip them off in advance to searches of his Frederick apartment June 25 and Aug. 1.

"We're not aware of any FBI employee who has named a 'suspect' in the anthrax deaths investigation," Murray said. Also, he said, "the FBI does not alert the news media to the service of search warrants."

He added, however, "credible allegations concerning the mishandling of evidence will be investigated thoroughly." The FBI spokesman did not elaborate, but Hatfill's attorney, Victor M. Glasberg, alleged Sunday that the text of a bioterrorism novel written by Hatfill had been leaked to a TV network.

But a day after Hatfill's emotional statement at a news conference that public attention has made his life a "wasteland," the bureau declined to clear him. There was no sign that he has been ruled out as a potential suspect in the mailing of anthrax letters that killed five people and sickened at least 17 others last fall.

One new piece of evidence surfaced yesterday in the 10-month-old investigation. Officials in New Jersey, where the deadly letters were mailed, confirmed that anthrax spores were found last week on swabs taken from a mailbox in the business district of Princeton. The only mailbox to test positive of 561 tested, it may provide clues to the path of the anthrax mailer, they said.

No spores were found in Hatfill's apartment, law enforcement officials say, and no physical evidence links him to the mailings.

In light of that, some outside experts supported yesterday Hatfill's assertion that he has been unfairly targeted by investigators, who are under intense pressure to solve the case by the Sept. 18 anniversary of the first anthrax mailing.

"He's being railroaded," said Richard O. Spertzel, who headed the United Nation's biological weapons inspections in Iraq from 1995 to 1998. "I'm afraid they're creating another Richard Jewell," he added, referring to the security guard wrongly accused of planting a bomb at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996.

Spertzel, of Frederick, who said he has met Hatfill but does not know him well, said swabbing Hatfill's apartment for anthrax spores many months after the anthrax powder was prepared was a waste of time.

"There were plenty of two-legged guinea pigs in that apartment complex. If the anthrax had been made there, his neighbors would be dead," said Spertzel. He believes the anthrax was made in a sophisticated lab.

Hatfill, who trained as a physician but has forged a career since 1997 as a bioterrorism consultant, is among a number of scientists brought to investigators' attention because of their knowledge of biological agents and access to supplies of the Ames strain of anthrax used in the attacks.

But the two very public searches of Hatfill's apartment, as well as his colorful history and episodes of embellishing his resume, have focused far more attention on him than on any of the other potential suspects.

At times, Hatfill's friends say, the rumor mill among scientists and reporters following the anthrax investigation has distorted innocent acts by Hatfill, making them seem ominous. As an example, they point to a widely repeated report about a country house that Hatfill visited last fall.

In mid-June, two weeks before the first search of his apartment, biologist Barbara Hatch Rosenberg sent biodefense experts and reporters an account of a "likely suspect" who "had access to a conveniently located but remote location where activities could have been conducted without risk of observation." She wrote of evidence "that the suspect knew in October that the remote site was contaminated with anthrax."

On July 2, New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof, calling the Hatfill-like suspect "Mr. Z.," accused the FBI of "lethargy" in pursuing the suspect and elaborated on the "remote site" theory.

"Have you searched the isolated residence that he had access to last fall?" Kristof asked the FBI in a series of rhetorical questions. "The FBI has known about this building, and knows that Mr. Z gave Cipro to people who visited it. This property and many others are legally registered in the name of a friend of Mr. Z, but may be safe houses operated by American intelligence."

Pat Clawson, a broadcasting executive and former CNN reporter who has known Hatfill socially for six years, said he and Hatfill are part of a group of friends who visited a house in the Virginia mountains near Shenandoah National Park in October for a weekend of skeet-shooting and socializing.

The visit, in the middle of that month, came at the peak of anthrax hysteria, Clawson said. He told Hatfill that a few weeks earlier he had opened a vitriolic letter addressed to Oliver North, whose radio program is produced by Clawson's employer, Radio America. White powder had spilled from the envelope, which Clawson discarded.

In light of the subsequent anthrax deaths, Clawson said, he asked Hatfill whether he should get on Cipro. Hatfill told him that the tetracycline Clawson was taking for an infection should suffice. A general discussion of anthrax and antibiotics followed, with Hatfill offering advice to the others, said Clawson and George R. Borsari Jr., a lawyer and owner of the Virginia house.

Borsari said he was contacted a month ago by an FBI agent who asked him about Hatfill's access to the "cabin," really a three-bedroom house. He said he told the agent that Hatfill had visited the house a few times but had to call from the road in October to get directions.

As for the idea that his mountain house might be a safe house used by U.S. intelligence, Borsari simply laughed. "Boy, if it's a safe house, the CIA is way behind on the rent," he said.

Some of the speculation surrounding Hatfill has been fueled by his very public interest in anthrax. In his statement Sunday, Hatfill said his research at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick from 1997 to 1999 involved viruses such as Ebola, not bacteria such as anthrax.

That appears to be true. But Hatfill's resume says he has a "working knowledge" of production methods for biological warfare agents, including bacterial agents. It specifically names the anthrax simulant Bacillus globigii, for which manufacturing methods are identical to those for anthrax, experts say.

In addition, Hatfill has often spoken publicly over the past five years about anthrax and its potential as a weapon.

In 1997, he gave a Washington Times columnist scenarios for a biological attack that included "anthrax spores put into the ventilation system of a movie theater." The next year, he told Insight magazine that fumes reported at Baltimore-Washington International Airport "could be a form of testing for a possible future terrorist attack - perhaps next time using anthrax."

Also in 1998, Hatfill copyrighted a novel, Emergence, with co-author Roger Akers, who - according to the Associated Press - indicated in an interview yesterday that the book describes an anthrax attack on Congress.

The same year, Hatfill spoke about anthrax on the television show of Armstrong Williams, the conservative commentator told CNN yesterday. "There's no doubt in my mind that he had knowledge about anthrax," Williams said, adding that the FBI has questioned him about Hatfill's appearance.

Hatfill showed slides of anthrax victims at a June 1998 bioterrorism conference in Washington. In December, at Temple Beth Ami in Rockville, he "described the problems encountered with developing anthrax as a weapon," according to the temple's Web site.

Hatfill's friends say such public talk of anthrax merely reflects his devotion to the cause of biological defense.

"The Steve Hatfill I've known for years is a very charming, charismatic, sensitive and funny guy," Clawson said. "He's not a sociopath who'd go out and kill people."

Copyright © 2002, The Baltimore Sun

Investigators in anthrax probe canvass area around Princeton mailbox that tested positive for spores

The Associated Press

August 14, 2002, 7:21 PM EDT

WASHINGTON -- The FBI publicly declares Dr. Steven J. Hatfill no more or less important than 30 "people of interest" in the investigation into last fall's anthrax attacks, but law enforcement officials concede he is being treated differently. 

Hatfill's photo is the only one being shown to residents of the Princeton, N.J., neighborhood where a mailbox tested positive for anthrax last week. 

And a U.S. official close to the case, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Hatfill's apartment was the only home searched under a warrant in connection to the case. 

Several FBI and Justice Department officials declined to comment Wednesday on whether the circulation of Hatfill's picture signifies an advancement in the investigation into who killed five people and sickened 13 others by sending anthrax through the mail. 

Hatfill's spokesman, Pat Clawson, said it's time for the FBI to either reveal why the government is interested in Hatfill or clear him. 

"The only thing the FBI has said is that he has a very colorful background, yet they are destroying this man's reputation," Clawson said. "Normally when you're doing a photo canvassing you have photos of more than one person, because you want to eliminate false identifications. The fact that the FBI is using only one photo makes the entire process suspect." 

Clawson also noted that the FBI had confiscated all of Hatfill's travel documents and records. 

This week, Hatfill's attorneys filed a complaint about the FBI investigation to oversight offices at the Justice Department and the FBI. The complaint alleges officials leaked information about Hatfill to the press, including that he was a "person of interest" in the case, Clawson said. 

Hatfill, 48, previously worked at the Army Medical Research Institute at Fort Detrick, Md., once home to the U.S. biological warfare program and a repository for the Ames strain of anthrax used in the attacks. 

At a news conference Sunday, Hatfill proclaimed his innocence and allegiance to America, condemned the FBI's investigation of him and emphasized that his background is in the study of viral diseases such as Ebola, not bacterial diseases such as anthrax. His lawyer said Wednesday that Hatfill has never been to Princeton. 

A senior U.S. law enforcement official confirmed Wednesday that the FBI began showing Hatfill's photo around Princeton on Monday. The agents are trying to determine whether anyone saw Hatfill last September or October near a mailbox where authorities believe the anthrax letters were mailed, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. 

One senior law enforcement official said the FBI was avoiding discussion of Hatfill to prevent a "Richard Jewell" situation. 

The FBI targeted Jewell as a suspect in the bombing at the 1996 Summer Games that killed one person and injured more than 100. Jewell insisted he was innocent and complained the FBI's investigation had ruined his career and personal life. He never was charged and was publicly cleared three months later with a government apology. 

Legal experts say even without calling Hatfill a suspect, the FBI is making Hatfill look like one. 

"I think law enforcement does have the right to go around and show the pictures of suspects to people," said Lawrence Goldman, president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. "But when there is little evidence of wrongdoing, the FBI has to be very careful. There is a general lack of sensitivity in law enforcement as to how reputations are destroyed." 

Buck Revell, a former FBI counterterrorism chief, said circulating a picture is not unusual and probably does not signify a development in the case. 

"It is a routine part of an investigation," Revell said. "It doesn't mean they are ready to charge him or that he is the only potential suspect, but it does show a continuing interest on the part of the FBI." 

Revell also said the intent of FBI photo canvassing is to establish the possibility that a person was in an area, not necessarily to accumulate evidence for a trial. When trying to amass evidence for prosecution, investigators generally do a "photo lineup," showing witnesses a picture of a suspect among several photos of people with the same general features. 

Federal authorities have sampled 600 mailboxes in New Jersey since last fall, including the mailbox in Princeton, which is believed to be the first to test positive for anthrax spores. Thirty-nine tests are outstanding. 

Copyright © 2002, The Associated Press

August 16, 2002

IT COULDN'T be any clearer if novelist Richard Preston had previewed it in his latest bioterrorism thriller. 

Any federal investigator trying to unearth the anthrax mailer who terrorized the nation last fall would want to speak with Dr. Steven J. Hatfill. 

He's a scientist knowledgeable about anthrax who commissioned a study on the danger of an airborne attack of the bacteria.  He has worked at the nation's top biodefense laboratory and described the ease with which deadly germs can be cooked up at home. He has decried the United States' vulnerability to an attack. 

Given that profile, who wouldn't take a look at Dr. Hatfill? 

But there's a difference between that and exposing someone's life to the harsh glare of negative media publicity in a case that is as sensitive and unsolved as the anthrax murder case is. 

The FBI says it is looking at 20 to 30 "people of interest" in the national search to determine who sent the anthrax letters. But no other names have surfaced. 

Why? Does the case against Steven Hatfill -- who hasn't been arrested or charged -- mirror the FBI's myopic and mistaken pursuit of security guard Richard Jewel in the Atlanta Olympics bombing case? 

Dr. Hatfill and his lawyer would have Americans believe so, and he has so accused the FBI. That's called taking the offensive.  His contention that no physical evidence links him to the mail attacks remains uncontested, despite leaks that bloodhounds linked him to the sent letters. 

Still, the doctor's background underscores the reasons he's a "person of interest." 

He witnessed an outbreak of anthrax while studying medicine in Zimbabwe; a suburb of the capital Harare bears the same name as the fictional school listed in the return address on two anthrax letters. He lost his government security clearance a month before the attacks, and lost his job with a defense contractor because of it. He claimed a doctoral degree and Special Forces training that he never completed. There's enough there to warrant inquiry. 

If agents or other government officials are irresponsibly leaking case material to impugn Dr. Hatfill's credibility, then they should be disciplined. And the doctor may be owed more than an apology. 

But if investigators are merely narrowing their list of suspects, they should complete the work and arrest the culprit on the evidence needed to prove guilt. That may take longer than Dr. Hatfill or another "person of interest" might like, but the importance of solving this case takes precedence. 

The case may not conclude as novelist Richard Preston would have scripted it. But, in the end, it's the integrity of the investigation that must hold up. 

Copyright © 2002, The Baltimore Sun

By Mona Charen

August 19, 2002

WASHINGTON -- Dr. Steven Hatfill may or may not be the killer who sent anthrax through the mail last year. But something smells about the way the FBI is handling this matter. 

Without arresting him, a researcher who never worked with anthrax, and even without calling him a suspect -- merely one of 20 or 30 "people of interest" -- the FBI apparently tipped off the press when it made a scheduled search of Dr. Hatfill's apartment.

When the FBI agents arrived, they were accompanied by satellite trucks and news helicopters buzzing overhead. What if they are wrong? Will the press ever correct with the same vigor that it misreports? Almost never -- the Richard Jewell case being the only exception that leaps to mind, and he had to sue. 

More often, the unjustly accused have no recourse. In the immortal words of Ray Donovan, Ronald Reagan's secretary of labor, who was acquitted of corruption charges in a court of law after a prolonged trial by the media, "Where do I go to get my reputation back?" 

A spokesman for the FBI denies tipping the press, but those helicopters and news trucks did not arrive due to clairvoyance.  Not only does it look like the FBI was fingering a man against whom it has very little evidence in order to obscure the FBI's lack of progress in finding the anthrax terrorist or terrorists, it further looks like the FBI has bull-headedly followed only one possible scenario -- the lone American scientist -- in its search. 

The Weekly Standard's David Tell has waged a lonely battle to challenge the FBI on this. In a series of detailed articles (see The Weekly Standard, April 29), Mr. Tell has examined the FBI's peculiar reliance on a research professor at the State University of New York named Barbara Hatch Rosenberg. She has apparently encouraged the FBI to believe that a disgruntled American scientist loosed anthrax on the political and media elite last year. 

Her views sound a bit loopy to the dispassionate observer. She apparently told the BBC that the FBI has known the true identity of the anthrax mailer for some time but won't arrest him because "he knows too much." 

Well, let Mr. Tell tell: "Last fall, you see, the man's Langley masters supposedly decided they'd like to field-test what would happen if billions of lethal anthrax spores were sent through the regular mail, and it was 'left to him to decide exactly how to carry it out.' The loosely supervised madman then used his assignment to launch an attack on the media and Senate 'for his own motives.' And, this truth being obviously too hot to handle, the FBI is now trying hard not to discover it." Okaaaay. 

Then there is the matter of Syed Athar Abbas, a Pakistani picked up for defrauding two banks out of $100,000 and running a sophisticated check-kiting scheme. Mr. Tell reports that when the FBI checked him out, it discovered that he had purchased a "fine food particulate mixer" (the sort that might be used for making biological weapons) for about $100,000 in cash. Was the FBI interested, or was it too busy chasing Dr. Hatfill? 

To read Dr. Hatfill's statement is to suspect very strongly that the man is innocent. If I were wrongly accused, I think I'd write a statement like his. Some excerpts: 

"I've devoted much of my professional career to safeguarding men, women and children from the scourge of different types of disease, from leukemia to infectious disease. ... I am appalled at the terrible acts of biological terrorism that have caused death, disease and havoc in the great country starting last fall. ... I wish the authorities Godspeed in catching the culprit or culprits. I do not object to being considered a subject of interest by the authorities because of my knowledge and background in the field of biological warfare defense. ... 

"This does not, however, give them the right to smear me and gratuitously make a wasteland of my life. ... If I am a subject of interest, I'm also a human being. I need to earn a living [he's been fired from two jobs because of this investigation]. I have a family, and until recently, I had a reputation and a bright professional future." 

If the FBI has screwed this up, heads should roll. 

Mona Charen is a syndicated columnist. Her column appears Mondays in The Sun. 

Hatfill offers job records showing work time in Va.; Attorney general is criticized; Scientist says FBI trying to save bungled probe

By Scott Shane
Sun Staff

August 26, 2002

ALEXANDRIA, Va. - Stepping up his counteroffensive against FBI anthrax investigators who have targeted him, Dr. Steven J. Hatfill released documents yesterday showing that he worked long hours in Virginia the days the contaminated letters were mailed in New Jersey last fall.

In his second public statement in two weeks, Hatfill accused the FBI of bungling the high-profile investigation of the bioterrorist attack that killed five people and then pursuing him publicly in a cynical attempt to demonstrate progress. He also offered to take blood tests and give handwriting samples to prove his innocence.

Hatfill singled out Attorney General John Ashcroft for publicly naming him as a "person of interest" in the anthrax investigation as recently as last week. Hatfill's attorney, Victor M. Glasberg, released copies of formal misconduct complaints he has filed with the Justice Department against Ashcroft and FBI agents pursuing the case.

"This assassination of my character appears to be part of a government-run effort to show the American people that it is proceeding vigorously and successfully with the anthrax investigation," said Hatfill, his voice occasionally breaking with emotion.  "I want to look my fellow Americans directly in the eye and declare to them, 'I am not the anthrax killer.'"

But in a curious aside, Hatfill said he believes he will be charged with some crime unrelated to the anthrax mailings by investigators eager to save face and to "justify their massive financial expenditure arising out of their pursuit of me." He did not specify what crime he might be charged with, but told the throng of reporters outside Glasberg's office: "Remember, please, that you heard this from me first."

Hatfill, 48, is a physician and bioterrorism expert who worked at the Army biodefense center at Fort Detrick from 1997 to 1999. The FBI has conducted two highly publicized searches of his Frederick apartment. The agency has also searched a rented storage unit in Florida and his girlfriend's apartment in Washington. He released photographs yesterday showing what he said was the disarray left behind after the search of the belongings of his girlfriend, whom he did not name.

FBI agents have confiscated his passport, travel records, calendars and other personal documents, according to Pat Clawson, a friend and former reporter acting as his spokesman.

"I am openly followed by FBI agents in cars and on foot, 24 hours a day," Hatfill said. "Going to the store for a pack of gum yields a parade of FBI cars, sometimes following me as closely as two to four feet from my rear bumper."

In his first public statement Aug. 11, neither Hatfill nor his attorney would answer questions as to his whereabouts at the time of the mailing of anthrax-laced letters in New Jersey.

Yesterday, they released a time sheet from Science Applications International Corp., the defense and CIA contractor in whose McLean, Va., office Hatfill worked until March. The sheet shows that on the days when the letters were probably mailed, Sept. 17 and 18 and Oct. 8 and 9, Hatfill put in 14, 13.5, 13, and 11.25 hours, respectively.

Hatfill acknowledged that even those long days would have left him time to drive to New Jersey overnight, mail the letters and return before the workday began. "I have little to say about nonsense of this sort," he said. "I was living and working in the D.C. area the entire time when the anthrax letters were mailed."

Hatfill said he has invited the FBI to test his blood for anthrax antibodies, suggesting that a low reading would be evidence that he had neither recent exposure to the bacteria nor recent vaccination. But because he was given an anthrax vaccination as recently as 1999, his blood might still contain some antibodies, so it is unclear whether such a test would be definitive.

Hatfill also asked the FBI to take a handwriting sample and compare it to the writing on the letters. He said he would waive privacy claims and insist that the FBI make public all results of blood and handwriting exams.

Hatfill and Glasberg blasted the FBI for some of its recent tactics, in some cases repeating criticisms leveled by others.

For example, after anthrax spores were recently found in a mailbox in Princeton, N.J., agents showed merchants in the area a photograph of Hatfill, asking them whether they had seen the man last year. But experts on witness identification say such a procedure is seriously flawed, considering Hatfill's face was recently on television and in newspapers. Justice Department guidelines call for witnesses to pick a suspect out of an array of several photographs of different people.

Hatfill also criticized the FBI for waiting seven months before calling on the scientific expertise of William C. Patrick III, a veteran of the Army's old offensive bioweapons program who specialized in dry powder weapons. As The Sun reported last year, the bureau took months to talk to any of the weapons program veterans, even though about two dozen who are still living actually manufactured weapons-grade anthrax powder throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

FBI spokesmen did not return calls seeking comment last night.

At the news conference, Hatfill strongly criticized Nicholas Kristof, a New York Times columnist who has written about him several times, accusing the FBI of "lethargy" and urging investigators to pursue clues about a scientist he called "Mr. Z." In his most recent column on the subject, published Aug. 13, Kristof acknowledged that Hatfill was "Mr. Z" and reported, without attribution, that Hatfill had failed three polygraph tests since January.

Hatfill called that allegation "a total lie" yesterday, saying he has been given only one polygraph examination by the FBI and was told he had passed.

Hatfill's spokesman, Clawson, said Kristof had failed to seek comments from Hatfill or his attorneys before making allegations against him. He said Kristof was guilty of "journalism malpractice at its worst."

Correspondence released yesterday showed that The New York Times declined to publish Glasberg's letter on the issue, saying it was too long. The Times' opinion page also rejected the letter, and Kristof declined to run it in his column.

Reached at his Scarsdale, N.Y., home last night, Kristof said only: "You can quote me as saying I stand by the columns."

Glasberg would not comment on evidence that Hatfill embellished his resume with a Ph.D. degree he did not earn and an Army Special Forces unit he did not serve in. But Glasberg suggested that the resume inaccuracies are real, saying, "I've seen a whole lot of resumes that are, how shall I put it, expansive."

Glasberg linked his client's problems to those of men being held for months without charges in connection with the Sept. 11 investigation.

"These are dark times for civil liberties," he said.

Copyright © 2002, The Baltimore Sun

Hatfill says investigation by FBI has ruined his life

By Scott Shane
Sun Staff

September 4, 2002

Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, who says the federal government has ruined his life by linking him to the anthrax investigation, was fired yesterday from his job as a bioterrorism trainer at Louisiana State University.

Hatfill was hired as associate director of LSU's National Center for Biomedical Research and Training on July 1 and put on paid leave Aug. 2, the day after FBI agents conducted a second search of his Frederick apartment.

"The university is making no judgment as to Dr. Hatfill's guilt or innocence regarding the FBI investigation," said Chancellor Mark A. Emmert in a brief statement released by the university.

Emmert said the decision to dismiss Hatfill "was not reached quickly or easily" but took into consideration the ability of the university "to fulfill its contractual obligations to funding agencies and to maintain its academic integrity."

University officials, citing privacy rules, declined to elaborate. But Hatfill's $150,000-a-year job at LSU, devising and teaching courses on bioterrorism to emergency personnel, was financed with a grant from the U.S. Department of Justice, which is in charge of the anthrax investigation.

In addition, Hatfill has at times in the past claimed to hold a Ph.D. degree from a South African university that he was never awarded and has falsified his military record. His spokesman, Pat Clawson, has said Hatfill believed he had the doctoral degree and dropped it from his resume when he learned it had not been awarded.

Clawson said the university called Hatfill's attorneys yesterday afternoon and told him of their decision to fire him. No explanation was given.

In a statement, Hatfill blamed the investigation for his firing.

"My life has been completely and utterly destroyed by [Attorney General] John Ashcroft and the FBI," Hatfill said. "I do not understand why they are doing this to me. My professional reputation is in tatters. All I have left are my savings, and they will be exhausted soon because of my legal bills."

Hatfill, 48, who trained as a doctor in Zimbabwe, is among a number of scientists whose expertise and access to the Ames strain of anthrax used in last fall's attacks brought them to investigators' attention.

But he appears to have gotten far more attention than anyone else from FBI agents, who conducted high-profile searches of his apartment, his car, a storage unit he rented in Florida and his girlfriend's apartment in Washington.

In two emotional news conferences last month, Hatfill denied any involvement in the anthrax mailings, which killed five people, and lambasted Ashcroft, the FBI and the media for wrecking his career.

Hatfill worked from 1997 to 1999 for the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in Frederick, the primary custodian of the virulent Ames strain of anthrax.

Hatfill and another scientist, Joseph Soukup, commissioned a study of a hypothetical anthrax attack in February 1999 as employees of defense contractor Science Applications International Corp., said Ben Haddad, spokesman for the San Diego-based company.

From 1978 to 1994, Hatfill had lived in southern Africa, where he earned a string of academic degrees and disturbed many of his colleagues with his right-wing rhetoric and what appear to be tall tales of a heroic military career.

He claimed to have served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam and to have been discharged after his plane was shot down and he broke his back. However, his military record showed that to be false.

He joined the military in 1975, as the Vietnam War was ending, and was discharged in 1978.

The Associated Press contributed to this article.

Copyright © 2002, The Baltimore Sun 

By Scott Shane
Sun Staff
Originally published September 12, 2002

FBI agents investigating last year's deadly anthrax mailings conducted a third search yesterday of the former apartment of Dr. Steven J. Hatfill in Frederick, according to a government source.

FBI spokesman Chris Murray in Washington declined to comment on the search, and no details of what the agents were looking for could be learned.

The apartment, in a low-rise complex called Detrick Plaza, is just outside the gate to Fort Detrick, where Hatfill worked from 1997 to 1999 at the Army's biological warfare defense center.

After the apartment was searched June 25 and Aug. 1, Hatfill, a 48-year-old physician and bioterrorism expert, denied that he had had anything to do with the attacks and said that the FBI's scrutiny has wrecked his career.

He was recently fired from a $150,000-a-year job at Louisiana State University, where he trained emergency personnel to handle bioterrorism incidents. The dismissal followed an order from the Department of Justice that Hatfill should not be allowed to work on any LSU programs funded by the department.

The FBI's return to the Frederick apartment indicates that despite Hatfill's protests, investigators have not ruled him out as a suspect in the anonymous mailings, which killed five people and disrupted the mail system and the federal government for weeks last fall.

But it is unclear what they hoped to discover that did not turn up in the two previous daylong searches, in which a computer and bags of belongings were removed for inspection.

Pat Clawson, a friend of Hatfill's who is acting as his spokesman, said Hatfill and his attorney, Victor M. Glasberg, had not been informed of the search.

Clawson said Hatfill moved out of the apartment a month ago.

"Why do they have to search a third time?" Clawson said. "Isn't the FBI competent enough to get the job done the first two tries?"

Clawson said that in Hatfill's continuing effort to clear himself, he voluntarily visited the FBI's Washington field office two weeks ago to give a blood sample and leave palm prints and fingerprints. He also offered to give a handwriting sample, but agents said they had obtained some during the searches.

Hatfill's blood sample could be checked for antibodies to anthrax, indicating whether he has recently been exposed to the bacteria. But because Hatfill's work at Fort Detrick required an anthrax vaccine that would have produced antibodies, some scientists say a blood test is not likely to prove anything.

Hatfill's DNA and fingerprints could also be compared with any recovered from the anthrax letters. But officials have said that neither DNA nor fingerprints were found on the envelopes, which had preprinted postage rather than stamps that might bear traces of saliva.

The addresses on the envelopes and the notes inside were handwritten, so handwriting analysts could compare them to Hatfill's writing. 

Copyright © 2002, The Baltimore Sun 

Former Army Scientist Forged Ph.D. Certificate,
School Says Forgery is kind of intrigue in Hatfill's past attracting interest in anthrax case

By Scott Shane, Sun Staff

When recent reports in The Sun and other publications revealed that former Army bioweapons scientist Dr. Steven J. Hatfill had claimed a Ph.D. he had not received, he offered an explanation.  He had completed the work for the degree at Rhodes University in South Africa and assumed it had been granted, he said through his spokesman, Pat Clawson. Later, when he learned the degree had not been awarded, he stopped listing it on his resume, he said.

But when applying for a research job in 1995, Hatfill provided to the National Institutes of Health a handsome Rhodes University Ph.D. certificate in molecular cell biology with his name on it, signed by the university vice chancellor and other officials.

The Ph.D. certificate, a copy of which was obtained by The Sun from the NIH under the Freedom of Information Act, is a forgery, Rhodes officials say. The university seal is not in the right place, the vice chancellor's signature has the wrong middle initial and other names are made up, they say.  "Our parchment doesn't even look like that," says Angela Stuurman, assistant to the registrar at Rhodes University. "It's most definitely a forgery."

Hatfill's attorney, Victor M. Glasberg, declined to comment on the degree, saying in an e-mail: "We are not feeding the media frenzy on collateral issues. If you ask me whether Dr. Hatfill was standing on the grassy knoll when JFK was shot, I will give you the same answer."

Indeed, the forged Ph.D. sheds no light on whether Hatfill had anything to do with the anthrax letters, which he has adamantly denied.  But it is an example of the kind of intriguing episodes from Hatfill's past that have attracted intense interest from the FBI and the news media. In fact, Hatfill's own past description of his credentials may have contributed to the FBI's focus on him in the anthrax case. 

His 1999 resume claims "working knowledge ... of wet and dry BW [biological warfare] agents, large-scale production of bacterial, rickettsial, and viral BW pathogens and toxins, stabilizers and other additives, former BG [Bacillus globigii] simulant production methods."  Such knowledge would be quite relevant to the preparation of the dry anthrax powder in the envelopes.  Bacillus globigii is a nontoxic relative of the anthrax bacterium and is often used as an anthrax simulant. Anyone who knows how to grow Bacillus globigii and turn it into a simulant powder could do the same with anthrax, scientists say.  But does Hatfill really have such knowledge? His official research at the NIH and later at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick involved viruses, chiefly Ebola and Marburg.  In his statements to the news media complaining of being unfairly targeted, he has insisted that he has no experience with anthrax or other bacteria. 

Asked whether Hatfill really has the knowledge he claims on his resume, Glasberg said "working knowledge" did not imply actual hands-on experience with biological agents, but rather familiarity with the "principles" of biodefense. He suggested further that because Hatfill had nothing to do with the anthrax letters, there is no justification for the news media's interest in his resume and his past. 

It is certain that Hatfill's false claims about his past, his 15-year sojourn in Rhodesia and South Africa and his penchant for dramatizing the bioterrorist threat in a novel and in interviews have made him of great interest to reporters and scientists who are following the investigation.  Add the timing of the devastating suspension of Hatfill's security clearance last year - a month before the anthrax letters were mailed - and it is easy to see why the FBI took an interest.

It is harder to say why that interest continues nine months after agents first interviewed him and administered a polygraph. And the FBI won't comment.

Probe: Investigation has been widely criticized for puzzling delays and questionable methods.

By Scott Shane
Sun Staff

October 9, 2002

It began with an ugly red bump on the middle finger of Johanna Huden's right hand. Huden, an editorial assistant for the New York Post, thought it was an insect bite.

In retrospect, Huden's infection, which appeared about Sept. 21 last year, would turn out to be the first sign of the first major bioterrorist attack in U.S. history. Her job opening the Post's mail had put her in contact with spores of Bacillus anthracis leaking from a poisoned letter to the editor - making her what epidemiologists call the "index case" of the anthrax outbreak.

The attacks turned the daily mail into a lethal weapon, killing five people and sickening at least 17 others, some of whom suffer lingering fatigue and other ailments a year later. Scientists have discovered how little they really knew about anthrax, considered until recently chiefly a threat to cattle in Third World countries. And the federal government has begun to pour billions of dollars into defense against bioterror - though some critics wonder whether the boom in germ studies might actually make the country less safe.

But even as the anthrax attacks have set off a scientific gold rush, the extensive criminal investigation that began a year ago this week has failed to identify the perpetrator. Despite the combined resources of the FBI and the Postal Inspection Service, the investigation has been widely criticized for unaccountable delays and questionable investigative methods.

In November, investigators knocked down the door of a house in Chester, Pa., shared by the city's health commissioner and director of lead-poisoning prevention, and conducted a 13-hour search in biohazard gear. The two officials, Drs. Irshad and Masood Shaikh, and city accountant Asif Kazi, all Pakistani natives, were questioned at length by FBI agents. Nothing more has happened, but an FBI spokeswoman says the investigation of the Shaikh brothers and Kazi "is still ongoing."

More recently, investigators have wound up in a public standoff with biodefense expert Dr. Steven J. Hatfill. With agents following him around the clock and conducting much-publicized searches of his former Frederick apartment, Hatfill has mounted a counter-campaign, saying the pursuit has destroyed the career and reputation of an innocent man. The FBI still appears to be focused on Hatfill, but the bureau has never named him as a suspect or made public any evidence linking him to the attacks.

For Huden, whose cutaneous anthrax infection left only a mottled scar on her finger, the FBI's failure to solve the anthrax case is frustrating and alarming.

"It's shocking that with so many agents, they couldn't find what's going on right here on U.S. soil," she says. "There's no closure to it. You don't know who did it. You don't know if they could do it again."

'We don't have a clue'

Experts who have watched the investigation unfold are beginning to wonder if the attacker will ever be identified.

"A year later it appears that collectively we don't have a clue," says David Siegrist, who studies bioterrorism at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies in Arlington, Va.

Richard H. Ebright, a biochemist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, has followed the case closely and says it has been plagued by inexcusable delays and a reliance on dubious methods.

"The investigation appears to have had a very slow start and appeared for a long time to be off-track," he says. "The investigators did not make use of the scientific resources available."

For example, by accessing research databases, the investigators should have been able to identify in a matter of minutes most of the institutions that had used the Ames strain of anthrax that was used in the attacks, Ebright says. Yet subpoenas for samples of Ames anthrax weren't sent until February - and then their receipt was delayed further while a storage room was prepared at the Army's biodefense center at Fort Detrick in Frederick.

"They could have collected samples in days or weeks instead of six to eight months," he says.

Similarly, not until August did investigators find a contaminated mailbox in the Princeton, N.J., business district, after testing 600 mailboxes along the postal route where the anthrax letters were most likely to have been mailed. Ebright says that by his rough calculation, three technicians should have been able to test 600 mailboxes in about two weeks, leaving open the question of why it took 10 months. "It's incomprehensible," he says.

Steven M. Block, a Stanford University biophysicist, points out that investigators just returned to Florida last month to further trace anthrax spores in the tabloid newspaper building where the first person to die of inhalation anthrax, photo editor Robert Stevens, worked. The building had been sealed off since November.

"That could have been done six months ago," Block says. "They look more like Keystone Kops with every tick of the clock."

The lack of expertise with anthrax hampered investigators, who often had to make up their techniques as they went along.  Certain angles that looked promising - such as genetic fingerprinting to trace the mailed anthrax back to a particular lab - turned out to be dead ends. But inexplicably, agents took months to speak with any of the two dozen living U.S. scientists who made anthrax in the nation's old biological weapons program, and some have not been interviewed to this day.

Never interviewed

"We could have given them a thorough background," says Bill Walter, 77, who was involved in the production of every batch of anthrax ever made at Fort Detrick. Now retired in Florida, he still has not been interviewed. "Why we weren't talked to the day after they found the first spores I can't understand."

There may be a reasonable explanation for the delays, but the FBI is not offering one. Chris Murray, spokesman for the bureau's Washington field office, which is leading the investigation, declined to comment on any of the criticisms. His boss, FBI Assistant Director Van Harp, did not return telephone calls.

The FBI quickly made public a profile of the perpetrator that seemed to combine self-evident traits ("He probably has a scientific background to some extent, or at least a strong interest in science") with others that seemed a stretch ("He lacks the personal skills necessary to confront others"). By contrast, the bureau has never made public the scientific analysis of the anthrax powder, which might permit outside experts to contribute valuable ideas about how, where and with what equipment the powder was prepared.

"With so little visible progress, I think an airing of the evidence might actually help them," Block says.

In the absence of authoritative information from the government, the anthrax attacks have become a sort of mirror for the political views of commentators.

For much of the investigation, the most influential outsider to comment on the investigation was Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a liberal biologist and arms control expert at the State University of New York who believes the United States may have conducted secret bioweapons research that violates the international Biological Weapons Convention. She suggested that the anthrax mailer was a U.S. scientist who had worked in secret government programs.

But by April, with no such suspect in public view, conservatives began to attack Rosenberg and wonder aloud whether she and the FBI were wrong that the mail terrorist was a lone American. The revelation that one of the Sept. 11 hijackers had sought treatment for a leg lesion resembling cutaneous anthrax reignited speculation that foreign terrorists might be to blame.

David Tell, opinion editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, ridiculed Rosenberg as a hapless amateur detective who had misled the FBI into ignoring the obvious: that perhaps the anthrax mailer was a radical Islamic terrorist, just as the notes in the envelopes ("Death to America ... Allah is great") seemed to indicate.

'Making the Iraq Case'

In the summer, that view began to be echoed by others who believe Iraq might be behind the attacks. They cited evidence from United Nations inspections years earlier demonstrating Iraq's interest in anthrax weapons and its capability to make them. In a Sept. 5 editorial titled "Making the Iraq Case," The Wall Street Journal complained that "the FBI persists in pursuing the yellow brick road theory of a lone madman laid out by Barbara Hatch Rosenberg" and urged the bureau to consider Iraq or al-Qaida.

Although FBI officials have said in their rare public statements that they haven't ruled anything out, the investigators seem still to be focused on the American-scientist scenario. That is implicit in their well-publicized pursuit of Hatfill, 48, whose now-vacant apartment they have searched three times; whose friends they have questioned; and whom they have followed with teams of agents, according to Hatfill and his attorney, Victor M. Glasberg.

In two emotional news conferences, Hatfill has portrayed himself as an innocent man hounded by an out-of-control Justice Department. But although his plea has drawn considerable public sympathy, the FBI appears to be undeterred. Investigators visited his former apartment last month, and his spokesman, Pat Clawson, says agents are still following Hatfill around.

Most experts who support the domestic-scientist theory of the anthrax attacks suggest a motive of twisted patriotism: that the attacker was a biodefense insider who hoped the letters would wake up the government and country to the menace of bioterror. By including notes saying "This is anthrax" and "Take penacilin" and by taping the seams of the envelopes, the theory goes, the perpetrator may have hoped to minimize the danger.

If that was the idea, it didn't save the five people who died. But the letters did galvanize the country, creating widespread awareness of the insidious danger posed by germ weapons. And the budget for biodefense has quadrupled, reaching $5.9 billion for the next fiscal year.

"The budget is going through the roof," says Block, the Stanford biophysicist. "It's wonderful. In my opinion, any money spent on vaccines and buttressing the public health system is well worth it," protecting not only against terrorists but other disease threats.

Others are not so sure. If, in fact, the terrorist was an American biodefense insider who got the anthrax from a laboratory, then multiplying the number of laboratories and people using deadly biological agents may only increase the danger, says Ebright, the Rutgers biochemist.

Solving the case might clarify the source of the threat - American insiders, al-Qaida agents or someone else. Meanwhile, at least one person able and willing to use anthrax as a weapon is still at large.

"If this guy was trying to make a point, by George, he's made his point," says the Potomac Institute's Siegrist. "But the person who did this is still out there and presumably capable of doing it again. He's committed mass murder and gotten away with it."

Techniques: The three California handlers brought in by the bureau are viewed skeptically by many in their field.

By Scott Shane
Sun Staff

October 29, 2002

Three keen-nosed bloodhounds named Lucy, Knight and TinkerBelle, flown in by the FBI from Southern California late last summer to help with the anthrax investigation, are a major reason for agents' focus on former Army bioterrorism expert Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, according to sources with knowledge of the case.

But the three bloodhound handlers brought into the anthrax case - who also helped with the Washington-area sniper investigation - use equipment and techniques that are rejected by many others in the field, including both of the major police bloodhound associations.

It is uncertain what, if any, other evidence the FBI may have against Hatfill, a 49-year- old physician and biologist who worked at the Army's biodefense center at Fort Detrick from 1997 to 1999. Hatfill adamantly denies having anything to do with the anthrax attacks, saying he has been targeted by investigators desperate to show progress in the year-old case.

News media reports and scientists' views on the likely source of the mailed anthrax that killed five people last year remain strikingly divided. Last week, ABC News reported that the bloodhounds were the FBI's "secret weapon" in firmly linking Hatfill to the anthrax letters. Yesterday, The Washington Post published a report suggesting that the anthrax in the letters might actually have been produced by a bioweapons program in Iraq or some other country, not by a renegade U.S. scientist as the FBI appears to believe.

FBI spokesman Paul Bresson said yesterday that investigators have ruled out no possible source. "We're exploring all leads and letting the facts take us where they will," he said.

Whatever the FBI's ultimate conclusion, the controversy over the bureau's use of bloodhounds reveals a surprisingly haphazard approach to enlisting outside forensic help in one of the largest investigations in U.S. history. If charges are ultimately brought against anyone, the debate over how the dogs were used could be a hurdle in proving the case.

Unlike even many midsize police departments, the bureau does not have its own bloodhounds or handlers so it must recruit outsiders.

In this crucial case, the 15-year FBI veteran who selected the handlers and dogs is an explosives expert who says he has no experience using bloodhounds himself. Agent Rex Stockham acknowledges that the California handlers and their methods are viewed skeptically in the field, though he says the critics base their opinions on prejudice, not evidence.

"The guys in Southern California are social outcasts in the bloodhound handling community," said Stockham, a forensic examiner in the explosives unit at the FBI Laboratory in Washington.

'Talking trash about us'

The two major associations, the Law Enforcement Bloodhound Association and the National Police Bloodhound Association, "are out there talking trash about us," Stockham said. In fact, he said, he was virtually "laughed out" of one training seminar at which he tried to present results of the California handlers' work.

Jerry Nichols, a Colorado police officer and president of the Law Enforcement Bloodhound Association, does not mince words in criticizing the Californians.

"These are people we have credibility problems with," said Nichols, who has worked with bloodhounds for 13 years, conducted more than 500 bloodhound searches and testified in court 21 times. "I'm extremely skeptical. I don't believe these dogs really do what they claim to do."

A half-dozen other handlers interviewed by The Sun expressed similar doubts, including veteran Maryland police bloodhound handlers who admitted being irritated that the FBI had flown dogs across the country for searches that were mostly in the Frederick area.

But the critics have not dissuaded Stockham and the FBI from using the three handlers and their hounds - Bill Kift, a police officer in Long Beach, Calif., and his dog, Lucy; Dennis Slavin, an urban planner and reserve officer with the South Pasadena Police Department, and TinkerBelle; and Ted Hamm, a civilian who runs his own bloodhound business and is used by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, and Knight.

"It's new," Stockham said of techniques used by the three men. "It's going to be criticized. I'm critical of it myself. I'm evaluating it for the FBI lab."

Stockham said he first became acquainted with the three handlers after seeing a 1999 video of their experiments with taking scents from fragments of exploded bombs.

But Stockham said he could not comment on the use of the bloodhounds on the anthrax case, the sniper case or any other open case. He also said the FBI had asked Kift, Slavin and Hamm not to comment; they did not return phone calls.

Truc Do, a Los Angeles County deputy district attorney who has prosecuted cases successfully based in part on blood-hound evidence produced by Slavin and Hamm, said the critics are misinformed. She said the California handlers are very careful to test their techniques before trying them on real cases.

"They've been working at the forefront of this kind of evidence," said Do. She was skeptical at first but has been won over: "You really have to see it to believe it."

Traditionally, a bloodhound handler uses a "scent article" to start his dog looking for a trail left by the person who had contact with the article. For example, a dog might be given an item of a missing child's clothing.

Then, on command, the dog sniffs around an area for a matching scent. If the dog picks up the child's scent, it trails with nose to the ground until it finds the child or the point where, for instance, the child was pulled into a car.

Instead of using the original scent article, handlers often put a small gauze pad on the item - clothing, facial tissue, a steering wheel - and allow the gauze to absorb the scent before preserving the "scent pad" in a plastic bag.

Pushing the limits

But the Californians have pushed the limits of the bloodhound art, taking scent off shell casings from firearms used in crimes, fragments of exploded bombs - and the decontaminated anthrax letters.

The Californians often use a $895 machine called a Scent Transfer Unit, resembling a small vacuum cleaner, that is designed to draw the scent off the article and deposit it on the pad. One of the machine's inventors is Larry R. Harris, a veteran bloodhound handler who trains with Slavin, Kift and Hamm.

Neither of the two police bloodhound associations has endorsed the Scent Transfer Unit. Officers of the two groups say it offers little advantage over using a gauze pad alone and in fact might confound matters. They contend that an older scent might linger in the machine when it is used on a new case - a charge its users deny.

In addition, bloodhound experts say, the Californians have been quite aggressive in using the dogs not only to follow fugitives or missing persons, but also to identify potential suspects - such as Hatfill - out of a number of people who might have committed the crime.

A false positive

That raises the possibility of a false positive - the identification of an innocent person as the perpetrator, with dire consequences. Some handlers say that there is always a chance that an eager-to-please dog will identify someone even if there is no scent match.

I. Lehr Brisbin Jr., a University of Georgia biologist who has a doctorate in animal behavior, is one of the few scientists who has actually tried to test dog handlers' claims that a bloodhound can accurately pick out a perpetrator from several suspects.  He has conducted numerous experiments in which the bloodhound tried to pick from a half-dozen people the one whose scent was on a baseball cap, he said.

No dog was able to do it consistently.

"As a scientist, what they're supposed to have done [in the anthrax case] sounds like a miracle," said Brisbin, a bloodhound handler himself. "Every time I ask a dog to identify a suspect under controlled conditions, the dog can't do it."

Indeed, a federal jury awarded $1.7 million last year to a man wrongly accused of rape after police identified him in part based on the use of Slavin's bloodhound, TinkerBelle. DNA evidence later proved the man, Jeffrey Allen Grant, had not committed the rape.

Hatfill's attorney, Victor M. Glasberg, has suggested that such a mistake might have occurred with the bloodhounds used in the anthrax case, which he has ridiculed as "bionic dogs."

While few details of what the California handlers did in the anthrax case are known, Hatfill said through a spokesman that a bloodhound entered a room where he was sitting and approached him, prompting one agent to call out that the dog was identifying him.

Similarly, William C. Patrick III, another bioterrorism expert, said he and his wife were asked to stand on their lawn in Frederick, and two bloodhounds were led near them.

"They released the dogs, maybe 10 feet away," Patrick said. "My wife and I are dog lovers and we called them, and they walked up and we patted them." Patrick said he was told the dogs had not identified him as the perpetrator.

'Too many variables'

Cpl. Douglas H. Lowry, the senior bloodhound handler for the Maryland State Police, said that if he had been asked to take his dog to potential suspects' houses or approach suspects to see whether the scent from the letters could be matched, he would have refused to try.

"I think there's too many variables," said Lowry, a handler for 23 years who works from the Hagerstown barracks. "Let's say there's a cat or dog that urinated on the floor. You're going to have to be a pretty good handler to tell [the dog's reaction to] that from identifying the suspect."

In addition, Lowry and several other bloodhound handlers say they are doubtful that a useful scent could be taken from the anthrax letters. They note that the perpetrator probably minimized handling of the letters because no fingerprints or DNA could be recovered from them.

Then the letters went through the postal system, rubbing against other letters with other scents. And finally, the letters were decontaminated using radiation, which might affect the scent.

Two false trails

The use of the dogs in the sniper case raised other doubts for some handlers, although the dogs apparently played no role in the identification of two suspects last week.

A Maryland law enforcement officer involved in the sniper investigation said the dogs from California, given the scent taken from spent shell casings, followed two false trails in Montgomery County.

One led to a house, for which a search warrant was obtained and which turned out not be relevant. The other led to a dog-grooming parlor, the officer said.

Others defended the Californians' work, particularly on the anthrax case. Two people in touch with FBI investigators said the three dogs were given scents taken from three different letters, and all consistently identified Hatfill while ignoring other potential suspects.

'Proud' of colleagues

Harris, the inventor of the Scent Transfer Unit, defended his three California colleagues. "Until these [critics] have tried it and tested it, they shouldn't talk about it. I'm extremely proud of these young people doing this work," said Harris, 74.

Do, the Los Angeles County prosecutor, also said the California bloodhound handlers ran tests in which they had a person touch an envelope, irradiated the envelope in the way the anthrax letters were decontaminated - and found the dogs could still track the person successfully using the scent taken from the irradiated letters.

In any case, Do said, while rules vary from court to court, nowhere can bloodhound evidence alone be used to convict a person of a crime. There has to be other, corroborating evidence, she said.

"The dog is not telling you this person committed the crime," she said. "All the dog is telling you is that the scents match. It's like a fingerprint. The fact that your fingerprint is on the gun does not mean you fired it."

Single maker a possibility, scientists now theorize

By Scott Shane
Sun Staff

November 3, 2002

The anthrax powder in the poisoned letters that killed five people last year could have been prepared using tabletop equipment costing a few thousand dollars, according to two scientists with knowledge of the FBI's yearlong investigation.

While experts consulted by the FBI believed early in the investigation that the anthrax might contain silica or other sophisticated additives to make it float more easily in the air, the consensus now is that no additives are present and that the anthrax was probably made using a relatively simple process, the scientists say.

"There's really nothing all that special about it," said one of the scientists, who spoke on the condition that they not be identified.  "There are many ways to do it."

The conclusion that manufacturing the powder would not require spray-dryers costing tens of thousands of dollars or other elaborate machinery points away from the possibility that the anthrax was made by a state bioweapons program such as Iraq's.  It suggests that the powder could have been prepared by a single person with the right knowledge in a relatively simple clandestine lab.

The FBI appears to have focused on that theory for months, questioning dozens of scientists with ties to the U.S. biodefense program. But with no arrest in sight, some conservative critics have suggested that the bureau should reconsider the possibility that the powder might have been made in Iraq or by a foreign scientist working for al-Qaida.

Such criticism grew louder late last summer after a former Army bioterrorism expert, Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, accused the FBI and media of destroying his career and reputation by targeting him in the investigation. He has adamantly denied any connection to the attacks.

The powder in the letters addressed to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and Sen. Patrick J. Leahy was made of virtually pure anthrax spores, the tough, dormant form of the Bacillus anthracis bacteria, scientists say. The powder contained about 1 trillion spores per gram, close to the theoretical limit of purity.

But one of the scientists who described the powder to The Sun said that such purity can be achieved using relatively simple methods, such as repeatedly spinning the anthrax mixture in a centrifuge and washing out non-spore materials.

While anthrax produced by Army weapons makers in the old U.S. offensive biological warfare program had a lower purity, that was because of techniques they used for efficient, large-scale production, the scientist said. The bioweapons makers of the 1950s and '60s could have made trillion-spore-per-gram anthrax easily on a smaller, laboratory scale, the scientist said.

In order to get a better idea of what equipment and methods were used by the mail attacker, the FBI has asked scientists to try to "replicate" the mailed anthrax using different production techniques, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller told reporters Friday.

The work will be performed at the Army's Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, where scientists have made tiny quantities of dangerous anthrax powder for many years to test detection equipment and decontamination procedures for U.S. troops.

One official said scientists conducting the current anthrax-making experiments at Dugway for the FBI are working with the Ames strain of anthrax used in the mail attacks. At least half a dozen different powders are to be made, the official said.

Matthew S. Meselson, a Harvard University biologist who has examined electron microscope photographs of the mailed anthrax for the FBI, said the powder appeared to be pure spores, but did contain some clumps, probably because of exposure to humidity. State biowarfare programs have used additives to reduce clumping and make the spores more deadly.

Meselson said the confusion over the possibility of a silica additive may have risen because X-ray studies of the powder detected the element silicon, one component of silica. But he said silicon is naturally present in anthrax, noting a 1980 Journal of Bacteriology paper that found an "unexpectedly high concentration of silicon" in anthrax spores.

Mueller said Friday that the FBI still believes in its profile of the anthrax attacker as a loner with some scientific training and access to Ames anthrax, a strain identified by the Army's biodefense lab at Fort Detrick in 1981 but distributed since then to at least two dozen other labs.

But he denied that the FBI has been limited by any single theory. "We have never ruled out any scenario, and to the extent that there are leads that come up, whether it be to individuals or methods of manufacturing or what have you, we pursue them," Mueller said.

"Am I satisfied? No, because we don't have the person or persons responsible identified and charges being brought against them," Mueller said.

"Are we making progress? Yes. And we continue to make progress," he said.

Because notes in some of the letters revealed that the powder was anthrax and urged the recipient to take penicillin - a warning that reduced the likely death toll - some analysts have suggested foreign terrorists are not the most likely perpetrators.

Instead, the analysts say, the attacker might be an American trying to alert the nation to the threat of bioterrorism.

By Scott Shane
Sun Staff
Originally published December 13, 2002

FBI anthrax investigators began a search for evidence yesterday in a forest northwest of Frederick, apparently following up on a tip concerning former Army bioterrorism expert Dr. Steven J. Hatfill.

Agents informed local police they would be searching through the weekend in the City of Frederick Municipal Forest, a sprawling watershed in the Catoctin Mountains about 10 miles south of the presidential retreat at Camp David.

Investigators have excavated part of a clearing, and FBI divers searched in some of the dozen small ponds in the watershed.

A brief statement issued by the FBI indicated that investigators have already conducted sampling for anthrax in the area, which is frequented by hunters, anglers, hikers and mountain bikers. The search appears to be aimed at finding traces of the bacteria or equipment used to make it.

"The FBI is conducting forensic searches on public land located within the City of Frederick, Maryland," the statement said, adding: "It is important to note that based on water, soil and sediment testing already conducted, there is no indication of any risk to the public health or safety."

As in the past, FBI officials would not confirm that the search is related to Hatfill, the 49-year-old physician and virologist who has been the focus of investigators for months.

But Pat Clawson, a friend of Hatfill's who acts as his spokesman, said he had heard the investigators were following up on a tip that Hatfill had been seen in the watershed. Hatfill worked at the Army's biodefense center at Fort Detrick in Frederick from 1997 to 1999 and lived near the base until last summer.

Clawson said Hatfill told him yesterday that he had spent time in the parks around Frederick only while volunteering with a local Boy Scout troop.

"He's just mystified," Clawson said.

Hatfill, who was fired by a bioterrorism training program at Louisiana State University last summer after FBI agents searched his apartment, continues to deny that he had anything to do with the anthrax attacks. Letters mailed to two U.S. senators and media organizations killed five people and sickened at least 17 last year.

"The FBI can search the planet until hell freezes over, but it will find that Steve Hatfill was never involved in the anthrax attacks," said Clawson, a former CNN reporter who works for a radio production company. "We'd just like to know how many searches it takes to get his reputation and employment restored."

Also yesterday, Sen. Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican, released two letters from the Justice Department answering his queries about its treatment of Hatfill. He had asked why Attorney General John Ashcroft called Hatfill a "person of interest" in the anthrax investigation, and why the department prohibited LSU from employing Hatfill on its training contracts.

In the replies, Assistant Attorney General Daniel J. Bryant said the "person of interest" label was not intended to imply that Hatfill was a suspect.

"The phrase was never used by the FBI or Department of Justice to draw media attention to Dr. Hatfill," Bryant wrote. "On the contrary, the phrase was used to deflect media scrutiny from Dr. Hatfill and to explain that he was just one of many scientists who had been interviewed by the FBI and who were cooperating with the anthrax investigation."

Bryant acknowledged that LSU was told not to hire Hatfill "as a subject-matter expert or course instructor" on Justice-funded programs. He gave no explanation for the ban.

Hatfill had previously obtained a federal research job using a forged Ph.D. certificate from a South African university.

Clawson said Bryant's letters were "bureaucratic gobbledygook" showing that Ashcroft's Justice Department "is utterly shameless about trampling on due process and civil liberties."

He said Hatfill, who had completed training as a United Nations biological weapons inspector, is living in Washington and searching for work.

Investigators blocked off a mile and a half of an icy two-lane road bordering the park. Two tents were set up in a field, and plastic sheeting was spread over a hole dug in the clearing, the Associated Press reported. About 15 investigators could be seen.

William C. Staley, a retired Department of Natural Resources police officer who lives nearby, said most of the watershed is covered with thick brush. "It's pretty wild," said Staley, 74. "Some places you can't walk through it."

He said the area is dotted with about a dozen small ponds, up to an acre in size and about 10 feet in depth.

Copyright © 2002, The Baltimore Sun

Months of tests to find safe way to kill spores raised price, experts say

By Scott Shane
Sun Staff

December 18, 2002

Cleaning up the invisible trail of biological poison left by the anthrax letters mailed last year will cost hundreds of millions of dollars by the time the decontamination effort is complete in 2004 or later, government officials say.

The cleanup reached a new peak this week, with the long-delayed fumigation of the huge Brentwood mail-sorting facility in northeast Washington and the start of what is expected to be an 18-month rehabilitation of the State Department's mail facility in Sterling, Va.

The human tragedy of the attacks - five dead, including two Brentwood workers, and at least 17 cases of illness - has been well-documented. But the economic impact of a few teaspoons of fine-grained powder spilled from seven letters has turned out to be far greater than experts anticipated.

"The economic costs are huge," said Dorothy A. Canter, chief scientist for bioterrorism issues at the Environmental Protection Agency, who is tracking the decontamination work. "It's in the hundreds of millions of dollars for the cleanup alone."

To reduce the chance that a new biological assault could again devastate the nation's postal system, undoing all the decontamination work, the Postal Service is testing germ detectors at Baltimore's main postal facility on Fayette Street.

Based on preliminary results with the biological detection system, designed by Northrop Grumman Corp., the equipment will be installed in 14 more postal facilities for further testing, said Postal Service spokesman Bob Novak. The detectors are designed to identify about a dozen potential biological agents, including anthrax.

In the weeks after the anthrax attacks, hundreds of federal offices in all three branches of the federal government were evacuated. The Bush administration more than quadrupled spending on preparedness for bioterrorism, wrenching the public health system from routine prenatal care and AIDS prevention to cope with such exotic threats as smallpox.

Meanwhile, anthrax cleanup costs have skyrocketed. No precise estimate is possible, officials say, because most of the work is still ahead.

But the Postal Service says decontaminating Brentwood and another sorting center in Hamilton Township, N.J., will cost "in excess of $100 million." The bill for decontaminating the Hart Senate Office Building and other Capitol Hill offices cost the EPA and its contractors about $42 million, according to figures provided by the EPA to Iowa Republican Sen. Charles E. Grassley, who has asked the General Accounting Office for a review. Many millions more have been spent testing and cleaning other government and postal buildings.

The costs were driven up, officials say, by months of trial-and-error experiments to find reliable, safe ways of killing the hardy anthrax spores.

In heavily contaminated buildings, costly furnishings, computers, carpets and even drywall have had to be ripped out. Environmental regulations require elaborate paperwork before toxic chlorine dioxide gas is used or contaminated materials are incinerated.

"We've never had to do anything like this in history," said Barbara Johnson, president of the American Biological Safety Assoc., an organization of about 1,000 professionals in the field. "The government is erring very, very much on the side of safety. It's a very conservative approach, but I don't think there's any other choice."

Officials say they have moved cautiously to be certain buildings are safe before traumatized workers move back in. Postal employees in particular feel they were recklessly endangered last year when officials failed to close the Brentwood facility or to give workers antibiotics when anthrax was discovered.

"Some people are ready to go back," said Dena Briscoe, a 22-year postal employee and president of Brentwood Exposed, an advocacy group representing workers of the closed facility. "But a lot of people still have fears. Some people just wish the building could be abandoned. Knowing that the person who mailed the anthrax has never been caught really heightens our fears."

The legal watchdog group Judicial Watch submitted documents this month to prosecutors seeking a criminal investigation of the delay in closing Brentwood. The group also filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, asserting that Brentwood workers, most of whom are black, were not given the same treatment as the predominantly white congressional employees.

Last weekend, chlorine dioxide gas was pumped into the 700,000-square-foot Brentwood mail center, recently renamed for the two postal workers who died after contracting inhalation anthrax there, Joseph Curseen Jr. and Thomas Morris Jr.

This week, workers in biohazard suits re-entered the building and began to collect more than 8,000 strips embedded with spores of a nontoxic bacteria very similar to anthrax.

By mid-January, the results should determine whether all the spores were killed. If all goes well, the Postal Service hopes to reopen the facility in April.

The cleanup strategy was pioneered this year by the EPA at the Hart building, where an anthrax-laced letter addressed to Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle was opened.

"Essentially you have an engineering project here that has never been done before," said Postal Service spokesman Greg Frey of the Brentwood cleanup. "It's on a much, much larger scale than Hart," he added - about 90,000 cubic feet for the Daschle suites fumigated in the Hart building, compared with 14 million cubic feet at Brentwood.

For the fumigation, the building had to be completely sealed and humidity increased to 75 percent, making the spores vulnerable, postal officials say.

At least one other major building, the former offices of American Media Inc., the tabloid newspaper company in Boca Raton, Fla., where the first victim worked, remains closed and abandoned, with no immediate plans for decontamination.

As the Brentwood decontamination went on, about 100 FBI agents have conducted a search of ponds and woods in a watershed area near Frederick, apparently looking for equipment used to make the anthrax. Former Army bioterrorism expert Steven J. Hatfill, who has been the focus of anthrax investigators for months, lived in Frederick until last summer. He has denied any connection to the attacks.

"They've been taking things out of two fire ponds and labeling everything and taking it away," said Nancy Gregg Poss, a spokeswoman for the city of Frederick. "If they found what they're looking for, we still don't know." 

Copyright © 2002, The Baltimore Sun 

Brentwood: After months of preparation, the $100 million fumigation of the D.C. mail-sorting center is done. Will tests show the toxic spores have all been killed?

By Scott Shane
Originally published Dec 27, 2002

WASHINGTON - In the ancient battle of man against microbe, there has never been a scene quite like this:

Dozens of glistening silver tanker trucks loaded with liquid chemicals.  Heated tents containing towering tanks where the chemicals are mixed to make disinfecting gas. Five miles of pipes to carry the gas into the sprawling Brentwood mail-processing center. Two hundred people working around the clock, guarding the perimeter, bending over test equipment, donning space suits to enter the hot zone.

"We had to build it from the ground up," says John H. Bridges III, an environmental engineer for the U.S. Postal Service and the "incident commander" in charge of the anthrax cleanup of the postal service's sprawling Brentwood mail-sorting center in Northeast Washington.  "There's nothing else like it in the world."

Bridges was peacefully fishing near his Virginia home when the call came in October 2001 that he had just been appointed to take charge of the decontamination. He had no idea the job would last this long.

He and his colleagues are elated that the oft-delayed fumigation went smoothly Dec. 14, though tests still must make certain that all the anthrax spores were killed.

With its security fences and rows of tents, the cleanup operation looks like a cross between a military encampment and a refugee village. It is designed to vanquish an enemy that is at once vanishingly small and astonishingly tough.

If they could somehow be swept up and deposited in one place, all the anthrax spores scattered about the 14 million-cubic-foot interior of Brentwood would not come close to filling a single sugar packet.

Yet that same minuscule pile would contain millions upon millions of the spores that leaked from two letters sent to U.S. senators 14 months ago. And if they wafted into the air and were breathed in by unsuspecting postal workers, they would in theory be enough to wipe out the 1,600 employees scheduled to return to work this spring at Brentwood.

If the workers need any reminder of the tragedy that happened here, it is written on the fence: Brentwood has been renamed for the two postal workers who were fatally infected with anthrax, Joseph Curseen Jr. and Thomas Morris Jr.

Tearing down the building without disinfecting might have spread dangerous spores through the neighborhood. So officials had to mount a meticulous decontamination, despite the huge cost.

Only days ago, the postal service estimated the cost of the cleanups at Brentwood and a smaller sorting facility in New Jersey as "in excess of $100 million."

By last week, when officials showed two dozen journalists around at Brentwood, the size of the "excess" was becoming clearer: Thomas G. Day, the postal service's vice president for engineering, says the likely bill will be $100 million for Brentwood alone, where the cleanup has already required more than 1 million man hours of labor. Cleaning the Trenton, N.J., plant will cost an additional $50 million, he says.

Such mind-boggling spending might be taken as a sort of unintended tribute to nature's ingenuity. Like other members of the Bacillus family of bacteria, Bacillus anthracis can take the form of growing cells or dormant spores, an adaptation that ensures its survival through extended droughts, searing summers or frigid winters.

After killing a cow or other mammal - its natural host - the living cells of the anthrax bacteria fall to the ground with their victim, revert to spore form and hide in the soil.

They appear to be able to survive in this state for centuries - until, for example, a rainstorm washes the spores to the surface where they are ingested by another cow.

Then, in the animal's warm, moist lungs or guts, they blossom into active cells and begin their deadly multiplication.

When human beings began to hunt for a weapon they could take from biology and use against one another, anthrax spores got a high ranking.  Anthrax is not contagious, so it would not turn back and infect the people who used it. And the spores could survive even the blast of a bomb that would scatter its deadly payload over wide swaths of enemy territory.

In earlier times, bioweapons researchers in both the United States and the Soviet Union put anthrax near the top of their lists in their hunt for the ideal biowarfare agent. Evidently the still-unidentified anthrax mailer had the same idea.

"The spores are bound up in a round basketball shape, with a hard surface for chemicals to get through," says Curtis B. Thorne, a retired microbiologist who studied anthrax and other members of the Bacillus family at Fort Detrick and the University of Massachusetts for 46 years.

"You can expose them to heat or cold, light or UV [ultraviolet] and they're protected. And they can hide in very small places."

Thorne says he used to store spores of nontoxic Bacillus bacteria by putting the material in a pot of garden soil stored on a shelf - sometimes for decades. In fact, he says, he has some Bacillus subtilis in his home refrigerator in Amherst, Mass., that he collected more than 30 years ago.

Such durability makes for a difficult cleanup, as government scientists found when they scrambled for a method to use on the Hart Senate Office Building last year.

They considered formaldehyde gas, used in the early 1970s to cleanse the Fort Detrick buildings where anthrax was made, but formaldehyde is a suspected carcinogen.

They tried a germ-killing foam developed at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, where its inventors claimed it would do no damage to offices and would dry to harmless dust.

Not so, says Dennis Carney, who oversaw the anthrax cleanup on Capitol Hill for the Environmental Protection Agency.

"It took paint and varnish right off the walls. It caked onto surfaces and literally had to be scraped off," he told a recent terrorism conference.

Finally the experts settled on chlorine dioxide, used widely to disinfect water and food.

Testing showed that to kill all spores required a gas concentration of 750 parts per million for 12 hours - if humidity and temperature were just right. Under political pressure to reopen the affected congressional offices, cleanup crews worked in two 12-hour shifts.

"We'd tell them [Senate officials] it was going to take three months, and they'd say, 'You have two weeks,'" Carney says.

The lessons learned at Hart were applied this month at Brentwood - only the space being fumigated was about 150 times larger.

Though they believe the spore kill went well, officials won't dismantle the miles of pipes until 4,000 samples are taken throughout the building and 8,000 test strips embedded with nontoxic anthrax-like spores are checked to make sure all are dead.

"You don't want to take down all the equipment and then find out you hadn't killed all the spores," says Day, the postal official. "You don't want to start all over again."

Search confirmed to be related to FBI's interest in ex-Army scientist

By Scott Shane
Sun Staff

January 25, 2003

In their second search since mid-December, FBI anthrax investigators returned to the woods near Frederick yesterday in an apparent hunt for biological equipment used to make the spore powder that killed five people in mail attacks 15 months ago.

The return of agents in frigid temperatures to a remote part of the Frederick watershed, about eight miles northwest of the city, marked the latest episode in the bureau's yearlong scrutiny of Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, who worked at the Army's biodefense center at Fort Detrick from 1997 to 1999 and lived in Frederick until August.

A law enforcement source confirmed that the new search is related to investigators' continuing interest in Hatfill, 49, who has steadfastly denied any connection to the anthrax attacks.

Hatfill's spokesman, Pat Clawson, said the scientist remains under intensive FBI surveillance, with as many as eight cars following him when he leaves the Northwest Washington apartment building where he lives with his girlfriend.

"The sad thing is the FBI is wasting so much money on an investigation of the wrong man," Clawson said.

The FBI's Washington field office issued a terse statement yesterday virtually identical to one put out Dec. 13, before a weeklong search in the watershed that involved about 100 agents using earth-moving equipment and divers to search the small ponds in the area.

"The FBI is conducting forensic searches on public land located within the City of Frederick, Maryland. These searches are related to the FBI's investigation of the origin of the anthrax-laced letters mailed in September and October 2001," the statement said.

The statement reassured residents that there is no dangerous contamination in the area, which contains a reservoir supplying water to Frederick.

"Based on water testing already conducted, there is no indication of any threat to public health or safety associated with our search activities," the statement said.

Frederick Police Chief Kim C. Dine, who was briefed by the FBI last week, said the new search is taking place in a part of the watershed more remote than the December search, which focused on a few acres not far off Gambrills Park Road. Unlike the December search, this one will not require closing roads, he said.

The FBI ordered flight restrictions above the watershed to prevent news organizations from taking aerial photographs of the search, officials said.

The bureau's pursuit of Hatfill began more than a year ago but became more public and intense beginning in June with the first of three searches of his Frederick apartment.

He has blamed the FBI and news media for his dismissal from two $150,000-a-year jobs in bioterrorism training, one at Science Applications International Corp. and the other at Louisiana State University.

Trained as a United Nations bioweapons inspector, Hatfill now hunts for work and watches television reports of inspectors doing their work, said Clawson, a former CNN reporter and friend of Hatfill who volunteered to handle media calls for him.

Clawson said the intensity of FBI surveillance has waxed and waned. But when Hatfill drives out on errands, "he's followed by an entourage. They're right on his bumper. They run red lights to keep up with him."

Last month, Clawson said, he advised Hatfill to drive repeatedly around a traffic circle in downtown Washington.

"The entire entourage followed him three times around the circle," Clawson said. "It was just comical to watch." 

Arrest of Texas professor highlights emergence of security as a major issue

By Scott Shane
Sun Staff

January 26, 2003

For three decades, Dr. Thomas C. Butler pursued medical science with quiet dedication at Texas Tech University, treating patients, publishing research papers and occasionally flying off to India or East Africa to study diseases. 

But only this month did he achieve fame. After Butler reported 30 vials containing plague bacteria missing, about 60 local, state and federal law enforcement agents swooped down on the medical school as word of the bioterrorism scare was broadcast worldwide. 

When the scientist then admitted that he had, in fact, destroyed the samples, he was hauled off to jail in handcuffs, accused of lying initially to the FBI. He has been released on bail, but he has surrendered his passport and is required to stay home on electronic monitoring to await a federal grand jury hearing next month. 

Colleagues have rallied around Butler, a white-haired 61-year-old with the kindly face of a television physician, insisting that he is no terrorist. They suspect he fibbed about the missing vials because he had not completed the paperwork required to document their destruction. They consider the FBI's reaction to be far out of proportion to the threat, even if the vials had disappeared. 

"It scares the hell out of all of us," says Ted Warren Reid, a biochemist at Texas Tech who was preparing to collaborate with Butler on a study. "I think this guy is a typical absent-minded professor. You have 10 things going on at once and you forget something." 

The reverberations are being felt across the country. 

"Personally I found this event in Texas very chilling," says Susan C. Straley, a plague researcher at the University of Kentucky.  "I'm scared. It's sort of a police-state atmosphere." 

But security experts say the episode in Lubbock, Texas, is only one sign of how terrorism is remaking the world of biological research. Scientists used to thinking of their work as life-saving must now consider whether a terrorist could turn it into a weapon for mass killing. 

Laboratories accustomed to the unlocked doors and open publications that promote scientific exchange now face voluminous paperwork, background checks and even censoring of sensitive journal papers. 

"Many feel biology has lost its innocence now, just as physics lost its innocence with the development of the atomic bomb," says Joseph Henderson, a former Department of Energy safety official who studies biosecurity at the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies. 

While the biology problem first came to public attention with the anthrax attacks 15 months ago, it is likely to grow only more serious as biotechnology advances, Henderson says: "As science gives us the power to re-engineer viruses and bacteria, we may be looking at the next generation of bioweapons whose dangers we can't yet even imagine." 

Already two new laws - the USA Patriot Act and the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act - have imposed a dizzying array of new restrictions and reporting requirements on scientists whose work involves any of 62 pathogens listed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as potential bioweapons. 

The rules are being phased in, with many scheduled to take effect Feb. 7. But many scientists privately acknowledge that they have yet to read or understand the regulations, whose complexity rivals that of the tax code. 

Universities can no longer employ citizens of seven countries associated with terrorism to work with the listed bacteria and viruses - even if the employee is a permanent U.S. resident working in a mailroom shipping the organism. Other employees must undergo a "security risk assessment" by the Justice Department to weed out those with criminal records or ties to domestic or foreign terrorist groups. 

Research organizations must register with the federal government, providing detailed safety plans and lists of people who will work with the dangerous agents. They must maintain detailed records of experiments with the pathogens and how they were disposed of, reporting theft, loss or release of any of the listed germs. 

Some researchers fear the bureaucratic burden will discourage scientists from working with them. 

"Will all these forms we have to fill out impede our ability to do research?" asks Dr. Michael Donnenberg, head of infectious diseases at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. "It weighs into the question of whether to work with these agents." 

Donnenberg, for instance, is planning a research project involving a bacterium called Burkholderia mallei, which causes a disease called glanders in horses and other animals. Though it rarely infects humans, it is on the CDC list as a potential bioweapon. 

After some consideration, Donnenberg decided the promise of his proposed research - trying to find a vaccine against glanders - makes it worth the extra costs and hassle. But he has serious concerns about how the terrorist threat is distorting biomedicine.

"My greatest overall emotion is that the money is not being spent well - that we could spend the money on other diseases that cause much more suffering and death, such as HIV, tuberculosis and malaria," he says. In addition, he fears that the federal government, which increased bioterrorism funding from $503 million in 2001 to $2.9 billion last year, might interfere with scientists' freedom to publish their findings. 

Trying to forestall government censorship, the Association for Microbiology has begun to conduct security reviews of papers submitted to the 11 journals it publishes, from Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy to the Journal of Virology. 

After reviewing several hundred manuscripts so far, editors have deleted details from two papers, said Ronald Atlas, president of the association and co-director of the Center for the Deterrence of Biowarfare and Bioterrorism at the University of Louisville. 

"We removed some information that we thought might be dangerous," says Atlas, declining to be more specific. But he insists the association will not cut papers so much that other scientists can't replicate the work. 

Atlas says some kinds of biological research are likely to "go behind the fence, just as the nuclear physics community has gone behind the fence." But he worries that walling off some research will have consequences more dire than in the nuclear field. "If we slow biological research, people die," Atlas says. 

One irony of the current era in biotechnology is that the same breakthroughs that promise to cure terrible diseases and produce new drugs and vaccines can have implications for terrorism that the researchers might not foresee. Last year, Australian researchers trying to create sterile female mice inadvertently made a lethal form of mousepox by adding one gene to the virus.  Experts worry similar alterations could be made to smallpox, one of the most feared of bioweapons, making it more deadly. 

'Persephone effect'

A paper published by the Hopkins biodefense center this month dubs the dual nature of bioscience achievements "the Persephone effect," for the innocent flower-picker in Greek myth who was kidnapped by Hades, taken to the underworld and forced to live there half the year as his queen. 

"If biological science is Persephone, she can live both on earth and in the underworld," says Gigi Kwik, an immunologist at the Hopkins center and lead author of the paper, published in a new journal, Biosecurity and Bioterrorism, whose appearance is itself a sign of the times. "Learning to cure disease, you also learn to cause it." 

The Hopkins paper calls on scientists to take the initiative in designing reasonable controls to prevent excessive government interference or incidents like the flap in Texas. 

"Clearly we need more research than ever on plague," Kwik says. "You don't want to make the rules so onerous that you drive people out of the field." 

But the Texas Tech affair has disturbed many scientists, as did a similar episode last year at the University of Connecticut.  Asked to destroy some decades-old anthrax samples, graduate student Tomas Foral, 26, put two vials in a laboratory freezer for further research. He was charged with illegally possessing anthrax, and a judge ordered him in November to complete 96 hours of community service. 

In 1980, when Straley, the University of Kentucky microbiologist, began working with the Yersinsia pestis bacterium, which causes bubonic plague, "we certainly never thought of it as a potential weapon. It was a model for the study of human pathogens and how they cause disease." Still, Straley says she has no objection to the new federal regulations. "Working with virulent strains carries certain responsibilities. We have to adapt," she says. 

Caution or overkill?

In court papers, Butler acknowledged having misled officials about the vials he destroyed. "Because I knew that the pathogen was destroyed and there was no threat to the public, I provided an inaccurate explanation to [university safety officials] and did not realize it would require such an extensive investigation," Butler told FBI agents, the documents say. 

But his supporters say that the episode represents clumsy overkill by law enforcement officials who lack scientific training. 

Because plague is common among prairie dogs in the Southwest, a determined terrorist could collect the bacteria from the wild, they say. Butler's vials contained only tiny amounts of bacteria of unknown virulence, and it was not treated to become an aerosol that victims could breathe in. 

"Trust me, under your kitchen sink there are chemicals just as dangerous as this stuff," says Peter Agre, a professor of biological chemistry at Johns Hopkins who knew Butler at Hopkins, where he did his medical residency, and at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. "He was a diligent, dedicated doctor and the last person who would do anything wrong. It's a terrible overreaction." 

Butler's attorney, Floyd Holder, declines to discuss his client's actions. But he says the government is scaring away the very scientists who can make the country safer from bioterrorism. "If I'm a scientist, you're not going to catch me working with these agents," Holder says. "Not after this."

BOOK REVIEW
By Scott Shane
Sun Staff

March 9, 2003

The Killer Strain: Anthrax and a Government Exposed, by Marilyn W. Thompson. HarperCollins. 256 pages. $25.95. 

The anthrax killer is still out there. He - OK: he or she - presumably takes pride in turning Washington upside down and rattling the American people with about as much powder as some people put in their morning coffee. If his goal was to focus the attention of the U.S. government on bioterrorism, he can consider his letters a smashing success. 

Now, if he's feeling a bit ignored, he can pick up a copy of the first book wholly devoted to his crime. The Killer Strain is a readable narrative account of the first major bioterrorist attack in U.S. history. I'm sorry to report that it contains no scoops - the chapter on Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, the FBI's most-scrutinized potential suspect, is a rehash of news reports. But the book offers a breezy condensation of the miles of newspaper column-inches devoted to the attack and its enormous impact. 

If The Killer Strain feels incomplete, that is not the fault of Marilyn W. Thompson, an editor at The Washington Post who has supervised some anthrax coverage. She can't answer the most important questions about the attacks: Who mounted them?  Was it a renegade American scientist, as the FBI seems to believe, or might it have been Iraq or al-Qaida, as some conservative analysts still insist? What equipment and expertise was required to make this spore powder so fine-grained that it spread like smoke? And what was the motive? Only when the FBI produces convincing answers to these questions will it be possible to draw more lasting conclusions about the significance of the attack. 

Thompson wisely builds her story around a question that can be answered now: How did the government do in its initial response to the unprecedented germ assault, which killed five people and sickened at least 17 more? 

Thompson offers a largely sympathetic account of the bureaucrats and scientists who suddenly found themselves facing a microscopic enemy with which they had little experience. While she depicts their errors in judgment under fire, she suggests that the only real villain is the anthrax mailer. 

A central scene, for example, is the press conference held by top postal executives inside the Brentwood mail-sorting center in Washington on October 18, 2001 - a setting selected deliberately to reassure nervous postal workers they were safe. They weren't safe, as would be tragically demonstrated within days as two workers died and two more got critically ill. But the bigwigs obviously didn't know it at the time, or they wouldn't have trooped into the cavernous mail facility for their show-and-tell. 

"The press conference would stand as an illustration of the government's bumbling response to the dangers posed by the anthrax-laden letters," she writes. "With a taped envelope and a thirty-four-cent stamp, the letter's sender had outsmarted the government's top scientists, its doctors, and the seasoned bureaucrats running a critical part of the nation's infrastructure." 

Consider John Ezzell, one of the Army's top anthrax experts at Fort Detrick and perhaps the leading character in her narrative. His work was not perfect; Thompson describes his horror as he notices that the bleach he's used to decontaminate his workbench has soaked the edge of one of the anthrax letters, conceivably destroying critical evidence. 

But The Killer Strain also depicts Ezzell's fierce dedication to his job, his frustration when he and his colleagues are treated as potential suspects, and his very human fear for his own safety: After a day of working with the letters, he actually snorts bleach into his nostrils, determined to kill any stray spores. Such details round out the characters, making strident criticism seem unreasonable. 

Thompson comes closest to outrage in describing the glaring contrast between the treatment of well-off, mostly white Senate staffers, who were given antibiotics that saved them from becoming ill, and that of working-class, mostly black Brentwood workers, who were assured for several critical days that they didn't need antibiotics. That delay probably cost the lives of two workers, Thomas Morris and Joseph Curseen. 

On this point, I think Thompson is too easy on the bureaucracy. She notes that the Centers for Disease Control, the Army's biowarfare experts at Fort Detrick and postal officials all initially agreed during those critical days in October 2001 that postal workers were safe. 

But she fails to emphasize sufficiently the fact that they hadn't even bothered to consult the Americans with the greatest knowledge of weaponized anthrax - the Fort Detrick retirees who made horrific bioweapons in the 1950s and 1960s. 

Reachable by phone in Frederick and Florida, the old-timers could have told the officials coping with the crisis that anthrax spores can pass easily through paper, and that some especially vulnerable people can be fatally infected with inhalation anthrax by exposure to a very small number of spores. 

Armed with those simple facts, postal executives might have closed Brentwood immediately and ordered life-saving antibiotics for all the workers. But no one called the Detrick veterans until months later. 

When the next attack comes, the government will know better. 

Scott Shane, a reporter for The Sun, has covered the anthrax attacks and the FBI's investigation since the fall of 2001. He is a former Moscow correspondent and author of a book on the Soviet collapse, Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union.

CIA funded research on chemicals in supplies

By Scott Shane
Sun Staff

March 12, 2003

Scientists funded by the CIA have developed a method to trace anthrax spores used in a terrorist attack to the place they were grown by identifying the distinct chemical fingerprint of local water supplies. 

Their research, presented yesterday at a biodefense conference in Baltimore, measured minute quantities of certain oxygen and hydrogen isotopes that exist in different ratios in water from different parts of the United States. 

The telltale chemicals remain in the spores even if they are dried into a fine powder, like the anthrax mailed to U.S. senators and media organizations in the fall of 2001. 

Helen W. Kreuzer-Martin, a University of Utah biologist and lead author of the study, said FBI agents working on the anthrax investigation have consulted her research team about their methods but have not given them a sample of the mailed anthrax for testing. 

She said it is possible that the FBI has used similar techniques to trace the water or chemical nutrients used to grow the deadly bacteria. 

The findings were presented to the American Society for Microbiology meeting, which has drawn 800 scientists from as far away as Ukraine and Australia to the Marriott Waterfront Hotel to discuss ways to detect bioterrorism, protect people and treat victims. 

In their anthrax study, researchers grew Bacillus subtilis, a harmless bacteria that resembles anthrax, using local water from five different U.S. cities. After freeze-drying the spores and analyzing them, they were easily able to distinguish those grown in Baton Rouge, La.; Los Alamos, N.M.; Durham, N.C.; and Salt Lake City. 

But they were not able to tell bacteria grown in Durham from bacteria grown in Columbus, Ohio, because the water in those two cities contains nearly identical quantities of the oxygen and hydrogen isotopes. 

Thus, while the method might not pinpoint the exact source of water used to grow germs, it can rule out many locations. 

"It's not foolproof," Kreuzer-Martin said. "But if the terrorist used water from the tap, we could tell a lot about where the spores were grown. We could say, for example, the spores were not grown in Iraq, they were not grown at Dugway Proving Ground [in Utah], but they could have been grown in Chicago." 

Obviously, she said, if the terrorist used water transported from elsewhere, the analysis would point to the source of the water rather than the place the anthrax was made. 

Terrorism experts say tracing the perpetrator of an anonymous terrorist attack - whether it uses germs, poison gas, explosives or radioactive material - is critical if those responsible are to face punishment or retaliation. 

That explains the Central Intelligence Agency's funding of the work and the fact that a CIA scientist, Janet Dorigan, collaborated on the study. 

In the pursuit of the anthrax mailer, top FBI officials have said that no possible sources have been ruled out, including foreign countries such as Iraq and the possibility of a renegade American scientist. 

But since last summer, agents appear to have zeroed in on the area around Fort Detrick in Frederick, the major source of the Ames strain of anthrax used in the mailings. 

They repeatedly searched the apartment of former Army biowarfare expert Dr. Steven J. Hatfill and spent two weeks this winter searching woods and ponds for discarded biological equipment. 

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the federal government has more than quadrupled bioterrorism funding, and researchers have rushed to study smallpox, anthrax and other diseases that today pose little or no natural threat to human beings. 

But while some public health experts fear the terror threat is distorting research, scientists in Baltimore yesterday said much of the bioterror work is basic research that should shed light on issues from HIV to cancer.

By Scott Shane
The Baltimore Sun Staff
Originally published April 11, 2003

Army scientists have reproduced the anthrax powder used in the 2001 mail attacks and concluded that it was made using simple methods, inexpensive equipment and limited expertise, according to government sources familiar with the work. 

The findings reinforce the theory that has guided the FBI's 18-month-old investigation - that the mailed anthrax was probably produced by renegade scientists and not a military program such as Iraq's. 

"It tends to support the idea that the anthrax came from a domestic source and probably not a state program," said David Siegrist, a bioterrorism expert at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies. "It shows you can have a fairly sophisticated product with fairly rudimentary methods." 

The new research, carried out at the Army's biodefense center at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, raises the disquieting possibility that al-Qaida and other terrorist groups could create lethal bioweapons without scientific or financial help from a state. The Bush administration had cited the possibility that Iraq might supply weapons to al-Qaida as a key reason for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. 

"It would be better for our country if they'd concluded that [the mailed anthrax] had to have been made in a big facility with a lot of biowarfare experts," said David R. Franz, a former Army biodefense official and consultant on bioterrorism. 

But Richard O. Spertzel, a biowarfare expert and former United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq, said he has heard that the Dugway research failed to match exactly the purity and small particle size of the mailed anthrax. Though he has no involvement in the case, he believes the FBI would be wrong to rule out Iraq or other states as the source of the deadly powder. 

Van Harp, assistant FBI director in charge of the Washington Field Office, who oversees the anthrax investigation, declined to comment on what he called "uninformed speculation" about the anthrax research. 

But Harp said 50 investigators are still working on what the bureau calls the Amerithrax case, backed by "a huge scientific effort." 

"We're making progress," he said. 

The anthrax-laced letters were mailed on Sept. 18 and Oct. 9, 2001, from a Princeton, N.J., mailbox and addressed to media organizations and two U.S. senators. The attack killed five people and sickened at least 17 others, and hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent to clean up government offices and postal facilities. 

FBI and Postal Inspection Service agents initially considered a link to the Sept. 11 hijackers or Iraq. But after genetic analysis showed the anthrax was derived from the Ames strain used in the U.S. military biodefense program, investigators concentrated their effort on a domestic source. 

Agents interviewed and conducted polygraph tests on scores of employees at the U.S. military biodefense research centers at Fort Detrick in Frederick and at Dugway Proving Ground. 

Since last summer, they have focused much of their effort on Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, a former Fort Detrick bioweapons expert, repeatedly searching his Frederick apartment. In December and January, the FBI launched an extensive search in woods and ponds outside Frederick, an effort sources said was aimed at finding discarded biological equipment or other evidence. 

Meanwhile, the FBI's Amerithrax task force ordered an exhaustive battery of scientific tests on the anthrax. Outside scientists say researchers probably have used chemical analysis to trace the water and nutrients used to grow the anthrax to a particular geographic area. 

As part of the scientific sleuthing, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III announced in November that investigators were trying to "reverse engineer" the mailed anthrax. 

Several sources discussed the work with The Sun on condition of anonymity. One investigator said that with about a dozen samples completed, scientists have matched the mailed powder closely enough to conclude it was made with "a pretty small operation" that cost "no more than a few thousand dollars." 

The perpetrator would have needed expertise in microbiology to separate the dormant anthrax spores from the living vegetative cells, to dry the spores without killing them and to mill the product, the source said. 

But the methods used point more to a makeshift lab than a professional operation, the source said. One clue pointing away from a state program was the absence of any additive to neutralize the spores' electrical charge and make them float more freely. 

Such additives or coatings, including glass-like silica, were routinely used in past U.S., Soviet and Iraqi bioweapons programs, and some accounts have suggested that silica was present in the mailed anthrax. But more thorough testing disproved that.

"Everybody was looking for a coating, but there wasn't one," the investigator said. 

The government is retaining detailed data on the various anthrax samples produced, creating a reference library to help track the source of powder used in any future anthrax attack. 

Meanwhile, FBI agents still appear to be scrutinizing Hatfill, 49, a physician who became a lecturer and consultant on bioterrorism in the late 1990s. He has adamantly denied any connection to the anthrax letters and suggested the FBI has persecuted him because it can't find the real culprit.

Two weeks ago, two agents visited Insight magazine reporter Timothy W. Maier in Washington to ask him about an interview he conducted with Hatfill in 1998. They seemed particularly interested in a photograph printed in Insight that year of Hatfill posing in bioprotection gear, demonstrating "how a determined terrorist could cook up a batch of plague in his or her own kitchen using common household ingredients and protective equipment from the supermarket," as the caption put it. 

Maier said he was surprised it had taken so long after the FBI first started showing an interest in Hatfill before they looked into the article and photograph. 

Critics of the FBI's efforts have pointed to other delays. In August, New Jersey Congressman Rush D. Holt blasted the bureau for taking nearly a year to test New Jersey mailboxes before finding the contaminated box in Princeton. 

But last week, after a new FBI briefing, Holt seemed far more impressed. 

"Although I have been critical in the past of the conduct of the FBI's investigation, I am pleased to report today that the investigation seems to be making progress," Holt said. "The FBI has narrowed its search. That's about all I am permitted to say at this point."

Spores reportedly found during Dec., Jan. searches of waters near Frederick

By Scott Shane
Sun Staff

May 12, 2003

The FBI might drain a pond in the woods near Frederick in hopes of finding physical evidence to help identify the person who mailed anthrax-laced letters that killed five people and sickened at least 17 others in 2001, Frederick Mayor Jennifer P. Dougherty said last night.

She spoke in response to news reports yesterday that FBI investigators found anthrax spores and other evidence in their search of ponds in the area northwest of Frederick during December and January.

CNN reported that traces of anthrax were found on one unidentified object taken from a pond. The network said the amount was so small that CNN's source did not know if it was possible to determine whether it was the Ames strain of anthrax used in the attacks.

In addition, The Washington Post, citing anonymous sources, reported yesterday that divers retrieved a "clear box" with holes that could accommodate protective biological safety gloves, as well as vials wrapped in plastic.

Scientists working with dangerous microbes often use a "glove box," a sealed container made of glass or clear plastic with glove ports fixed in place to allow the researcher to manipulate equipment without being directly exposed to the germs. Such equipment ranges from laboratory-size units of the kind used at the Army's biodefense center at Fort Detrick in Frederick to small, inexpensive "glove bags" made of flexible plastic that can be disposed of after a single use.

One person who has heard a description of the box allegedly found in the pond said last night that it was not a commercially manufactured glove box or glove bag, but rather a plastic tub with two holes in it. The source, who has spoken to FBI officials, said some investigators believe it might have been part of jury-rigged equipment used to load the anthrax spores into the envelopes later sent to two U.S. senators and several media organizations.

The Post reported that some investigators think the box might have been partially submerged in the water while the envelopes were loaded. That might have allowed the perpetrator to remove the envelopes sealed in plastic bags so that spores on the outside of the bags would wash away, and the equipment could be abandoned in the pond.

But if spores or equipment were found in a pond months ago, they evidently have not proven to be the breakthrough the FBI needs to link the crime to a suspect who can be charged in the attacks. The bureau has been under intense pressure to solve the 20-month-old case, partly because the poisoned letters contaminated scores of federal offices and postal facilities, causing huge disruption and generating hundreds of millions of dollars in cleanup costs.

Dougherty, the Frederick mayor, said the idea of draining one pond about an acre in size and up to 10 feet deep was first mentioned to city officials by the FBI more than six weeks ago, and investigators told the Frederick police chief yesterday no decision has been made.

As many as 100 FBI investigators conducted an intensive search in December and January in the Frederick watershed, a wild, hilly area northwest of the city and adjacent to Cunningham Falls State Park and Gambrill State Park. Agents blocked roads, set up portable laboratories and combed the forest for clues.

Divers also were deployed to break through thick ice - Dougherty said it was 8 degrees below zero one day - and retrieve dozens of objects from the bottoms of the ponds. The items were meticulously numbered, labeled and returned to FBI facilities to see if any might be equipment used and dumped by the anthrax mailer.

Yesterday's reports from CNN and the Post were the first indication that those searches produced potentially valuable evidence.

The FBI has been criticized by some conservative commentators for seeming to ignore the possibility that foreign terrorists or Iraq might have been responsible for the anthrax mailings. Some suggested the case might be solved by the discovery of biological weapons facilities in Iraq, but little evidence of recent Iraqi bioweapons activity has turned up.

Instead, FBI investigators have maintained their focus for more than a year on the theory that a rogue American scientist or technician mailed the letters. Scientists at the Army's Dugway Proving Ground in Utah have tried to reproduce the anthrax powder in the letters, concluding that it could have been made in a modest home laboratory with tabletop equipment.

FBI agents on the case have devoted huge resources to scrutinizing former Army biowarfare expert Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, 49, who worked at Fort Detrick from 1997 to 1999 and lived in Frederick until late last year.

Pat Clawson, a former television reporter and friend of Hatfill who acts as his spokesman, said last night Hatfill remains under constant surveillance by the FBI.

"The surveillance continues around the clock. It's outright harassment, with as many as eight FBI cars following Steve when he goes out" from his Washington apartment, Clawson said.

Clawson said Hatfill, who was fired from two biodefense-related jobs last year, remains unemployed and believes the FBI has pursued him only because it has made no progress in finding the real culprit.

"Steve Hatfill continues to deny that he had anything to do with the anthrax attacks," Clawson said. "I think it's immoral and un-American to continue to damage his reputation through a campaign of rumors and innuendoes."

Scientist being watched in anthrax investigation

By Scott Shane
Sun Staff

May 20, 2003

FBI anthrax investigators' relentless surveillance of a former Army bioterrorism expert took a bizarre turn Saturday when a vehicle driven by an agent hit Dr. Steven J. Hatfill on a busy Georgetown street - and Hatfill wound up with a $5 ticket.

The driver of the FBI sport utility vehicle, Bryan Blankenship, told police he "drove off, striking" Hatfill, but was not charged, according to a police report. Hatfill was cited for "walking to create a hazard."

The FBI vehicle, a Dodge Durango, ran over Hatfill's right foot and knocked him to the pavement on Wisconsin Avenue about 4:30 p.m. Saturday, said Hatfill's spokesman, Pat Clawson. Clawson said Hatfill had "a goose egg several inches long" on his foot and abrasions on his forehead and was attended to by paramedics at the scene.

Hatfill, who is trained as a medical doctor, refused a ride to the hospital, Clawson said, because he is out of money, has no health insurance and believed no bones were broken.

"He was dazed and out of it for a few minutes, and he's pretty banged and bruised," Clawson said. "He's absolutely enraged. There was nothing about this that constituted legitimate surveillance."

Hatfill can pay the $5 ticket or contest it in court, said Officer Kenneth Bryson, a spokesman for the Washington Metropolitan Police.

The incident occurred after Hatfill and his girlfriend left their Northwest Washington apartment to buy paint at a Wisconsin Avenue store. As the woman parked the car, Hatfill leapt out and approached a Dodge sport utility vehicle that had been following him dangerously closely, Clawson said.

When Hatfill protested to the FBI agent behind the wheel and tried to snap his picture, the agent pointed a video camera at the scientist and simultaneously hit the accelerator, knocking Hatfill down, Clawson said. That description accorded with statements attributed to both Hatfill and Blankenship in the police report.

FBI spokeswoman Debra J. Weierman declined to comment.

Asked why only Hatfill was charged if Blankenship drove into him, Bryson said: "Based on the facts and circumstances at the scene, the officers concluded that the pedestrian was at fault."

The encounter was embarrassing enough to provoke a rare public statement from the FBI's Washington field office, which oversees the anthrax investigation.

"We are aware of an incident ... between Mr. Steven Hatfill and an FBI employee," said Michael E. Rolince, the acting assistant FBI director in charge of the Washington office. "During the incident, Mr. Hatfill fell to the ground on Wisconsin Avenue."

The statement said Hatfill "refused medical treatment," an assertion that Clawson disputed.

For months, FBI surveillance teams have staked out apartments where Hatfill is staying, trailed his car with as many as eight vehicles and followed him into shops and restaurants, according to Hatfill's friends and lawyers.

But Hatfill, who has vehemently protested his innocence, has not been charged and no evidence connecting him to the anthrax attacks has ever been made public.

Mike Hayes, who spent 20 years as an FBI agent specializing in surveillance, said aggressive, obvious tailing is unusual in a criminal investigation, where agents usually try to avoid being spotted.

Only when FBI surveillance teams trail foreign spies are they sometimes directed to "bumperlock" their targets, following closely to prevent them from meeting contacts or visiting dead drops, he said.

The surveillance might be intended to prevent Hatfill from disappearing or taking some other action, said Hayes, president of Technical Threat Analysis Group in California. "What you're describing - really obvious surveillance - doesn't make a lot of sense," he said.

Hatfill's attorney, Thomas G. Connolly, declined to say whether his client will file a formal complaint with the FBI. In the past, his attorneys have protested to the Justice Department about what they called pointless harassment of an innocent man.

The odd encounter was the latest twist in the investigation of the anthrax-laced letters mailed to U.S. senators and news organizations in 2001, killing five people and sickening at least 17.

Under heavy pressure from the White House and Congress to find the culprit, the bureau deployed hundreds of agents across the country. By last summer, however, they appeared to focus their most-intensive efforts on Hatfill.

Having trained as a physician in Zimbabwe and South Africa, Hatfill returned to the United States in the mid-1990s and forged a new career as an expert in the emerging field of bioterrorism.

Hatfill worked at the National Institutes of Health and later spent two years at the Army's biodefense research center at Fort Detrick, in Frederick, where he did research on the Ebola virus in a building where other scientists were studying the Ames strain of anthrax used in the attacks.

After coming under scrutiny in the anthrax probe, Hatfill was fired from two $150,000-a-year jobs, first with a defense contractor and then with Louisiana State University. By then, reporters had dug up numerous misstatements on Hatfill's resume, including false claims that he had served in an Army Special Forces unit and earned a doctorate from a South African university.

In two televised news conferences last summer, Hatfill denied involvement in the anthrax mailings and accused the FBI and Justice Department of destroying his life.

If anything, the FBI's pursuit of Hatfill has intensified since then. For months, he has had repeated near-accidents with FBI surveillance vehicles that were following closely and running red lights to keep up, according to Clawson, a Hatfill friend and former CNN reporter.

A few weeks ago, an agent following Hatfill swore at him and made an obscene gesture when the scientist tried to take his picture, Clawson said.

"The FBI doesn't have anything to show for its anthrax investigation," he said. "So they're trying to provoke him into taking a swing at an FBI agent or doing something else to give them an excuse to lock him up."

Head of journalist group says it's 'not a good fit'

By Scott Shane
Sun Staff

June 5, 2003

For months, hundreds of journalists have sought an interview with Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, the former Army bioterrorism expert who has been under 24-hour surveillance by FBI anthrax investigators for more than a year. Nearly all have been turned down. 

But when Hatfill offered to address the nation's largest organization of investigative journalists at its annual convention, which opens in Washington today, it was the journalists who said no. 

"It's not that we don't want to hear Steven Hatfill," said Brant Houston, executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors Inc., a professional organization whose conference is expected to draw more than 1,000 people. 

But Houston said Hatfill is "not a good fit" for IRE, as the group is known, because its speakers are not newsmakers but working journalists who speak on such topics as "Digging into Environmental Data" and "Tracking White-collar Crime." 

"I really have to stress that we're a conference that goes after the nuts and bolts of news-gathering," he said. 

In addition, Houston said, Hatfill's offer came only two weeks ago, when the IRE conference program was nearly complete. "It's hard to add something in the last two weeks, especially when there are already 280 speakers," he said. 

But Pat Clawson, a former reporter and friend of Hatfill who handles the stream of media inquiries for him, thinks more than a mismatch between speaker and conference is at work. 

"This refusal to hear Steve represents elitist arrogance on the part of the media," said Clawson, a former correspondent for CNN and NBC Radio. "The press feels it is too good to hear from its critics." 

Clawson, who joined IRE shortly after its 1975 founding and acted as bartender at its first conference in Indianapolis in 1976, said he was particularly chagrined by the rejection because he had talked Hatfill into making the offer to speak. 

"I said, 'Why don't you walk into the lion's den and confront these guys?'" Clawson said. "Steve finally decided he was interested in going in and talking about how he felt he'd been treated by the press. ... He's got some constructive ideas on how the media should handle a situation like this." 

Clawson said IRE does include some non-journalists among its conference speakers. Last year four judges were on one panel, he pointed out. And this year, FBI Agent Brad Garrett, who has participated in the anthrax investigation, is scheduled to be part of a panel called "Art of the Criminal Investigation." 

To Houston's explanation that IRE wants "nuts and bolts" speakers, Clawson replied: "What is more nuts and bolts than to have a target of a major national investigation by the press sit down and talk about what that experience is like? Why should journalists not be made aware of the human consequences of their reporting?" 

Clawson also complained that one of the IRE officials who decided against letting Hatfill speak, board member and Washington Post reporter James Grimaldi, had a conflict of interest. 

Hatfill had criticized an article Grimaldi wrote about background checks for United Nations weapons inspectors, Clawson said. Hatfill trained as a weapons inspector but was not sent to Iraq. 

Grimaldi declined to comment. 

The flap over Hatfill and IRE is the latest episode in an extraordinary saga in the media's coverage of criminal justice. 

No one has been charged with sending the anthrax-laced letters that killed five people and sickened at least 17 others in late 2001. But Hatfill has been publicly identified as a focus of the investigation since an FBI search of his Frederick apartment a year ago. 

Attorney General John Ashcroft has said on television that Hatfill is a "person of interest" in the anthrax case. An FBI surveillance team follows Hatfill everywhere he goes. 

Last month, Hatfill was fined $5 for "walking to create a hazard" after an FBI vehicle ran over his foot and knocked him down on a Georgetown street. 

Hatfill has denied any connection to the anthrax attacks and blamed the FBI scrutiny and media coverage for destroying his life. Fired from two jobs since the investigation began, he is unemployed and lives with his girlfriend in Washington. 

But media interest in Hatfill has not let up. Yesterday, Clawson got a call from a filmmaker who wants to make a documentary about Hatfill's life. Today, Clawson is scheduled to meet with a Japanese TV crew for a report on the anthrax case.

By Scott Shane
Sun Staff
Originally published June 10, 2003

FREDERICK - In a costly and unusual step in its hunt for the anthrax killer, the FBI began draining a 1-acre trout pond in a Frederick County forest yesterday, hoping to find discarded biological equipment or telltale anthrax spores on its muddy bottom.

The project, estimated to cost about $250,000 and take several weeks, began yesterday morning after a state biologist told investigators how to avoid trampling a rare yellow-fringed orchid and other endangered species in the area.

The search follows the discovery in the pond last winter of a plastic box that some investigators believe may have been used by the person who mailed anthrax-laced letters to news media organizations and U.S. senators in 2001. The attacks killed five and sickened at least 17.

The object appeared to be a homemade glove box, a biological safety device fitted with gloves to protect someone working with dangerous germs, though no gloves were attached. Anthrax tests on a rope also found in the pond have been inconclusive, according to a law enforcement official.

FBI agents began searching the woods last fall as a result of a tip suggesting that a former Army bioterrorism expert, Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, might have thrown biological equipment in the pond. The work drastically accelerated in December and January, when scores of agents combed the woods, and divers cut through the pond ice.

Hatfill, who worked at the Army's biodefense center at Fort Detrick from 1997 to 1999 and lived near the base until last summer, has been intensely scrutinized by the FBI's "Amerithrax" task force for more than a year. Surveillance teams follow him whenever he leaves his Washington apartment.

One official who talks regularly to investigators said the task force is divided into one faction that believes Hatfill is still a promising suspect and another that is frustrated by the failure to find substantive evidence against him. "Even the ones who favor draining the pond aren't all that certain they'll find anything," the source said.

Hatfill has publicly and repeatedly protested his innocence, as he did again yesterday.

"When Steve heard the news this morning, he just chuckled and shook his head that they would waste all that money," said his spokesman, Pat Clawson. "They can search every pond in Maryland and drain the Pacific Ocean and they won't find evidence linking Steve Hatfill to the anthrax attacks, because there is no such evidence. On the other hand, if this will help further establish Steve's innocence, we welcome it."

At midday yesterday, FBI agents, postal inspectors and contractors were gathered at the rain-swollen pond, known locally as Whiskey Springs Pond, as generators and pumps rattled away.

All-terrain vehicles were parked near several large tents. People authorized to pass the roadblock on Gambrill Park Road to approach the site were wearing "Fire Pond Alpha" identification cards specially manufactured for the project.

Whiskey Springs is one of a dozen fire ponds in the Frederick Municipal Forest dug by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s to provide water to fight forest fires, locals say. The city-owned watershed is about eight miles northwest of Frederick, bordering on Gambrill and Cunningham Falls state parks.

The thick hardwood forest is a favorite of fishermen, mountain bikers and hikers. It was an incongruous place to find the yellow crime scene tape that was strung from tree to tree, blocking access to Whiskey Springs and parts of four other ponds.

Frederick County workers were laying stone on a new gravel road through the muddy woods to the pond, the second such road they have built for the FBI since December.

"It's a very unnatural activity in a very natural setting," said Richard McIntire, a spokesman for the Maryland Department of the Environment, which has assigned a wetlands specialist to advise the investigators. "We're determined that when all this is over, the area will be returned to the state 
that evidently has made it a very special place for the people who live around there."

McIntire said no permits were required to drain the pond, because the work "is considered an emergency-type situation" and because the estimated 50,000 gallons of water will be pumped back "into the immediate environment," meaning local woods and streams.

In addition to the Maryland Department of the Environment, the state Department of Natural Resources had specialists at the scene yesterday to advise the FBI and its engineering contractor, Phillips and Jordan Inc. of Knoxville, Tenn., on minimizing environmental damage and protecting rare plants and creatures, including the wild orchid and a species of newt.

The FBI and the office of Frederick Mayor Jennifer P. Dougherty assured the public that the city's water is safe to drink.

"Over 300 soil, water and sediment tests have taken place in the course of this investigation," the mayor's statement said, and daily sampling continues.

After FBI divers left the pond over the winter, state fisheries workers stocked Whiskey Springs Pond with about 1,300 rainbow trout.

Many of the trout died because of poor water quality, but it had nothing to do with anthrax, said Heather Lynch, a DNR spokeswoman. DNR workers will monitor the pond as the water drops and may move the fish elsewhere if numbers warrant, she said.

Investigators are believed to be looking for more equipment that might be linked to the anthrax letters. In addition, outside experts say, they will probably sample the muck on the bottom extensively in search of anthrax spores.

"A small quantity of anthrax would be hundreds of thousands or even millions of spores," said Dr. William M. Nelson, president of Tetracore, an anthrax testing company, who did anthrax testing for the FBI and military while in the Navy. "You could take 1,000 samples from the bottom and try to grow it. All you need is one spore."

He said investigators are likely to use a specialized growth medium designed to kill ordinary pond bacteria but enhance the growth of anthrax. If anthrax does grow from a sample, he said, it would be possible to sequence its DNA and see if it matched the Ames strain of anthrax used in the attacks.

The Ames strain is used by the Army at Fort Detrick to test vaccines. The strain was first isolated from a dead cow in Texas in 1981. It is not found in nature in Maryland, scientists say.

Training work that won commendation helped attract attention of FBI

By Scott Shane
Sun Staff

July 3, 2003

In the months before the anthrax attacks of 2001, Dr. Steven J. Hatfill helped design and set up mock bioweapons laboratories for U.S. agencies to train commandos and intelligence officers to recognize germ factories in Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere. 

The work won him a government commendation. But it may also have given the FBI a reason to spend thousands of man-hours scrutinizing every detail of Hatfill's life, searching for a link to the anthrax-laced letters that killed five people. 

For training sessions he led in West Virginia, Hatfill provided an anthrax simulant called Bacillus globigii, defense officials say. The nontoxic relative of the deadly anthrax bacteria was sprinkled around so that trainees could use high-tech equipment to detect the germs. 

For labs set up on the Pacific island of Guam, at a base in the Western United States and at the Special Forces training facility at Fort Bragg, N.C., Hatfill scavenged discarded biological equipment of the kind used to turn germs into weapons. 

But the units never manufactured any germs and were not capable of making the anthrax mailed in the attacks, according to defense officials and contractors involved in the projects. 

"No way in the wildest dream could it have been used to make anything," says William C. Patrick III, a Frederick scientist retired from Fort Detrick who worked closely with Hatfill on one project. 

Neither have investigators found a single spore of anthrax on the equipment or among Hatfill's belongings, law enforcement officials say. 

So, the critical question about Hatfill's work on mock bioterror labs remains unanswered: Does it have any relevance to the deadly letters that drove U.S. senators and Supreme Court justices out of their offices and gave the nation a taste of the devastation a bioattack could cause? 

Or does it merely help explain why one of the biggest criminal investigations in history has focused so closely on one man while failing to crack the case? 

Over the past 18 months, FBI surveillance squads have pursued Hatfill in convoys whenever he leaves home. Investigators imported bloodhounds from California in an effort to link Hatfill to a scent found on the letters - a technique some bloodhound experts say is so flawed that it is meaningless. 

Agents have repeatedly searched the Frederick apartment where Hatfill lived until August and his girlfriend's Washington apartment, where he lives now. Most recently, they spent $250,000 to drain a pond in the woods near Frederick, sifting the muck and pumping dirty water into a tanker truck to be tested for anthrax. 

But the evidence turned up by the Amerithrax task force, as the investigation is known, has been insufficient either to charge Hatfill with the crime or to clear him so that get on with his life. 

After a front-page article in yesterday's New York Times detailed Hatfill's role in building one of the training labs, the scientist again denied any connection to the attacks. 

"Steve Hatfill knows nothing about the anthrax attacks," said his spokesman, Pat Clawson. "He is a loyal American patriot who loves his country. ... His dedication to duty has often required great personal risk and sacrifice. 

"For legal and security reasons, he is unable to speak publicly about his work. If the facts were known, we believe most Americans would be grateful for his service to our nation. He looks forward to the day when his name is cleared and his reputation restored so he can resume his career of public service." 

Most of Hatfill's training work was conducted for Science Application International Corp., a defense contractor that employed him from 1999 until March 2002. According to those familiar with his work, FBI agents infiltrated some of his classes to size him up as a potential suspect after the anthrax mailings. 

Agents spent two weeks studying a mock mobile biolab he helped build on an old truck chassis on the property of a Frederick contractor, AFW Fabrication, then halted the unit for another look while it was being transported to Fort Bragg, according to a source close to the case. 

Even as he came under FBI suspicion, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Special Forces Command allowed Hatfill to continue working on SAIC's contracts. At the same time, he was completing training as a United Nations biological weapons inspector, though he never was deployed to Iraq. 

Even as the FBI was grilling him in May 2002, the Defense Intelligence Agency sent him a commendation, and officials there still have a high opinion of his work. 

"Everyone says this is a smart guy - extremely helpful," said one agency official. "They say they learned a hell of a lot from him." 

But media scrutiny has uncovered an erratic and deceptive side to Hatfill's personality, reflected in falsehoods and exaggerations on his resume. 

Most significantly, he never earned the Ph.D. he claimed to obtain research jobs at the National Institutes of Health and the Army's biodefense research center at Fort Detrick. Nor did he serve in Special Forces as he claimed, having flunked out of training after one month.

Hatfill used a doctored copy of the medical degree he received from the University of Zimbabwe, preferring to substitute the old name the institution used during white rule - the University of Rhodesia. He has claimed other titles and experiences in military and medical units in Zimbabwe and South Africa that officials say conflict with their records. 

This pattern of deception, combined with his deep involvement in biowarfare research and training, appears to have prompted the huge investment the FBI and Postal Inspection Service have made in examining Hatfill. 

However, as months have passed without any decision to charge or clear him, even the investigators have split into camps, according to an official who speaks regularly with agents on the case. 

Some agents still believe that they're on the right track, while others have grown skeptical that Hatfill had any connection to the attacks. 

One reason the investigation has dragged on so long is that Hatfill's biodefense activities were so extensive. 

For the DIA, from 2000 to 2002, he trained future members of the Chemical-Biological Intelligence Support Teams later deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq to hunt for bioweapons. 

The training took place in Virginia classrooms and at two field locations in West Virginia: Camp Dawson and the Memorial Tunnel complex, an abandoned highway tunnel converted to a counterterrorism training facility. That is where Hatfill provided petri dishes of the kind used to grow bacteria and Bacillus globigii powder to simulate anthrax, a DIA official said. 

Also in 2000, Hatfill began doing parallel work for U.S. Special Forces Command, headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla. For that work, he scavenged three biological safety cabinets being discarded by Army researchers at Fort Detrick, where he had worked from 1997 to 1999. Fort Detrick was the chief repository of the Ames strain of anthrax used in the mail attacks. 

The cabinets, equipped with glove ports through which technicians could safely manipulate dangerous germs, were used in mock bioterror labs in at least three locations. One official said all three cabinets were eventually destroyed during exercises in which troops learned, with Hatfill's guidance, how to safely attack and disable such labs. 

One former colleague describes Hatfill as extremely animated in describing how he planned to build one of the mock labs. "He talked about it all the time - how realistic he was going to make it," the colleague said. "But I never found anything suspicious about his conduct at the time." 

Congressman criticizes bureau's lack of progress; No trace found at Frederick pond

By Scott Shane
Sun Staff

August 2, 2003

Nearly a year after Dr. Steven J. Hatfill went before the press to proclaim his innocence in the anthrax case and denounce FBI harassment, the bureau continues to focus its costly investigation on him but has not found evidence to solve the case.

Now, with no breakthrough from the $250,000 draining of a Frederick-area pond, Hatfill's lawyers are preparing a civil suit to fight back, a New Jersey congressman wants answers from the FBI and the bureau may be at a crossroads in the case.

"It's getting to the point that the FBI either should bring charges against him or end this constant surveillance," said David Siegrist, who studies bioterrorism at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies and knows Hatfill professionally. "It was perfectly fair for the FBI to follow someone for a time. But now it's more than a year and it's really moved from investigation to harassment."

Rep. Rush D. Holt, a New Jersey Democrat and physicist who has criticized the investigators' slow pace, said he was encouraged after a private FBI briefing in April, but now fears the investigation has lost steam. His district includes both the Princeton mailbox where the deadly letters were mailed and a Trenton mail processing center now undergoing decontamination.

"My constituents need and deserve a resolution to this," Holt said. "Swift apprehension and justice, criminologists will tell you, is particularly important for deterrence. In this case it's already gone on for two years."

Holt, who said the fact that it took agents nine months to find the contaminated mailbox "verged on incompetence," said he is asking the FBI for a new briefing on the status of the case.

Debra Weierman, a spokeswoman for the FBI's Washington field office, declined to comment on progress in the case. "The investigation is continuing," she said.

One law enforcement official who asked his name not be used acknowledged that "there's a lot of pressure on us to do something one way or the other" regarding Hatfill. He said investigators have never abandoned other areas of inquiry, but they may now broaden their efforts.

"We're trying not to be so narrow-minded as to look only at [Hatfill]," the official said. "We're going to go back and see what we have. We may reinterview some people."

Another source said scientists have made progress in fine-tuning genetic analysis to help the FBI trace the mailed anthrax to a particular lab.

Meanwhile, tests on mud, water and junk taken from a pond near Frederick drained by the FBI in June have detected no spores of anthrax, The Washington Post reported yesterday. The law enforcement official confirmed the report, while cautioning that not all tests are complete.

The pond draining, based on a tip about Hatfill, accounts for only a small fraction of the money expended by the FBI and Postal Inspection Service to trail Hatfill, search places he's lived and trace his activities before the anthrax letters were mailed in 2001.

In two news conferences last August, Hatfill tearfully insisted he had nothing to do with the anthrax attacks and accused the FBI of targeting him to give the impression of progress in the politically sensitive case.

He since has been fired from a job as a bioterrorism trainer and has been unable to find new work. He has been followed regularly by FBI cars, one of which knocked him down in May after he approached with a camera.

Now Hatfill's attorneys are preparing a civil lawsuit targeting those he blames for his plight, ranging from members of the media to scientists who have spoken to the FBI, according to people with general knowledge of the preparations.

Hatfill's legal team is headed by Thomas G. Connolly, a litigator with a Washington law firm, who handled high-profile espionage and fraud cases in 10 years as a federal prosecutor.

Also representing Hatfill are Victor M. Glasberg, an Alexandria, Va., attorney who has handled employment and civil rights cases, and Nick Bravin, a colleague of Connolly in the Washington law firm of Harris, Wiltshire and Grannis.

Connolly declined to comment on Hatfill's legal plans and Glasberg did not return a reporter's call. Other sources would not specify the targets or theory of the planned legal action.

A one-year statute of limitations on libel cases in Washington, Maryland and Virginia, where he has lived and worked, would put much of the early news coverage of Hatfill beyond legal reach, said Bruce Sanford, a Washington attorney specializing in media law.

But claims that others invaded Hatfill's privacy or placed him in a "false light" have a longer statute of limitations and would not be precluded, he said.

One obstacle to any Hatfill lawsuit might be his history of exaggerating his credentials, including providing employers with a fake Ph.D. certificate and falsely claiming to have served in an Army Special Forces unit. Without reference to Hatfill, Sanford said: "Jurors don't like people who fabricate and then accuse other people of making mistakes and fabricating."

Ronald Kessler, author of a 2002 history of the FBI titled The Bureau - The Secret History of the FBI, said "It's certainly highly unusual for this much effort to go into a single possible suspect." But he cautioned against "playing the blame game" and assuming the FBI has been negligent or reckless in its pursuit of the anthrax mailer.

He said the FBI has 11,500 agents, compared with 40,000 police officers in New York City alone, and the bureau has been subjected to unprecedented demands since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

"The anthrax case is one of the biggest the FBI's ever had, given the targeting of members of Congress and the impact on the whole country," Kessler said. Still, he added, "The FBI not only has to investigate terrorism and anthrax, but Enron, kidnappings, organized crime, bank robberies and espionage."

But experts on bioterrorism call the failure to find and punish the anthrax mailer an ominous development.

"The whole biodefense community is disturbed that this crime has not been solved," said Siegrist, of the Potomac Institute. "It encourages potential perpetrators to think that they can attack America in this way and get away with it."

Sores not likely related to anthrax, but site is near recently sampled waters

By Jonathan Bor and Julie Bell
Sun Staff

August 13, 2003

Public health authorities are testing soil and water samples from a Frederick pond for clues to what gave a dog and its owner skin lesions after they entered the water.

State and county health officials said yesterday that they had considered the possibility of anthrax, but that the sores weren't consistent with the deadly disease.

"Right now, it does not appear to be anthrax," said Maryland Health Secretary Nelson J. Sabatini, adding that any suggestion the two had the disease would be irresponsible. The agency nonetheless has notified the FBI and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Meanwhile, the Frederick County Health Department posted signs yesterday around the football field-sized pond, warning people to keep away. The department also sent water and soil samples to the state health laboratory.

The woman and her springer spaniel developed the sores after entering the pond July 27 during a training operation for the Thurmont Community Ambulance Service, officials said.

Nancy Poss, a spokeswoman for Frederick Mayor Jennifer P. Dougherty, said the handler and her dog were the only members of the group to go in the water, and the only ones to get sores.

The pond, which has no official name, is one of many constructed decades ago for firefighting purposes on a 7,000-acre, city-owned tract northwest of town.

In recent months, the ponds attracted attention when the FBI drained one and sent divers into three others as part of the investigation into the anthrax attacks of 2001.

The pond the dog and woman entered was not one of those, but the FBI did take water and soil samples from it that were negative, Poss said.

Sabatini said the dog developed lesions around its mouth and abdomen within days of entering the pond. The owner quickly took it to a veterinarian, who said the sores could be many things, including anthrax.

A veterinary specialist later said the lesions did not look like anthrax, but suggested that the owner call the Frederick County Health Department anyway, on the theory that something in the water might have made them sick. When the woman called yesterday, health officials advised her to see a physician about sores that had developed on her face and palms.

The county health officer said the woman saw a doctor yesterday -- but by then, her symptoms had cleared. 

Ex-bioterrorism expert with Army fined $5 for 'walking to create hazard'

By Frank D. Roylance
Sun Staff

August 16, 2003

WASHINGTON - The government has finally nailed Dr. Steven J. Hatfill. 

The former Army bioterrorism expert and current "person of interest" in the FBI's investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks was convicted yesterday in a District of Columbia traffic court of "walking to create a hazard," an offense that occurred in May when an FBI surveillance truck ran over his foot. 

The pedestrian ticket will cost Hatfill $5. 

Bryan Blankenship, the FBI employee behind the wheel of the bureau's black Dodge Durango that day, was not charged in the incident. No FBI personnel or any other witnesses appeared at the half-hour hearing. 

But the driver's actions were "irrelevant" to the charge, said Stephen Lawson, the hearing officer for the District's Department of Motor Vehicles. 

"At the point when the respondent [Hatfill] stepped into the roadway, where he was not protected by a crosswalk - at that point the violation was complete," he said, upholding the charge and the fine. 

Flanked by his two lawyers, Hatfill pulled some crumpled bills from his pocket and walked toward the cashiers' windows to pay his fine. But, put off by long lines, he decided to mail in a check instead, and headed for a gaggle of reporters and TV cameras waiting outside. 

Hatfill, dressed in a dark blue suit and red tie, stood back while his lead attorney, Thomas G. Connolly, took the opportunity to attack the FBI again for an "unrelenting campaign of harassment" against his client "for no legitimate reason." 

That campaign left Hatfill "writhing in pain on the streets of the district," Connolly said, "and a [Washington] police officer writes him a ticket. And, of course, the FBI agent who ran him down received nothing - no ticket, no violation." 

Hatfill, he said, has done nothing to deserve such scrutiny by the FBI or the news media, Connolly said. "All he asks is to be left alone," the attorney said. 

He is likely to ask for more than that, however. Hatfill is expected to file a lawsuit targeting the FBI, some news media and others for actions that he says have "destroyed" his life. 

The FBI has never charged anyone with sending the mysterious, anthrax-laced letters mailed to U.S. senators and news organizations in the weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The letters killed five people and sickened at least 17. 

The FBI's attention fell on Hatfill last year. Trained as a physician in Zimbabwe and South Africa, he returned to the United States and a career as a bioterrorism expert. He worked for the National Institutes of Health and the Army's biodefense research center at Fort Detrick, in Frederick, Md., in a building where others were studying the Ames strain of anthrax used in the attacks. A Sun investigation found his resume listed a Ph.D. he did not earn. 

Once the FBI's interest in him became public, Hatfill lost two $150,000-a-year jobs in succession. And despite his repeated protestations of innocence, investigators searched his residences, interrogated his friends and, during some stretches, followed him 24 hours a day. 

On May 17, Hatfill told police, he and his girlfriend parked outside a store in Georgetown to buy paint. At that point, he approached an FBI vehicle that had followed him, he said, because he believed it was being driven in an unsafe manner. 

When he attempted to approach and photograph the Durango's driver, he said, the agent swung the truck away from the curb and into the traffic lane, running over Hatfill's right foot and knocking him down. 

Hatfill was treated at the scene and declined transport to a hospital. "Steve's too tough to go to the doctor," Connolly said yesterday. But the lawyer showed reporters a blurry photograph of what he said was Hatfill's badly bruised right foot. 

Hatfill and his attorneys were smiling and joking as they sat down in Lawson's hearing room, across a table from Clyde Pringle, the 26-year-old D.C. police officer who ticketed Hatfill in May. 

When nine reporters also filed in, Pringle's jaw dropped. "What the ... " he said under his breath. Hatfill winked at Pringle but did not speak at the hearing, except to deny the charge. 

Pringle testified that he reached the scene after Hatfill was struck and found him on the ground. He said he spoke to Hatfill and the FBI agent, who acknowledged that agents were following Hatfill 24 hours a day. 

Under questioning by Nick Bravin, Hatfill's second attorney, Pringle said he also interviewed two female witnesses and viewed the FBI's videotape of the incident. But neither the women nor the tape was presented at yesterday's hearing. 

Bravin said, "I don't think the government has presented clear and convincing evidence of any offense." 

Pringle said he considered all the evidence at the scene and concluded that Hatfill was at fault. 

He said it was the first ticket he had ever written for "walking to create a hazard" in four years on the force. But in the absence of a protected crosswalk, Pringle said, "Mr. Hatfill should have walked on the sidewalk." 

Hatfill did not say whether he would appeal the conviction. He has 15 days to do so. 

By Scott Shane
Sun Staff
Originally published August 27, 2003

WASHINGTON - Fighting back after more than a year as a public target of the FBI's anthrax investigation, Dr. Steven J. Hatfill filed a federal lawsuit yesterday accusing Attorney General John Ashcroft and other officials of harassing him with relentless surveillance, wrecking his reputation and preventing him from finding work to cover up their failure to find the real bioterrorist behind the 2001 attacks.

Hatfill's 40-page lawsuit asks the federal court to declare that the Justice Department and FBI have violated the Constitution, the Privacy Act and their own regulations by labeling him a "person of interest" and effectively putting him under "roaming house arrest."

It seeks a court order to stop the surveillance and alleged leaks to the media, as well as asking for unspecified monetary damages.

"Dr. Hatfill had nothing to do with the horrific anthrax attacks," Thomas G. Connolly, Hatfill's lead attorney, told reporters outside the federal courthouse here.

"No evidence links Dr. Hatfill to the crime, yet the attorney general and a number of his subordinates have attempted to make him the scapegoat. In the process they have trampled Dr. Hatfill's constitutional rights and destroyed his life."

Hatfill, 49, a physician who worked at the Army's biodefense research center at Fort Detrick from 1997 to 1999 and has trained FBI agents and Special Forces troops on bioterrorism, did not attend the news conference. Connolly noted that he had declared his innocence in two impassioned public statements a year ago and seeks only "the right to be left alone."

The lawsuit adds a few new details to the public knowledge of investigators' pursuit of Hatfill, which the suit says has involved "tens of thousands of man-hours and tens of millions of dollars."

In March, it says, Hatfill went to a job interview in a McLean, Va., hotel. Hatfill's hopes "were dashed, however, when at the conclusion of his meeting, he and his prospective employer walked out of the meeting room and were met by FBI special agents conspicuously videotaping the encounter," the suit says.

"After being subjected to this invasion," it says, "the prospective employer no longer had any interest in hiring Dr. Hatfill and thus, the FBI's harassment had its intended effect."

Justice Department spokesman Bryan Sierra declined to comment on the suit. He noted that an internal inquiry by the department's counsel, H. Marshall Jarrett, concluded in January that Ashcroft's labeling Hatfill as a "person of interest" in the anthrax case "did not violate any law, regulation or Department of Justice policy or standard."

The FBI also had no comment on the litigation, said Debra Weierman, a spokeswoman for the bureau's Washington Field Office. Van A. Harp, the recently retired head of the office, was named in the lawsuit. He could not be reached last night.

Legal experts said yesterday that the lawsuit poses an unusual challenge to the government, whose pursuit of Hatfill as the sole identified suspect for many months in a major case is virtually without precedent.

"This is not a frivolous lawsuit," said I. Michael Greenberger, a University of Maryland law professor who served in the Justice Department in the Clinton administration.

Greenberger said the Privacy Act claim might pose a particular threat. "The clearest route for Hatfill is the alleged improper release of records to people outside the government," Greenberger said.

If the lawsuit survives an initial government motion to dismiss, "I think with what Hatfill's gone through, he may have a substantial claim to monetary damages," he said.

L. Lin Wood, who represented security guard Richard Jewell in libel lawsuits after Jewell was wrongly identified as a suspect in the Atlanta Olympics bombing case, said Hatfill's situation eclipses that case in several regards.

While the FBI publicly declared Jewell no longer a suspect after 88 days, Hatfill has been the focus of investigators for more than a year with no statement clearing him, Wood said.

In addition, no government official ever publicly referred to Jewell as a "person of interest," as Ashcroft did at least three times last year of Hatfill on national television.

"I'm sure the government probably had an obligation to investigate Dr. Hatfill," Wood said, given the scientist's knowledge of biological weapons. "The problem with the Hatfill investigation is that it's gone on for so long and he's the only one publicly identified by the attorney general of the United States. What does he have to do to find out why the government is treating him this way?"

In the Jewell case, libel claims were settled by NBC, CNN, the New York Post and WABC radio for a reported total of more than $2 million. But Wood did not file suit against the FBI because he and Jewell believed the media were "the real villain," he said.

By contrast, Hatfill's lawsuit names only government officials and agencies as defendants. But the text of the lawsuit accuses a scientist, Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, of groundlessly urging the FBI to pursue Hatfill and lists alleged leaks of confidential investigative information to ABC, CBS, Newsweek, The New York Times and The Washington Post. Rosenberg has denied naming Hatfill to reporters or congressional staff members whom she briefed.

Asked whether the media or others might be sued in the future, Connolly said he thought it unwise to speculate about "who might end up in Steven Hatfill's crosshairs."

Attacks: Debilitating symptoms dog those exposed to the spores, leaving most unable to work.

By Scott Shane
Sun Staff

September 18, 2003

Two years after the first major bioterrorism attack in U.S. history nearly killed them, most of the inhalation anthrax survivors are still suffering severe physical and psychological aftereffects that have left them unable to work.

"Some days I get up, and after an hour and a half I have to lie back down," says David R. Hose, 61, who was infected on his job at a State Department mail-handling facility.

Before he breathed in the microscopic spores, Hose says in an exhausted voice from his home in Winchester, Va., he was a healthy man who routinely put in 12-hour days handling heavy diplomatic mail pouches. Today, after the anthrax and a near-fatal bout of pneumonia, "I'm on three heart medications. I have asthma. I'm extremely weak."

Whoever dropped letters loaded with anthrax spores into a blue mailbox in the Princeton, N.J., business district Sept. 18 and Oct. 9, 2001, gave the nation a taste of the devastation that bioterrorism can cause.

The government rushed to spend billions of dollars stockpiling vaccines for smallpox and anthrax and bulking up defenses against the chance that al-Qaida might try germ warfare. Universities battled for biodefense grants and built high-security labs.

But on the human scale where the postal attacks found their random targets, some victims of the mailings feel lost in the shuffle.  They struggle to get by on worker's compensation, fight over medical bills and feel as though they have borne the brunt of the mail attacks alone. Their anxiety is not eased by the fact that nearly two years into the FBI's costly, much-criticized hunt for the anthrax mailer, the culprit is still at large.

"These guys are also victims of terrorism," says Ramesh Patel, whose wife, Jyotsna Patel, 45, a New Jersey postal worker, survived inhalation anthrax and is still tormented by weakness, nightmares and crying bouts.

"I would say they should be treated like anyone who was at the World Trade Center or the Pentagon. But they've been completely forgotten."

The billions of spores that spewed from the anthrax letters infected 11 people with inhalation anthrax; six survived. That surprised experts, who had expected a death rate even with treatment above 75 percent. An additional 17 people developed the blackened skin sores of cutaneous anthrax; all recovered.

But though they are grateful to be alive, the inhalation anthrax victims still feel the effects of the anthrax toxin every day.

Fatigue, says New Jersey postal worker Norma J. Wallace, 58, "is a given at this point. The shortness of breath still comes. I still have joint pain."

By memorizing Bible verses and working through books of brain-teasers, Wallace says, she believes she has nearly overcome the memory problems that trouble the survivors.

Still, "I have to consciously focus on what I'm doing, or I lose my train of thought."

That's typical, says Dr. Tyler C. Cymet, who heads family medicine at Sinai Hospital and is assistant professor of internal medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He has conducted telephone interviews with all but one of the six anthrax survivors every three months since late 2001.

His colleague, Dr. Gary J. Kerkvliet, an internist at Sinai with a Hopkins faculty appointment, continues to care for William R. Paliscak Jr., a criminal investigator for the U.S. Postal Inspection Service who has been severely ill since shortly after he was showered with anthrax-laden dust while removing an overhead filter at the Brentwood postal center in Washington.

Paliscak never tested positive for the Bacillus anthracis bacteria or its toxin, but Kerkvliet and Cymet are convinced that his debilitating illness resulted from his exposure.

They say they understand the bitterness of the survivors, who have gotten no special financial help or medical care from the U.S. government. Only one has been able to return to work - the oldest, Florida mailroom worker Ernesto Blanco, 75.

Cymet contrasts the lack of federal outreach with the Israeli government's rapid and sustained support for victims of terrorism, which he witnessed after responding to a bombing during a recent trip to Israel.

"It's not medicine's finest moment," Cymet says of the haphazard follow-up with the survivors. "We need leadership."

In his periodic 20-question telephone survey of the inhalation anthrax survivors, Cymet has found that five still report similar symptoms: weakness, memory problems, cold sweats, low-grade fever and headaches.

"It's tough to ferret out what's psychological, what's physiological and what's post-traumatic stress disorder," he says.

Cymet's informal survey appears to have reached more of the inhalation anthrax survivors than any other study, but he admits that his phone interviews are a poor substitute for a full-scale study. As a hospital doctor with a busy practice, it is all he can manage, he says.

One study of the anthrax survivors - cutaneous as well as inhalation - is being conducted by Dr. Mary E. Wright of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda. Confidentiality rules prohibit Wright from naming participants, and she declined to give their number.

Of four inhalation anthrax survivors interviewed by The Sun, only one, Leroy "Rich" Richmond, a Brentwood postal worker who lives in Stafford, Va., said he was participating.

Wright's study seeks to understand "the natural history of anthrax" and to devise a protocol for the treatment of future victims, she says. Because the last case of inhalation anthrax in the United States before 2001 occurred in 1976, Wright says, "anthrax is new territory."

She says it's too early to discuss findings but expresses sympathy for the survivors. "I've talked to these people, too, and I understand their anger and frustration," she says.

Richmond, 58, says he still suffers from "continuous fatigue" and memory loss and is glad to be in Wright's study. But he feels the government's response to the victims should be more than just asking for cooperation with research.

"We've been cast aside. We're just an afterthought," he says.

If the official anthrax survivors feel neglected, Paliscak, the ailing postal inspector, has not even been given an official diagnosis of the illness that has shattered his life.

Paliscak, 39, was a hockey-playing, weight-lifting picture of health before following a supervisor's orders to remove an air filter above a heavily contaminated mail-sorting machine in the Brentwood postal center in October 2001.

A few days later, he fell severely ill. He has spent roughly half of the time since then in the hospital with severe breathing problems, mental confusion, extreme weakness and glandular dysfunction.

"He was heavily exposed to anthrax," says Kerkvliet, his physician. "And after that, physiologically, he fell apart." Months of testing found no cause other than anthrax for his ills, he says.

Kerkvliet says he is frustrated that the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have not taken an interest in his patient's medical mystery. If Paliscak's case shows that a person can be devastated by anthrax exposure without testing positive, that could expose flaws in the testing regimen that should be corrected before any outbreak, Kerkvliet says.

It is little comfort to the survivors that their experience has fueled a bio-preparedness boom. This month, about the time the government announced $350 million in grants to create biodefense programs nationwide, Hose said he learned he will have to start paying $548 a month for health insurance. That's a quarter of his worker's compensation.

Meanwhile, the FBI's failure to catch the anthrax mailer has given rise to dark conspiracy theories on the part of several victims. Hose, for example, believes the anthrax mailings might have been a "black ops" government program designed to pump money into the biodefense and drug industries.

His thinking is based partly on the fact that the 2001 attack involved a few teaspoons of powder - not the scale to be expected from al-Qaida. Speculating about future attacks, Hose projects his suffering onto thousands of people.

"If they sprayed anthrax from the tops of buildings in 10 major cities, we'd be done for," Hose says. "The sick people would overwhelm the hospitals. And the spores don't die. They'd be out there forever."

FBI's interest in Hatfill seems to have dropped off

By Scott Shane
Sun Staff

November 28, 2003

Adding fuel to a debate that has simmered among scientists since the 2001 anthrax attacks, an article published today in Science magazine says that the deadly spores mailed to two U.S. senators contained sophisticated additives to make the powder float more freely in the air. 

If confirmed, such a technical innovation might be an important clue in the seemingly stalled FBI investigation, narrowing the field of potential suspects to people with access to such additives and expertise in using them. 

It would point away from an alternative possibility: that a person with modest scientific skills working alone in a home lab could have made the powder, which killed five people and sickened at least 17 others in October and November 2001. 

The latter possibility appears to have been the leading theory guiding FBI agents who over the past 18 months have sunk huge amounts of manpower into investigating former Army biowarfare expert Dr. Steven J. Hatfill. 

The FBI's interest in Hatfill, whom Attorney General John Ashcroft publicly identified last year as a "person of interest" in the anthrax case, seems to have dropped off. The once-obvious 24-hour surveillance of Hatfill, which was so intense that an FBI vehicle ran over Hatfill's foot in May, has disappeared over the past two months, said two people who spoke with Hatfill recently. 

In August, Hatfill filed a lawsuit against Ashcroft and other top Justice Department and FBI officials accusing them of destroying his career with a campaign of leaks suggesting that he was the anthrax killer. The lawsuit said Hatfill had been targeted to cover up the FBI's failure to make significant progress toward solving the case. 

In a reply filed Nov. 21, FBI agent Richard L. Lambert, who has headed the anthrax task force for the past year, said the "scope and complexity" of the investigation is "unprecedented in the FBI's 95-year history." 

In a rare public description of the investigation, Lambert said the bureau "has expended 231,000 agent hours in the investigation of the anthrax attacks, the equivalent of 89 agent work years." 

In a separate filing on Nov. 21, Justice Department lawyers asked U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton to delay action on Hatfill's claim that government leaks about him violated the Privacy Act. They said they will seek dismissal of the suit's other claims. 

Describing the anthrax investigation as "intensely active," the 12 government lawyers say that allowing Hatfill to pursue his claim now would force the FBI to reveal "sensitive investigative information, including theories of the case, evidentiary discoveries, forensic methods, witness identities, and ... investigative initiatives." 

The Science article, by free-lance writer Gary Matsumoto, addresses scientists' analysis of the tiny quantity of powder retrieved from letters addressed to Democratic Sens. Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont. 

Matsumoto suggests that the spores were treated with two additives: silica, commonly added to industrial products to prevent clumping; and polymerized glass, a more exotic substance used to bind the silica to the spores. 

Matsumoto writes that U.S. intelligence officials briefing experts from other NATO countries told them that the anthrax powder contained polymerized glass, which "leaves a thin glassy coating that helps bind the silica to particle surfaces." 

But as the Science article notes, other scientists advising the FBI have concluded that the anthrax powder contained no additives. In a briefing on Capitol Hill late last year, Matsumoto writes, FBI scientist Dwight Adams suggested that the element silicon was naturally present in the spores and that no silica was added. 

A similar dispute continues over experiments at the Army's Dugway Proving Ground to try to reproduce the powder in the letters using various kinds of equipment. The goal was to "reverse-engineer" the mailed anthrax to try to figure out how it was made. 

Government sources familiar with the work told The Sun in April that the Dugway researchers felt they had succeeded in reproducing the powder and concluded that it was made with relatively inexpensive equipment and limited expertise. 

Others familiar with the work, including former United Nations bioweapons inspector Richard O. Spertzel, said the powder made at Dugway did not float as freely as the powder mailed to the senators. 

Whether changing scientific conclusions have reduced the FBI's focus on Hatfill is uncertain. Any change of strategy might have resulted from the arrival of a new assistant FBI director in charge of the Washington field office, which is running the anthrax investigation. 

Michael A. Mason, a veteran agent who took the Washington job in July, said publicly in September that leaks about Hatfill had damaged the investigation. He said Ashcroft had discussed Hatfill in response to news media inquiries but that "there is absolutely zero value in coming forward with persons of interest up to the point we indict the person." 

Hatfill's attorney, Thomas G. Connolly, declined to comment for this article. Attempts to reach a spokesman for the FBI investigation were unsuccessful. The FBI has routinely declined to answer questions about the case. 

By Scott Shane
Sun Staff

January 27, 2004

WASHINGTON - A federal judge said yesterday that he is not convinced that allowing a lawsuit by Dr. Steven J. Hatfill to proceed will endanger the FBI's investigation of the anthrax letters that killed five people in 2001.

During a motions hearing, U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton expressed sympathy for Hatfill's claim that government leaks have wrecked his career, the basis for the suit he filed in August against Attorney General John Ashcroft, the Justice Department, the FBI and other law enforcement officials.

"I totally understand how his life has been, at least at this point, virtually destroyed," Walton said. "I know I'm not inclined to give an open-ended stay," which would freeze the lawsuit indefinitely.

Walton said the government's voluminous court filings have not persuaded him to postpone the suit until the anthrax case is solved, as Justice Department lawyers are seeking.

"Is Mr. Hatfill still a suspect?" Walton asked. "Are there any suspects? At some point, it seems to me, if Mr. Hatfill did not commit this crime, he should get his life back."

In response, Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark E. Nagle told the judge that later yesterday the Justice Department would deliver to him an affidavit containing secret additional information on the progress of the anthrax case to justify the delay.

Nagle called Hatfill "an individual who by his own declaration is implicated in the investigation" but gave no indication of whether investigators still are interested in the former Army biowarfare expert.

Hatfill, 50, who worked as a virologist at the Army's biodefense laboratory at Fort Detrick from 1997 to 1999, was the focus of an international tidal wave of publicity after the FBI first searched his Frederick apartment in June 2002. Investigators also searched his girlfriend's apartment in Washington and a storage locker he had rented in Florida.

For much of 2002 and 2003, FBI surveillance teams kept Hatfill under 24-hour watch, and one FBI watcher actually ran over Hatfill's foot after the scientist approached his car outside a Georgetown paint store. In three nationally broadcast television appearances, Ashcroft called Hatfill a "person of interest" in the anthrax case.

Since coming under scrutiny in the anthrax case, Hatfill has been fired from jobs as a bioterrorism trainer at defense contractor Science Applications International Corp. and at Louisiana State University, which was formally advised by the Justice Department not to employ him on federal contracts.

In researching hundreds of articles and broadcasts about Hatfill, reporters have discovered that he claimed to hold a Ph.D. he did not earn and used a forged Ph.D. certificate from a South African university to get research jobs at the National Institutes of Health and at Fort Detrick. Acquaintances have described Hatfill as a colorful and eccentric character who explained and sometimes demonstrated how terrorists could cook up bioweapons in kitchen labs and once posed for a magazine photographer in an improvised biohazard suit.

But FBI investigators have never made public evidence linking Hatfill to the anthrax attacks.  Law enforcement sources told The Sun last year that the investigators were divided over whether the pursuit of Hatfill showed promise or was a distraction and waste of resources. 

For his part, Hatfill has consistently denied that he had anything to do with the anthrax attacks, which shut down federal and congressional offices and sickened at least 17 people in addition to the five killed. In public statements and in his lawsuit, he asserts that the government has made him a scapegoat for its failure to find the real culprit who mailed anthrax-laced letters to news media organizations and two U.S. senators in late 2001.

Hatfill now lives with his girlfriend in Washington and has been unable to find work, his lawyers and friends say. They also say the FBI surveillance that was obvious until late last year has become far less evident or has been dropped.

Mark A. Grannis, who represented Hatfill yesterday along with Thomas G. Connolly, said his client has a right under the federal Privacy Act to find out who in the government leaked his name and details of the investigation to the news media.

"For the past 14 months, [Justice Department officials] have been feeding Dr. Hatfill's name to the press," Grannis said.

Walton said that after reviewing the government's secret affidavit, as well as more information Grannis promised to provide on Hatfill's behalf, he will either issue a written ruling on the government's request to freeze the lawsuit or hold an additional hearing Feb. 6. 

Copyright © 2004, The Baltimore Sun 

By Scott Shane
Sun Staff
Originally published February 7, 2004

WASHINGTON - A federal judge yesterday kept alive Dr. Steven J. Hatfill's lawsuit against the FBI and Justice Department for allegedly smearing him with selective leaks from their anthrax investigation. 

U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton said he would permit Hatfill's attorneys to submit questions and request documents from the government and news organizations. 

Hatfill, a former U.S. Army bioweapons expert identified by Attorney General John Ashcroft as a "person of interest" in the anthrax case, claims public statements, leaks and surveillance by the government since 2002 have derailed his career and wrecked his life. 

He filed suit in August, saying the harassment and leaks violated the federal Privacy Act and his constitutional rights. 

The Justice Department has argued that permitting Hatfill's attorneys to question the government about leaks would interfere with the FBI investigation. 

No one has been charged with mailing the anthrax-laced letters that killed five people and made at least 17 others sick in 2001. In court papers, an FBI official has said 28 FBI agents and 15 postal inspectors are working on the case, and investigators have questioned 5,000 people and issued 4,000 subpoenas. 

But after reviewing a secret memorandum prepared by the Justice Department, Walton said he is still not convinced that allowing Hatfill's lawsuit to proceed will hurt the investigation. 

"The problem I'm having, to be very candid, is that I could see us here this time next year in the exact same posture that we're in now," Walton said. "I do agree with Dr. Hatfill's position that based on what he's alleging, he's been injured. To require that he remain in limbo indefinitely is a problem." 

After an hour-long hearing, Walton directed Hatfill's attorneys to submit written questions and document demands to the government by Feb. 27. Then Justice Department lawyers will have to specify how answering the questions will do harm. 

Walton ruled that Hatfill's attorneys are free to submit questions about the alleged leaks to people outside the federal government. 

Mark A. Grannis, an attorney for Hatfill, gave three examples of allegations about Hatfill that the news media attributed to federal sources. One was a report that FBI agents had found a sample of Bacillus thuringiensis, a relative of the anthrax bacteria used as a pesticide, in his refrigerator.  Another was a report that bloodhounds "went crazy" matching a scent from the anthrax letters to Hatfill's scent. The third was that Hatfill was given a lie detector test by the FBI in July 2002. 

While not confirming the reports, Grannis said Hatfill should be allowed to find out who leaked them to reporters. 

Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark E. Nagle said many allegations about Hatfill were attributed in the news reports to "government sources" or "law enforcement officials," not to the FBI. He suggested that leaks may have come from state or local police cooperating with the FBI. 

In addition to Hatfill's lawsuit, the government is defending a suit filed by the family of Robert Stevens, the photo editor in Florida who was the first person to die of anthrax. That suit claims the mailed anthrax originated in a government biodefense program.

By Scott Shane
Sun National Staff

March 30, 2004

WASHINGTON - Based in part on secret information provided by the FBI, a federal judge yesterday postponed for six months Dr. Steven J. Hatfill's lawsuit against the government for targeting him in its investigation of the anthrax-laced letters that killed five people in 2001.

U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton ordered the government to give him another private update on progress in the case in July, when the FBI says sophisticated tests on the anthrax powder may have revealed more about where it came from. But the judge agreed to put off until at least October requiring the government to answer most of hundreds of questions submitted by Hatfill's lawyers.

Walton said he sympathized with the predicament of Hatfill, a former Army biowarfare expert who has been fired from two jobs since coming under scrutiny in the anthrax case.

"The man's a pariah. Nobody's going to hire him," Walton said.

But the judge said he also understands the government's desire not to let Hatfill's lawsuit interfere with the case. "Obviously we're talking about a very important investigation in which the lives of elected officials were put in jeopardy and the lives of other people were taken," he said, referring to anthrax letters addressed to two U.S. senators.

Walton referred obliquely to secret reports on the progress of the investigation provided to him by the FBI. In light of those reports, which neither Hatfill nor his lawyers have seen, Walton said he would "with reluctance" put off the bulk of the lawsuit until Oct. 7.

The judge said the government should provide to Hatfill's attorneys some limited information it already agreed to give up. He also said Hatfill's attorneys could submit questions to third parties, including news media organizations that reported leaks from the investigation.

Hatfill, 50, is a U.S.-born physician who trained in southern Africa and became an expert on biological warfare in the 1990s while working as a researcher at the National Institutes of Health and the Army's biodefense center at Fort Detrick.

He was among dozens of biodefense scientists questioned by FBI investigators because of their expertise and possible access to supplies of the Ames strain of anthrax used in the attacks. But while most of the researchers got only fleeting attention, Hatfill became the target of repeated, highly publicized searches, round-the-clock surveillance and intensive news media coverage that apparently relied on leaks.

Hatfill has adamantly denied having anything to do with the anthrax letters. In August, he filed suit against Attorney General John Ashcroft, who had publicly referred to him as a "person of interest" in the case, other top Justice Department and FBI officials, and their agencies.

Walton said he will rule later on whether to dismiss constitutional claims against Ashcroft and other individual defendants, as the government seeks. Legal observers say the major threat to the government is probably not those counts but Hatfill's claim under the Privacy Act against the Justice Department and FBI.

Hatfill, who lives with his girlfriend in Washington, attended yesterday's hearing but did not speak. He slipped out a side entrance to avoid TV cameras staking out the courthouse.

By Scott Shane
Sun National Staff

June 11, 2004

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are investigating how a Frederick research institute mistakenly shipped live anthrax bacteria to a California lab where at least five people were exposed to the potentially deadly germs.

The five vaccine researchers at Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute were placed on antibiotics, and none has shown symptoms of infection, said Bev Mikalonis, a hospital spokeswoman.

Scientists at Southern Research Institute in Frederick intended to send dead anthrax bacteria to their collaborators in Oakland, said Thomas G. Voss, vice president of homeland security and emerging infectious diseases at SRI.

The killed germs were to be injected into mice to produce antibodies against the disease, one step toward developing an improved vaccine.

But when the mice were inoculated over the past two weeks, nearly all died, prompting the researchers to perform tests to determine the cause of death.

When the tests confirmed that the mice had died of anthrax, state and federal health officials were notified and researchers who had contact with the anthrax samples or the mice were placed on the antibiotic Cipro as a precaution, Mikalonis said.

FBI agents from a bioterrorism unit in San Francisco removed the bacteria from the Oakland facility Wednesday.

Bill Carter, a spokesman at FBI headquarters in Washington, said bureau personnel were called in only because of their equipment and expertise. No wrongdoing is suspected, and no criminal investigation is planned, he said.

CDC experts are investigating the incident to determine why the bacteria were not "inactivated" by the standard procedure of immersion in a hot-water bath, Voss said.

CDC officials could not be reached for comment.

Voss said that before the anthrax was shipped, the sample was tested for the presence of live bacteria, but none was detected.

"We're trying to go through the lab notebooks and make sure we know what was done and how it was done," Voss said. "We may need to increase the sensitivity level on our testing."

Voss said there was no danger to Southern Research personnel because they always use protective equipment in handling anthrax and are vaccinated against the disease.

The anthrax was shipped in March from Frederick to Oakland, where it was stored in test tubes. Voss said even killed bacteria are transported in plastic tubes enclosed in a sealed container inside a secure shipping box.

On May 28, the material was injected into 10 mice, all of which were found dead May 31. A second group of 40 mice were inoculated June 4, and all but one were found dead Monday, Mikalonis said.

Only then did the scientist in charge of the project learn that the mice had died and begin an inquiry, she said.

Southern Research Institute, founded in 1942 and based in Birmingham, Ala., is a not-for-profit organization that conducts research under contracts with the government and private companies.

Its infectious disease branch in Frederick employs 70 people, including 20 who work on biodefense and emerging diseases, Voss said.

The Frederick lab is rated at Biosafety Level 3, the second-highest level of security, Voss said.

That is sufficient to work with anthrax, which the lab has used for research on vaccines, antibiotics and germ detection methods since 2001, he said.

By Scott Shane
Sun National Staff

July 4, 2004

In a possible break for the FBI's investigation of the anthrax letters of 2001, scientists have discovered that the mailed anthrax was a mix of two slightly different samples, giving the bacteria a distinct signature that might make it easier to match with a source, according to two non-government experts who have been told of the finding.

The discovery that bacteria taken from the letters all grew in the double pattern was made at least a year ago, and it is not known whether the FBI's hunt for a matching sample has succeeded. The bureau and its scientific consultants are screening dozens of anthrax samples collected all over the United States and in some foreign countries, seeking the closest match to the spores used in the attack, according to a scientist who advises the FBI.

The revelation of the double pattern of the mailed anthrax comes as the FBI is due Tuesday to give a Washington judge a secret progress report on the investigation the bureau calls Amerithrax, which is well into its third year without visible results.

The FBI progress report, requested in March by U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton, is likely to be less about old-fashioned police work than newfangled science, according to statements made in court by FBI and Justice Department officials. The case of the anthrax-laced letters that killed five people and sickened at least 17 others in 2001 has become the first major test of an emerging scientific discipline called bioforensics, the use of genetic analysis and other modern laboratory tools to track germs used in an attack back to their origin.

FBI spokeswoman Debra Weierman declined last week to discuss the investigation, except to say that tests on the anthrax powder have not been completed. But experts on the fast-developing science of biological sleuthing say it should by now have helped the bureau to substantially narrow the search.

"I think we have the science now to trace the anthrax to a particular lab," said Babetta L. Marrone, a cell biologist at the Los Alamos National Laboratories and a member of an FBI advisory group on bioforensics.

Still, she says, finding the source lab will not by itself identify a perpetrator, only reduce the number of potential suspects. "If I had to guess, I'd say what has the FBI stumped is the non-scientific stuff," Marrone said.

Walton is presiding over a lawsuit filed by former Army biowarfare expert Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, who says the government wrecked his career and upended his life with a deliberate campaign of leaks falsely suggesting that he was the anthrax mailer. Hatfill's lawyers want to obtain FBI documents and question government officials to support his claims.

In successfully seeking to put on hold Hatfill's lawsuit and another filed by the widow of a Florida anthrax victim, the FBI claimed in court early this year that the investigation was at a "critical stage" and that the litigation could endanger investigators' work.

Impressive effort

An affidavit filed by FBI Inspector Richard L. Lambert in January described a major scientific effort to define the "specific forensic signature" of the attack anthrax.

"To forensically characterize the anthrax evidence ... the FBI has contracted with 19 government, commercial and university laboratories which are performing research, analyses and evaluations to assist the FBI Laboratory," Lambert wrote. "Most of these scientific initiatives are scheduled to be completed within the next six months. If successful, these initiatives will ... facilitate the attribution of the anthrax used in the attacks to one or more U.S. and foreign laboratories."

Of 30 FBI special agents and 13 U.S. postal inspectors working full-time on the case, officials say, eight of the FBI agents have a doctorate "in a scientific discipline related to the investigation."

"I've been impressed with the patience and perseverance of our partners in the FBI," said Claire M. Fraser, director of the Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville, a private organization that is carrying out much of the genetic analysis for the bureau.

Fraser said she could not discuss specific findings related to the investigation. But she said that after initial skepticism, she has been pleasantly surprised by the progress made in the past year in finding forensically useful ways to distinguish samples of anthrax from one another.

Still, she said genetic analysis of samples of pathogens is not nearly as advanced as the human DNA testing that has become routine in investigations of murder, rape and other crimes. "We're not even close to being at that level," she said.

Ronald Kessler, a Washington author who has written several books on the FBI, said the Amerithrax investigation represents the largest mobilization of inside and outside scientists in the bureau's history.

The emphasis on first-rate science is in part a reaction to a scandal in the 1990s that discredited some work by the FBI laboratory, Kessler said. "That definitely led to a realization that they had to get outside accreditation and hire outside scientists, not just rely on agents who had worked their way up," he said.

But the nature of the anthrax crimes - the first major bioterrorist attack on U.S. soil - is driving the reliance on research. "You're talking about inventing a new science here," Kessler said.

The finding that the attack anthrax came from a combination of two distinct samples is one small step in that new science. Like other bacteria, anthrax grown in the laboratory forms tiny colonies of bacteria that can have particular physical characteristics. Colonies from different strains or samples can be larger or smaller, have more or less uneven edges or form distinctive shapes.

While all the anthrax used in the attacks is a variant of the Ames strain, scientists found that the spores recovered from the envelopes grew into two slightly different kinds of colonies.

That might mean part of the original sample was removed from a freezer and grown for a period of days, allowing very slight genetic mutations, and then recombined with the original sample, according to the two outside experts familiar with the tests. The perpetrator might then have taken a sample from the mixed batch and used it to grow the bacteria used in the attack. The double pattern gives the mailed anthrax one more distinctive characteristic to be compared with possible sources.

"Potentially, that could be very useful," one scientist said.

Rapid development

The developing science of bioforensics, also known as microbial forensics, encompasses far more than the genetic fingerprinting or patterns of growing colonies.

Advanced testing on samples of anthrax or other organisms can also reveal clues to the location of the water used to grow them, because isotopes of oxygen and other elements in water vary from place to place. Germs also usually carry traces of the growth medium, or nutrient mixture, used to produce them, yielding another potential clue.

Some bioweapons, including anthrax spores, can contain chemical additives to permit the germs to float freely in the air. Experts who have seen the mailed anthrax have been divided on what additive it contained or whether it contained one at all.

All such markers will be studied at a bioforensics unit being created by the Department of Homeland Security as part of its planned $200 million biodefense center at Fort Detrick in Frederick. Currently occupying temporary space at the Army's biodefense laboratory, the National Bioforensic Analysis Center will maintain a reference library of biological samples and data to be consulted in the event of a biological attack, according to written plans for the center.

Abigail A. Salyers, a University of Illinois professor who organized one of the first meetings on bioforensics while president of the American Society for Microbiology in 2002, said she has been impressed with the field's rapid development.

She's pessimistic, however, that the anthrax case will be solved. "The case would be compelling if they found in someone's apartment or home some of this same anthrax mixture," Salyers said. Nearly three years after the attacks, that's unlikely, she said.

But she said the quest is building scientific knowledge and laboratory techniques that will be critical in understanding and tracing the source of any future biological attack.

"Even if they don't solve the anthrax case, that doesn't mean it's a dead loss," Salyers said. "We've developed an awful lot of very useful information in trying to solve it."

By Scott Shane
Sun National Staff

July 8, 2004

After reviewing a secret progress report on the FBI's anthrax investigation, a judge has confirmed his postponement of Dr. Steven J. Hatfill's lawsuit against the federal government for at least three more months.

U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton signed an order Tuesday delaying proceedings in the lawsuit until Oct. 7, when he will again review the investigation. Government lawyers had sought the postponement, saying that Hatfill's lawyers' requests for documents and depositions would interfere with the case.

On Tuesday, Walton reviewed a classified declaration written by Richard Lambert, the FBI inspector in charge of the investigation of the anthrax-laced letters that killed five people in 2001. The declaration was then "stored in an appropriate secure container at the Department of Justice," according to court papers.

Hatfill, a former Army biowarfare expert at Fort Detrick in Frederick, denies any connection to the attacks.

By Scott Shane
Sun National Staff

July 21, 2004

FBI anthrax investigators have closed some high-security laboratory suites at the Army's biodefense research center at Fort Detrick, apparently searching for scientific evidence as the third anniversary of the unsolved case approaches.

The temporary shutdown of much-needed lab space at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases marks a notable return of investigators to the Frederick facility where numerous employees were questioned by the FBI in the early months of the investigation. In recent months, FBI agents have seized medical records and computer hard drives from the institute, causing friction with Fort Detrick officials, according to a source in contact with the Army institute's scientists.

Neither the FBI nor the Army would describe the work being done since the labs were closed Friday. But a law enforcement official and a scientist said it has not produced a major breakthrough in the case.

Debra Weierman, a spokeswoman for the FBI's Washington field office, said agents would be at the labs "for a few more days."

Investigators have shut off access to bacteriology labs in the main USAMRIID building and an adjoining building where anthrax research is done or has been done, according to the source. Only caretakers responsible for feeding research animals are being permitted to enter, the source said.

Outside scientists said the agents might be hunting for stray spores of anthrax that match the genetic and chemical signature of the anthrax mailed in September and October 2001. The FBI has said in court papers that it has engaged 19 labs to study the spores in order to trace them back to a particular facility.

Investigators have found that the mailed anthrax consists of a combination of two different samples that form slightly different patterns when the bacteria are grown in the lab, The Sun reported this month. Scientists can use this peculiarity in combination with the genetic fingerprint of the anthrax, isotopes in the water used to grow it and the properties of chemical additives to try to match the powder to its source.

Henry L. Niman, a Pittsburgh molecular biologist who has followed the anthrax case closely, noted that spores of anthrax can survive for centuries in soil, and that spores might linger in a laboratory for years after research was performed there.

"My guess is they'd be vacuuming in all the corners, hoping to find spores that match," Niman said. "If they can show it came from a certain lab, then they can see who had access to that lab."

A possible complication if a match is found at USAMRIID is that its laboratories were used extensively after the anthrax mailings to study the envelopes and their contents. So if matching spores are found, it might be difficult to prove whether they were there before the mailings or spilled during a subsequent examination of the evidence.

Sounding an alarm?

The anthrax letters, which investigators believe were put in a mailbox in Princeton, N.J., were postmarked Sept. 18 and Oct. 9, 2001. They were addressed to two Democratic U.S. senators, Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, and to media organizations.

The anthrax killed five people, including two Washington, D.C., postal workers, and sickened at least 17 others, leading to the shutdown of numerous government buildings.

Because the accompanying notes included militant Islamist rhetoric and were mailed in the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, investigators at first pursued the possibility that al-Qaida might be responsible.

But the notes also warned that the letters contained anthrax and urged recipients to take antibiotics, which investigators believe points to an American more intent on sounding an alarm about bioterrorism than killing large numbers of people.

Since late 2001, the investigation has appeared to focus chiefly on American biodefense laboratories, including USAMRIID, which first identified the Ames strain of anthrax used in the letters and was its main distributor.

Hatfill suit on hold

A biowarfare expert who worked at USAMRIID from 1997 to 1999, Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, was followed for months in 2002 and 2003 by FBI surveillance teams. FBI investigators went to great lengths in their scrutiny of Hatfill, repeatedly searching his former apartment near Fort Detrick, bringing in bloodhounds in an attempt to trace a scent from the letters to him, and draining a pond near Frederick in search of discarded anthrax-making equipment. But since late last year, agents have rarely been seen tailing Hatfill, his acquaintances say.

Last August, Hatfill sued the FBI and Justice Department, alleging that they had wrongly targeted him as the anthrax mailer. The lawsuit has been put on hold until at least October, after the FBI told the judge that it might interfere with the investigation.

This month, Hatfill filed a second lawsuit against the New York Times and one of its columnists, Nicholas D. Kristof, claiming Kristof's columns implied he was the perpetrator.

Copyright © 2004, The Baltimore Sun 

By Scott Shane
Sun Staff

August 1, 2004

For years, in total secrecy, they studied the black art of bioterrorism.

They designed deadly, silent biological dart guns and hid them in fountain pens and walking sticks. They crunched lethal bacteria into suit buttons that could be worn unnoticed across borders. They rigged light fixtures and car tailpipes to loose an invisible spray of anthrax.

They practiced germ attacks in airports and on the New York subway, tracking air currents and calculating the potential death toll.

But they weren't a band of al-Qaida fanatics -- or enemies of any kind. They were biowarriors in the U.S. Army's Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick.

From 1949 to 1969, at the jittery height of the Cold War, the division tested the nation's vulnerability to covert germ warfare -- and devised weapons for secret biological attacks if the United States chose to mount them.

A few years ago, its story -- never before told in detail -- would have seemed a macabre footnote to U.S. history.

Now, after the Sept. 11 attacks, the anthrax mailings and a steady stream of government warnings on terrorism, the fears of the 1950s have returned -- and the experiments of Fort Detrick's covert bioweapons makers suddenly resonate in a new era. In the biological realm, there is little that any terrorist group could concoct that Fort Detrick's "dirty tricks department," as veterans call it, didn't think up decades ago.

But because of the division's scant recordkeeping and the fast-disappearing ranks of its aged scientist-warriors, the knowledge it acquired is being lost to history.

One of the few survivors is Wallace Pannier, 76, who remembers standing in a Frederick County field watching sheep shot with what the Army called a "nondiscernible bioinoculator" -- a dart gun. The bosses demanded a dart so fine that it could penetrate clothing and skin unnoticed, then dissolve, leaving no trace in an autopsy.

"If the sheep jumped, that meant people were going to jump, too," said Pannier, now living a quiet life tending his flowers and shrubs in Frederick.

Once perfected, the dart gun astonished those who saw it in action. Charles Baronian, a retired Army weapons official, recalls a demonstration at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.

"Twenty-five seconds after it was shot, the sheep just fell to the ground," said Baronian, 73. "It didn't bleat. It didn't move. It just fell dead. You couldn't help but be impressed."

The rest of the Army's offensive biological weapons program thought big: 500-pound anthrax bombs that could contaminate entire cities. But the Special Operations Division -- known at Fort Detrick by its initials, SO -- studied biowarfare on a more intimate scale, figuring ways to kill an individual, disable a roomful of people or touch off an epidemic.

'Army has no records'

The existence of the SO Division was revealed only six years after it shut down, in a 1975 Senate investigation into CIA abuses. Senators wanted to know why the CIA had retained a lethal stock of shellfish toxin and cobra venom after President Richard M. Nixon's 1969 order to destroy all biological weapons stocks. They found that the poisons had come from the SO Division under a CIA-Army project code-named MKNAOMI.

But records show that even CIA bosses were stymied as they tried to get the facts on the SO Division. "The practice of keeping little or no record of the activity was standard MKNAOMI procedure," a CIA investigator wrote. The military offered little help, he added: "The Army has no records on MKNAOMI or on the Special Operations Division."

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request from The Sun, the Army said no records of the Special Operations Division could be found. Nor is there any mention at the National Archives, which reclassified Fort Detrick's old biowarfare records after the Bush administration ordered agencies to withhold anything that might aid terrorists.

Few SO Division veterans are still alive. Fewer still are willing to describe their work. They are not sure what is still classified and don't relish leaving biological horror tales for their grandchildren.

"I just don't give interviews on that subject," said Andrew M. Cowan Jr., 74, the division's last chief, who is retired and living near Seattle. "It should still be classified -- if nothing else, to keep the information the division developed out of the hands of some nut."

But it is possible to assemble a patchwork portrait from documents obtained by The Sun under the Freedom of Information Act, Senate investigative files and private document collections, including the National Security Archive in Washington and even the Church of Scientology, which long collected material on government mind-control research.

And a few Detrick retirees who worked in the SO Division or collaborated with it spoke sparingly about what they know. Most are proud of their work, pointing out that the Soviet biological program was much larger and also developed assassination tools.

Unsuccessful attacks

The veterans still slip into biowarrior-speak, in which "good" means good-and-lethal. "It made a real nice aerosol," they'll say, or "That would give you real good coverage."

All say that if the biological devices they made were used against humans, they never learned about it. But it is impossible to be certain, they say, because the program was strictly compartmented: One worker didn't know what another was doing, let alone what CIA or Special Forces did with the bioweapons.

The 1975 Senate investigation revealed that the SO Division supplied biological materials for several planned CIA attacks, none of which were successful.

In 1960, the CIA's main contact with the SO Division, Sidney Gottlieb, carried a tube of toxin-laced toothpaste to Africa in a plot to kill Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. But the CIA station chief balked and pitched the poison into a river, a congressional investigation later revealed.

Records suggest, though they do not prove, that the SO Division also supplied germs for CIA schemes to kill or sicken Cuban leader Fidel Castro, and that it came up with the poisoned handkerchief that the agency's drolly-named Health Alteration Committee sent to Iraqi Prime Minister Abdul Karim Qasim in 1963. (He survived.)

Army Special Forces also asked the SO Division to design biological assassination weapons. Fort Detrick's engineers delivered five devices -- including the dart gun -- collectively known as the "Big Five." But records of what Special Forces did with the weapons remain classified, said Fort Bragg archivist Cynthia Hayden.

If the work sounds sinister today, there were doubters at the time, too. A 1954 Army document says high-ranking officials -- including George W. Merck, the pharmaceutical executive and top government adviser on biowarfare -- wanted to shut down the SO Division because they considered it "un-American."

But Fort Detrick's rank and file rarely voiced such doubts. "We did not sit around talking about the moral implications of what we were doing," said William C. Patrick III, a Fort Detrick veteran who worked closely with the SO Division. "We were problem-solving."

And if the orders came to unleash the weapons, Fort Detrick's biowarriors were ready.

During the Vietnam War, William P. Walter, who supervised anthrax production at Fort Detrick and worked with the SO Division on projects, asked British intelligence agents for blueprints of the office occupied by North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh. Plotting a covert germ assault is easier if the room's cubic footage and ventilation system are known, he says.

"We thought if the president of the United States wants to kill somebody, we want to be able to do it," said Walter, now 78 and retired in Florida.

Opening of the division

A gun or a bomb leaves no doubt that a deliberate attack has occurred. But if someone is stricken with a sudden, fatal illness -- or an epidemic slashes across a crowded city -- there is no way of knowing whether anyone attacked, much less who.

That was the key conclusion of the Pentagon's Committee on Biological Warfare in a secret October 1948 report on covert biowarfare.

At the time, the United States feared a shadowy global enemy, organized in secret cells overseas and on U.S. soil --Communists. Echoing today's fears, the report said the United States "is particularly vulnerable" to covert germ attack because enemy agents "are present already in this country [and] there is no control exercised over the movements of people."

Although it emphasized the threat to America, the report called for offensive capability. "Biological agents would appear to be well adapted to subversive use since very small amounts of such agents can be effective," the report said. "A significant portion of the human population within selected target areas may be killed or incapacitated."

Setting an imaginative tone for what would follow, the report listed potential targets: "ventilating systems, subway systems, water supply systems ... stamps, envelopes, money, biologicals and cosmetics ... contamination of food and beverages."

Seven months later, in May 1949, the Special Operations Division quietly opened at Fort Detrick.

The other divisions there, created during and after World War II, focused on large-scale biological attack, said Walter, who completed a quadruple major at Mount St. Mary's College in Emmittsburg and went to work at Fort Detrick in 1951.

At the time, planners regarded bioweapons as a valuable military option -- more devastating than chemical weapons, but more selective than a nuclear attack.

"Biological agents can really cover more territory than nuclear weapons," Walter said. "Biological's better than nuclear because it doesn't destroy the buildings."

Shrouded in secrecy

Fort Detrick's other divisions had diabolical tricks of their own. For instance, Walter said, their scientists bred antibiotic-resistant bacteria to make standard Soviet and Chinese treatments useless against U.S. weapons.

Still, the veterans say, Special Operations stood apart. You didn't apply for SO, you were chosen. And even within the tight-lipped world of Fort Detrick, the SO Division's secrecy was extraordinary.

"Most of the people [at Fort Detrick] didn't know what was going on in SO," Pannier said. "And they got angry because you wouldn't tell 'em what was going on."

When Pannier hitchhiked to Fort Detrick to take up his new assignment in 1946, he saw so many guard towers that he thought he had been sent to a prison. After three years there, he went home to Utah and completed a degree in bacteriology. When he returned, his former boss recommended him to the SO Division, "sort of a little Detrick within Detrick."

SO Division personnel -- about 75 at the unit's peak -- didn't get the usual parking stickers. They had metal tags that could be removed from their cars when they traveled undercover.

Pannier spent a night on the roof of the Pentagon taking air samples to rule out a bioattack before a visit by President John F. Kennedy.

He was also assigned to see what germs were leaking from a Merck pharmaceutical plant on the Susquehanna River, observations that would be crucial to U.S. spies trying to identify Soviet bioweapons facilities. Pannier posed variously as a fisherman, an air-quality tester and a driver with a broken-down car.

When East Bloc officials who were suspected of working in biowarfare labs traveled abroad, U.S. agents secretly swabbed their clothes so the SO Division could test for germs.

Fanning out across the country, SO Division officers also played the role of bioterrorists in an era before the word had even been coined. Their usual mock weapons were two forms of bacteria, Bacillus globigii (BG) and Serratia marcescens (SM).

Scientists thought both were harmless, though later research found that SM could cause illness or death in people with weakened immune systems.

In an elaborate 1965 attempt to assess how travelers might be used to spread smallpox, SO Division officers loosed BG in the air at Washington National Airport and at bus stations in Washington, Chicago and San Francisco, then tracked its movement using air samplers disguised as suitcases.

Tracking travelers' routes, Fort Detrick scientists plotted on a U.S. map the smallpox cases that would result from a real release.

The germ-spreaders were never challenged, the report noted: "No terminal employee, passenger or visitor gave any outward indication of suspicion that something unusual was taking place."

The next year, without alerting local officials, SO Division agents staged a mock attack on the New York subway, shattering light bulbs packed with BG powder on the tracks.

"People could carry a brown bag with light bulbs in it and nobody would be suspicious," Pannier said. "But when [a bulb] would break, it would burst. ... The trains swishing by would get it airborne."

The SO Division's report concluded that "similar covert attacks with a pathogenic agent during peak traffic periods could be expected to expose large numbers of people to infection and subsequent illness or death."

Understanding U.S. vulnerability may have been the main purpose of such experiments. But defensive findings had offensive implications. No one had to tell experimenters that Moscow, too, had a subway.

'Big Five' arsenal

If the subway tests could be explained as defensive, there was no such ambiguity in the SO Division's development of covert biological weapons.

Mysterious characters from Fort Bragg and the CIA came and went at the SO Division, leaving wish-lists and checking progress. For cover, CIA visitors often wore military uniforms and said they worked for "Staff Support Group." No one mentioned aloud the name of the agency financing so much of the division's work.

"It was never really said, except that probably by the middle '60s it became obvious," Pannier said. Army bosses "would ask: 'Are you keeping them happy?'"

Most CIA records on the SO Division were apparently destroyed in 1973 by Gottlieb, the agency's liaison to Fort Detrick. But declassified invoices the division submitted to the CIA give a sense of the work.

Germ dispensers could be concealed in many objects, such as the exhaust system on a 1953 Mercury. ("It might look like a smoky, oil-burning car," Pannier said.) There were invoices for fountain pens, even "1 Toy Dog, 98 cents."

There are receipts for books with suggestive titles: The Assassins, The Enemy Within, Dictionary of Poisons. There are rent bills for cabins at state parks -- a favorite site for secret meetings.

And there is much ado about dogs, including supplies for a "Buster Project." One plan for the dart guns was to knock out guard dogs so U.S. agents could sneak into foreign facilities.

But dogs were not the primary target of the SO Division's creative efforts. "The requirements of the Army Special Forces were the driving force defining SOD activities, and ... Special Forces' interest included a number of weird things, definitely among which was assassination," a CIA retiree told an agency investigator in 1975, according to a declassified report.

The former CIA man referred to the arsenal that came to be called the Big Five. "The Big Five program was devoted to assassination," said Patrick, who worked closely with the SO Division as chief of product development at Fort Detrick. He calls it "the most sensitive program we ever created at Detrick," and says its details should still be kept secret because they might be useful to terrorists and "embarrassing to the United States."

Walter, the former Detrick anthrax maker, calls the Big Five "hair-raising. We really kept that thing hush-hush," he said.

Detailed descriptions of the Big Five remain classified. But documents show that they included at least one version of the biological dart, dipped in shellfish toxin and fired from a rifle using a pressurized air cartridge.

Walter recalled that colleagues were sent overseas to collect the mussels that produced the poison, into which the darts would be dipped. Tiny grooves guided the dose: "You could time a death by the load [of toxin] you shot," he said.

Among the other Big Five weapons: a 7.62 mm rifle cartridge packed with anthrax or botulinum toxin that would disperse in the air on impact; a time-delay bomblet that would release a cloud of bacteria when a train or truck convoy passed; and a pressurized can that sprayed an aerosol of germs. The fifth is described in unclassified documents only as an "E-41 disseminator."

Walter recalls an effort to package the spray device in a food can for smuggling into the Soviet Union and planting in a target's office or apartment.

"We had a hell of a time with that because we had to get Russian cans," he said. "It had to look exactly like an ordinary can."

'Nothing has changed'

Of all the old bioweaponeers, Patrick is the only one who still has ties to U.S. biodefense programs, working as a consultant and trainer. But he said the government has made little effort to learn from the work of the Special Operations Division and the larger biowarfare program.

Although bioengineering today could produce more virulent pathogens, "nothing has changed" in the most challenging part of covert biological attack: delivering germs so that they infect people, Patrick said.

"The problem today is there's a huge disconnect between what us old fossils know and what the current generation knows," Patrick said. "The good doctors at CDC [the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] don't have a clue about aerosol dissemination, and the military is not much better."

Walter, in Florida, agreed with Patrick's diagnosis. But he said it's fine with him if the dark lessons of Fort Detrick's early days are lost forever.

"When we all die off, that's it," he said. "If anybody with bad intentions got hold of the things we had, it would be disastrous."

By Stephen Manning
The Associated Press

Originally published November 18, 2005, 3:41 PM EST

GREENBELT // The widow of a Clinton postal worker who died after being exposed to anthrax in 2001 is suing the hospital that treated him, claiming it ignored signs that he suffered from the effects of the deadly spores until it was too late.

Southern Maryland Hospital Center, which denies the charges in court papers, has in turn filed a complaint against the federal government, saying it failed to protect workers at a Washington mail center that processed several anthrax-filled letters. If found liable in court, the hospital wants the government to shoulder some of the responsibility.

The lawsuit, which seeks an undisclosed sum, was originally filed in Prince George's County Circuit Court last year, but a hearing is scheduled for Monday in U.S. District Court on the hospital's complaint. The federal government says it is not liable in the case.

Joseph Curseen died Oct. 22, 2001, one of two workers from the former Brentwood postal facility who were killed when they inhaled anthrax released from mail.

Curseen operated a mail sorter on Oct. 15 when an anthrax-laced letter mailed to former Sen. Tom Daschle went through his machine. The letter was one of two that led authorities to shut down several Capitol Hill buildings after the mail was opened and anthrax was released into the air.

Curseen passed out and went to the hospital early Oct. 21 with a fever and other flu-like symptoms, according to the lawsuit. He was diagnosed with dehydration and sent home. The next day, his health deteriorating, Curseen returned to the emergency room. He was finally diagnosed with inhalation anthrax, but died around noon.

The lawsuit claims doctors failed to detect the anthrax during his first visit even though several other cases from Brentwood and elsewhere had been linked to the mail.

It alleges Curseen told emergency room workers he was employed at Brentwood and that the information appeared on his charts. But his blood was not tested and he did not receive other measures that could have detected the illness, the lawsuit states.

"Had the hospital run the appropriate tests, blood tests and so forth, they would have easily detected the rampant anthrax coursing through his body," said Alan Rifkin, an attorney for Curseen's widow, Celestine.

The lawsuit names the hospital, a contract company that employs the hospital's emergency room staff and several individual doctors and nurses.

In court filings, the hospital says Curseen never identified himself as a postal worker from Brentwood. It claims he responded well to treatment for dehydration, and that Curseen said he felt "much better" before he was released Oct. 21.

The hospital also faults the U.S. Postal Service for not responding quickly enough to the anthrax threat, saying it waited too long to offer antibiotics to Brentwood workers that could have protected them against anthrax. Postal officials deemed the plant safe for work even as Capitol Hill workers received antibiotics to counter anthrax released by letters processed at Brentwood.

"The United State of America failed to close Brentwood, failed to administer prophylactic antibiotics to its employees (including the decedent) and maintained the appearance to the medical community (including the defendants) and the general public that there was no threat or danger," the complaint reads.

An attorney for the hospital did not immediately return a phone message today seeking comment.

In a motion to dismiss the hospital's complaint, the Department of Justice argued that the federal government can't be sued by Curseen's estate, according to the Federal Employees Compensation Act. Therefore, it would not be liable as a third party for any damages a jury might deem are owed to Curseen by the hospital.

A Justice Department spokesman would not comment on the case.

A federal judge reached a similar conclusion in a $100 million class action lawsuit filed by Brentwood workers against the Postal Service. The case was thrown out last year when the judge ruled the only way the workers can pursue claims against the government is through the worker's compensation process. That ruling has been appealed.

By Alex Dominguez
The Associated Press
Originally published November 21, 2005, 5:55 PM EST

GREENBELT // A federal judge sent back to state court today a suit filed by the widow of a postal worker who died during the 2001 anthrax mailings.

The suit claims Southern Maryland Hospital Center ignored signs Joseph Curseen suffered from anthrax until it was too late. The hospital, in turn, has sought to bring the federal government into the case, claiming it failed to protect workers at a Washington mail processing center that processed several letters containing spores that cause the potentially deadly disease. The hospital claims the federal government should bear some of the responsibility for the death of Curseen.

U.S. District Judge Peter Messitte agreed with the plaintiffs that the case should be heard in Prince George's County Circuit Court. While the U.S. government would have the right to move the case to federal court if it was the defendant in the suit, there is little case law involving such situations and the time for requesting a move had long passed, the judge said.

"The case does not belong here in any respect," Messitte said.

The lawsuit, which seeks an undisclosed sum, was originally filed in Prince George's County Circuit Court last year. The federal government says it is not liable in the case.

Alan Rifkin, an attorney for Curseen's widow, Celestine, said the hospital did not conduct appropriate tests that would have easily detected the disease.

Curseen, who died Oct. 22, 2001, was one of two workers from the former Brentwood postal facility who died after inhaling anthrax released from mail. Curseen operated a mail sorter on Oct. 15 when an anthrax-laced letter mailed to former Sen. Tom Daschle went through his machine. The letter was one of two that led authorities to shut down several Capitol Hill buildings after the mail was opened and anthrax was released into the air.

Six days later, Curseen passed out and went to the hospital with a fever and other flu-like symptoms, according to the lawsuit.

After he was diagnosed with dehydration, he was sent home but returned the next day, when he was diagnosed with inhalation anthrax and died later that day.

The lawsuit claims doctors failed to detect the anthrax during his first visit even though several other cases from Brentwood and elsewhere had been linked to the mail and federal officials were warning medical staff to look for people with anthrax symptoms.

It alleges Curseen told emergency room workers he was employed at Brentwood and that the information appeared on his charts. But his blood was not tested and he did not receive other measures that could have detected the illness, the lawsuit states.

In court filings, the hospital says Curseen never identified himself as a postal worker from Brentwood.

The hospital also faults the U.S. Postal Service for not responding quickly enough to the anthrax threat, saying it waited too long to offer antibiotics to Brentwood workers that could have protected them against anthrax.

Attorneys for the Justice Department refused to comment on today's ruling or the case.

A federal judge reached a similar conclusion in a $100 million class action lawsuit filed by Brentwood workers against the Postal Service. The case was thrown out last year when the judge ruled the only way the workers can pursue claims against the government is through the worker's compensation process. That ruling has been appealed.

By Douglas Birch
Sun reporter
Originally published July 30, 2006

It could be the plot of a Cold War thriller: A Soviet mole burrows into America's top biodefense lab and steals strains of the deadly viruses that cause Rift Valley and Lassa fevers.

He ships the killer microbes back to Moscow in the bags of Aeroflot pilots, who turn them over to a super-secret arm of the KGB that plots bioterror attacks.

A chilling tale of fictional intrigue? Some biowarfare experts think it actually happened at Fort Detrick in the 1980s, and they say there is evidence to support their suspicions.

Alexander Y. Kouzminov, a biophysicist who says he once worked for the KGB, first made the allegation last year in a book, Biological Espionage: Special Operations of the Soviet and Russian Foreign Intelligence Services in the West.

Biowarfare experts dismissed the memoir at first, largely because Kouzminov also claimed that a series of contemporary disease outbreaks resulted from the release of germ weapons.

But in recent weeks, another former Soviet scientist told The Sun that his lab routinely received dangerous pathogens and other materials from Western labs through a clandestine channel like the one Kouzminov described.

Also, a U.S. arms control specialist says he has independent evidence of a Soviet spy at Fort Detrick. Although not definitive, their statements buttress Kouzminov's allegations about the Frederick military installation.

Experts worry that the United States' huge $7-billion-a-year biological defense effort will increase the odds of bioterrorism - by generating dangerous new microbes and scientific knowledge that could be diverted or stolen.

The FBI declined to comment on the possibility of Soviet spying at Fort Detrick in the 1980s. However, if an agent once penetrated America's top biodefense lab, biowarfare experts say, the incident would show how difficult preventing such losses can be.

The Detrick agent, Kouzminov wrote, clandestinely "gained information" on experiments with Rift Valley and Lassa fevers, hemorrhagic diseases that can drown a victim in his own body fluid, as well as the bacterium that causes tularemia, which can cause diarrhea, vomiting and pneumonia.

KGB officials also sought a sample of the U.S. smallpox vaccine, although Kouzminov does not say whether they obtained it. Soviet defectors have reported that in the 1970s and 1980s, the U.S.S.R. was trying to develop vaccine-resistant organisms capable of defeating U.S. biowarfare defenses.

Serguei Popov, a scientist once based in a Soviet bioweapons lab in Obolensk, south of Moscow, said that by the early 1980s his colleagues had obtained at least two strains of anthrax commonly studied in Detrick and affiliated labs. They included the Ames strain, first identified at Detrick in the early 1980s. It became the standard used for testing U.S. military vaccines, and it was the strain contained in the 2001 anthrax letters that killed five people and infected 23 in the U.S.

Popov, now at the National Center for Biodefense and Infectious Disease at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., said Obolensk researchers could easily obtain organisms mentioned in Western research papers.

"If you wanted 'special materials,' you had to fill out a request," he said. "And, essentially, those materials were provided. How and by whom, I can't say."

One colleague, Popov said, used this "special materials" program to obtain a strain of Yersinia pestis, a plague bacterium being studied in a Western lab. But he didn't know whether that particular germ came from Detrick.

There has never been any doubt about Detrick's key role in the history of U.S. biowarfare. Once a sleepy military airfield, the facility was turned into a center for top-secret research into biological weapons in the waning days of World War II.

It remained so until 1969, when President Richard M. Nixon ended development of new U.S. bioweapons, and the military study of lethal organisms shifted to the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, or USAMRIID.

That agency was founded at Fort Detrick in the late 1960s to conduct defensive biological research. Its scientists developed new vaccines and drugs to treat natural and manmade outbreaks.

Given that change in mission, former Detrick scientists and arms control experts agree that there were no secret, offensive programs at Detrick in the 1980s. In fact, they say there wasn't much secret work at all.

But Kouzminov says the KGB still wanted specific items from Western labs - including Detrick - that were closely held or at least not widely available.

Those included samples of specific disease strains, the growth media used to raise microbes, and vaccines the labs developed. The Soviets also wanted the aerosol powders U.S. scientists used to infect animals with bioagents during drug and vaccine tests.

At least three KGB spies targeted U.S. biodefense efforts in the 1980s, Kouzminov said. But the biophysicist, who worked primarily in Western Europe, offers no details about what the other two did. He wrote that his superiors called "our man at Detrick" their key biological agent.

Kouzminov and the biological moles worked in the KGB's Department 12 of Directorate S, housed in a high-rise building in a forested patch of southern Moscow. The group's mission, he said, was to develop germ weapons and poisons, to steal biodefense secrets and to plot biochemical terror attacks to be launched in the event of war.

The description of Department 12 in Biological Espionage squares with those of other defectors, said Oleg D. Kalugin, a retired KGB major general now living in the U.S.

Raymond Zilinskas, a bioweapons expert with the Monterey Institute of International Studies, and two colleagues wrote a scathing review of Biological Espionage in Nature, a British scientific journal.

The authors challenged Kouzminov's claims that the U.S. is pursuing an offensive bioweapons program. For example, he suggested that the 1993 outbreak of hantavirus in the American Southwest resulted from a U.S. military release of a bioweapon genetically engineered to attack Native Americans. The Nature review called the allegation "bizarre" and "astonishing."

The authors also complained that Kouzminov revealed few real KGB secrets. "It seems surprising," the reviewers wrote, "that an insider can write a book about the special operations of Soviet foreign intelligence services ... and provide so little about their achievements."

But Zilinskas, who is researching a history of the Soviet bioweapons program, told The Sun this month that his sources now say that Soviet intelligence routinely obtained details of work at USAMRIID that went beyond the descriptions in scientific journals.

"It was clear there was somebody at Fort Detrick" who worked for Soviet intelligence, Zilinskas says.

According to Kouzminov's account, the KGB delivered biological materials to Moscow through what was called the VOLNA channel. Aeroflot pilots who were also KGB officers carried these sometimes-lethal microbes to Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport in their personal luggage.

By the late 1980s, Department 12 was receiving about 20 parcels a year through VOLNA from agents in its American section, which included North, Central and South America.

In an e-mail, Kouzminov said he didn't know the identity of the Detrick spy or other details of the USAMRIID espionage. Such knowledge was closely guarded, even within the KGB. Careless comments by his bosses, though, suggested that the agent was a devout Catholic whose work frequently took him to Latin America.

Milton Leitenberg, an arms control expert with the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, investigated the spying claim last year. As far as he can determine, no one fitting Kouzminov's description worked at Detrick in the 1980s.

An FBI spokesman said the agency would not comment on spying allegations.

But William C. Patrick III, a retired Detrick biologist and veteran bioweapons expert, said he has long suspected penetration by Soviet agents.

His suspicions cropped up in the early 1990s, when he debriefed Ken Alibek, who as Kanatjan Alibekov served as the deputy chief of Biopreparat, the leading Soviet bioweapons research agency. Alibek emigrated to the U.S. less than a year after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991.

As he and Alibek traded stories, Patrick said, both realized that the Soviet and American programs had moved in a curious lock step during the 1950s and '60s.

"Anything we discovered of any import, they would have discovered and would have in their program in six months," Patrick said.

He doesn't doubt that the Soviets kept spying beyond the end of the U.S. offensive program. After his conversations with Alibek, he recalled, "For the next two weeks I tried to think, 'Who the hell are the spies at Detrick?'"

It would have been surprising if the KGB had not kept an eye on Fort Detrick, which was vilified in the Soviet press as a palace of sinister secrets.

Researchers who worked at Detrick at the time say there was no basis for this notoriety. Dr. C. J. Peters, a researcher and administrator at USAMRIID from 1977 to 1992, said a mole at Detrick in those days wouldn't have turned up critical intelligence - or obtained germs - that the KGB couldn't have found elsewhere.

Kouzminov claimed in his book that the KGB targeted "secret" experiments at USAMRIID. But Peters said that almost all the lab's work was published in scholarly journals, and scientists there worked on only two classified projects during that era. In one, scientists screened blood serum from U.S. Special Forces for novel infections. In another, the lab analyzed blood from two elite Soviet commandos.

 Still, the Soviets were deeply suspicious of Detrick. Many former Russian bioweapons experts remain so.

Dr. Pyotr Burgasov, a former chief sanitary physician of the Soviet Union, recalled in a 2002 interview with The Sun how he was escorted through Fort Detrick in the late 1960s - and was barred from one building. Detrick officials told him they feared he might contaminate the sterile research animals inside. But 11 years after the U.S.S.R. crumbled, he still didn't buy that explanation. "I am told America shows its research to scientists," he said. "But they showed nothing to me."

Distrust evidently bred cynicism. According to defectors, at the moment Soviet leaders signed the Biological Weapons Convention in 1975, they were pursuing a large-scale clandestine germ weapons program. After the deception was exposed, President Boris N. Yeltsin ordered a halt to offensive research in 1992.

Kouzminov, in a series of e-mails, defended his book against critics, saying that his aim was to raise an alarm about the "possibility" that several nations - including the U.S. - are conducting offensive bioweapons research. He also proposes the creation of an International Biological Security Agency, modeled on the International Atomic Energy Agency, to prevent proliferation.

Russia's biodefense establishment might have a vested interest in raising fears about U.S. intentions, some experts think. If Russia's leaders feel threatened, one said, they could increase spending on biodefense and intelligence agencies - institutions that have struggled for money since the end of the Cold War.

The FBI also questions whether Biological Espionage has an ulterior purpose. Agency spokesman William D. Carter said in a statement that "there is no way to discount that this book (like other books by former intel officers who seem to have no problem moving around, including into and out of Russia) is not part of a disinformation campaign by the Russians."

Kouzminov, who left Russia with his family in 1994, called the FBI's disinformation comment "rubbish," a reflection of Cold War thinking. "I have written this book purely from my heart," he wrote. "I was alone in this, without any group ... behind my back."

douglas.birch@baltsun.com

By Robert Little | Sun reporter
August 2, 2008

The Frederick County scientist who killed himself days before federal prosecutors reportedly planned to charge him with five murders related to the 2001 anthrax attacks had been under suspicion for more than a year and was recently accused of making "homicidal threats" as the pressure built and investigators closed in.

Bruce E. Ivins, a 62-year-old microbiologist who was part of an elite team of researchers at the U.S. Army's biochemical laboratory at Fort Detrick, was being linked to the same deadly mail-borne anthrax attacks that his lab helped to investigate. Justice Department prosecutors planned to seek the death penalty against Ivins, according to sources close to the case, and had convened a federal grand jury to hear evidence.

According to a neighbor, federal agents had been monitoring Ivins' house for a year.

Federal investigators disclosed few new details yesterday about their interest in Ivins, whose association with the anthrax case was first reported yesterday by the Los Angeles Times. Ivins' attorney released a statement declaring his client's innocence, blaming his suicide on the "relentless pressure of accusation and innuendo."

But details pieced together from court records, Army investigative reports and interviews with dozens of family members, colleagues and acquaintances paint a sketch of a respected, if rather intense scientist who seemed to unravel as prosecutors' intention to pursue a criminal case against him became clear.

Court records show that Ivins briefly entered Sheppard Pratt Services at Frederick Memorial Hospital, a 15-bed psychiatric unit, around July 10, less than three weeks before killing himself with an overdose of prescription-strength Tylenol and codeine.

Also around that time, he called Jean C. Duley, a social worker in Frederick, and left a threatening message, the records show. It was unclear yesterday what, if any, relationship existed between them.

On July 24, Duley sought a protective order against Ivins in Frederick County District Court, saying the scientist had a "history ... of homicidal threats, actions [and] plans." A judge granted the protective order, finding that Ivins had placed Duley "in fear of imminent serious bodily harm." The order was dismissed Thursday, two days after Ivins' death.

Duley also said in her handwritten petition that she was scheduled to testify yesterday before a federal grand jury and that she expected Ivins to be charged with five murders.

Even as they expressed doubt about his role in the anthrax attacks, colleagues described Ivins as a focused, often emotional scientist who didn't always respond well to pressure or criticism.

"There were times when he was not happy with the intensity of the discussion, sort of like, 'How can you question what I want to do here?'" said Norman Covert, a former public affairs director at Fort Detrick who served on a scientific committee with Ivins from 1999 through 2004.

His estranged brother, Tom Ivins, said Bruce often acted "omnipotent" because of his education, which included a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of Cincinnati.

Yet Covert and other acquaintances also described Ivins as among the top scientific researchers in the specialty of biodefense and said they never found any reason to doubt his integrity. In 2003, Ivins shared the Decoration for Exceptional Civilian Service, the highest award for an Army civilian. He is co-author of an article on anthrax vaccination in the current issue of the journal Vaccine, one of the top scientific journals in the field.

"My jaw hit the table when I saw his name," said Alan Zelicoff, a biodefense expert and former senior scientist at Sandia National Laboratories. "He was darn well respected in the field."

"I am totally aghast at this," Covert said, adding that he is "very distressed by it all, and curious about what the FBI thinks they have."

The 2001 mailings of letters laced with anthrax powder, delivered to news organizations in New York, a tabloid newspaper in Florida and congressional offices in Washington, killed five people, including two postal workers, a New York hospital worker, an elderly Connecticut woman and a photography editor. Seventeen people suffered illnesses related to anthrax exposure but recovered.

The federal investigation that ensued, which the FBI calls Amerithrax and characterizes as "one of the largest and most complex in the history of law enforcement," has resulted in more than 6,000 subpoenas but no arrests. The lab at Fort Detrick went into overdrive after the attack, developing anthrax vaccines as well as testing samples of powder sent from people throughout the country who believed, always mistakenly, they had been the target of another attack. Terrorism experts say the impact on the postal service and thinking about domestic terrorism has been profound.

"To this day, virtually all communications with federal agencies are through the Internet, and it started because of that event," said Gary LaFree, director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland.

The Justice Department, the FBI and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service issued a joint statement yesterday, saying there had been "significant developments" in the investigation and promising additional information "in the near future." The three agencies "have significant obligations to the victims of these attacks and their families that must be fulfilled" before more announcements, the statement said.

According to law enforcement officials familiar with the process, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media, Justice Department officials are leery of disclosing too much information, having been stung by leaked false claims related to one-time suspect Steven Hatfill, who has been exonerated and recently settled an invasion of privacy claim against the government for $5.82 million.

Federal investigators moved away from Hatfill and concluded that Ivins was the culprit after FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III changed leadership of the inquiry in late 2006, the Times reported yesterday

Officials are also bound by grand jury secrecy rules and have begun the process of having documents unsealed for public release, the sources said. They said Justice Department lawyers are combing through material to determine whether to dissolve the grand jury and close the case entirely, which would be a possible indication that Ivins is suspected of having acted alone.

Some victims of the 2001 attacks, meanwhile, said they felt a sense of resolution in the latest developments. Mark Cunningham, a New York Post editor who developed an infection after being exposed to anthrax at work, said he considered Ivins' suicide evidence of guilt.

"We will never know for sure - that's life," Cunningham told the Associated Press. "But this is good enough for government work. It's better government work than I had expected at this point."

Still, many who knew Ivins came to his defense. His attorney, Paul F. Kemp, released a statement that said: "We are saddened by his death, and disappointed that we will not have the opportunity to defend his good name and reputation in a court of law."

Others urged the FBI not to close the case prematurely. Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, who was given antibiotics and forced into a temporary space after trace amounts of anthrax were found in his Capitol Hill office, said the investigation has a personal nature for him.

"The manufacturing of anthrax is very complex and intricate. I don't think it would surprise anyone if there was someone, some other people involved in this," Cummings said. "I just hope that as they close their files, that they'll make sure - and I know they will - that there's no one else involved."

Ivins was linked to another controversy related to anthrax when he failed to report possible contamination of work spaces at the Fort Detrick lab in late 2001 and mid-2002, according to documents detailing an Army investigation of the incidents. The Army concluded the lab was sloppy with its safety procedures and reporting.

Dr. W. Russell Byrne, a colleague who worked in the bacteriology division of the Fort Detrick research facility for 15 years, told the Associated Press that aggressive FBI agents "hounded" Ivins when they began to suspect his involvement in the 2001 attacks, raiding his home twice. A neighbor told The Sun she had seen federal investigators monitoring Ivins' house for a year or more.

Byrne, who doesn't believe Ivins was behind the attacks, said the investigation led to Ivins' hospitalization for depression earlier this month. He said local police forcibly removed Ivins from his job because of fears he had become a danger to himself and others.

By Melissa Harris | Sun reporter
August 3, 2008

Lebanon, Ohio - Barbara Weisenfelder didn't believe the FBI agents for one minute. They had told the director of this village's historical museum that they had come all the way from Washington to interview residents as part of an insurance fraud investigation.

The agents said Bruce Ivins, 62, the youngest son of the town's long-deceased druggist, had faked his death. And they wanted to know everything about him and his family. They even inquired about the name of the architect and contractor who built the family's beige-colored, single-story home on Orchard Avenue in the 1930s.

"We knew who they were checking on, and that's all we needed to know," Weisenfelder, 77, said yesterday, recalling the agents' visits in 2007 and 2008.

She called up an Internet-savvy friend, who Googled Ivins' name. The search produced an October 2004 article from USA Today about Ivins' failure to report contamination at his bio-defense lab at Fort Detrick. Weisenfelder said she "put two and two together" and then shared what she learned with other volunteer curators at the museum, a brick Colonial building that was once a gymnasium.

"I was very curious," Weisenfelder said. "Ever since, they've teased me at the museum that I helped the FBI solve the case."

Ivins, a resident of Frederick County, made headlines in recent days, apparently killing himself just as federal prosecutors were reportedly preparing to charge him in the 2001 anthrax attacks that left five people dead and an entire nation jittery. Until then, few people had heard of the award-winning scientist at Fort Detrick.

But for more than a year, a small group of elderly women who volunteer at the Warren County Museum - a collection of antiques and frontier artifacts - suspected that Ivins had played a role in the deadly anthrax attacks. As many as four agents - from the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and U.S. Postal Service - came to two of their regular Wednesday meetings asking lots of questions.

Had Ivins attended his father's funeral at the Presbyterian church? Had he kept in contact with any old classmates from Lebanon High School? Attended reunions? Could they see his old yearbooks? Where was his family's drug store? What was the family like? Did they know of a school or cemetery named Greendale?

"They asked the Greendale question repeatedly," said John J. Zimkus, Lebanon's historian. "I looked, and I couldn't find anything."

On Friday, Zimkus was watching the news and saw a federal official hold up copies of the … poisoned envelopes mailed to Sen. Patrick J. Leahy and Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle in 2001, amid the anthrax scare. The return address: "4th Grade. Greendale School."

"I didn't make the connection until then," Zimkus said.

Members of the Ivinses' immediate family hadn't lived in Lebanon since the early 1980s. According to Bruce Ivins' eldest brother, Tom Ivins, he came to town to move their father, T. Randall Ivins, to Maryland after he wrote a $10,000 check to a woman who had befriended him.

After completing his doctorate at the University of Cincinnati, Bruce Ivins is believed to have returned to the county seat of about 20,000 only to sell the house and attend his father's funeral.

Bruce Ivins was so seldom present that the "Memory Lane" columnist for the local weekly newspaper, The Western Star, once erroneously reported that he had died. The author corrected the error in a subsequent column.

Bruce Ivins' mother died in 1970. Tom Ivins said that Bruce was at her side in the hospital. Randall Ivins closed the drugstore soon thereafter, and Bruce sold the family home - which locals say his father had built to resemble a house he saw in France - in the mid-1980s.

The federal agents spoke to Mike McMurray, who owns the home where the Ivinses once lived and runs McMurray Frames and Gifts on the town's main thoroughfare, which is dotted with specialty shops, offices, a picture-postcard ice cream parlor, and the state's oldest inn, the Golden Lamb. McMurray's wife, Marilyn, was a year behind Ivins at Lebanon High School, where he graduated in 1964.

"They mostly asked a lot of questions we couldn't answer," such as the name of the architect who designed and the contractor who built the house, said Mike McMurray. "They wanted to know if they could have a look around. I said, 'Yes,' but they never did."

Mike McMurray met Bruce Ivins only once - when McMurray toured him and his wife through the home, surrounded by Colonial mansions, and showed them how to run the boiler. Marilyn remembers Bruce as a brilliant student. She said a photo from his high school yearbook, the Trilobite, shows a lean teenager smiling in front of his project on antibiotics at a science fair. "It didn't surprise me that he became a world-renowned scientist," Marilyn McMurray said.

The Ivins family had long and prominent roots in Lebanon, now a bedroom community of Cincinnati and Dayton.

The Ivinses were one of the early families here. There are many people still living in the surrounding countryside with the Ivins surname. Vicky Toppy, the museum's director, said they are distant relatives of Bruce Ivins, whose family were "townspeople."

Bruce Ivins' grandfather purchased the drugstore in 1893, eventually turning it over to Bruce's father, who was known as a gentle and caring man. In the 1950s, the soda fountain at the Ivins-Jameson Drug Store was the place to hang out on Saturday nights, as the Salvation Army band played concerts out on the corner.

Ivins' interest in science likely began in the old drugstore, where his father mixed his own "fluid extracts" by "percolating grain alcohol over dried herbs," Randall Ivins said in an oral history for the museum.

Gerald Miller, a retired interior designer, says he can remember Bruce Ivins as a child working behind the soda fountain of the drugstore, now Heritage House Gifts owned by Steve and Paula Jackson.

The FBI agents were also interested in the basement of the old drugstore building, which is just a few doors down from McMurray's frame shop.

Other than cobwebs, a few pieces of woodworking equipment and a grocery bag stuffed with old patterns for making clothes, there is little to see, Steve Jackson said. "I assume they were down here looking for documents, and checking the walls to make sure they weren't hollow," he said. "I noticed these papers were moved," pointing to some equipment instructions. "I don't think they found anything."

Zimkus' theory is that the FBI believed Ivins hid something in Lebanon, or they hoped to uncover a link between Ivins and the "Greendale School" postmark.

"The agents were not very forthcoming," Zimkus said. "They asked a lot of questions, and didn't answer very many. I once asked them, 'When this is all over, will we know what this has been all about?' And they said, 'Probably not. It won't be too exciting.' "

melissa.harris@baltsun.com

By Stephen Kiehl and Josh Mitchell
Sun reporters

8:52 PM EDT, August 7, 2008

A day after the Justice Department released hundreds of documents purporting to link Bruce E. Ivins to the 2001 anthrax killings, scientists and legal experts criticized the strength of the case and cast doubt on whether it could have succeeded.

Federal investigators presented a raft of circumstantial evidence this week intended to prove Ivins' guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

But officials lacked direct evidence, such as hair fibers, DNA samples or handwriting analysis, that the eccentric microbiologist created the deadly powder in his Fort Detrick lab. Questions also remain about Ivins' ability to convert the spores stored in his lab into the powder sent through the mail.

More than half a dozen experts in law and bioterror pointed out Thursday what they consider major flaws in the government's case and said they were not convinced that Ivins acted alone in mailing the letters that killed five people - or that he was involved at all. They said the science that led the FBI to Ivins has not been explained and that the other evidence did not amount to conclusive proof.

Because Ivins committed suicide last week, that evidence will never be tested at trial, but his attorney has repeatedly insisted that the scientist was innocent.

The FBI said it used a sophisticated mapping technique to connect the anthrax in the letters with a flask in a Fort Detrick lab where Ivins worked. But that technique is so new that in the hands of a skilled defense lawyer, it could be "unraveled in front of a jury," said Michael Greenberger, a professor at the University of Maryland Law School.

Not all legal experts were skeptical of the case. Former federal prosecutor E. Lawrence Barcella said the FBI appeared to have done a remarkably thorough investigation. "They've made a very strong circumstantial case, an extremely strong circumstantial case," Barcella said.

Others said the focus on Ivins' lab raised concerns. The government said that 16 government, commercial and university labs had the strain of anthrax with the same genetic mutations as the anthrax used in the attacks. Only one of those 16 was in Maryland or Virginia - where the government thinks the envelopes used in the attacks were purchased. That lab is the one where Ivins worked.

"I thought that was a bit of a stretch," said Jonathan D. Tucker, a biological warfare expert on a federal commission to prevent terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction. "It's such a key piece of their argument, and it's based on inference. We don't know which other labs had the strains with the mutations."

And even at Fort Detrick, the government said that more than 100 people had access to the flask, creating a lot of room for reasonable doubt.

"There is a classic defense mechanism - to raise reasonable doubt by presenting the jury with viable options as to how the crime was perpetrated," Greenberger said. "This case would have been a very, very difficult case to prove."

The FBI defended its work on Wednesday, saying the painstaking investigation could lead to only one conclusion: Ivins was solely responsible for the attacks. They said the fact they had only circumstantial evidence did not weaken their case, which they now consider closed.

"Thousands of prosecutors in thousands of courthouses across this country every day prove cases beyond a reasonable doubt using circumstantial evidence," Joseph Persichini, assistant director of the FBI's Washington field office, said Wednesday.

In addition to the flask connection, Barcella said the time logs that show Ivins used his lab late at night just before the anthrax mailings raise strong suspicions. He said prosecutions based solely on circumstantial evidence were common and that the strongest such cases relied on the premise that all other alternative scenarios have been ruled out.

That's what happened with the anthrax case, Barcella said. The FBI "eliminated every possibility until they were left with one, which is a tedious but very thorough way to do an investigation," he said.

But other experts say the FBI has not shown how it cleared the 100 or more other people who had access to the flask - the kind of detail that would be forced out at trial. Lacking a trial in this case, experts said Congress should hold hearings or order an independent review of the evidence.

"If those questions are not resolved, there will always be a residue of doubt that the perpetrator will still be at large and that an innocent man may have been accused," said Tucker, of the federal anti-terrorism commission. "It's very important to tie up these lingering loose ends and address the gaps."

Among the unresolved questions:

How do officials believe Ivins made the anthrax? The FBI says Ivins used his lab to convert anthrax spores into powdered anthrax, but no proof has been presented that he had the equipment or the expertise to do so.

"I'm waiting for it to be shown that the quantity and the quality of the powders in the anthrax letters could have been produced in those suites" at Fort Detrick, said W. Russell Byrne, who retired from Fort Detrick in 2003 and was Ivins' supervisor from 1998 to 2000. "I don't know how to make the stuff," he said.

He also said that so many people were going in and out of the labs at odd hours to check on experiments that it's unlikely Ivins would have gone undetected if he had been working on something illicit, even at night.

The FBI said Ivins used a machine called a lyophilizer in his lab to make the anthrax. But such a machine is also used in creating anthrax vaccines.

Why did two of the anthrax letters include a harmless bacterial contaminant, but not the others? The FBI has not shown where that bacterium originated or if agents tried to trace it to Ivins. Nor has there been an explanation of why the first set of letters contained the bacterium but not the second set.

Experts would also like to see more detail from the FBI on how exactly it was able to link the anthrax used in the mailings to the flask handled by Ivins.

"So much of the FBI's case is based on the fact they are 100 percent convinced it came out of that one container," said Randall Larsen , national security adviser for the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. "Even the FBI themselves admit this is a brand-new technology they came up with."

What motive would Ivins have had? The FBI suggested he wanted heighten the need for an anthrax vaccine he was working on. The FBI also released Ivins' own e-mails that describe his mental state as depressed, delusional and paranoid.

But does that make him a killer?

"He's obviously a disturbed individual, but how that disturbed behavior exhibited itself does not seem at all relevant to engaging in a bioterrorist attack," said David Fidler, director of the Indiana University Center on American and Global Security.

And Byrne said he never saw bizarre behavior that went beyond what might be expected from an eccentric scientist.

"If he had mental health problems, he was taking care of them well," Byrne said. "Could he have been so smart that he completely fooled me?

"Yeah, it's possible, but I doubt it."

stephen.kiehl@baltsun.com

By Sara Neufeld | Sun reporter
August 10, 2008

FREDERICK - In the days since Bruce Ivins committed suicide, federal authorities have portrayed him as a mentally ill man who had threatened to kill a social worker and was responsible for the deadly anthrax attacks of 2001.

Yesterday, as about 250 friends, relatives and colleagues filled the dark wooden pews at St. John the Evangelist Roman Catholic Church in Frederick, a very different portrait of the Army scientist emerged.

Ivins, 62, was remembered during the memorial service as a talkative man who liked to understand how everything around him worked. He studied the weather and knew different types of cloud formations. For 28 years, he was an active church member and musician. He enjoyed cartoons, 1950s rock music, using his chain saw to cut firewood and shooting at a range or at boxes and cans in the backyard. He volunteered for the Red Cross.

There was little mention of the allegations that brought a horde of media to stand on the sidewalk outside, save for a reading at the beginning of the service from the book of Job. The pastor, the Rev. Richard Murphy, said Job was falsely accused of sin and felt abandoned, just like Ivins.

As mourners filed into the Greek Ionic-style church, whose five-story bell tower makes it the tallest building in Frederick, soft piano music resonated throughout the sanctuary. At one point during the service, the pianist played a song that Ivins wrote and composed himself - the legacy of his mother's insistence that all three of her sons take piano lessons, said Charles Ivins, one of his two brothers. As boys growing up in Lebanon, Ohio, Bruce, the youngest brother, obeyed her order dutifully, he said.

The service lasted just over an hour, with sunlight streaming through light-yellow, arched stained-glass windows. Ivins' widow, Diane, asked people to talk about the different aspects of his complex life, and the speakers elicited several laughs from an otherwise solemn crowd as they described the scientist's offbeat sense of humor.

Twenty-three years ago, Ivins and his wife adopted 1-year-old twins, Amanda and Andy, and became close friends with a couple who had previously cared for the children as foster parents. The foster father, identified as Jim, recalled how he and Ivins would challenge their children to sports competitions outside their homes; the two friends called their team the "Geezers." Once, Ivins recruited Jim's daughter, who was about 12 at the time, to stand below him during a juggling performance where he was throwing knives into the air.

Ivins had worked since 1980 for the Army's institute for infectious diseases. Colleagues at Fort Detrick, where another memorial service was held earlier in the week, said Ivins made personal sacrifices as he worked to improve national security and was respected internationally. A prolific author, he had written 55 scientific articles. Though he worked long hours, he talked often about his pride in his children. Together with their mother, they held a reception after yesterday's ceremony.

One co-worker said Ivins enjoyed mentoring young scientists and liked to banter about most any subject. She said he would seem disappointed if she agreed with whatever position he was taking on a given issue and would change the subject as many times as necessary to find a lively topic of debate.

Charles Ivins, who referred to himself "C.W," was the only relative to speak. He described his brother Bruce's compassion when he went repeatedly to visit a dying aunt, sitting with her and reading to her. He said he misses his brother but is glad his "torment" is over.

sara.neufeld@baltsun.com

By David Wood
February 10, 2009

The biodefense lab at Fort Detrick in Frederick began a thorough search of its freezers yesterday to ensure that it has an accurate inventory of the deadly bacteria, viruses and toxins accumulated there over a period of 40 years, Defense Department officials said.

Col. John P. Skvorak, commander of the U.S. Army Medical Institute of Infectious Diseases, ordered a "stand-down," or pause in ordinary operations, and a complete inventory last week after 20 vials of "biological select agents and toxin" (BSAT) were discovered in a freezer box that was listed as containing only 16 vials.

Army officials insisted there are no missing vials of lethal substances and no danger to the public.

They said the problem lies with unused, older samples of research materials that were in storage before the institute's records were computerized in 2005.

Until then, the inventory of deadly stocks was kept on paper by hand.

"It's a record-keeping thing," said Caree Vander-Linden, a spokeswoman for the institute.

Accounting for all the material in the institute's freezers and refrigerators could take three months.

"We are not going to sacrifice accuracy for speed," she said.

Authorities moved quickly to begin to resolve the discrepancies, given the institute's role in the 2001 anthrax mailings that killed five people.

Bruce Ivins, who was identified by federal authorities last year as the perpetrator of the mailings, was an anthrax researcher at the institute when he killed himself in July after learning he was about to be charged with the crimes by the FBI.

In a memo to his staff last week, first reported by the blog ScienceInsider, Skvorak said the "probability that there are additional vials of BSAT not captured in our [computerized] data base is high."

He said he was ordering the stand-down and a suspension of some research until "a full certification" of the contents is complete.

Reporting of such discrepancies is required under tightened regulations adopted last month by the Defense Department in the wake of the Ivins case, in which authorities say the researcher was able to divert deadly anthrax without being detected.

Any material that is not properly accounted for, including material on hand that is not in the computer database, must immediately be reported to the Army vice chief of staff, Gen. Peter Chiarelli.

Officials in his office were not available for comment yesterday.

Outside Fort Detrick, some scientists were not so quick to dismiss the incident as a harmless record-keeping problem.

"If there are [bioweapons] samples that are undeclared, unaccounted for, those samples can be stolen or diverted with no means of detection," said Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University.

He said such discrepancies "happen all the time" in normal laboratory environments, "but when it happens in a lab handling bioweapons, that's a serious concern."

Ebright acknowledged that security measures at Detrick "are substantially more stringent" than at civilian government and academic labs that handle lethal material.

There are about 400 research labs that handle lethal material in the United States, he said.

The research at the Institute of Infectious Diseases is designed to examine highly hazardous biological agents in order to design effective protection in the form of vaccinations or antidotes.

It is the government's premier research lab on biological warfare defenses.

Skvorak said that animal research currently under way at the institute will continue during the inventory process.