Australian and international intelligence agencies are increasingly alarmed at the emergence throughout South and South-East Asia of terrorist groups linked to Osama bin Laden, amid new evidence that the multi-millionaire Saudi extremist has bought biological weapons from a former Soviet state.

Confirmation to The Sunday Age from intelligence sources that bin Laden associates recently bought the deadly anthrax and plague viruses from arms dealers in Kazakhstan comes as Australian authorities prepare for the massive task of securing the Olympics from terrorism.

While Australian security analysts still rate the risk of terrorist attack at the Sydney Games as low, they nonetheless believe any terrorist violence would represent an intelligence failure that could only be dealt with reactively and "largely medically".

"Essentially the fight against this sort of terrorism is preventive - it comes down to the agencies stopping the people who do this sort of thing from coming in," an Australian source said.

` "If there is a flaw in intelligence and this sort of (biological) attack happens, we can do little but react and try to minimise the human damage."

As part of the pre-Games anti-terrorism campaign, Australian security agencies are investigating phone calls made to numerous New South Wales addresses in late 1992 and early 1993 by convicted Islamic extremists linked to the February 26, 1993, bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York that killed six people and injured 2000.

In separate trials in mid-1990s, nine bin Laden-linked Islamic terrorists were convicted of the Trade Centre bombing, of planning a day of anti-American terror and of murdering Rabbi Meir Kahane, a US-based radical Jewish leader in 1990.

The Sunday Age has been provided with the telephone records of several of the convicted terrorists and their colleagues, which show the extremists had extensive contact with possible associates in Australia before and after the New York bombing.

The records show that one of the terrorists, Ibrahim El-Gabrowny, made two telephone calls lasting 19 minutes and nine minutes to a business in Dean Park, NSW, early on August 24, 1992. He made two more calls to another business in Yagoona, NSW, on March 20 and 21, 1993 - less than a month after the Trade Centre bombing.

El-Gabrowny was originally charged with conspiracy in the bombing but was later convicted as an accessory to the murder of Rabbi Kahane.

The phone records also show that Mahmud Aboulahimi - one of the bombers who was sentenced to life in jail - and another associate also made numerous calls to NSW before and after the bombing.

While some people who were resident at the NSW addresses have since moved, it is believed that the telephone records have formed the basis of a massive pre-Games Australian surveillance operation by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation with help from police and other intelligence agencies.

The Sunday Age also has documentary evidence that shows that another convicted Trade Centre bomber, Mohammed Salameh, was preparing to apply for migration to Australia about the time of the crime.

Meanwhile, sources maintain that Australian security and intelligence agencies are increasingly concerned about bin Laden's growing links with extreme Islamic groups throughout South and South-East Asia.

While international intelligence agencies have established that Muslim rebels in the Philippines - who are currently holding 21 hostages - are getting financial support from bin Laden, there is growing concern that the terrorist mastermind could also be funding separatist Islamic groups in the Indonesian provinces of Aceh and Ambon.

"That is a suspicion based on some evidence that is yet to be conclusively proven," an Australian source told The Sunday Age.

"It would be consistent with the spread of bin Laden funding throughout Asia as this guy looks for more swamps (hiding places) that are less detectable to the US."

In April this year the US State Department identified Afghanistan and Pakistan as a new international hub of Muslim extremism.

The department said that while the US was once threatened by state-launched terrorism, the new global terrorist threat was expected to come from small networks of religiously and ideologically motivated groups.

While Australian authorities, including the Federal Government, have repeatedly said there is "no specific threat" against the Olym-pics, sources maintain that a judgment has already been made that any terrorist threat is likely to come from bin Laden-funded groups.

Australian and international security analysts are interpreting the significance of the purchase of biological weapons - including the deadly anthrax and plague viruses - from Kazakhstan arms dealers by bin Laden associates.

"The world has long been afraid of the biological warfare threat, but Islamic terrorist groups have not to date used such weapons against the West," an Australian source said.

"The very fact that it has been established, without doubt, that bin Laden now has these weapons is, by its very nature, of significant concern."

Disclosures that bin Laden associates now have biological weapons coincides with a warning from a leading US infectious-disease expert that the US is ill-equipped to deal with such an attack.

"It is not a question of if such an event will occur, but rather when, as well as which agent will be used and how extensive the damage will be," warned Michael Osterholm, who heads the private Minnesota-based Infection Control Advisory Network.

"Given the enormity of what is possible, we must prepare for a potential nightmare."

The Australian Bureau of Criminal Intelligence and ASIO are coordinating criminal intelligence assessments before and during the Olympics.

It is believed that they are receiving extensive help from law enforcement and intelligence agencies from several countries, including the United States and Israel.

Experts say Jersey City is a breeding ground for terrorist cells

By TOBY ECKERT 
COPLEY NEWS SERVICE 

JERSEY CITY, N.J. -- Standing outside the Al Tawheed Islamic Center, in a neighborhood under suspicion, Ahmed Abdelsayed described himself as an
"American-Arab-Muslim" -- in that order.

The distinction is important these days because, for the second time in eight years, authorities have linked Arab men from Jersey City to an attack on the World Trade Center.

Terrorism experts say Jersey City has become a hotbed of radical Islam and a breeding ground for the type of terrorist cells thought to have carried out the Sept. 11 attacks that killed thousands.

Local Muslims deny that, saying that most Muslims here are peaceful and moderate, and that the attacks were executed by a handful of outlaws.

At least five men who lived in an apartment building in the city's Journal Square neighborhood have been detained in connection with last week's devastating strikes.

Two of the men, arrested in Texas, reportedly were booked on a flight the day of the attack and carried box cutters like those wielded by the hijackers who crashed two jetliners into the trade center.

The men were part of the congregation at the nearby Masjid Al-Salam mosque, authorities say.

Four others connected to the mosque, including blind Egyptian cleric Omar Abdel-Rahman, were convicted of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, which killed six people.

"If I had to name any place that was instrumental in forming these networks across the United States, (Jersey City) would be it," said Harvey Kushner, chairman of the criminal justice department at Long Island University.

"The spiritual guidance from local imams comes out of that area, and a lot of fund raising," contended Kushner, who has been a consultant on terrorism to several government agencies. "They have been operational in that area for 15 years, at least."

Yesterday, the Star-Ledger of Newark reported that investigators believe New Jersey was the financial hub of the terrorist operation. Authorities suspect the attack was masterminded by Saudi exile Osama bin Laden, who is believed to be in Afghanistan.

Muslims who live in the area say outsiders are unfairly stereotyping their entire community.

"I'm sure, 100 percent, that's not true Muslims," another man standing outside the Al Tawheed Islamic Center said of the terrorists. "It's a peaceful religion, very peaceful."

Most Arabs come to the United States to find work or escape political repression in their homelands, not to harm it, he said, taking time out from sprucing up the center for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

"If we break this country, we break ourselves," said Abdelsayed, who is from Egypt.

A few blocks away on bustling Kennedy Street, men poured into the Al-Salam mosque, a nondescript walk-up squeezed between a jewelry store and a nail salon, for afternoon prayers.

They respectfully removed their shoes and stacked them neatly on a shelf before heading upstairs, referring all questions about the detained worshippers to a spokesman, who was absent.

Around the corner, on residential Tonnele Avenue, two longtime residents of the neighborhood recalled last weekend's police raid on a brownstone apartment building on the block. Three men were led away in handcuffs, they said.

Two other men who lived there -- Ayub Ali Khan and Mohammed Jaweed Azmath -- were arrested in Texas last week. They had been booked on a flight from Newark to San Antonio that departed around the same time as other jetliners that smashed into the trade center and the Pentagon.

When the flight was diverted to St. Louis, they boarded an Amtrak train bound for Texas. They were arrested in Fort Worth after police found them carrying box cutters, hair dye and cash during what authorities said was a routine drug search.

It was the ultimate war game for armchair strategists. A dozen experts gathered at Andrews Air Force Base for two days in June for a germ-warfare assault on America's heartland. The exercise was called Dark Winter. The scenario: Oklahoma, Georgia and Pennsylvania have been deliberately targeted with smallpox virus. The mission: to marshal the full resources of the Federal Government and limit the damage. But even though the players included seasoned leaders--former Senator Sam Nunn acting as the President, former presidential adviser David Gergen as National Security Adviser, Oklahoma Governor Frank Keating playing himself--the situation got quickly out of hand. Within two weeks, 16,000 Americans were infected, and 6,000 were dead or dying.

Dismal as that performance was, it all seemed rather theoretical at the time. Not anymore. In the aftermath of the attack two weeks ago, the idea that weapons of mass destruction might be trained on the U.S.--not by such rogue nations as Iraq but by rogues like Osama bin Laden--suddenly seems a lot less unthinkable. Ordinary Americans are waking up in the middle of the night with nightmares about poisoned water supplies and miniature nuclear weapons set off in city streets.

But the chances of such an attack happening anytime soon are remote, most of the terrorism experts consulted by TIME agree. For starters, it takes a lot more money to build, research or steal a weapon of mass destruction than to hijack a plane or unleash a truck bomb. It also takes a lot more brainpower. Says Amy Smithson, a chemical and biological weapons expert at the Henry Stimson Center in Washington: "I can sit here and dream up thousands of nightmare scenarios, but there are a lot of technical and logistical hurdles that stand between us and those scenarios."

The experts also agree, however, that they must rethink their assumptions. The Sept. 11 attacks took patient planning and training; no terrorist group had ever carried out so complex a mission. "I was not at all alarmist about this threat based on the historical record," says Jonathan Tucker of the Monterey Institute of International Studies in Washington, "but given what happened, we need to reassess the threat."

Of the three major types of weapons of mass destruction, biological agents may pose the greatest potential threat, followed by nuclear bombs and chemical weapons. Here's how our experts gauge the relative dangers:

Chemical Weapons
Ranging in sophistication from rat poison to powerful nerve toxins, chemical weapons are by far the most popular among terrorists. That's because the raw materials are relatively easy to get, and the finished products don't have to be kept alive. But chemical weapons aren't well suited for inflicting widespread damage. Unlike germs, chemical agents can't reproduce, observes Tucker. "You have to generate a lethal concentration in the air, which means you need very large quantities." To kill a sizable number of people with sarin, for example, which can be absorbed through the skin as a liquid or inhaled as a vapor, you would need something like a crop-dusting plane--which is why investigators last week were so alarmed to find a manual for operating crop-dusting equipment while searching suspected terrorist hideouts. Still, to attack a city with sarin, you would probably have to fly thousands of pounds back and forth over heavily populated areas--not something easily done, especially now.

Indeed, the most devastating nonmilitary chemical attack ever, by the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Tokyo in 1995, killed only a dozen people. One reason is that the delivery method was crude: cultists dropped plastic bags of sarin (smuggled in lunch boxes and soft-drink containers) on a subway platform and pierced them with umbrella tips. Also the amounts were relatively small. Says Smithson: "Any bozo can make a chemical agent in a beaker, but producing tons and tons is difficult." Aum Shinrikyo tried to make the stuff in bulk, recruiting scientists and spending at least $10 million, but it failed.

Terrorists could try to tap into the more ample supplies of chemical arms believed to be stockpiled by Iraq and other outlaw states. But Tucker points out that the leaders of such countries would probably be reluctant to let weapons banned by international treaty out of their direct control; if they were traced back it could lead to swift retaliation. "We know Saddam Hussein is ruthless," he says, "but generally he is not reckless."

Nuclear Weapons
More than 25 years ago, in an eerie foreshadowing of the World Trade Center attack, the writer John McPhee explored with nuclear physicist Ted Taylor the question of how you could topple the Twin Towers with a small atomic bomb. Positioned correctly, McPhee reported, a nuke a tenth as powerful as Hiroshima's could knock a tower into the Hudson River.

But that assumes you could manufacture the bomb and put it into position. A terrorist would first have to get hold of some sort of fissionable material--ideally, says Princeton University nuclear proliferation expert Frank von Hippel, enriched uranium. North Korea, Iraq and Libya are believed to have uranium stockpiles but would probably be loath to let them go. A more likely source is the former Soviet Union, where bombmaking supplies are plentiful, the economy is in upheaval, and security has collapsed.

Bin Laden reportedly tried to obtain uranium from the breakaway Soviet states, but his sources bilked him, offering instead low-grade reactor fuel and radioactive garbage. Even if he had been successful, says von Hippel, it would take at least 150 lbs. of uranium plus hundreds of pounds of casing and machinery to make a weapon. "Nobody's going to be carrying a bomb around in a suitcase," he says.

Far likelier is an attack on a nuclear power plant with conventional explosives--a fact recognized by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which has staged mock commando raids on U.S. plants for years. Alarmingly, these war-game assaults have often succeeded, sometimes "releasing" more radiation than Chernobyl (an accident, it's worth remembering, that by some estimates caused 30,000 deaths).

Biological Weapons
Germ warfare has been around since at least the Middle Ages, when armies besieging a city would catapult corpses infected with the black plague over the walls. Today the bugs authorities most fear are anthrax (a bacterium) and smallpox (a virus). Both are highly lethal: the former kills nearly 90% of its victims, the latter some 30%. Anthrax is not communicable; smallpox, on the other hand, can be transmitted with horrifying ease from one person to another. "The feelings of uncertainty, of who is infected, of who will get infected, are the main advantages of biowarfare," says Stephen Morse of the Columbia University School of Public Health.

During the cold war, both the U.S. and the Soviet Union began developing anthrax as a biological weapon. Today 17 nations are believed to have biological weapons programs, many of which involve anthrax. Officially, the only sources of smallpox are small quantities in the labs of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and at Vector in Koltsovo, Russia. But experts believe that Russia, Iraq and North Korea have all experimented with the virus and that significant secret stashes remain. Even more worrisome are reports that Russia used genetic engineering to try to make anthrax and smallpox more lethal and resistant to antibiotics and vaccines. (The U.S. put a similar program on hold.)

Whatever form the next attack takes, all evidence suggests that the nation is still largely unprepared. That's beginning to change. The NRC has plans to beef up already heightened security at power plants, and public health officials are beginning to get serious about staving off biological assaults. Last year, for example, the CDC authorized a private company to cook up 40 million additional doses of smallpox vaccine to add to the U.S. stockpile--a job that will take several years. "We also need to develop new drugs and vaccines against other organisms that might be a threat," says Dr. Margaret Hamburg of the Washington-based Nuclear Threat Initiative. "And we need to do research to better understand how some of these organisms cause disease."

Why not just vaccinate every American against every possible germ-warfare agent? That would be impractical, if not impossible, and the side effects of the inoculations would pose a significant health risk. Instead, says Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, we should strengthen the country's public health system. After Sept. 11, hospitals in New York City were asked to report any outbreaks of unusual symptoms. Health experts know that in the event of biological attack, the earlier an epidemic is detected, the easier it is to contain.

Experts in antiterrorism share their concern. At the turn of the past century, says Brian Jenkins of the Rand Corp., epidemics of diseases like yellow fever and cholera kept health workers on their toes. Now, after a decade of cutbacks, "our ability to treat large numbers of casualties has been reduced," he says. "The notion of reinvesting to create a muscular public health system is not a bad idea, even if there is no terrorism."

Anthrax ground zero

In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and a report that one of the terrorists trained on a crop-dusting plane, the media has increasingly turned its speculation of future horror to chemical and biological warfare.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote last Wednesday, September 19:

"With a dusting of anthrax spores from a helicopter or a mist of nerve gas in a subway ventilation system, terrorists could carry out a stealthy chemical or biological strike as lethal as the World Trade Center suicide mission."

On September 4, the New York Times reported that since 1979, Battelle has increased its employees involved in chemical and biological warfare research from 500 to 800 at its King Avenue and West Jefferson laboratories.

In order to keep us safe from "terrorist attacks," Battelle is involved in manufacturing a more deadly strain of anthrax, the Times reported. As Battelle explained to the Columbus Dispatch, you have to develop the more deadly lethal strain so that a vaccine can be found. It's termed "defensive" work.

The Times also reported that to keep us safe from terrorism, the Central Intelligence Agency once replicated a Soviet-era biological bomb to study how well it would disperse biological agents like anthrax under varying atmospheric conditions. The Times said two sets of tests were conducted at Battelle.

The United States is reported to have the largest inventory of biological and chemical agents in the world. All are officially for defensive purposes. Assisting Battelle in its "defensive" biological weapons program is Dr. Kenneth Alibek, described in a 1998 Dispatch article as a former "top official in a massive Soviet effort to develop biological weapons for possible use against American forces."

The Dispatch reported that "Alibek was first Deputy Director Biopreparat, the civilian arm of the Soviet biological-weapons program." He supervised 3,200 workers in over 40 facilities. Following World War II, various former Nazi scientists reportedly worked at Battelle as a byproduct of Operation Paper Clip, a Cold War operation to secure Hitler's best and brightest before the Soviets snatched them.

The Russian government has charged that Battelle's activity violates a 1972 global treaty banning secret research on biological weapons. The 1972 protocol specifically forbids nations from developing or acquiring weapons that spread disease, but allows work on vaccines and other "protective measures." Since the CIA bomb was built and tested for purely "defensive" measures, the military denies it's violating the treaty.

The Jefferson Township Fire Department has assured West Jefferson and central Ohio residents that everything is safe. Fire Lieutenant Timothy Stainer told the Dayton Daily News, "We have had training specific to anthrax." The training drills occur four times a year.

Battelle's website notes, "The United States Department of Defense openly acknowledges the capacity of both potential adversaries and terrorists to employ weapons of mass destruction, particularly chemical and biological (CB) weapons Battelle's CB defense product line is organized to support these programs."

I haven't felt this reassured about my safety since Ronald Reagan named our nuclear missiles "Peacekeepers." If Americans can't tell the difference between freedom-loving defensive anthrax and evil terroristic bin Laden-type anthrax, then they ought to just get the hell out of central Ohio.

-Bob Fitrakis
with research by Marty Yant
September 27, 2001

As fears of a follow-up terrorist attack spread across the nation, experts warn that bioterrorism could be the next weapon in the terrorist arsenal.

And they say the question is not if it will happen, but when and where.

Though bioterrorism can take many forms, Robert Wallace, an expert in biological warfare, said people have become more concerned with the ground-transported threat.

Anthrax threats

Wallace, professor of biology at Ripon College in Ripon, Wis., said anthrax is the most likely biological killer terrorists might use.

Anthrax is an acute infectious disease caused by the spore-forming bacterium Bacillus anthracis, according to the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention Web site, www.cdc.gov.

Only 1 billionth of a gram of anthrax, the size of a speck of dust, is lethal, he said.

“Anthrax is naturally occurring in soils,” Wallace said. “Any decent microbiologist could isolate and grow up a supply.”

The difficulty of delivering the supply is a major detriment, he said.

“You would have to be able to grow it, place it in spores and deliver it,” Wallace said, “all without becoming infected yourself.”

But people who don’t mind the risks and will die for their cause are out there, he said.

Smallpox virus

A second possible threat is the smallpox virus, Wallace said. It would be much more difficult, though not impossible, for a terrorist to acquire the smallpox virus, he said.

Smallpox is a viral disease unique to humans. It survives by passing among people, spread by the inhalation of air droplets or aerosols, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention Web site.

“The United States still has samples of the virus at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Ga.,” Wallace said. “Although, I don’t think you would be able to get a hold of it if you wanted to.”

He said he knows of an incident regarding a man who used to work at the center who left and began working for Iraq.

“There was speculation as well as concern that he may have stolen a vial,” Wallace said. “It is my gut instinct that no one walked off with anything.”

The vials have been counted, he said, and the right people know if anything is missing.

“Although I am not sure that we would know if anything were missing,” Wallace said, “It would cause too much of a panic to release that kind of information.”

Wallace thinks the United States used the stored amount of the virus to develop a vaccination to quell a possible outbreak.

Wallace said he had heard of the development of smallpox and anthrax weapons that could be lobbed into the United States on intercontinental missiles by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. He is aware of the existence of an unknown amount of the smallpox virus at the Russian Academy of Sciences institute for viral research in Moscow.

“Although the supply of smallpox may be available, it is very difficult to get a hold of, and even more difficult to do significant damage with,” Wallace said.

An attack on life

Helen Jensen, ISU professor of economics, is a member of the National Research Council’s Committee on Biological Threats to Agricultural Plants and Animals. She said she isn’t positive what the exact threat to plants and animals is at this time, but she said terrorists could try to harm the United States’ food supply.

“We are not as prepared as we would like to be, but the level of awareness is now higher,” Jensen said.

Wallace and Jensen said they believe Americans are already being terrorized just by the concern about the possibility of these events taking place.

“The terrorists are not trying to destroy our infrastructure,” Wallace said. “What they want to do is stop the way we do business.”

The Sept. 11 tragedy took lives and shook the economy, he said, but that was not the terrorists’ main goal.

“What it really did was stop people from living normal lives,” Wallace said.

The threat of bioterrorism is causing people to go out and buy gas masks, stockpile antibiotics and alter the way they lead their normal lives.

“You can’t wear a gas mask 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” Wallace said. “Besides that, who’s to say a gas mask will be helpful anyway?”

He said most people don’t know the particulars of wearing a mask, and if the mask is old, doesn’t fit right or is worn improperly, it is ineffective.

But despite this fact, Ames residents are stocking up.

Marshal Toms, employee at Ames Surplus, 4723 Lincoln Way, said its gas masks have been sold out since Sept. 14.

“We have 50 on the way, all of which are spoken for,” he said, “and another 50 people [are] on a list who want one.”

By Steve Sternberg, USA TODAY

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Early on Oct. 2, an ailing 63-year-old tabloid photo editor named Bob Stevens lapsed into a coma in a Lantana, Fla., hospital. Doctors there suspected meningitis, and infectious-disease expert Larry Bush expected to confirm their diagnosis by studying Stevens' spinal fluid. What Bush saw in the microscope's glowing circular field would set off alarms from Tallahassee to Washington, D.C., and send shock waves nationwide.

Stevens' spinal fluid teemed with "large, blue rods," soon to be confirmed as Bacillus anthracis, an ancient plague of cattle, goats and sheep. Anthrax virtually never strikes humans unless they work in slaughterhouses or have other close contact with grazing animals. Stevens worked in an office park.

"Why would I be seeing anthrax," Bush remembers wondering. "Did something happen with this man that I'm not aware of?"

What had happened, federal experts have concluded, was the first lethal biological attack on the USA. The attack provided the first test of the nation's defenses against the insidious weapons of bioterrorists, weapons that in this case appear to have arrived in the mail and were detonated by simply tearing open an envelope.

Since Stevens' death three days later, seven of his co-workers at American Media Inc., the publisher of several popular supermarket tabloids, also have tested positive for exposure to anthrax. In New York, two NBC news employees, a police officer and two lab technicians also have developed symptoms. In Reno, an undisclosed number of employees of a local Microsoft office may have been exposed to anthrax-laced pornographic pictures mailed from Malaysia.

The scope of the investigation will continue to challenge the resourcefulness of public health experts, lab workers, doctors, and police charged with protecting the public. The lessons learned in Florida already are being applied in New York, Reno and dozens of communities nationwide dealing with anthrax scares.

"What we're seeing here is a pretty good test of the public health system," says David Fleming, deputy director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is playing the lead role in the public health probe. "What we've seen so far is pretty good."

Bush of JFK Memorial in Lantana agrees. "The criticism I hear is that we're not prepared," he says. "I think it's just the opposite. Federal, state and local governments have geared up for this. You have to remember, it's a work in progress. There have been no cases of bioterrorism or anthrax like this."

A mystery unfolds

In the last days of a visit to North Carolina, Bob Stevens thought he might be coming down with a severe case of the flu. Driving home to Lantana with his wife, Maureen, Stevens found himself so feverish and so bone-weary he couldn't wait to get home to bed.

After arriving home on Monday, Oct. 1, he went to bed early, only to wake up a few hours later, vomiting, confused and with a fever of 102. Between 2:00 and 2:30 a.m., doctors say, his worried wife drove him to the emergency room of JFK Memorial Hospital, just a few blocks away. By morning, his condition had grown so much worse that doctors were forced to put him on a ventilator to help him breathe.

Suspecting that Stevens had spinal meningitis, doctors there drew a sample of his spinal fluid for analysis. It seemed at first to confirm their fears. Spinal fluid is ordinarily clear as spring water; Stevens' spinal fluid was cloudy and packed with white blood cells, a sure sign of infection. Concerned, his doctors called infectious-disease specialist Bush sometime between 6:30 and 7 a.m., while he was en route to the hospital for a meeting.

Bush took the spinal fluid to the hospital's microbiology lab and looked at it under a microscope. What he saw puzzled him. Bush saw large, loaf-shaped blue rods, which aren't ordinarily a cause of meningitis. "They could be bacilli, which I wouldn't expect to cause such a severe infection in an (otherwise) healthy individual," he says he reflected at the time. "Not many bacilli can do that."

One of the few is anthrax. But anthrax, typically an occupational disease of people who work with susceptible animals, made no sense. Doctors had diagnosed fewer than 20 cases of the most deadly form of anthrax in the last century. "Why would I be seeing a case of anthrax," he asked himself, "when they haven't been seen in years?"

Bush ordered four preliminary tests to rule out anthrax as a cause of Steven's illness, but none of them clearly eliminated the possibility. Bush notified the director of the Palm Beach County Health Department, Jean Malecki, about the case. "I didn't want rumors coming out of the hospital that we had a case of anthrax and have her hear it on the street.

"I also thought I might need her help."

On Tuesday, Oct. 2, with Malecki's approval, he shipped samples of Steven's blood and spinal fluid by overnight courier to the state microbiology lab in Jacksonville. By then, Bush felt "pretty sure" his patient had anthrax, but the state's tests also were inconclusive. By the next night, state microbiologists had conducted their own tests. One test seemed to indicate anthrax; a second test did not. None of the tests, however, pointed at another cause.

That night, microbiologists at the state lab contacted the CDC. The Atlanta-based agency sent a plane to Jacksonville to fetch samples and rush them back to a CDC lab for further testing. The samples arrived Thursday morning. Without waiting for the results, the CDC sent 10 epidemiologists and two lab experts to Florida, and two epidemiologists to North Carolina.

Bradley Perkins, of the CDC, deployed the Florida team. Some epidemiologists traced Stevens' movements and contacts; others started calling hospitals to ask about other cases of anthrax. The lab workers continued on to a state lab in Miami to help test an expected flood of samples. On the afternoon of Thursday, Oct. 4., after the field investigation was well underway, the CDC and the state's Jacksonville lab confirmed Bush's worst suspicions: Stevens had become the first American diagnosed with the deadliest form of anthrax since 1978.

'An isolated case'

Florida Secretary of Health John Agwunobi made the first public announcement on the case at a press conference Thursday, Oct. 4. Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson quickly followed up with an announcement at a White House press conference that day, saying Stevens appeared to be "an isolated case."

Stevens' condition continued to get worse. Late Thursday night, Stevens' kidneys failed. On Friday, doctors placed him on dialysis, but to no avail. On Friday afternoon another organ would go: Stevens' heart. "We weren't able to resuscitate him," Bush says.

On Sunday, Oct. 7, the investigation reached a crucial turning point. Medical tests disclosed that one of Stevens' co-workers, mailroom worker Ernesto Blanco, 73, also had been exposed to anthrax bacteria. He had not yet come down with the disease, however, and could be effectively treated with antibiotics. And tests of Stevens' workplace detected a stray spore of anthrax bacterium on his computer keyboard.

Those findings prompted the county to shut down the AMI building. It also shifted the focus of the investigation from the Stevens' visit to North Carolina to AMI headquarters in Lantana. The CDC shipped enough antibiotics to Palm Beach County to treat more than 1,000 people.

And they dispatched three public health advisers to help AMI executives and Palm Beach County health workers gather more than 770 people who had visited the tabloid headquarters since Aug. 1 for anthrax testing and counseling.

By Monday, health workers were swabbing noses to detect anthrax spores. They interviewed employees, counseled them and gave them a 15-day supply of antibiotics. Experts at the state's branch laboratory in Miami and at the CDC were soon working around the clock. Many of the state experts were fresh from a CDC training course on the lab identification of germ warfare agents.

By the end of last week, tests had identified six other AMI employees who had been exposed to anthrax bacteria. One of those, Stephanie Daily, 36, also worked in the mailroom. The identities and work assignments of the other five AMI workers have not been disclosed.

The team leader, Perkins, says that environmental testing found anthrax bacteria in an employee's mailbox, but the FBI has asked the CDC to withhold the employee's name while the criminal investigation is pending.

On the night of Wednesday, Oct. 10, Miami-based U.S. Attorney Guy Lewis announced that, although no evidence had turned up to link the Florida crisis to international bioterrorists, " we are now conducting a criminal investigation of this matter." Florida Health Secretary Agwunobi added: "All the evidence to date indicates that the anthrax issue we face is limited to the AMI building."

Two days later, CDC officials would announce they had begun to investigate similar incidents in New York and Reno. "I didn't think we'd have another situation like this for a long, long time," Perkins says. "But we're better prepared for future events because of it. Some of the folks who worked on this investigation are already involved in New York."

By ROBERT A. ROSENBLATT and JOSH MEYER | Times Staff Writers
October 16, 2001

WASHINGTON - Postal inspectors hunting for the senders of anthrax-laden mail have a number of tools to figure out when and where a letter was mailed. But their techniques may be insufficient to find the individuals who sent the envelopes that have generated anxiety among the public and postal workers, according to current and former postal authorities.

Unless there is a major break--such as figuring out where the anthrax was produced or lifting a matching fingerprint from an envelope--the odds are long that law enforcement investigators will track down the culprits.

"I would say if you sent a letter, you will have a reasonable expectation that you will not get caught," said a former top Postal Inspection Service security administrator. "It's just too hard to track them down."

Working closely with the FBI, postal investigators Monday were trying to lift fingerprints from the letters, including one sent to the office of the Senate majority leader, Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), and to take DNA samples from any saliva found on the envelopes.

Meanwhile, the Postal Service announced Monday that it will furnish gloves and filtering face masks to employees who request them. The agency also announced the formation of a special task force of management, union and major corporate mailers to discuss the threat of biological and chemical materials sent through the mail.

Postmaster General Jack Potter urged Americans to combine vigilance with calm. "We have mobilized our military, but we also must mobilize our common sense," he said. "Panic must not defeat us." He told his agency's workers: "If you see a suspicious package or letter, leave it alone. Don't shake it or bump it. Isolate it, and call for help."

Postal inspectors have had success catching those who send bombs through the mail, but few arrests have been made in incidents in which someone sends a threatening letter, whether the letter actually contained hazardous materials or simply claimed to have dangerous contents, officials acknowledged Monday.

After the Unabomber case, in which explosive devices were sent through the mail, the Postal Service changed its rules, banning any packages weighing more than 16 ounces from being dropped into mailboxes. In such cases, they are returned to the sender or examined by postal authorities. Packages heavier than a pound must be handed directly to a clerk at a post office, who can look for anything suspicious and demand to see the mailer's identification.

But there have been no new special security rules for the vast bulk of the mail flow--the envelopes containing bills, letters and greeting cards. The intricate system--which moves 608 million pieces of mail each day--relies on machines to read virtually all addresses and ZIP codes--even hand-scrawled envelopes--and relatively few workers touch an envelope during the sorting process unless it becomes jammed in a machine.

However, employees handle the mail before and after the machines sort it and read the ZIP codes. They unload volumes of mail picked up at boxes, load the trays feeding the sorting machines and prepare the mail for distribution by carriers, who drive and walk the routes to hand-deliver the mail at homes and businesses.

In investigating the anthrax reports in three states and on Capitol Hill, authorities did handwriting analysis on the letters and scrutinized the envelopes to see if they bore any special characteristics that would help determine where they were sold and who bought them, postal and FBI officials said. Authorities are also trying to determine if the packages containing anthrax are from the same source.

And they spent the day trying to "back trace" the mail to see where it came from, and when.

In some cases, it may be possible to tell which particular mail drop was used. Authorities also will be able to determine when a letter was dropped off within a few hours, since U.S. postmarks bear an "a.m." or "p.m." stamp. That "window" can further be identified based on the time of day that mail is picked up in that jurisdiction, the particular routes taken by mail carriers and when the letter was received at a central processing center, according to Bill Hall, acting inspector in charge of the Southern California division of the Postal Service inspectors unit.

In rare cases, it may be possible to get video footage of the sender, since some mail drops are situated near businesses that operate video cameras, such as gas stations and banks.

But they also cautioned that the odds are great that they will not be able to back trace the anthrax-ridden mail to its original senders, especially if the senders took steps to cover their tracks.

"The chances of figuring out where they came from are slim and none," said the former Postal Service investigator.

In the past, many threatening letters turned out to be hoaxes. During 1999 and 2000, there were 178 letters mailed in the United States with threats that they contained anthrax, Hall said. But none of the letters actually contained anthrax, "so we didn't back trace" many of the letters, Hall said. There were 60 threatening letters before the Sept. 11 terrorist attack, none of them legitimate.

In its announcement Monday, the Postal Service sought to reassure its anxious workers, promising the gloves and masks on request, and offering nitrile gloves to those who might be allergic to conventional latex ones. Some workers concerned with the possible health threats from dust in mail processing plants or from the solvents used in inks already had been using masks or gloves.

The Postal Service has promised its unions a nationwide video conference today "giving better and hopefully more specific management instructions and guidance on this issue," said Tom Fahey, a spokesman with the American Postal Workers Union, which represents 366,000 employees.

The former postal investigator said that postal carriers have become terrified of handling the mail despite assurances that anthrax is usually spread only when a letter is opened. The drumbeat of news about more and more anthrax-laden letters is causing waves of near-panic at post offices around the nation, he said.

"Postal inspectors are getting calls from mail rooms all over the place, asking, 'What do we do? They want to know how to identify it,' " said the former administrator, who remains as a consultant to the Postal Service.

Anthrax: Reporters Without Borders concerned about threats against the press

Reporters Without Borders is deeply concerned about the death from anthrax, on 5 October, of an American journalist, and about the disclosure afterwards of twelve more cases of the same disease - all of them connected to the press or to the inquiry into the anthrax issue. Our organization remains cautious about the meaning of this very issue, because so far, no inquiry has been able to show a link between the origin of the bacillus and the identity of its senders. Besides, for several cases, the exact circumstances of the contamination are unclear. Moreover, the presence of the bacillus in two letters sent to a Democratic Party leader in the Senate and a Microsoft branch in Reno (Nevada) excludes the hypothesis of an attack specifically targeting the media.

Robert Stevens, a photographer for The Sun, a publication of American Media Inc. (AMI), in Boca Raton (Florida), died on 5 October after contracting a pulmonary form of anthrax. A few days later, Ernesto Blanco, responsible for the mail service in the AMI building, proved to be contaminated by the same bacillus. His colleague, Stephanie Dalley, working at the same service, turned out to be a healthy germ carrier. On 14 October it was disclosed that five other persons working for AMI had been in contact with the bacillus, but without catching the disease. So far, the circumstances of the contamination of the press group employees is unknown. Several publications of the group had previously described Ossama Bin Laden in an outrageous way.

Furthermore, tests on Erin O'Connor, from the NBC television network, based in New York City, revealed on 12 October that the journalist was suffering a cutaneous form of anthrax, less dangerous than the pulmonary one. The journalist could have been contaminated after opening a letter addressed to Tom Brokaw, a star TV news presenter. The letter, sent on 18 October from Trenton (New Jersey), contained several brown granules revealing traces of anthrax. In the following days, a police officer and two employees of a laboratory investigating the suspicious substance were declared to be healthy germ carriers. Meanwhile, another NBC employee showed signs of infection from anthrax.

On 15 October, Dave Westin, ABC News president, disclosed during a press conference that an ABC employee's seven-month-old baby had caught a cutaneous form of the disease. The baby had been taken to the ABC office on 28 September. Meanwhile, according to Bernard Kerik, the New York City police chief, nothing could prove that he had been infected at ABC.

On 12 October, the Governor of Nevada announced that traces of the bacillus had been discovered in a letter received by a branch of Microsoft in Reno (Nevada). Nobody has been infected, however. On 15 October, tests on a letter addressed to Tom Daschle, leader of Democrat senators, showed traces of anthrax. The people who were present when the letter was opened were not infected, Daschle stated on 16 October.

Investigators have still not ascertained who the senders of these infected letters are. Although President George Bush stated for the first time, on 15 October, that some links between the head of the Al Qaida network and the 11 September attacks were likely, he acknowledged that he had no accurate proof. As for the bacillus found in Florida, it allegedly came from an Iowa laboratory which sent it to other laboratories worldwide.

Fastest tests for anthrax not always the most accurate
Flip-flopping results underscore flaws in early detection methods

By ELIZABETH SHOGREN
Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON -- Pornographic material mailed to a Microsoft office in Reno, Nev., tested positive for anthrax on an initial screening. A second, more sophisticated test came out negative, but a third test -- all at the same Nevada State Lab -- showed positive results.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta is now looking at the material, and a spokesman says preliminary indications are that the sample is negative.

The flip-flopping results highlight how unreliable tests for the deadly bacterium can be -- both for suspect substances and the people who may have been exposed to them.

Experts say field tests are particularly error-prone and can produce false positive or false negative results. More extensive laboratory procedures have their own limitations. And accurate tests for bacterium in people are even more problematic.

The inconclusive results have heightened the agony for the people involved and the nation watching their plight so carefully.

But public health officials involved in the anthrax scare and experts around the country say certainty is not possible given the fallibility of the tests.

"It's confusing to the public but it's not confusing to us, because we know there can be equivocal testing that needs to be verified," said Bob Salcido, a Nevada investigator who worked on the case.

Even when the stakes are high, conclusive findings take time. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle's office discovered a suspicious letter about 10:30 a.m. Monday, but Capitol Police did not get final confirmation that the substance was anthrax until late that evening.

"This certainly warranted rapid response. Tom Daschle's office would get the fastest analysis available," said Calvin Chue, a research scientist for Johns Hopkins University's Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies in Baltimore.

Investigators on the scene of an anthrax scare can do preliminary field tests with a simple device that resembles a home pregnancy tests or with high-tech, suitcase-sized DNA scanners -- the gold standard for field tests. Both have limitations.

"None of the rapid tests can be considered a final confirmation," Chue said. "The trade-off for being very rapid is it's not 100 percent accurate. There is no single test that is 100 percent."

A false positive can result if the test is fooled by another member of the bacillus family, which includes anthrax and a large number of less threatening bugs.

"These tests are very fast but they do have a tendency for false positives," said Gary Andersen, a senior scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif.

False negatives are possible if there was simply not enough bacteria in the sample that was tested.

"This is why a sample may test negative a couple times, but a more sensitive third test would pick it up and you can say the test is positive," Chue said.

Back in the lab, scientists spread a specimen in a petri dish and place it in an incubator for 18 to 24 hours at body temperature to see if the anthrax bacterium grows. Once the bacterial colonies appear, several different tests are used to try to confirm the presence of anthrax.

In the Nevada case, two of these tests came out positive and another -- a direct fluorescent antibody test -- was negative, according to Salcido, who works at the state emergency operations center.

The final verdict lies with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has the ability to perform sophisticated DNA tests as well as more advanced bacterial culture analysis.

"The one we have is looking like it's going to be negative," said Lisa Swenarski of the CDC.

"The bottom line is that's not going to determine whether someone needs treatment or not. Even if you test negative you need to stay on the antibiotics."

The incubation period may be as long as 50 days for anthrax spores that have been inhaled. That is why people are given 60-day regimes of antibiotics.

By PETE YOST, Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Federal investigators are trying to track anthrax-laden letters back to their point of origin as a New Jersey postal carrier who may have handled the envelopes tested positive for the disease.

Authorities offered $1 million for information leading to the arrest of those who sent the anthrax.

The female letter carrier who may have handled the envelopes sent to NBC News anchorman Tom Brokaw in New York City and Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle in Washington worked out of the West Trenton, N.J., local post office facility. She and a CBS News employee who opens Dan Rather's mail in New York brought to six the number of people infected with the disease since Oct. 4, including a Florida man who died.

The Washington Post reported in Friday's editions that FBI agents were tracing the mail route of the female letter carrier, who had contracted cutaneous, or the skin form, of anthrax, suggesting the anthrax-laced letters may have come from her route.

The Post also said a worker at a Washington facility that delivers mail to Congress had tested positive for anthrax exposure, the first case off the grounds of the Capitol that appeared associated with the letter to Daschle, officials said.

Officials were almost certain that a maintenance worker who serviced mail-sorting machines at the Trenton post office's regional distribution center in Hamilton, N.J., has anthrax, the Postal Inspection Service reported.

Another postal worker at the Hamilton facility was being tested for possible exposure to anthrax. The two employees were being treated and taking antibiotics, Acting Gov. Donald DiFrancesco said. Customers who visited the West Trenton post office in the past three weeks were urged to see a doctor if they had any symptoms of illness or a rash.

As reports of new anthrax exposures came in, Bush administration officials tried to assure a jittery nation that authorities were on the alert for terrorist acts.

``Our antennae are up for all conceivable risks,'' said Tom Ridge, the new chief of homeland security. While saying there was no specific threat, the government notified doctors nationwide that they should watch for possible cases of smallpox, food poisoning and deadly viruses like Ebola.

Surgeon General David Satcher said stockpiles of antibiotics were sufficient to respond to the anthrax threat.

Congressional activity was largely shut down by the anthrax scare — the House officially in recess because of the threat, the Senate in session but with its sprawling complex of three office buildings closed.

Officials said they had received laboratory results for hundreds of people at the Capitol, but no additional reports of positive tests for anthrax exposure beyond the 31 congressional workers disclosed on Wednesday. Those exposed included 23 aides to Daschle, five police officers and three aides to Sen. Russell Feingold, who occupies a Senate office building suite adjoining Daschle's.

CBS officials said the aide to Rather, Claire Fletcher, 27, was recovering. ``She's doing fine,'' network news president Andrew Heyward said. ``Her prognosis is excellent.''

Federal investigators, meanwhile, pressed for evidence at research labs and universities that may have access to anthrax and questioned pharmacies to see if anyone tried to buy large amounts of antibiotics before the nationwide anthrax scare.

One scenario being explored is whether someone living in the United States might have worked with a foreign country or an overseas domestic terrorist group with enhanced biochemical capabilities, officials said.

``We think it may be ill-advised to think about the situation in terms of an either-or matrix,'' Attorney General John Ashcroft said. He also raised the possibility that the anthrax attacks could be the work of more than one homegrown terrorist.

``It might well be that we have opportunists in the United States or terrorists in the United States who are acting in ways that are unrelated,'' the attorney general added.

Ashcroft said that he could not rule out a connection between the anthrax attacks and the events of Sept. 11.

Tests have concluded that the anthrax in the letter sent to Brokaw was of the same strain as the anthrax sent to an American Media Inc. in Boca Raton, Fla., where one man died.

Investigators were intrigued by the fact that the anthrax sent to NBC in September was in a heavy granular substance that would not likely go airborne while the anthrax found in the later Daschle letter was professionally made and more likely to float into the air.

Given that the similar handwriting and envelopes suggested a single sender, the differing anthrax specimens suggest the sender may have received sophisticated assistance in between the Brokaw and Daschle letters, government officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Some of the traditional evidence-gathering was slowed because the envelopes were contaminated with anthrax, making tests such as fingerprinting, DNA analysis and saliva more risky for lab technicians.

In other developments:

—Preliminary tests at two more Florida post offices that handled mail for the American Media publisher where anthrax was first found have a ``minuscule'' amount of anthrax, state health officials said. The facilities in Boca Raton and Lake Worth were to be cleaned and reopened Friday.

—Final tests on a letter in a Microsoft office in Reno, Nevada, came back negative for anthrax, Gov. Kenny Guinn said. 

Moscow shrugs off anthrax claims
By Sergei Blagov

MOSCOW - Russia has dismissed claims that the anthrax outbreaks in the United States are linked to the legacy of the Soviet biological warfare program, but ordinary Russians are not convinced by Moscow's reassurances that they are safe.

Allegations of a Soviet connection to the US anthrax cases have been rampant since beginning of the scare. A former Biopreparat factory employee, Ken Alibek, alias Kanajan Alibekov, claimed that anthrax spores discovered in the United States had been produced at a factory in Kazakhstan, at Stepnogorsk.

Denying the claims, Biopreparat factory deputy director Valentin Yevstigneyev told Kazakh state-run television on October 22 that his facility had no connection whatsoever with anthrax spores discovered in the US. "Alibekov, a former Biopreparat employee, is either uninformed or is making deliberately libellous allegations," he said. Yevstigneyev said there had been projects to develop biological weapons in Stepnogorsk but the projects were shut down after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. By embarking on the project, the Soviet Union had violated the Biological Weapons Convention that it signed in 1972.

Russia's Defense Ministry also dismissed media speculation about a possible "Russian connection" with the US cases. "Any attempts to find evidence linking the US anthrax outbreaks to Russia are absolutely groundless," the ministry said in a statement on October 19. "All anti-bio-warfare units of the Defense Ministry do not pose any environmental hazard, while Russia's anti-bio-warfare troops possess all necessary means to deal with any threat," the statement added.

On April 2, 1979, an anthrax outbreak infected 94 people and killed at least 64 in Sverdlovsk, now called Ekaterinburg, some 1,360 kilometers east of the capital, Moscow. The government claimed the deaths were caused by anthrax from infected meat, but even now some Russian officials find the version of the Soviet government unbelievable.

Eyewitnesses, too, refused to subscribe to the government's version. "The roofs and walls of our houses were washed twice by people in masks," said Zinaida Vikulova, a survivor. Thousands of people were vaccinated and treated with antibiotics. Nina Berdyugina, former chief therapist in Sverdlovsk, said: "It was not meat poisoning, it was something else. The KGB secret service investigated the incident."

US officials have long suspected that the outbreak was caused by an accidental release of anthrax spores from a Soviet biological weapons facility located in the city.

After the demise of the Soviet Union, President Yeltsin Boris admitted, without going into details, that the anthrax outbreak was the result of military activity. He also signed a decree banning work on biological weapons and officially acknowledging that the Soviet Union had violated the 1972 Convention.

In April 1994, Yeltsin signed a decree to compensate survivors of the Sverdlovsk incident. However, according to Lev Fedorov, chairperson of Russia's Chemical Safety Union, the decree stipulated that only those who had been infected at their work places would be compensated. "As a result, people infected outdoors or at their homes, in other words most of the victims, received no compensation," he said.

In a 1999 book on the Soviet biological weapons program, Biohazard, Ken Alibek indicated that a missing air filter in an exhaust system was to blame for the Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak. The incident remains the only case of inhaled anthrax on record in the former Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union's biological weapons program included a network of germ factories, which produced hundreds of tonnes of anthrax spores, according to researchers. Military researchers were engaged in attempts to create lab-designed lethal bugs, and researchers were dispatched to Africa and Asia to collect rare local bacteria and viruses.

"During the Cold War, the two foes [the Soviet Union and the United States] prepared weapons of destruction," said Beniamin Cherkassky, a bacteriologist at the Russian Academy. Referring to the mail scare in the US, he said: "Mail delivery is not the most efficient way of employing biological weapons, while letters were arguably designed to cause panic by attacking media outlets."

Russia has lived with anthrax for centuries. In the 19th century up to 15,000 Russians contracted anthrax and 3,000 died of it each year. Even now some 15-20 people still contract anthrax each year, according to health authorities. Some 35,000 burial sites for cattle infected with natural anthrax exist in Russia, and 15,000 sites can be found in other former Soviet states.

Despite all the evidence, Russian officials still try to convince the public that there is nothing to fear about anthrax. There will be no bio-war because "tens of tonnes" of anthrax powder are needed to cause mass outbreaks, Russia's chief veterinary official, Guennady Onischenko, said, adding that Russia produces two million doses of anthrax vaccine per year. Officials also dismiss the possibility of new germ leaks. Nikolai Urakov, head of Russia's State Biological Research Center in Obolensk, south of Moscow, told RTR television that stocks of deadly germs were being guarded as tightly as nuclear facilities.

But ordinary Russians are not convinced. According to a recent opinion poll, 64 percent of Russians fear accidental leaks of dangerous substances rather than bio-terrorism, which is dreaded by 36 percent of the respondents.

Although mass vaccination is not contemplated, caution is required in Russia, Onischenko said. "On October 17, we informed regional health authorities to be vigilant with 'odd letters'," he said.

Russia, too, has become subject to an anthrax scare. On October 23, the Tomsk region in Siberia introduced extra measures against anthrax. Farit Astakhov, head of the regional mail service, ordered his employees to sort mail in gloves and respirators. Tomsk experienced an anthrax outbreak in 1977, when seven people were infected.

(Inter Press Service) 

Washington, October 27 [2001]

Initial tests on anthrax sent to Senator Majority Leader Tom Daschle found a chemical additive that keeps the spores airborne and is a trademark of Iraq’s biological weapons programme, ABC News has reported.

Three well-placed but separate sources told ABC News World News Tonight yesterday that the chemical agent, called bentonite, was discovered during a series of tests on the Daschle letter performed at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and at other sites.

The substance helps keep the tiny anthrax particles in mid-air by preventing them from sticking together.

Bentonite is a trademark of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons programme, the report said, although ABC noted that it could be used by other countries.

The White House quickly denied that tests on the letter to Daschle had shown the presence of bentonite.

“It’s not true,” spokesman Ari Fleischer said.

ABC reported that government officials were performing several supplemental rounds of tests to verify the initial findings because of the significance of the bentonite discovery.

Meanwhile, experts said it was possible that someone else had produced the bentonite using the Iraqi technique, according to ABC.

The ABC report says that the substance is found in soil around the world, including in the USA and in Iraq.

But officials cautioned that even if Iraq or maverick Iraqi scientists were the source of the anthrax, it remained to be seen who had actually sent the tainted letters.

Fourteen persons have now contracted either inhalation anthrax or the less serious manifestation of the disease, skin anthrax, in the USA but officials have not established who is behind the scare. Three persons have already died.

Meanwhile, trace amounts of anthrax bacteria have been found in the offices of three members of the US House of Representatives in a government building next to the US Capitol, the police said yesterday night.

Lt Dan Nichols of the US Capitol police said the anthrax had been detected on the sixth and seventh floors of Longworth House Office Building, in the offices of Democratic Reps. John Baldacci of Maine and Rush Holt of New Jersey and Republican Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana.

Nichols said authorities were still awaiting the results of tests taken in other parts of Longworth Building, one of three large structures that contain the offices of House members.

US health officials have decided to issue anthrax vaccines for investigators and others at high risk of exposure to the dangerous germ warfare agent, CNN said.

“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is saying today it has decided to administer the anthrax vaccine to certain high-risk workers,’’ said CNN yesterday, citing CDC officials.

It said criminal investigators and decontamination personnel were seen as “high-risk’’ workers best suited for the vaccine.

The vaccine, its use now restricted to certain laboratory workers and members of the US armed forces, could later be extended to some postal workers.

Meanwhile, former UN weapons inspector Timothy Trevan said “It means to me that Iraq becomes the prime suspect as the source of the anthrax used in these letters,”

In the process of destroying much of Iraq’s biological arsenal, UN teams first discovered Iraq was using bentonite.

“That discovery was proof positive of how they were using bentonite to make small particles,” former UN weapons inspector Richard Spertzel told ABC. 

PTI, AFP, Reuters

INTELLIGENCE agents from Prague to Swansea are uncovering a trail of clues that point to President Saddam Hussein of Iraq having a hand in al-Qaeda’s terrorist missions.

Iraqi ministers have spent the week protesting Baghdad’s innocence to the United Nations, but will not say why some of its diplomats who met Mohammed Atta, one of the suspected September 11 hijackers, disappeared from their European posts after that date.

Nor will Baghdad explain why Saddam’s agents were spotted at various times this year with Atta in Germany, Spain, Italy and the Czech Republic.

Many in the Pentagon are sure Saddam helped to orchestrate the simultaneous hijackings and the anthrax attacks, but President Bush and Tony Blair have yet to be convinced. To get proof of the Baghdad connection, senior officials in the Bush Administration even sent a former CIA Director to Britain on a covert mission.

Intelligence officers in Washington have deliberately leaked the testimony of an Iraqi defector hiding in Turkey who said that Saddam set up a terrorist training school on the outskirts of Istanbul to practice hijacking a Boeing passenger aircraft. The CIA says that it is assessing the claims.

Meanwhile, a special FBI team sent to Europe to uncover al-Qaeda cells say that they are studying a report from Prague that anthrax spores were given to Atta during his last meeting in Prague in April with Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, the Iraqi consul. “If it can be shown that Atta was given a flask of anthrax,” a Western intelligence official said, “then the link will have been made with Osama bin Laden and with Iraq.”

What is known is that Atta made at least four visits to the Czech Republic to see Mr al-Ani. Czech intelligence officers who saw them embrace at Ruzyne Airport admit that they had no idea who the man greeting Saddam’s envoy was. When they were followed to the headquarters of Radio Free Europe the suspicion was that they may have been plotting to bomb it.

Yesterday the German newspaper Bild suggested a more sinister motive for their meetings. The claim, according to Israeli security sources, is that Atta was handed a vacuum flask of anthrax by his Iraqi contact. From Prague, it is believed Atta flew to Newark. From New Jersey, letters laced with anthrax were sent to broadcasters and politicians in New York, Washington and Florida. Czech officials have been to Washington to reveal all they know, but they can’t question the Iraqi envoy because Mr al-Ani was deported from Prague in April for “activities incompatible with his status as a diplomat”.

Stanislav Gross, the Czech Interior Minister, confirmed yesterday a meeting in Prague between Atta and Mr al-Ani just weeks before the envoy was expelled.

US scientists believe the anthrax spores sent to Tom Daschle, the Senate Majority Leader, had been treated with a sophisticated chemical additive only three countries can manufacture: Russia, America and possibly Iraq.

Former UN weapons inspectors suggest that Saddam could have helped bin Laden to get nuclear material. Critics of the Pentagon’s view say that Iraq would not share its nuclear secrets, but might watch for others trying to buy on the black market.

Italian police say they are investigating how Saddam also used his Embassy in Rome to foster his partnership with al-Qaeda. One of Saddam’s intelligence agents, Habib Faris Abdullah al-Mamouri, was sent to be the new headmaster of a school for Iraqi diplomats in Italy. The bogus headmaster has not been seen in Rome since July, shortly after he also met Atta. The pair are also said to have been together in Hamburg and Prague.

There is no proof the men were in direct contact, but as one intelligence source in Madrid said: “They chose a strange time and place to take a holiday.” The Rome daily Il Messaggero, quoting Western intelligence sources, said of Mr al-Mamouri that “he spent more time pursuing contacts helpful to the Iraqi regime among fundamentalist Islamic groups than he had on his supposed teaching duties”.

Italian officials say that Mr al-Mamouri held the rank of general in the Iraqi secret service, and from 1982 to 1990 worked in the Special Operations Branch forging Baghdad’s links with Islamic fundamentalist groups in Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Gulf and Sudan. He was transferred to his “teaching duties” in 1998, although all the Iraqi Embassy will say of his sudden departure is that “he had money problems”.

Although Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, and others in his department are sceptical of Saddam’s involvement, there are many influential figures in US intelligence who claim that Iraq’s links with bin Laden go back to the early Nineties.

Desperate for allies after the Gulf War, Saddam sent Faruq Hijazi, his secret service director, to Sudan in 1994, where bin Laden then had his headquarters. The meetings were brokered by Hassan al-Tourabi, the Sudanese Muslim leader, who was bin Laden’s protector. The Sudanese belatedly offered to show the CIA all they knew about bin Laden and his visits, to ingratiate themselves back into the international fold, but the Americans scorned the approach.

The Iraqi connection with bin Laden continued when the terrorist leader moved to Afghanistan. Mr Hijazi, who is now Saddam’s envoy in Turkey, reportedly met the al-Qaeda leader at his fortified home in Kandahar and in Kabul.

Mr Hijazi also disappeared from his embassy last month after the first reports of his meetings with al-Qaeda, and he is believed to have slipped back into Ankara earlier this week. The Foreign Ministry in Turkey says it has not been told that the Ambassador had returned, although the Iraqi Embassy says that he is “resting”. What puzzles Turkish officials is that there are no airport records of his return.

US Intelligence says Saddam cultivated the relationship with al-Qaeda at the start of 1998 by inviting the man regarded as bin Laden’s deputy — Ayman Zawahiri — to dine with Taha Yasin Ramadan, the Iraqi Vice-President. That was such a success that a delegation from al-Qaeda attended Saddam’s birthday celebrations that April, and it was during this trip that arrangements were made for bin Laden recruits to receive the sort of advanced weapons training they could not get in their camps in Afghanistan.

The hand-picked bin Laden agents found themselves under the supervision of Saddam’s violent son, Uday, who wanted to conscript some of bin Laden’s skilled fighters into his own militia. Bin Laden reciprocated by dispatching “400 Afghan Arabs” to Iraq to fight Kurds.

The most curious attempt to implicate Saddam was in South Wales last month when James Woolsey, the former CIA Director, is reported to have visited a Swansea college. The hope was that the testimony of college lecturers and recollections of former students could be used to convince sceptics in the US Administration and Downing Street that Saddam has helped to provide agents to carry out al-Qaeda attacks.

Mr Woolsey, who refuses to give details of his British itinerary, has always believed that the Iraqi leader masterminded the 1993 terrorist bombing of the World Trade Centre.

The trip to the Swansea Institute was to establish the true identity of one of bin Laden’s bombers, who claims to have studied computer-aided engineering in South Wales.

Additional reporting by Roger Boyes in Berlin; Richard Owen in Rome and Andrew Finkel in Istanbul

Washingtonpost.com
Following is the transcript of ABC's "This Week," hosted by Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts.

Guests: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld; British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw; Dr. David Franz, former commander of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases; Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; Washington Post columnist George Will; and George Stephanopoulos.

DONALDSON: This morning, war on two fronts. In Afghanistan, after the heaviest round of bombing so far, U.S. forces are still struggling to destroy the Taliban. With winter and Ramadan fast approaching, is the operation succeeding? We'll ask Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.

ROBERTS: Plus, the unseen enemy at home. As the anthrax scare spreads through Washington, where is it coming from, and can it be controlled? We'll ask Dr. Anthony Fauci from the National Institutes of Health and bioterrorism expert Dr. David Franz.

ANNOUNCER: That's This Week, featuring George Will and George Stephanopoulos. And joining the round table, ABC News White House correspondent Terry Moran.

Now, from Washington, Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts.

DONALDSON: Welcome to our program.

And Cokie, welcome back.

ROBERTS: Good to be back, Sam, thank you.

DONALDSON: Well, on the battle front overseas, almost seven weeks into the war against terrorism, U.S. war planes are now striking at the Taliban front lines in northern Afghanistan, perhaps a prelude to a push by the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance forces toward Kabul.

And heavy bombing of Kabul itself continues. Pictures from Al Jazeera, Arab television, reportedly show civilian casualties caused by the latest U.S. raids. These 10 civilians were killed, according to witness reports. U.S. officials say great care is taken to avoid civilian casualties, but the Taliban are seeking to exploit mistakes in a propaganda war aimed at turning the Arab world against the U.S. campaign.

Iraq's deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, tells ``The London Telegraph'' his country is not producing anthrax and calls that charge ridiculous, but says it is only a matter of time before the United States and Britain attack Iraq.

Here on the home front, the effort to prevent further cases of anthrax and to find its source continues.

Our chief investigative reporter, Brian Ross, has the latest from New York.

Brian?

BRIAN ROSS, ABC CORRESPONDENT: Thanks, Sam. As two Postal Service workers were buried this weekend, victims of the deadly inhalation anthrax, more than 10,000 people remained on antibiotics, from postal employees to justices of the Supreme Court. The fact is, investigators simply do not know if there are other, as-yet-undiscovered anthrax letters somewhere in the system.

To be on the safe side, authorities continue to expand the circle of people who should take antibiotics, and the post office in Princeton, New Jersey, was closed after what was reported as the discovery of just one spore of anthrax.

The trail remains cold for investigators in New Jersey, who are left hoping the $1 million reward will turn up something, but so far it has not. And despite continued White House denials, now four well-placed and separate sources have told ABC News that initial tests on the anthrax by the U.S. Army at Fort Dietrich, Maryland, have detected trace amounts of the chemical additives bentonite and silica, which many experts say are trademarks, although from hard evidence, of the Iraqi biological weapons program.

At the same time those results were coming in, officials in the Czech Republic confirmed that hijacked ringleader Mohamed Atta had met at least once with a senior Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague, raising what authorities consider some extremely provocative questions.

And this weekend, FBI agents are conducting anthrax tests on two cars Mohamed Atta had owned, tests an FBI spokesperson said no one had previously thought were necessary.

Cokie?

ROBERTS: Thank you, Brian.

And now joining us is Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Thank you so much for being with us, Mr. Secretary.

RUMSFELD: Thank you.

ROBERTS: I want to get to that question about Iraq later. But first, the war. There've been stories over the weekend that give the perception that this war after three weeks is not going very well, that the Taliban is getting stronger, that Osama bin Laden is still at large, that one of the chief opposition leaders has been assassinated, and that the Red Cross warehouse has been hit by U.S. bombs.

Is the war just not going as well as you had hoped it would at this point?

RUMSFELD: Oh, no, quite the contrary. It's going very much the way we expected when it began. Three weeks is not a very long time if one thinks about it. And the progress has been measurable. We feel that the air campaign has been effective.

The fact that for a period we did not have good targets has now shifted, because we are getting much better information from the ground in terms of targets. Also, the pressure that has been put on fairly continuously these past weeks has forced people to move and to change locations in a way that gives additional targeting opportunities.

ROBERTS: Did the military help Abdul Haq, the opposition leader who was assassinated Friday?

RUMSFELD: My understanding of that situation was that he had decided to come back in the country on a--in a form and manner of his own choosing, and that he did request assistance, and that he received some assistance. The assistance unfortunately was from the air, and he was on the ground. And regrettably, he was killed.

ROBERTS: But he did receive assistance from the U.S. military.

RUMSFELD: That's my understanding. No, I didn't say that. I said he requested assistance and received it.

ROBERTS: But not from the U.S. military?

RUMSFELD: No, it was from another agency.

ROBERTS: OK. From an intelligence agency, I would take it.

RUMSFELD: It was from another element of the government.

ROBERTS: OK. The question of victory is one that is some question of definition, and I think that polling generally shows that getting Osama bin Laden is considered an important part of this campaign. And I want to show you some things that you said over the last week about this question.

You said, ``The military role will be over there when the Taliban and the Al Qaeda are gone, gone, and that is what this is all about.'' Then you said of Osama, ``He's got a lot of money, he's got a lot of people who support him, and I just don't know whether we'll be successful.'' And finally, ``Until you have him, you do not have him.''

So what is the progress? Until he's no longer functioning as a terrorist, he is functioning as a terrorist. That sounds like you think that he is still the problem, and until we get him, we've not won, but we might not get him.

RUMSFELD: Well, those are a few of the things I've said on the subject. I've said a great many things on the subject. I've also said there's--I have every reason to believe we will find him. I've also said that I don't think that he's the whole problem.

This is not about a single person, it is about the problem of terrorism. He is one element of Al Qaeda. There are a lot of leaders. If he were--disappeared today off the face of the earth, there would still be the Al Qaeda network, there would still be other terrorist networks, and there still would be worldwide terrorism that would need to be dealt with.

So I think that it makes--it's a mistake to too great an extent to try to personalize what's going on in this world. We lost thousands of people here in the United States. The president has declared war on international terrorism. He is hard at taking the war to them, because there's no way to defend everywhere in the world against terrorists. You simply must go find them and root out those networks.

That is what the--is under way. To think only about one man, I think, is a mistake. Will we get him? I think we will. And I certainly hope so.

ROBERTS: Why not put in massive ground troops now to go in and find the elements of Al Qaeda and hopefully also Osama?

RUMSFELD: Well, we've not ruled out the use of ground troops.

ROBERTS: And is the possibility that they will go in and go in soon?

RUMSFELD: Well, I think if one hasn't ruled them--I didn't say soon, but I think if someone has not ruled out the use of ground troops, there certainly is that possibility.

ROBERTS: But you're not saying they're going to go in any time soon. And in great numbers?

RUMSFELD: Well, that wouldn't be very wise of me, would it, to...

ROBERTS: And...

RUMSFELD: ... to say that we think something's going to happen in the period immediately ahead. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to talk about what we might or might not do.

ROBERTS: The question of timetable, you've also said, is important not to have a timetable, that it has to go according to how the war goes. But you heard over the weekend that President Musharraf of Pakistan used the echo word from Vietnam, ``quagmire.'' And then he said there does need to be a timetable.

Here's what he said. ``Military action must be brought to an end as soon as possible, and if it is unable to achieve its military goals in a certain time, we need to switch to a political strategy.''

Problems with the coalition falling apart?

RUMSFELD: Well, first of all, there's nothing in that statement that anyone could disagree with. No one would want a military campaign to go on longer than necessary. And he said it should be as--brought to an end as soon as possible. Everyone would want it to be--end as soon as possible.

Second, there is no coalition. There are multiple coalitions. And we have said that from the very beginning. We are getting all kinds of different assistance from different countries all across the globe. And the--about, oh, a week or two ago, I said, You know, some day in the next period, someone's going to say, Oh, the coalition's falling apart, the implication being, if one country decides they don't want to participate in one element of what it is we're doing, that therefore, quote, ``the coalition'' is falling apart.

We have said from day one, there is no single coalition, there are multiple coalitions. Countries are going to help us in the way they feel best. And we are getting enormous support from all across the world.

ROBERTS: But--so you're saying if Pakistan pulls out, that that's OK?

RUMSFELD: Pakistan's not going to pull out. The president of Pakistan has a very difficult situation. One has to appreciate how difficult that is. He is doing a terrific job, in my personal view, in managing that very difficult situation. And he is being exceedingly cooperative with us.

ROBERTS: Now, there is a perception, certainly, here in Washington that part of the reason that this war is not widened to go--you talked about going after terrorism all over the world--to go into Iraq, and you heard Brian Ross's report that the confirmation that Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence official, and this suspicion about anthrax and Iraq, and that this administration doesn't want o say the word ``Iraq'' for fear of having to go in, and that then the Arab world could fall apart.

RUMSFELD: This administration is not afraid of saying the word ``Iraq.'' Iraq's been on the terrorist list for years. There is no question but that Iraq is a state that has committed terrorist acts and has sponsored terrorist acts.

ROBERTS: Do you think it was--the meeting with Mohamed Atta was significant in terms of September 11?

RUMSFELD: I--we will know that only after the proper law enforcement people investigate that. Clearly, the meeting is not nothing, it is something notable.

ROBERTS: And the reports that the anthrax could have been tampered with by this bentonite that is Iraqi based?

RUMSFELD: Yes, I am really not into could-haves and might-haves. I think that in a position of responsibility in a government, I've got an obligation to talk about what I know about and to not speculate about those things, and I know that serious people are looking at both of those matters seriously.

ROBERTS: In the military.

RUMSFELD: In the United States government.

ROBERTS: And if, in fact, it turns out that it was Iraq that infiltrated the anthrax, what do we do?

RUMSFELD: Well, that is a hypothetical question that is--what--the kind of thing that ends up on the president of the United States' desk frequently, and those are tough decisions, and we'll just have to see.

ROBERTS: There's a sense, of course, that the coalition that was the--there for the Gulf War kept the United States from going after Saddam at the time. As you know better than I, there are a lot of people in this administration, in your Defense Department, who think that that was a mistake and that we should do it now.

RUMSFELD: There is--there's no question but that there's been a debate in the world as to how that conflict might have ended differently, and there's also no question but that Saddam is still a threat to his neighbors. He is a threat to the Kurds in the north of his country, he's a threat to the Shia in the south, he's a threat to his neighbors in Iran, and he's a threat to...

ROBERTS: Is he a threat to us?

RUMSFELD: ... Jordan. And he clearly, as a terrorist state, is a threat to other countries in the world, including the United States.

He has been contained to some extent because of Operation Northern Watch and Southern Watch, where the United States and coalition aircraft fly missions to prevent him from getting a head start to try to impose his will on his neighbors again.

It is a--it is true there are people around, in and out of government, who wish he weren't there, and certainly I'm one of them.

ROBERTS: But no plans to go after him at the moment.

RUMSFELD: We're doing what we're doing, and I will say this, the president has said this is a war against terrorist networks across the globe. There are many more than just Al Qaeda. They are in many more countries beyond Afghanistan. And it is something that we as a country and the many countries assisting us are currently doing.

It--we have to remember that what we see is only part of what's happening. The number of people who've been arrested, the number of bank accounts that have been frozen, the amount of intelligence that's been gathered, the law enforcement work that's going on, is in addition every bit as important as the military part that's taking place.

ROBERTS: Let me just ask you about something you just said, and we're about out of time. But what we see is just part of what's happening. There's some sense that we're losing the propaganda war, and those pictures we saw of those children at the beginning of the program have taken the place in our minds of the pictures of the World Trade Center being blown up.

Why not allow more press access so that the United States press can show pictures that fight the Arab press?

RUMSFELD: The--I don't--I'm not an expert on this subject, but my understanding is that the United States government during this period, with respect to the military element, has been enormously forthcoming, and the press has been involved in as many aspects as I believe has ever been the case of things where it's humanly possible.

The press has not been parachuting in on Special Operations activities into hostile environment in Afghanistan, to be sure. But I don't think they want to, nor do I think it would be safe for the troops trying to protect them once they got in there.

There are press people all over Afghanistan, and the ones that are following the Taliban are, of course, allowed to go where the Taliban wants, and they're being told what the Taliban wants. And the Al Jazeera television network has a pattern of putting out Al Qaeda propaganda. That's just a fact.

Now, you're right, it makes it very difficult. If one side lies, and they have lied repeatedly--they're using mosques, for example, for command and control, for ammunition storage. They are clearly not telling the truth about these casualties, we know that of certain knowledge.

Now, are people going to be killed in a war? You bet. And there are plenty of people throwing ordinance around in Afghanistan besides the United States. It's coming down--we're bombing from the air, but the opposition forces are in fact fighting against the Taliban. The Taliban's fighting against us and the opposition forces.

So when someone dies, it could have come from any one of those four locations.

ROBERTS: Right, OK.

Mr. Secretary, have you been vaccinated against anthrax?

RUMSFELD: No.

ROBERTS: OK. Thank you. Thank you...

RUMSFELD: Have you?

ROBERTS: No. Thank you very much. Thank you for being here.

Later in the program, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw will give his view of the military campaign and other weapons in the war against terrorism.

But first, two prominent members of the medical community answer the life-and-death questions on anthrax and other forms of bioterrorism. Drs. Anthony Fauci and David Franz, after this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TOM RIDGE, DIRECTOR OF HOMELAND SECURITY: Clearly we are up against a shadow enemy, shadow soldiers, people who have no regard for human life. They are determined to murder innocent people.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

DONALDSON: Joining us now are Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health. Welcome, Dr. Fauci.

FAUCI: Nice to be here, Sam.

DONALDSON: And Dr. David Franz, former commander of the U.S. Army's Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. Good to see you, Dr. Franz.

Number of questions for you about who may have made this particular anthrax that we're dealing with here in the United States.

But first I want to talk about who should be taking medication at this point. And a new medication, a generic drug, is now being substituted for Cipro. Is that correct?

FAUCI: That's correct.

DONALDSON: Tell us about that.

FAUCI: Well, first of all, the medication is doxycycline. We know now from the examination of the material, the anthrax, that it is sensitive to most of the standard antibiotics that you would expect it to be sensitive to. So the original studies in animals that guided the medical community toward ciprofloxacin and the concern that there would be genetic engineering of the microbe to make it resistant doesn't appear to be the case.

So now you have a much greater spectrum of antibiotics that you can use, including doxycycline.

DONALDSON: And this is not just because it might be cheaper than Cipro?

FAUCI: No, no, absolutely not. It happens to be cheaper, there happens to be a lot of it. But the real reason is that the microbe is sensitive to doxycycline as with the other--as well as other antibiotics.

DONALDSON: The Brentwood facility here where the letter to Senator Daschle came through and which has been closed now, downstream from that...

FAUCI: Right.

DONALDSON: ... are some 4,000 mail rooms.

FAUCI: Right, right.

DONALDSON: Should all of the people who have been in those mail rooms be immediately put on one of these drugs?

FAUCI: Well, you have to look at what the strategy of risk-benefit is. It's very clear that if you're in what we'll call a primary facility like Brentwood, that those people need to be treated. The concern about a secondary facility, which was the Sterling facility in Virginia, and those that directly get bulk mail from the Brentwood facility, since there was documentation that disease can occur in those settings, it was clear that individuals were being put on therapy.

So the obvious question now is, what about, as you say, Sam, downstream? And the philosophy has been to test people. If there's--if--not only people, but the environment--if there's positivity, then those people need to get treated.

If you have a situation where there's a high suspicion that there is contamination, you test and treat for a limited period of time. If the testing comes back negative, you stop. That's where we get the 10-day phenomenon that people might be confused about.

DONALDSON: But your answer seems to be that all of these people shouldn't immediately be put on the drug.

FAUCI: Well, the question is, should you just give it to every post person--every postal worker who's anywhere directly or indirectly connected? And the answer would be, unless there is a concern and risk that there was a contamination from one to the other.

So primary and secondary, there's no question it's yes. If something directly comes from Brentwood, that decision has been made that those individuals need to be tested.

DONALDSON: That Daschle letter...

FAUCI: I mean treated, not tested.

DONALDSON: Right. That Daschle letter must have contaminated other mail.

FAUCI: Right, right.

DONALDSON: That's the theory now. Am I correct?

FAUCI: Right. The theory is that either that letter contaminated other mail, or, as the director of the CDC said yesterday, the possibility that there may be another letter.

DONALDSON: But if other mail or another letter contaminated mail, it went to someone else.

FAUCI: Right.

DONALDSON: Are they at risk?

FAUCI: Well, well, yes, the answer would have to be, what kind of a risk? Because I know where you're going, and it's a question everybody's asking out there, Sam.

DONALDSON: Lot of mail went through Brentwood that day...

FAUCI: Right-o. If it--we're talking about bulk mail, and I'll just give you the basis upon which the decision was made. If there's bulk mail that comes from Brentwood, then where that bulk mail went is a risk to the postal workers. And that's why they're being treated.

DONALDSON: But to the recipient.

FAUCI: Right. At that point, there has been no indication that the recipient of that mail has been--is at risk. If someone gets infected in a household that you could trace back, then you have a much, much broader spectrum of treating. But at this point in time, the decision has been made that the recipient of a mail, a piece of mail from that, has not gotten sick yet, therefore the risk, at least at the present time, is not enough to have people broadly treat everyone who's gotten a letter.

DONALDSON: Dr. Franz, bentonite, that's the Iraqi signature in making anthrax for terrorism uses, for military uses, is it not?

FRANZ: Bentonite was used by the Iraqis in producing the anthrax that they produced, in producing the bacillus thuringiensis (ph) that they used as a model in developing this technology to produce anthrax, we believe.

However, bentonite is found throughout the world. Bentonite is found in the U.S., it's found wherever there was ever an active volcano, probably.

DONALDSON: Well, you know about the struggle going on. Our Brian Ross reports that he has four sources, ABC News does, that says that bentonite has been found in the Daschle anthrax. The U.S. government says no. Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesperson, told our White House correspondent yesterday that as of that time, no bentonite had been found.

What do you think's going on here?

FRANZ: Well, I think someone probably knows whether there's bentonite there or not. I don't happen to know. But even if we have definitive proof that we have bentonite in a sample from the Daschle letter, in my mind, that's just another piece of the puzzle, it's not the final piece of the puzzle.

DONALDSON: Well, you said it could be found all over the world. Are you telling us that people other than the Iraqis could, and if they're in the United States and have sophisticated knowledge of this, make an anthrax with the bentonite in it to try to help that anthrax be airborne?

FRANZ: Certainly. Bentonite is available from chemical companies, a number of them, in the U.S. and throughout the world. There are some interesting characteristics of bentonite. It's made typically--made up typically of silicon dioxide and some metal oxides. And they're in various formulations and various ratios in bentonite from various parts of the world.

So there's possibly another clue there to see where, if this was bentonite in the Daschle sample, where that bentonite came from.

But like all of the other issues related to biology, just because it's Ames strain doesn't mean it came from Ames. It may have come from someplace else, because these things can be moved around.

It's not like the bullet and rifling relationship in ballistic forensics. It's not like when you have a bullet with the marks on it from a specific barrel, you've got a definitive answer. That's not the way biology works.

DONALDSON: Let's talk smallpox. The U.S. government is now beginning a crash program to increase our supply of smallpox. Do you expect a smallpox outbreak, doctor, or is this simply an ounce of prevention?

FAUCI: This is total preparation. Whether we expect it or not, what we're doing, we have to do. We have to have smallpox vaccinations...

DONALDSON: Should we all...

FAUCI: ... (inaudible)...

DONALDSON: ... be vaccinated now?

FAUCI: At this point in time, no. But as we get the material, where we are in the position to make that decision, you measure the risk and benefits based on a lot of things, intelligence about whether or not there is smallpox that might be used as a bioterrorism weapon, or, certainly, if a smallpox case or cases spring up, that changes the whole landscape.

DONALDSON: Well, is (inaudible)...

FAUCI: But you've got to be prepared, you have to have the materials.

DONALDSON: As I understand it, there might be a three-week period before a person who has been infected begins to show the signs, and only then can infect someone else. But at that point, isn't it too late? Can't it spread like wildfire?

FAUCI: Well, certainly it can spread and that was one of the reasons why this has been historically such a devastating disease.

There are a couple of philosophies of how you approach smallpox. If you have an index case comes up, you quarantine, you isolate, you contact trace and then you vaccinate around that area. If you have multi-focal cases, then clearly you've got to do that a lot and in the essence, you're vaccinating everyone.

But there has to be an open discussion and debate about the risks and benefits right now or when we get the store of doing that because of the rare, but nonetheless serious, toxicities that are associated with the smallpox vaccination.

DONALDSON: Dr. Franz, what governments have this germ, this bacteria rather? how can it be spread?

FRANZ: The legal, the legal stashes of smallpox are in Atlanta and in Novasibirsk. I'm not concerned about those.

However, most of us turned in our samples of smallpox in the late '70s, and there were already some bad actors in the world at that time. I am concerned about those.

However, I believe that, were a terrorist to go to a leader of one of those countries, that leader would go to his virologist and say, ``I'd like some smallpox because I want to give it to a terrorist to use against the Americans.'' I think that virologist would probably say, ``You know, Mr. Leader, we better be careful what we do here because the Americans have a lot better public health system. They're better prepared to deal with this than we are, and maybe we better think twice.''

DONALDSON: So you're hoping that they wouldn't turn it over.</