Nations should be prepared for chemical, germ strikes
 

Bronwyn Brunner tries on a gas mask at Kaplan's Surplus Store in San Francisco. There has been a surge in gas mask sales since the attacks in New York and Washington.
 

MSNBC STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS

GENEVA, Sept. 24 —  Scientific advances have made it possible for terrorists to kill millions of people with biological or chemical weapons, the World Health Organization warned in a report released Monday. The agency urged nations to prepare for the possibility of such strikes.

      "THE MAGNITUDE of possible impacts on civilian populations of their use or threatened use obliges governments both to seek prevention and to prepare response plans," said the WHO’s report "Health Aspects of Biological and Chemical Weapons."
     The agency rushed out a draft of the 179-page report in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States after receiving calls from governments asking for advice on how to combat germ warfare.
     "The threat of these things is real," David Heymann, WHO’s executive director for communicable diseases, said.  "There are agents out there that if they were used in an area where there were millions of people ... could infect a great number of them."

CROP-DUSTERS GROUNDED

     WHO’s report comes as U.S. federal authorities have twice grounded crop-dusting planes amid fears that terrorists could use them following the attacks on New York and Washington. 

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      Employees of a Florida fertilizer company said a group of Middle Eastern men repeatedly asked about crop-duster planes in the months leading up to the terrorist attacks. An employee identified one of the men as Mohamed Atta, believed to be one of the suicide hijackers in the terrorist attacks.
      The report said modern technology had made large-scale attacks with diseases or poison a reality.  For example, the WHO report noted "the advent of ‘genetic engineering’ offers ... means of producing novel and perhaps more efficacious biological agents and toxins as compared with those of past weapons programs."
     Even though the threat is small, the potential effects are devastating.
     If a small number of people in a large city were infected with a disease that took several days to show itself, they would infect many more before they even knew they were ill. If the outbreak came in a city with a large airport, the disease could go all over the world, Heymann said.
      "Vulnerability to biological agents exists chiefly because of present inability to detect their presence in time for prompt masking or sheltering," the report warned, but added, "rapid detection methods based on modern molecular techniques are now being brought into service."
     Heymann said preparing for a bioterrorism attack is much the same as preparing for the natural spread of a disease and needs strong public health planning.
      The United States in particular is working to improve its public health monitoring and reaction system at the moment, he said. 

September 24 —

Bioterrorism expert Mark Osterholm says the United States is vulnerable to attack with biological weapons.

     Michael Osterholm, state epidemiologist at the Minnesota Department of Health, told NBC’s "Today" Show on Monday that the United States is unprepared to deal with attacks with biological weapons.
     "We live in a new world order, biological weapons have been developed and will be delivered," he said.  "Unfortunately, what we’re hearing on the Hill right now is that most of the resources dedicated to this will now go largely to the military. That’s going to leave us still very unprepared from a public health perspective."
      "We’re talking about the difference between what we saw in New York City, where it was a horrible situation with more than 5,000 fatalities but the [medical] system wasn’t overwhelmed because there were only 4,000 or 5,000 wounded people," he said. "Imagine now 100,000, 200,000, 300,000 people presenting for medical care in the New York medical system. That’s what biological weapons can do and that’s what we as a nation are largely unprepared to deal with."

INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION URGED

   The Italian health ministry said Monday it was putting together a rapid response group to "coordinate preventative operations" in light of the "delicate international situation."  Italy already has designated a secure laboratory and isolation facilities, it said. 

      The WHO report said countries needed to cooperate because an attack could easily overwhelm the resources of a single nation. It also called for all countries to sign and enforce the U.N.’s treaties on banning biological and chemical weapons.
     During the Cold War, The United States and the former Soviet Union built vast germ-warfare stockpiles. In July, the Bush administration pulled out of negotiations to enforce the biological weapons ban. 

What had been a public-health probe in Florida is now a criminal investigation

By Joseph Contreras, Michael Isikoff and Howard Fineman
NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE

Oct. 8 —  The possibility that a photo editor for the weekly tabloid The Sun was killed in a bioterrorism attack took on a new sense of urgency today after Florida public-health officials disclosed that a nose swab taken from a 73-year-old hospitalized co-worker contained the rare bacteria spore that induces Anthrax, an often-fatal illness.

PUBLIC-HEALTH OFFICIALS confirmed that Ernesto Blanco, a 73-year-old Cuban-American who works in the mailroom of American Media office building in Boca Raton tested as having been exposed to Anthrax. Blanco was admitted to a Miami hospital last week with symptoms of pneumonia. On Friday, Bob Stevens, a photo editor at The Sun, died from disease.

What had been described as a public-health probe instantly became a criminal investigation as FBI agents on Sunday evening sealed off the office building, which houses the offices of most of the country’s supermarket tabloids including The National Enquirer, The Star, The Globe, News of the World and others. Employees and visitors to the building were ordered to undergo medical tests. Grim-faced state officials who had initially tried to downplay speculation late last week that Stevens’s demise might have been caused by foul play didn’t sound so sure at a Monday afternoon press conference. “We can’t speculate as to the source of this particular anthrax germ,” said acting Florida Secretary of Health Dr. John Agwunobi, who confirmed earlier reports that Anthrax spores had been found on the computer keyboard at Bob Stevens’s desk. Other officials went further.  “We have to assume that a human element was involved,” concluded Florida Health Department director of disease control Dr. Landis Crockett.

NEWSWEEK has learned that the FBI is aggressively trying to locate a summer intern from nearby Florida Atlantic University in connection with the investigation. The intern, who sources said came from a Middle Eastern country, had sent an e-mail to all employees that a top American Media official described as “peculiar.” The e-mail thanked company employees for the help he gave them, but then contained language suggesting that he wasn’t saying “goodbye.” Another company official recalled the email as having “a sense of foreboding” and referring to a “surprise” or “something that he left behind.” Said the official, “it was weird.”

Sources at American Media said the FBI has asked company employees about any “enemies” the company or its papers might have. Given the content of the weekly tabloids, “that list would go on forever,” joked one employee. Alarmed workers say they are urgently trying to recall receiving suspicious or unusual letters and packages. Several are focusing on a letter that arrived at the company about a week before the Sept. 11 terrorist attack. It was described by sources as a “weird love letter to Jennifer Lopez”—similar, outwardly, to the types of mail the tabloids often get. But inside the oddly-worded letter was what was described as a “soapy, powdery substance” and in the pile of that a cheap Star of David charm. The letter, per routine, was taken in by the joint mailroom of the company. Employees said the letter was handled both by Stevens and Blanco. 

By late Monday afternoon, Boca Raton fire rescue vehicles and unmarked trucks and vans had descended on the American Media office building and investigators in white germproof suits were combing the ramp leading into the underground parking lot. Earlier in the day, hundreds of office workers filled out four-page forms at the Delray Beach health center asking them questions about their medical history, any recent unusual events that had occurred inside the building and whether they had visited the mail room and a photo library frequented by Blanco and Stevens.

The office workers were issued 15-day supplies of the antibiotic Cipro that doctors prescribe in cases of Anthrax exposure. A skittish golf pro who works at a course adjacent to the premises of the American Media headquarters looked on warily from a distance as law enforcement officials swarmed around the building this morning. “I’m very concerned, and I’m going to give my lessons on the far side of the course,” said Broken Sound Golf Course instructor Michael Meredith. “I’m going to try to stay as far away as possible.” He was not alone in voicing such sentiments on a day when the specter of bioterrorism suddenly loomed large over the placid suburbs of Palm Beach County. 

A few cases do not an epidemic make. But they’re unprecedented; worry over what’s next is contagious

By Sharon Begley and Michael Isikoff
Newsweek

Oct. 22 issue —  At first, the anthrax scares popping up everywhere could be dismissed as the products of overactive imaginations. In Florida, where residents were already spooked by reports that last month’s skyjackers had inquired about renting crop-dusters, authorities had received more than 100 calls about suspicious powders over the past few weeks; they all turned out to be innocuous substances such as plaster dust.

IN TRENTON, N.J., two office buildings were evacuated early last week after employees reported opening packages containing a white powder. Tests found no traces of any pathogens. An Internal Revenue office in Covington, Ky., was sealed off and 200 employees briefly quarantined after powder was found in an envelope. It, too, was harmless—as was the brown powder found in an envelope sent to a state agency in Ohio, the powder in a Halloween card sent to The Columbus Dispatch and the yellow powder in an envelope that an Ohio couple opened exactly a month after the September terrorist attacks. That one also contained a note.  “You are now infected with anthrax.” They weren’t. Nor was the divorce lawyer of a woman to whom a bitter husband sent a letter that, he warned, was impregnated with anthrax, the FBI told NEWSWEEK. Although anthrax is not contagious, fear of it was epidemic. 

But if the FBI, intelligence officials, local police and—most of all—Americans who had vowed not to live in terror were tempted to dismiss these scares as hoaxes or hysteria, they were quickly brought up short. By midweek eight employees at American Media Inc. in Boca Raton, Fla., had been exposed to Bacillus anthracis; one, photo editor Robert Stevens, was dead as the result of inhaling thousands of deadly spores. On Oct. 12 in New York City, NBC News assistant Erin O’Connor tested positive for cutaneous anthrax, apparently the result of exposure to a powder in an envelope she had opened three weeks before. And the next day a letter received at a Microsoft office in Reno, Nev., tested positive for anthrax: the envelope, in which Microsoft had sent a check to a vendor in Malaysia, had been returned, with the check intact.  It also contained pornographic pictures cut from a magazine, and dusted with anthrax spores. Suddenly, a hypothetical threat was all too real, and fears that had been bubbling under the surface for the past month burst into the open. In New York, Celeste Sharpe, a mother of two and former assistant district attorney in the Bronx, found out about the NBC anthrax through NYPD friends. Anxiously withdrawing cash from an ATM, she told a friend by cell phone, “I’m getting the hell out of the city.” 

October 12 — Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson and Attorney General John Ashcroft respond to the discovery of cutaneous anthrax in New York City.

OVERSUFFICIENT POSTAGE

President George W. Bush implored all Americans to live their lives as normally as possible. “Our government is doing everything we can to make our country as safe as possible,” he said. But while everyone agreed that panic wasn’t called for, prudence was. The U.S. Postal Service advised all Americans to monitor their mail carefully and to be suspicious of any envelopes without return addresses, with stains or odors or with too much postage (a hint that the sender really, really doesn’t want it returned for insufficient postage). The State Department ordered all U.S. Embassies to buy and store three days’ supplies of the antibiotic ciprofloxacin—as a precaution. Bayer, the German pharmaceutical giant, announced that it would increase production of Cipro, its trademark ciprofloxacin, by 25 percent beginning Nov. 1: wholesalers were running low on the drug throughout the United States. 

The panic was understandable: people are much more afraid of exotic, seemingly uncontrollable risks like anthrax than they are of familiar ones like flu (which kills more than 20,000 Americans each year). Anthrax is nothing if not exotic, at least in America.  It is caused by a bacterium, Bacillus anthracis. This rod-shaped microbe grows in soil, where it can be ingested by sheep, cows, horses and goats.  That’s why anthrax is labeled a veterinary disease, and why those most likely to contract it work with animals or animal products (such as wool). If growing conditions deteriorate, the bacteria form microscopic spores, which can remain dormant (and lethal) for decades. In the worst-known anthrax outbreak, at least 66 people died when spores were released from a bioweapons plant in Sverdlovsk, Russia, in 1979.

At every step in the anthrax investigations, officials were quick to minimize the threat. Yet those reassurances were eclipsed by other cases or by evidence that authorities are poorly prepared for a bioterror attack. When Bob Stevens was diagnosed with inhalation anthrax, his was an “isolated” case, Florida and federal health officials insisted, and almost certainly the result of accidental, natural exposure—even though anthrax has never been reported in animals or soil east of the Mississippi River and even though the United States recorded only 18 cases of inhalation anthrax in the 20th century and none since 1978. But when alert doctors found anthrax spores in the nose of AMI mailroom supervisor Ernesto Blanco, 73, who was hospitalized with pneumonia, “isolated” looked like it had company. FBI agents sealed the building two days after Stevens died, and agents in airtight jumpers and oxygen masks swarmed through AMI’s offices, scouring it for traces of anthrax. The next day, Oct. 8, AMI’s 700 employees and recent visitors lined up at the white annex building of the county Health Department in Delray Beach to have nasal swabs taken. By midweek AMI mailroom worker Stephanie Dailey, 36, had also tested positive for the presence of anthrax spores in her nose. Although hardly an official statement went by without the assurance that anthrax is not contagious, the message wasn’t getting through in south Florida. In Boca Raton, when 3-year-old Alexander de Jesus got ready to climb into a barber’s chair, the hair stylist showed him and his mother the door: she works one floor below The Sun, one of AMI’s five supermarket tabloids. 

COPYCAT CRIMES

Panic, and perhaps copycats, spread like a nasty flu.  Early last week St. Petersburg Times columnist Howard Troxler received a letter warning, in unsteady handwriting, “Howard Troxler ... 1st case of disease now blow away this dust so you see how the real thing flys.” “This” was a white, sugarlike substance. By the weekend it had tested negative for the presence of anthrax and other pathogens. 

Although seemingly every sicko with a grudge had decided that there’s nothing like an anthrax threat to strike terror in the heart of your target, the copycat threats that followed the Florida case seemed empty—until Oct. 12. Before dawn that morning the FBI learned that the anthrax bug had hit New York.  NBC, the FBI reported, had received a suspicious business letter addressed to “Nightly News” anchor Tom Brokaw. Postmarked St. Petersburg, Fla., it arrived Sept. 25, with no return address. When Brokaw’s assistant, Erin O’Connor, opened it, she found white powder and a note: “The unthinkable. See what happens next.” NBC’s security office called the FBI, which picked up the letter the next day.  Within days O’Connor, 38, developed a rash below her left collarbone. After it became more irritated, ulcerous and necrotic (filled with dead tissue), she saw a doctor. The Cipro he prescribed on Oct. 1 cleared the lesion. But it was a call from one of O’Connor’s doctors to the city Health Department, reporting a possible case of anthrax, and a call from the city to the FBI, that lit a fire under the bureau. The FBI ordered tests on the powder in the letter O’Connor opened, as well as a skin biopsy from O’Connor, at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

O’Connor tested positive for cutaneous anthrax. But the powder tested negative. When the FBI interviewed O’Connor more extensively, she recalled that she had gotten another letter, postmarked Sept. 18. She hadn’t thought anything of it. But, she finally remembered, it did contain some kind of dark, sandlike powder. That letter, postmarked Trenton, N.J., contained traces of anthrax, the FBI reported over the weekend. The delay in identifying the powder, and O’Connor’s lesions, confirmed fears that neither public-health officials nor law-enforcement agencies will recognize bioterrorism quickly. That would be especially horrific if the bug were a contagious microbe such as smallpox. 

FRIGHTENING SIMILARITIES

On the same day that O’Connor was diagnosed with cutaneous anthrax, The New York Times received a letter, postmarked St. Petersburg, on the same date as the letter sent to Troxler. It was addressed to Judith Miller, coauthor with three Times colleagues of the new best-seller “Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War,” and filled with white powder. There were “some similarities” in the handwriting on the letters to NBC and the Times, said Barry Mawn, head of the FBI’s New York office. Although the substance contained no anthrax, the Times assured readers in a front-page box in its Saturday edition “that no copies of the newspaper are printed in [our] Manhattan headquarters.” 

To trace the postal anthrax, investigators are trying to identify the strain in the Florida, Nevada and New York cases. To do that, they first grow the suspected anthrax spores in a nutrient medium, such as beef broth, until they germinate into live, rod-shaped bacterial cells, says Calvin Chue, research scientist at the Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies at Johns Hopkins University. If anthracis is present, antibodies in a test kit bind to antigens on its surface. If they do—the test takes half an hour—the antibodies fluoresce. In Reno, however, the state lab tested directly for anthrax spores and got a hit. In the current criminal investigations, the FBI hopes to determine which of the hundred-plus genetically distinct strains of anthrax were sent to AMI, NBC and Microsoft. They have not yet succeeded, and it’s not clear that doing so would help much.  Many types of anthrax can be found at microbiology labs across the world. The Ames strain, for instance, named after an Iowa lab where it was first isolated half a century ago, “is a very common virulent strain that’s used in every antibiotic and vaccine” study, says Martin Hugh-Jones of Louisiana State University.

If the science offers few leads, old-fashioned police work might. In Florida, investigators focused on a one-page, handwritten love letter addressed to Jennifer Lopez, NEWSWEEK first reported on its Web site. It was sent to The Sun, says a source, in Lantana, Fla. It reportedly arrived sometime after Sept. 17. Staffers laughed over it and passed it around the third-floor editorial offices. Enclosed was a small Star of David and a tablespoon or so of a bluish substance that resembled dishwashing powder. Bob Stevens was among those who handled the letter. As one staffer recalled to NEWSWEEK, “The only difference between Bob and those who watched him open it was that Bob [who had poor eyesight] held it up to his face.” Stevens’s spartan workstation—Macintosh computer, a mousepad decorated with photos of his friends, crayon drawings from a colleague’s young son—was a hot spot of anthrax. So was a receptacle in the mailroom, where Blanco and Dailey worked. But how five additional employees were exposed (blood tests came back positive over the weekend) is a mystery: some work for The National Enquirer, whose offices are “way the heck down the hall and around the corner,” says The Sun’s Carla Chadick.

LOTS OF WEIRD MAIL

Even if anthrax reached AMI through a letter, it wasn’t much to go on. “I’m not sure the FBI is ready for the amount of weird mail we get,” says Grant Balfour, a Sun writer.  When you write about alien abductions, celebrity brawls and the size of Osama bin Laden’s private parts, you’re not surprised when letters arrive with dirty underwear, human feces, claims to being a Romanov heir and other rants. 

FBI officials are skeptical that the anthrax at NBC, Microsoft and American Media Inc. came from Osama bin Laden or any other known terrorist. The connections so far are circumstantial. This summer Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi, who piloted the planes that hit the World Trade Center, rented an apartment in Delray Beach, a few miles from the AMI building, and took flying lessons nearby. Last week the White House was calling the FBI every two hours one night after a report that the two skyjackers had asked a Delray Beach pharmacist for an antibiotic to fight anthrax.   Rather than antibiotics, in fact, Atta asked for something to soothe an inflammation of his hands. The redness resembled the irritation caused by detergent or bleach. The pharmacist gave him a cream called acid mantle. The incident raised fears that Atta had been using caustic chemicals in a bioterror experiment: detergent effectively breaks up clumps of anthrax spores into smaller, deadlier particles. 

Although the FBI has not ruled out a connection to Al Qaeda, says one senior U.S. official, “my instinct says it’s a nut case.” One death, one easily treated rash and seven symptom-free people with anthrax spores in their noses or antibodies in their blood are hardly what experts expected from terrorists wielding a bioweapon. Every scenario until now has envisioned anthrax spores being aerosolized—dried and turned into a powder—and then disseminated widely in the air, probably into an enclosed space like a building or airplane. The goal would be to spread the spores like an invisible, lethal fog, keeping the particles small enough so that they could be inhaled before settling to the ground. In addition, many bioweapons experts thought terrorists intent on mass murder rather than just mass panic would use an antibiotic-resistant strain. The Russians engineered anthrax strains resistant to penicillin, doxycycline and other antibiotics by splicing in genes from naturally resistant strains of, say, the common intestinal bacterium E. coli. The Florida strain was not genetically engineered, the CDC says, and is vulnerable to antibiotics.

A TERRORIST CONNECTION?

But there is another reason law-enforcement officials have been at pains to emphasize that the anthrax cases have not been linked to Al Qaeda or any other terrorists.  “Biological-weapons agents can easily be obtained,” Ron Atlas, president of the American Society of Microbiology, wrote recently. “A survey of nearly 1,500 U.S. academic institutions indicates that 22 percent work with pathogenic microorganisms and toxins that could be used in biological-weapons development.” You can’t just walk into a lab and swipe a vial of anthrax, but researchers admit that nothing would stop a determined individual from hiring on at a lab, as a student or technician, and obtaining a starter culture.  “We all use student workers who are 18 or 19,” says LSU’s Hugh-Jones. “Most of them don’t even have any background you can check.”

Until the Feds cracked down in the late 1990s, pathogens could also be bought. In 1995, white supremacist Larry Wayne Harris ordered three vials of freeze-dried bubonic-plague bacteria from the nonprofit American Type Culture Collection, for $240. The germs turned out to be an innocuous vaccine strain (weakened, or attenuated, so they don’t give you the disease itself rather than trigger immunity to it). In 1986 ATCC sold three types of anthrax to the University of Baghdad, and in 1988 sold four strains to the Iraqi Ministry of Trade. All of ATCC’s sales were legal.  During the gulf war, however, American intelligence agencies became convinced that ATCC’s strains were among those that Iraq used in its biological-weapons program. A 1996 law restricts sales of the most deadly microbes, including anthrax and Ebola, but if scientists are denied access to the bugs, research on vaccines and cures will stop. 

The current anthrax cases have not changed one crucial reality: turning pathogens into weapons of mass destruction is hugely difficult. As far as intelligence agencies know, the group that put the greatest effort into bioterror was Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo cult. In April 1990, members drove an automobile outfitted to disseminate botulinum toxin around Japan’s Parliament building. In June 1993, they tried to disrupt the wedding of Japan’s crown prince by spreading botulinum toxin the same way. They also tried, for four straight days that month, to spread anthrax from a rooftop in Tokyo. “Nine failures in nine attempts attest to the difficulty of actually deploying biological weapons to cause mass casualties,” says Atlas. And Aum Shinrikyo had a war chest estimated at more than $300 million, as well as half a dozen labs and experienced biologists. Growing anthracis is hardly more difficult than growing sourdough starter. But turning bacteria into spores, the only form hardy and stable enough to be spread, requires the tricky step of shocking the bacteria with heat or chemicals without killing them. Perhaps the greatest hurdle is getting particles of the right size. Spores tend to clump. Yet particles must be between one and five microns to enter the lungs and trigger inhalation anthrax; it’s not easy to get a sprayer to dispense such a fine mist, as Aum Shinrikyo found. Assassination by microbe, however, is a different story. In 1978 the Bulgarian secret police killed dissident Georgi Markov by injecting deadly ricin (derived from castor beans) into his thigh with a pellet shot from an umbrella. And someone killed Bob Stevens. It all seemed like a bad movie. “What are the chances?” asked Penny Robbins, who works in the Microsoft building. “Reno and anthrax?” 

It would be foolish to think we can guess what criminals and terrorists will try next. But we might take note that, after 19 men turned planes into bombs, we ramped up airport security—just when people started sending anthrax through the mail. Now we treat our mail like toxic waste, planes with “mysterious powders” on bathroom counters get impounded and doctors bone up on anthrax. Perhaps, instead of fighting the last battle, it is time to anticipate the next. “If we just focus on anthrax,” says Ken Alibek, a top scientist in the Soviet bioweapons program who defected to the United States, “we’re going to get surprised.” We saw the effects of surprise, all too horrifically, on Sept. 11.

With Daniel Klaidman in Washington, Joseph Contreras and Kevin Peraino in Boca Raton, Erika Check in Atlanta and N’Gai Croal in Reno

The history of weaponized anthrax suggests that investigators have no shortage of suspects in the new bio-attacks

By Sharon Begley
NEWSWEEK

Oct. 29 issue —  Why anthrax? From the start of the modern era of bioweaponry, Bacillus anthracis has held a unique appeal for those seeking to militarize microbes. Although Japan’s Air Force scattered millions of bubonic-plague-carrying fleas and other pathogens from planes over 11 Chinese cities beginning in 1940, triggering mini-epidemics that killed some 700 Chinese and sent thousands more to the hospital, plague and most other pathogens have serious drawbacks as weapons.

PLAGUE REQUIRES cooperative animals (the fleas must bite the victim), and viruses such as variola, which causes smallpox, multiply only in living cells, making the production of arsenal-size quantities a stiff challenge. But bacteria such as anthrax, when fed little more than yeast extract, proliferate happily in a plain old lab dish. Plus—and this is anthrax’s greatest appeal—the bacteria readily form hardy, dormant spores that keep for years, obviating the need to make fresh batches. When the United States began its offensive biological-weapons (BW) program in 1942 at Camp (now Fort) Detrick in Frederick, Md., Britain and the Soviet Union were already working to add anthrax to their arsenals.

The global history of weaponized anthrax suggests that investigators will have no dearth of suspects as they pursue those responsible for killing one person and infecting at least eight others with mailborne spores since Sept. 11. So far, the spores mailed to American Media Inc. in Florida, to NBC in New York and to Sen. Tom Daschle’s office in Washington seem to be the same strain of anthrax (that is, of approximately the same genetic composition), suggesting a single source. The powder sent to Daschle’s office appears to have been prepared by someone who knew what he was doing. In contrast to the AMI spores, most of which fell harmlessly onto a computer keyboard (only the man who held a suspect letter to his face and breathed in the spores died), the powder sent to the Senate was fine enough to become airborne. That allowed 22 staffers and two Capitol Police officers to breathe it in. With anthrax, hang time matters. Half a dozen countries have managed to produce anthrax in an easily inhaled aerosol (the respiratory route to infection is the most deadly). To do that requires knowledge and equipment. Knowledge exists in the minds of the thousands of scientists who worked in the American, British, Soviet, Iraqi and other government anthrax programs. After the fall of the Soviet Union, many of its researchers were lured overseas. “There were people I knew very well who were in Iraq or Iran and other Muslim countries,” says former Soviet BW scientist Sergei Popov. And equipment is only a supply house away. 

“People think it’s difficult, but we were able to manufacture it in 20- and 50-ton reactors.”  — KEN ALIBEK former deputy head of the Soviet BW agency Biopreparat

The Soviet BW program, launched before World War II and ramped up during the cold war, showed the ease of producing anthrax in bulk. By the 1980s the Soviets could produce thousands of tons of weaponized anthrax annually, says Ken Alibek, former deputy head of the Soviet BW agency Biopreparat. “People think it’s difficult, but we were able to manufacture it in 20- and 50-ton reactors,” he says. Biopreparat also created antibiotic-resistant anthrax, by using standard recombinant DNA techniques to splice in a gene for resistance from a common microbe like E. coli. Because antibiotics kill the anthrax recently sent through the mail, investigators doubt that Russian stores were the source.

At Camp Detrick, America’s anthrax warriors grasped the need to aerosolize the germ. They produced some 5,000 anthrax bombs, but even the most effective released only 3 percent of its spores; the rest got blown into the ground or vaporized by the heat of detonation. So the Army changed tactics. From September 1950 to February 1951 its researchers tested dispersal methods by spraying stand-ins for anthrax (bacteria like the supposedly harmless Bacillus globigii) over San Francisco. In June 1966 they released an anthrax substitute into the New York City subway. Aerial dispersal of aerosolized anthrax spores, it seems, would work lethally well. 

President Richard Nixon halted America’s offensive BW program in 1969. Russia says it halted work in the 1980s—when Iraq was just getting started. Saddam Hussein put his BW program under the aegis of Iraq’s intelligence service and sited it in Salman Pak on the Tigris River. A terrorist training camp shared the site, says Raymond Zilinskas, a former United Nations weapons inspector now at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. The program was led by Iraqi Rehab Taha, who received her Ph.D. in biology at England’s University of East Anglia in the 1980s and who, upon joining the BW program, outlined a five-year plan for “industrial production of germ agents.” She wasted no time. In 1985 she received fermenters and other equipment, as well as two anthrax cultures from France’s Pasteur Institute. In April 1986 the Ministry of Trade, acting as a front for her program, bought seven strains of anthrax from the American Type Culture Collection, a biological supplier: the seven included three isolated at Detrick, the so-called Vollum strain and a Lederle Labs strain. The next year the ministry began buying tons of bacterial growth media, including yeast extract, and anthrax production began in the desert 35 miles southwest of Baghdad. Taha was good at her work. By 1989 her team had succeeded in agglomerating the spores into fine particles perfect for aerosolizing, says former U.N. weapons inspector Richard Spertzel. To reduce particle size to the respirable ideal, Iraq used “sequential filters” in devices about the size of coffins—a setup almost identical to that used at Detrick in the 1950s. Iraq field-tested anthrax not only in aerial bombs but also in sprayers attached to helicopters, fighter aircraft and possibly unmanned drones. 

Some of Iraq’s BW experts, according to a 1998 congressional task force, dispersed to Libya, Sudan and Algeria after the gulf war. Both Algeria and Syria reportedly still conduct bioweapons research. And despite the 1972 treaty banning biological weapons, say American intelligence sources, so do other nations. China is suspected of maintaining an offensive-bioweapons program. Egypt had developed biological-warfare agents by 1972. Iran “may have small quantities of usable [BW] agent now,” the Pentagon concluded earlier this year. The Soviets apparently “seeded” their cold-war allies with BW know-how. “We had a nice collaboration with North Korea,” says Popov, who defected to Britain in 1992. “They traveled to our facilities several times.” Pyongyang’s BW program had begun by the 1960s, and in 1970 placed an order with a Japanese firm for large quantities of anthrax, cholera and plague bacteria.  Today, concludes a 2001 U.S. Defense Department report, North Korea “may have [those three] biological weapons available for use.”

Investigators know less about anthrax in nongovernment hands. In September 1999 Ahmad Ibrahim al-Naggar, a member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, reportedly confessed to Egyptian security that the terrorist group had obtained anthrax from an East Asian country for $3,695 (plus shipping).  Egyptian Islamic Jihad is an ally of Osama bin Laden’s Qaeda network. And last year Mohamed Atta, suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 atrocities, may have met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence official. In the United States, hundreds of labs store anthrax in order to study vaccines, treatments and even genetic susceptibility to the disease. The labs are required to register with the government, but it is not clear whether all do. “Microbiologists are kind of like squirrels,” says Dr. Craig Smith, an infectious-disease specialist at Phoebe Putnam Memorial Hospital in Georgia, who advised the military during Desert Storm. “They keep bacterial strains all over the place, in university and even private collections.” 

With so many BW programs around the world, thousands of scientists have learned how to turn anthrax into a weapon. To put knowledge into practice, a rogue researcher would need equipment. And that’s not hard to acquire. In 1999 agents in the U.S. Defense Department’s Project Bacchus fanned out across the country to buy new and used filters, pipes, glassware, nutrients, a fermenter (to grow colonies of anthrax) and a milling machine (to grind down clumps of spores to the most infectious size). By summer 2000 their $1.6 million had equipped a mini BW plant; it made two pounds of simulated anthrax (“simulated” because they used a harmless bacterium like B. globigii to stand in for the deadly one). “So many of these machines are dual-use,” says Smith. “The same small, sealed milling unit used for producing pharmaceuticals can be used to weaponize anthrax. Fermenters can produce antibiotics as well as bioweapons. Culture media can grow bacteria for vaccines as well as weapons.” 

Investigators have not ruled out either domestic or foreign sources for the anthrax used in the recent attacks.  Clues from the physical and biological properties of the samples sent through the mail, they hope, may point to a source and hence a suspect. Biologically, the spores sent to NBC, American Media and Senator Daschle are indistinguishable. None, a lead investigator tells NEWSWEEK, match the seven samples Iraq bought from ATCC. Instead, they resemble a strain that labs across the world use in research, and one that Iraq tried unsuccessfully to buy from Britain in the 1980s. Physically, the spores sent to Daschle are what Spertzel describes as “in very small particles and readily dispersible into the air,” apparently allowing the 22 Senate staffers to inhale them. (It didn’t help that the woman who opened the anthrax letter panicked, tossing it into a trash can and releasing spores into the air.)   Keeping the clumps small requires manipulating the electrostatic charge (the same kind that causes static electricity) between spores. For that, the sort of equipment found in pharmaceutical or biology labs would be useful.

Investigators are not ruling out a connection with Al Qaeda, but the letters to Daschle and NBC appear homegrown. Daschle’s, which bore the return address of a fourth-grade class, said, “We have this anthrax. You die now ... Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is great.” NBC’s read, “This is next. Take penicillin now,” plus the last three phrases of Daschle’s letter. A powder-containing letter sent to AMI (but not recovered) contained a little star of David, recall staffers. So, too, NEWSWEEK has learned, did the anthrax letter to Daschle.

With Adam Rogers and Warren Getlerin Washington, Erika Check in New York, Christopher Dickey in Paris and bureau reports

A U.S.-Based Al Qaeda 'Sleeper Cell' Was Poised to Launch a Post-Sept. 11 Attack on a Major Washington Target; Would-Be Terrorists Went Underground or Fled U.S.

Evidence Indicates Al Qaeda Had Russian Help Developing Anthrax;
Al-Zawahiri Believed Involved in Bin Laden's Biological Weapons Program

NEW YORK, Dec. 9 /PRNewswire/ -- A U.S.-based cell of the Al Qaeda terror network nearly launched an attack on a major target in Washington, D.C. after September 11, Newsweek has learned.  Intelligence sources say a Qaeda "sleeper cell" in the U.S. was poised to launch the attack -- perhaps against the Capitol Building.  The sources believe that the FBI, in its sweep against visa violators and other illegals of Mideast backgrounds, picked up members of a "support cell" tasked with providing logistics help to the people actually carrying out the mission.  Intelligence sources say the would-be terrorists then went underground or fled the country.  Investigators have not yet been able to identify the plotters from among the hundreds of people caught in the FBI dragnet; they're not even sure they are still in custody, according to a Newsweek Special Report in the December 17 issue of Newsweek (on newsstands Monday, December 10), written by Senior Writer Jeffrey Bartholet and reported by Newsweek Correspondents in Afghanistan, Washington and the Middle East.

The war in Afghanistan has produced a hodgepodge of disturbing intelligence that investigators are still trying to sift and analyze.  Perhaps the most alarming evidence gathered so far concerns Al Qaeda efforts to develop biological weapons.  According to intelligence sources, U.S. operatives in Afghanistan have collected information that one or more Russian scientists were working inside Afghanistan with Al Qaeda operatives.  One well-placed source tells Newsweek that evidence from the scene indicates that the renegade Russians were helping Al Qaeda to develop anthrax, and that spores of the deadly disease may actually have been stockpiled by the terrorist group.  While intelligence sources say they believe any such stockpiles were destroyed in U.S. bombing raids, it is not known how much, if any, of the anthrax ever made it out of Afghanistan.

And the infamous Dr. Ayman Al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's closest lieutenant and considered the brains behind Al Qaeda, may have been directly involved in the biological program.  Al-Zawahiri, may have been hit by U.S. bombs last week, according to unconfirmed British intelligence reports.  Northern Alliance soldiers raided his house in Kabul on November 13 and a senior American intelligence official tells Newsweek that it resembled the lair of a mad scientist.  Soldiers found grenades, blasting caps, electronic components and "various solid and liquid substances," including white crystals and extremely fine, silvery powders in jars and plastic bags, and mysterious liquids in shampoo bottles labeled "special medicine."  American intelligence later collected samples from Northern Alliance colleagues and conducted chemical and biological tests.  One of the samples turned up a "positive indicator" for Bacillus Anthracis, or anthrax.  All of the samples are being retested, the source tells Newsweek.

The Kabul house of a Pakistani nuclear scientist, Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, contained sheaves of disturbing documents. These include the results of a massive Internet search on anthrax vaccines, and a report entitled: "Bacteria: What You Need to Know."  According to intelligence sources, investigators also found a New York Times article on Plum Island, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's animal disease center. The Plum Island center does research to help guard the United States "against catastrophic economic losses caused by foreign animal disease agents accidentally or deliberately introduced into the U.S.," its Web site explains.

Newsweek also reports that Bin Laden plied his Taliban hosts with money, gifts and other favors.  "He was always handing out $50,000 to this commander, or $10,000 to that commander," says Mullah Alhaj Khaksar, a senior Taliban defector.  "And cars -- Afghans love cars.  He would get 20 or 30 cars and bring them in from Kandahar as a present just before an offensive.  Western intelligence agencies estimate that bin Laden funneled as much as $100 million a year to the Taliban -- twice Afghanistan's official annual budget.

Some key terrorist fugitives appear to have had a hand in both the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen and the September 11 attacks.  Investigators are particularly interested in a meeting that took place in Malaysia on January 5, 2000.  The list of attendees included Tawfiq bin Atash (a.k.a. Khallad) and Fahad al-Quso, both of whom helped plan the Cole attack.  Also present were Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, two of the September 11 hijackers, and Ramzi Binalshibh (a.k.a. Ramzi Omar), who may have been the phantom "20th hijacker" who couldn't get the U.S. prior to Sept. 11 because of visa problems.  Newsweek has learned that when Almihdhar and Alhazmi left Malaysia, they flew directly to Los Angeles, where they quickly enrolled in a San Diego flight school.  That leads investigators to believe that at least some of the planning for September 11 took place at the Malaysia meeting.

A spy story tying Saddam to 9-11 is looking very flimsy 

by Michael Isikoff
Newsweek 
April 28, 2002

Did September 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta meet with an Iraqi agent in the months before the terrorist attack? Last fall, the Czech government provided the CIA with intelligence suggesting that just such a rendezvous had taken place. The Czechs claimed that Atta, the ringleader of the hijackers, made a special trip to Prague in April 2001, where he met the agent at the Iraqi Embassy.

The storyof the "Iraqi connection" spread rapidly through Washington. Advocates of U.S. action to topple Saddam Hussein seized on the account to bolster their arguments. New York Times columnist William Safire proclaimed the meeting an "undisputed fact" connecting Saddam to September 11. When Vice President Dick Cheney flew to the Middle East last month, a "senior U.S. official" on the trip referred to "meetings that have been made public" between Atta and Iraqi intelligence. "This story has taken on a life of its own," says a U.S. intelligence official. It shouldn't have.  NEWSWEEK has learned that a few months ago, the Czechs quietly acknowledged that they may have been mistaken about the whole thing. U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials now believe that Atta wasn't even in Prague at the time the Czechs claimed. "We looked at this real hard because, obviously, if it were true, it would be huge," one senior U.S. law enforcement official told NEWSWEEK. "But nothing has matched up."

The story behind the purported Atta-Iraqi meeting is nonetheless an illuminating window into the murky world of intelligence in the war on terrorism - and how easily facts can become distorted for political purposes. The tale begins in 1998, when Radio Free Europe, which is headquartered in Prague, started broadcasting anti-Saddam programs into Iraq, infuriating the dictator.  Late that year, Tom Dine, the director of Radio Free Europe, says U.S. officials warned him that "the Iraqis were plotting to blow us up." The information about the plot, sources said, came from a recent Iraqi defector who had fled Prague for Great Britain carrying nine suitcases and $150,000 in cash - the proceeds of which were supposed to have been used to finance the operation.

Radio Free Europe started round-the-clock video surveillance of the building. Soon enough, the cameras picked up a heavyset Middle Eastern man who was hanging around the RFE building taking pictures. He was sometimes accompanied by a thinner, taller man who wore a Shell Oil jacket. RFE passed along the pictures to the Czech intelligence agency, known as the BIS. The Czechs identified the heavier man as Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, an Iraqi diplomat widely believed to be a spy. The thinner man was never identified.

In late April 2001, al-Ani was again caught casing the building, and he was expelled from the country. Then, in the chaotic days after September 11, a Czech intelligence source inside Prague's Middle Eastern community saw Atta's picture in the media and reported that he had seen the same person meeting al-Ani at the Iraqi Embassy five months earlier. Czech Prime Minister Milos Zeman publicly confirmed the story to CNN during a visit to Washington last November. But the uncorroborated report, some Czechs now concede, should have generated more skepticism. "These [informants] tend to tell you what you want to believe," says Oldrich Cerny, the former director of Czech intelligence.

On closer scrutiny, however, the evidence became even less convincing. Although Atta had indeed flown from Prague to the United States in June 2000, the Czechs had placed the alleged meeting in April 2001. The FBI could find no visa or airline records showing he had left or re-entered the United States that month. "Neither we nor the Czechs nor anybody else has any information he was coming or going [to Prague] at that time," says a U.S. official.

But intelligence officials have been reluctant to set the record straight - both out of reluctance to embarrass an allied government and because so many anti-Saddam hawks in the Bush administration had embraced the story. To be sure, administration hardliners aren't ready to give up. Newsweek has learned that Pentagon analysts are still aggressively hunting for evidence that might tie Atta, or any of the other hijackers, to Saddam's agents. It may yet turn up, but for now, at least, the much touted "Prague connection" appears to be an intriguing, but embarrassing, mistake.

Newsweek Exclusive: Secret New Analysis Suggests Anthrax Attacker May Be a ScientificWhiz, Able to Make 'Weaponized' Form More Sophisticated Than Previously Known; Spores in Letter to Sen. Leahy Were Ground to a Microscopic Fineness Not Achieved by U.S. Biological Weapons Experts

DATELINE: NEW YORK, April 7

Government sources tell Newsweek that a secret, new scientific analysis sent to top government officials suggests the anthrax attacker may be a scientific whiz so smart that he succeeded in making a "weaponized" form of the bacterium more sophisticated than any form previously known.  In the April 15 issue (on newsstands Monday, April 8), Newsweek reports that the new analysis shows that anthrax found in a letter addressed to Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy was ground to a microscopic fineness not achieved by U.S. biological weapons experts. 

The Leahy anthrax strain-mailed in an envelope that was recovered unopened from a
Washington post office last November -- also was coated with a chemical compound unknown to experts who have worked in the field for years.  The coating matches no known anthrax samples ever recovered from biological weapons producers anywhere in the world, including Iraq and the former U.S.S.R.  Investigative Correspondent Mark Hosenball, National Security Correspondent John Barry and Washington Bureau Chief Daniel Klaidman report that the combination of the intense milling of the bacteria and the unusual coating produced an anthrax powder so fine and fluffy that individually- coated anthrax spores were found in the Leahy envelope, something U.S. bioweapons experts had never seen. 

Hopes that the anthrax genetic code would point to its lab of origin are fading.  Insiders
now say that the Leahy strain traces back to an anthrax epidemic in Texas cattle in the 1970s, samples from which were very widely distributed.  The new chemical findings are so puzzling that sources now fear the FBI's already slow-moving investigation could be set back still further. Using psychological profiles and earlier scientific analyses, the FBI had begun to focus on the possibility that the anthrax letters might have been sent out by a disgruntled scientist or technician who once worked on a U.S. government biological weapons program.  But investigators question whether any laid-off U.S. government scientist is able enough -- and has access to the right equipment -- to produce the unusual substance found in the Leahy letter.

A Sophisticated Strain of Anthrax

Last fall FBI profilers announced that the person who sent deadly anthrax-laced letters to news organizations and Capitol Hill was probably a grudge-bearing, sociopathic male laboratory nerd with knowledge of the geography of Trenton, N.J. But a new scientific analysis sent to top government officials suggests the anthrax attacker may be a scientific whiz so smart that he succeeded in making a “weaponized” form of the bacterium more sophisticated than any previously known. 

Government sources tell NEWSWEEK that the secret new analysis shows anthrax found in a letter addressed to Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy was ground to a microscopic fineness not achieved by U.S. biological-weapons experts. The Leahy anthrax—mailed in an envelope that was recovered unopened from a Washington post office last November— also was coated with a chemical compound unknown to experts who have worked in the field for years; the coating matches no known anthrax samples ever recovered from biological-weapons producers anywhere in the world, including Iraq and the former Soviet Union. The combination of the intense milling of the bacteria and the unusual coating produced an anthrax powder so fine and fluffy that individually coated anthrax spores were found in the Leahy envelope, something that U.S. bioweapons experts had never seen.

Hopes that the anthrax genetic code would point to its lab of origin are fading. Insiders now say that the Leahy strain traces back to an anthrax epidemic in Texas cattle in the 1970s, samples from which were very widely distributed. The new chemical findings are so puzzling that sources now fear the FBI’s already slow-moving investigation could be set back still further. Using psychological profiles and earlier scientific analyses, the FBI had begun to focus on the possibility that the anthrax letters might have been sent out by a disgruntled scientist or technician who once worked on a U.S. government biological- weapons program. Court records indicate that over the last several years, budget cuts and layoffs at Fort Detrick, the Frederick, Md., Army base which houses the U.S. government’s main germ-weapons lab, produced a platoon of disgruntled former employees with microbiological expertise and possible grievances against the government. But investigators question whether any laid-off U.S. government scientist is able enough—and has access to the right equipment—to produce the unusual substance found in the Leahy letter.

One alternative to the theory that the anthrax was produced by a brilliant loner is that it came from a team of scientists with access to sophisticated labs—the kind of team and labs that could be assembled only by a government. U.S. investigators can’t rule out the possibility that a foreign government, perhaps Iraq but more likely the former U.S.S.R., could have put together such a team. They have no leads on its possible existence, however. Another possibility is that an American scientific psycho bought the anthrax from a foreign government team. But there is no evidence to back this theory, either.

— Mark Hosenball, John Barry and Daniel Klaidman 

The FBI still doesn’t have enough evidence to arrest anyone, but agents do have intriguing new clues. An exclusive look at the search for the perpetrator of America’s worst bioterror attack

By Mark Miller and Daniel Klaidman
NEWSWEEK

Aug. 12 issue  - The dogs, purebred bloodhounds with noses a thousand times more sensitive than a human's, were barking and howling and straining at their leashes. Early last week FBI agents on the trail of last year's anthrax attacker turned to a 16th-century technology to help solve a 21st-century crime. Agents presented the canines with "scent packs" lifted from anthrax-tainted letters mailed to Sens. Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy (long since decontaminated), hoping some faint, telltale trace of the perpetrator's smell still remained months after the fact. 

THE AGENTS QUIETLY brought the dogs to various locations frequented by a dozen people they considered possible suspects-hoping the hounds would match the scent on the letters. In place after place, the dogs had no reaction. But when the handlers approached the Frederick, Md., apartment building of Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, an eccentric 48-year-old scientist who had worked in one of the Army's top bioweapons-research laboratories, the dogs immediately became agitated, NEWSWEEK has learned. "They went crazy," says one law-enforcement source. The agents also brought the bloodhounds to the Washington, D.C., apartment of Hatfill's girlfriend and to a Denny's restaurant in Louisiana, where Hatfill had eaten the day before. In both places, the dogs jumped and barked, indicating they'd picked up the scent. (Bloodhounds are the only dogs whose powers of smell are admissible in court.) 

After months of frustration, the Feds believed they were finally on the verge of a breakthrough.  Flamboyant and arrogant, with a penchant for exaggerating his achievements, Hatfill intrigued them. For years, he had loudly complained the United States wasn’t doing enough to prepare for a potential bioterror attack, and feared that his warnings weren’t being heeded. Then, the government suspended his security clearance after he failed questions on a polygraph exam he took while applying for a job at the CIA. The loss of his clearance put his job at a defense contractor at peril. The fact that the first anthrax letters went out a month later ultimately made investigators wonder: had the experience left him bitter enough to do something drastic?

Something else about Hatfill caught their eye. Agents surveilling his apartment watched him as he pitched loads of his belongings into a dumpster behind his apartment building—getting rid of evidence, some agents wondered.  Though the FBI says Hatfill has been cooperative all along, the dogs and the dumpster led agents to obtain a criminal-search warrant for Hatfill’s apartment—to turn up the heat. Agents arrived Thursday morning, with the bloodhounds in tow. When they entered the apartment, one of the dogs excitedly bounded right up to Hatfill. “When you see how the dogs go to everything that connected him, you say ‘Damn!’ ” says a law-enforcement official.

Yet despite the hounds’ enthusiasm, when the Feds left the apartment hours later, they found nothing linking Hatfill to the crime (lab tests of their findings are ongoing). Agents who went into the dumpster found only a heap of Hatfill’s personal belongings. Hatfill, who knew he was being watched by the FBI and had complained to friends about it, had a perfectly good explanation: of course he was throwing things into the dumpster. He had recently accepted a job at Louisiana State University, and was cleaning out his apartment before the move. (Last week LSU placed Hatfill on a 30-day paid leave of absence.)

Initial excitement, followed by dashed hopes, has typified the government’s maddening, months-long search for the person responsible for the worst bioterror attack on American soil. The six letters, mailed last fall to Leahy, Daschle, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, the New York Post and the Florida offices of the National Enquirer, wound up infecting 18 people and killing five. The crime was especially terrifying because the anthrax—a sophisticated, “aerosolized” powder—escaped from the envelopes, spread through parts of the nation’s mail system and contaminated an entire Senate office building. Nearly a year later, the main mail-handling center in Washington, D.C., has yet to be reopened.

The FBI is under tremendous pressure to close the case—unlike the September 11 hijackers, the anthrax killer is presumably still alive, and at large. The two targeted senators demand regular progress reports from the bureau, and are becoming increasingly impatient.

Plagued by false starts and dead ends, the investigators have turned their attention time and again to Hatfill. But officials say they aren’t close to making any arrests in the case. “We’re still a long way from any proof that we could take into court,” says one senior official. Through his lawyers, Hatfill has steadfastly maintained his innocence, and officials say that he has been very helpful and cooperative. “Dr. Hatfill... was voluntarily debriefed and polygraphed, and voluntarily agreed to have his home, car and other property subjected to a lengthy and comprehensive search by the FBI,” said Victor Glasberg, Hatfill’s lawyer, in a statement last week. “He... was told that the results were all favorable and that he was not a suspect in the case.” (Glasberg declined to answer questions.) Thursday’s search wasn’t the first time agents appeared at Hatfill’s doorstep. In the months before, he had voluntarily allowed agents to search his apartment on two other occasions.

Officials have been particularly careful to point out that Hatfill is one of “around 12” people they are looking at. They say he is not a suspect, or even a target of the investigation.  The bureau is still haunted by its botched investigation of Richard Jewell, the falsely suspected Olympic bomber who was all but convicted in the press by anonymous leaks from government agents, who were sure he was guilty. Jewell was eventually cleared of all suspicion and successfully sued for damages. The deeply embarrassing episode left a permanent chill on the bureau. “Richard Jewell looms large around here,” says an FBI official. “We’ve got to be very careful.”

In the frantic weeks after the attacks, federal agents tried to piece together a profile of the type of person who would have—and could have—carried out the crime. There were many possibilities. A foreign terrorist? A disgruntled scientist? Several times, they excitedly pursued promising leads that came up short. Last November, agents stormed the home of Aziz Kazi, a Pakistani-born budget official for the city of Chester, Pa. They hauled away dozens of boxes of his belongings and questioned him for hours about a mysterious liquid he had been seen carrying out of the house. It turned out the family dishwasher had backed up, and Kazi was bailing out his kitchen. In another lead, agents in Texas began watching an Egyptian man who had been fingered by a jailhouse snitch. Agents overheard his associates talking about delivering the contents of a “brown envelope,” and watched as he went to the airport. When they covertly searched his luggage, they found the envelope. Inside: insurance papers.

Before long, agents concluded that the sophisticated attacks were more likely carried out by someone who had access to a well-equipped lab. That meant a scientist—quite possibly one who worked for the government. The anthrax was finely produced to spread quickly through the air, not the sort of thing an amateur could create. FBI profilers believed the evidence pointed to a person who wanted to send a message, and possibly show off his talents, not necessarily to kill. Some of the letters warned the reader to start taking penicillin, and the anthrax itself was not an advanced, drug-resistant strain, but one that was easily treatable with common antibiotics. 

When agents began asking around the scientific community, one name kept popping up: Steven Hatfill. In the small, insular world of germ scientists, Hatfill’s outsized personality stood out. He regaled colleagues with tales of his exploits as a cold warrior in the ’70s, fighting with the elite SAS troops and notorious Selous Scouts of the white Rhodesian Army against black rebels. He claimed a brilliant career in the U.S. military, bragging to a friend that he flew fighter planes and helicopters. On his resume, he lists impressive credentials, including degrees in medicine from a Rhodesian university and a Ph.D. in microbiology from Rhodes University in South Africa.

Friends and colleagues uniformly use words like “brilliant” and “charming” to describe him. “Once when we were chatting I grabbed a thick medical reference book from the library and said to him, ‘Hey Steve, can I test you?’ ” recalled one former colleague. “It didn’t matter what I asked him: he repeated the answer as if reading the book to me.”  But he was also called “strange” and “short-tempered.” At a hospital in South Africa, colleagues recalled that he wore a 9mm sidearm, even when making his rounds. He drove fast and piled up traffic tickets, and had a reputation for running through girlfriends. One colleague dubbed him the “Warren Beatty of science.” He also had a habit of making wild claims.  One former colleague says Hatfill told him he was a fighter pilot in Vietnam and had been shot down over the China Sea.

In fact, many of Hatfill’s heroics appear to have been exaggerated. A copy of his military records, obtained by NEWSWEEK, shows that Hatfill joined the Marines in 1971, but was discharged a year later. He did a three-year stint in the Army, stationed in the United States, but did not rise above the rank of private—and was never trained as a pilot. Military records in Zimbabwe—and news-week interviews—show Hatfill did serve in the military in Rhodesia. But U.S. records show that he was in America for at least two of the years he claimed to have been fighting in Rhodesia.  More seriously, Hatfill’s Ph.D. also appears to be an invention. Rhodes University officials tell NEWSWEEK that he was indeed enrolled there at one point, but never received a degree. And he claimed to be a member of the prestigious Royal Society of Medicine; officials there say they have no record of his belonging.

Hatfill’s medical degree was for real, and friends and teachers described him as a gifted scientist. In 1995, Hatfill received a research fellowship at the National Institutes of Health for biomedical research. Two years later he won a job at the government’s premier biolab, the U.S. Army’s Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, or USAMRIID, located in Frederick, Md., an hour outside Washington, D.C.  The lab does hands-on research with deadly biological agents, including Ebola and anthrax. Hatfill worked on Ebola and Marburg research, and was not assigned to work with anthrax, according to a base spokesman.

Hatfill became focused on the dangers of a potential bioweapons attack in the United States—and believed the country wasn’t doing enough to prepare. He felt so strongly that he took his case to the public. Appearing on a cable-TV news show, he warned that anthrax could be sent through the mail. “He was so sure that this was going to happen,” recalls the show’s host, Armstrong Williams. “He was emphatic.”  Hatfill posed for a magazine photo spread that depicted him making a batch of anthrax in his kitchen. In 1999, he left USAMRIID for a job at Scientific Applications International Corp., a huge defense contractor where he did work detailing the risks of biological and chemical attacks. As part of his job, he gave periodic presentations to employees of U.S. military, intelligence and other government agencies.

Last summer Hatfill’s work was abruptly halted when he applied for a job with the CIA, a post that required a high-level security clearance. But when Hatfill failed the polygraph exam, the CIA rejected him for the job and the Pentagon suspended his existing security clearance. As a result, he lost his position at SAIC.

When the Feds first began looking at Hatfill soon after the attacks, he was open and friendly, invited agents to search his home and car, and allowed them to spend hours combing through a storage locker he kept near his parents’ house in Florida. He even waived his physician-patient privilege so investigators could ask his doctor about Hatfill’s prescriptions for Cipro. (He explained Hatfill had an infection.) The searches came up empty. There was one intriguing, but inconclusive, find. On Hatfill’s computer hard drive, agents discovered the draft of a novel. The thriller’s plot centered on a bioterror attack, and how the perpetrator covered his tracks. But the fictional musings of a scientist were hardly evidence, and the investigation stalled.

One of the major questions the Feds have yet to answer: how did the perpetrator pull it off? “It’s the big gap,” says one federal agent. Getting hold of the anthrax wouldn’t necessarily have been hard for a government scientist. At least one U.S. government lab has covertly manufactured a small amount of weapons-grade anthrax since the early ’90s.  And law-enforcement sources say the labs are notoriously lax at keeping track of their inventory, and their overall security is poor. “Someone could just put a Baggie in his coat and walk out of a lab with the stuff,” says one law-enforcement official. 

Yet even a highly trained scientist would have had a difficult time preparing and sending the anthrax without getting it all over himself and his surroundings. Anthrax researchers describe how the finely milled powder simply floats off glass slides before they can get it under the microscope. Getting the stuff into an envelope—and not everywhere else—would have required enormous skill. One possibility: the perpetrator had access to a commercial or government lab equipped with a “clean room.” Another: a sophisticated home lab.

Until investigators can find physical evidence tying someone to the crime, they’ll be forced to speculate about the perpetrator’s motives and methods. They are still casting an enormous net. Law-enforcement sources say they have issued hundreds of subpoenas nationwide, and they are sifting through thousands of documents in search of new leads. The clues may be too small to see—sweat or a scent on an envelope—but that may be all they need to bring out the hounds.
 

With Tom Masland, Mark Hosenball, Howard Fineman, Michael Isikoff, John Barry, Eleanor Clift and Mike Cadman. Research by Ruth Tenenbaum.

© 2002 Newsweek, Inc.

Bioweapons researcher Steven J. Hatfill says he has never worked with anthrax. What does his resumé say?

By Mark Miller
NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE

Aug. 12 —  Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, the American bioweapons researcher who has come under scrutiny by the FBI in connection with the anthrax attacks that left five people dead last fall, went public yesterday to proclaim his innocence. But in declining to elaborate on his prepared statement, he may have raised more questions than answers about his experience with the deadly bacterium.

STANDING ON THE steps of his lawyer’s Alexandria, Va., office in the sweltering midday sun, Hatfill, 48, proclaimed himself a “loyal American” who “had nothing to do in any way, shape or form with the mailing of these anthrax letters.” “It is extremely wrong for anyone to contend or suggest that I have,” he said. Bitterly criticizing a group of fellow scientists who for months have urged the authorities and the media to take a closer look at him, Hatfill accused the authorities and some in the media of trying to make him the “fall guy” for the anthrax attacks. “I will not be railroaded,” he said.

In his prepared statement, which he read to reporters, Hatfill said he understood that his expertise in biological and chemical warfare defenses made him a natural subject of interest to investigators looking into the anthrax attacks. He said he had no objection, for example, when he was asked last fall to take a polygraph—as other scientists in similar positions were asked to do—when FBI investigators visited his office and questioned him. After his polygraph test, he said, he was told that his answers had been judged as satisfactory and he was not considered a suspect in the anthrax attacks.

The Hunt for the Anthrax Killer

He also said in his statement that his area of scientific expertise, particularly at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infections Diseases (USAMRIID), one of the premier bioweapons facilities in the world, concerned viruses such as Ebola and Marburg. His research, he said, did not involve work with bacterium such as anthrax. 

“I have never, ever worked with anthrax in my life,” he said, a claim repeated by his civil attorney, Victor M. Glasberg, who was retained, Glasberg said, to help the 48-year-old scientist repair his battered public image. A spokesman for USAMRIID has confirmed that Hatfill worked in the virology section of the facility and his research did not involve anthrax. But the spokesman has also said Hatfill could have worked near someone who had access to anthrax. Former employees of USAMRIID have described remarkably lax security procedures at the facility; during the early 1990s, several pathogens went missing and remain unaccounted for, according to an inventory.

There is also Hatfill’s own resumé to contend with when considering his expertise in the area of anthrax. In 1999, he maintained that he had “respiratory and medical clearance to conduct research on Biosafety Level 3 pathogens [including] Plague and Anthrax.” He also asserted that he had “working knowledge of the former U.S. and former BW [bioweapons] programs, wet and dry BW agents, large-scale production of bacterial, rickettsial, and viral BW pathogens and toxins....” Hatfill also noted on his resumé that he was the “principal architect” for a pilot project to deal with a comprehensive response to a large-scale attack involving Weapons of Mass Destruction, including biological agents. Such a response would also include a “rational approach to decontamination following threats with Bacillus anthrasis [anthrax] and other BW agents.” It was apparently for this pilot project that Hatfill and another researcher commissioned a report from a noted American bioweapons researcher, William Patrick.  Although Hatfill apparently did not request such information, Patrick’s final report included specific details considering a mailed anthrax attack.

During his appearance Sunday, Hatfill took no questions and his attorney largely deflected inquiries about his client’s resumé as irrelevant to whether Dr. Hatfill should be a suspect in the anthrax attacks. Lawyer Glasberg also dismissed as “bogus” a report from NEWSWEEK’s "The Hunt for the Anthrax Killer" [Aug. 12, 2002] that FBI bloodhounds seeking out the scent associated with the sender of last year’s anthrax letters “went crazy” when they came into contact with the apartment building occupied by Hatfill.

“I especially object to having my character assassinated by reference to events from my past,” Hatfill said in his statement. “No more than any of you, I do not claim to have lived a perfect life. Like yourselves, there are things I would probably do or say differently than I did 10 or 20 or more years ago.”

NEWSWEEK also reported in its Aug.12 issue that there are questions about the veracity of Hatfill’s resumé and claims he has made to others about his past. For example, he claimed on the 1999 resumé to have a Ph.D from Rhodes University in South Africa. But Rhodes, while confirming he was registered to study at the school, says he was never awarded an advanced degree. 

Hatfill also has claimed to be a former member of the U.S. Special Forces. The U.S. military says that is not the case. He told some former friends that he had been a fighter pilot shot down in Vietnam; U.S. military records obtained by NEWSWEEK show he was in the Army and did not rise above the rank of private. 

He has further claimed to have been elected as a “Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine, London, England (1995); The RSM told Newsweek they have no record of a Dr. Hatfill. He claimed membership in the Oxford Association of University Teachers but it too told NEWSWEEK it has no record of his membership.

NEWSWEEK also previously reported that FBI investigators had found a draft of a novel by Hatfill on his computer hard drive. The novel, government sources told NEWSWEEK, dealt with a bioweapons attack on the United States. On Sunday, ABC News affiliate WJLA-TV in Washington reported that it had obtained part of the manuscript: “This novel envisions a biological attack on Congress,” a WJLA reporter said. “It’s an attack so deadly not only do members of Congress and congressional aides become ill, but hundreds of Washington residents become ill and many die as a result.”

Despite thousands of manhours of investigation, the identity of the anthrax killer remains elusive, frustrated law enforcement sources tell NEWSWEEK. FBI sources refuse to call Hatfill a “suspect” but say he is, like about two dozen others on a rolling list, a “person of interest” because of his background. Investigators acknowledge they are under significant political pressure—two of the intended victims, after all, were Senators Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle—as well as media scrutiny. But they are always mindful of a painful lesson named Richard Jewell, the Atlanta security guard wrongly said to have been behind the 1996 Olympics bombing. Hatfill’s attorney liberally invoked Jewell’s name on Sunday afternoon, but that may not be enough to quiet the speculation about his scientist client. 

© 2002 Newsweek, Inc.

MSNBC/REUTERS

BRASILIA, Brazil, April 28

A crew member of an Egyptian merchant ship has died in northern Brazil, almost certainly from anthrax, after opening a suitcase suspected of containing the substance, which he was taking to Canada.

A SPOKESMAN for Brazilian federal police in the Amazon state of Para said on Monday an autopsy of the Egyptian man, whom he named as Ibrahim Saved Soliman Ibrahim, showed that he had died after vomiting, internal bleeding and multiple organ failure. 

"He was the victim of anthrax," said Fernando Sergio Castro, adding that police were 90 percent certain that anthrax was the cause of Ibrahim's death. 

Ibrahim died in the hotel were he was staying on April 11. Several health workers who found his body were taken to a hospital after becoming ill but are now out of danger. 

Ibrahim had traveled to Brazil from Cairo to join his ship, the Wabi Alaras, which loaded bauxite in the Amazon to take to Canada.

"We imagine that this is about bioterrorism and Brazil was just used as a point of transfer," said Castro. 

Ibrahim died before his ship sailed to Canada, where it was quarantined by authorities last week. 

Canada was alerted to the ship through Interpol. 

A Health Canada spokeswoman in Halifax said Brazilian authorities had provided Canada with preliminary autopsy results but the final results were not expected to arrive in Canada before Tuesday at the earliest. 

Brazil's Castro said Ibrahim had been given the suitcase in Cairo by an unidentified person and was due to deliver it to somebody in Canada. But he doubted Ibrahim knew what the content of the bag was, otherwise he most likely would not have opened it. 

"He opened it because he was curious," Castro said. 

After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, five people died in still-unsolved anthrax mailings. 

"There is absolutely no criminal or terrorist threat to Canada," Royal Canadian Mounted Police Inspector Dan Tanner said from Halifax.

MSNBC
ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON, May 17 — Billboards in Louisiana where a serial killer is loose display the image of a grim-faced man with bushy eyebrows, and the title “person of interest.” When Maryland police discovered three bodies last month, they put out an alert for a “person of interest” — the suspected shooter. “Person of interest” has no legal basis but it has become a new part of American law enforcement vernacular.

MORE VAGUE than suspect or target, person of interest can apply to anyone who might have knowledge that police want. Critics complain it is a subtle way of calling someone a suspect, and authorities acknowledge the distinction is hard for people to make.

While not in law books or law enforcement manuals, the expression has popped up ever since Attorney General John Ashcroft used it last year to refer to Steven Hatfill, an ex-Army scientist, in the anthrax-by-mail case. Hatfill, who has not been charged, denies any involvement in the unsolved attacks and says Ashcroft’s characterization of him has destroyed his life.

The term now can be found nearly every week in newspaper headlines and heard in police news conferences.

“It seems like it’s becoming part of the legal lexicon,” said Jonathan Shapiro, an Alexandria, Va., attorney who represented Hatfill. “It’s a way for the Justice Department to tiptoe around the fact they’re crushing someone, ruining their lives, and not get sued by it.”

Bradford Berenson, a Washington attorney now in private practice after two years as a White House lawyer, said it is a catchall phrase to describe nonsuspects.

“They’re saying, ‘We’re worried about this person, we’re suspicious of this person, but we don’t have any hard evidence that they’ve done anything wrong,”’ Berenson said. “It’s almost the equivalent of saying ‘potential suspect.”’

SEEKING A DEFINITION 

He said the term may be more widely used, especially in terrorism cases.

Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, demanded an explanation after the expression’s debut. An assistant attorney general responded in a letter that person of interest was used by unidentified FBI sources in response to speculation that Hatfill might be a suspect in the anthrax mailings that killed five people in 2001. The lawyer said it is a commonly understood term for someone who is not a suspect.

But FBI spokesman Bill Carter said it is not an FBI term and is not used by agents to classify people under investigation.

Grassley said at the time that the phrase was unprecedented and not supported by formal policy or evidentiary standard. “Government agencies need to be mindful of the power they wield over individual citizens, and should exercise caution and good judgment when they use that power,” Grassley said.

It is so obscure that it shields law enforcement from lawsuits such as those filed by exonerated 1996 Olympic bombing suspect Richard Jewell. He was investigated by the FBI after he spotted the backpack that held a bomb that exploded in Atlanta.

Jewell’s attorney, L. Lin Wood of Atlanta, said police owe an explanation when singling out someone in a criminal investigation.

“I don’t think the government ought to be placing those labels on individuals,” said Wood, who also represents the family of JonBenet Ramsey and former Rep. Gary Condit, who was romantically linked to murdered intern Chandra Levy.

‘A SILLY, MEANINGLESS TERM’?

Lawrence Goldman, a New York City attorney and president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said that by saying “he’s just a person of interest, wink wink,” police are shielded from embarrassment if they end up arresting someone else.

“If you think about it, it’s a silly, meaningless term,” he said.

But Goldman acknowledged officers might have an easier time getting confessions that will survive appeals from persons of interest instead of suspects who are on notice that they are under suspicion.

Richard Uviller, a Columbia Law School professor and former prosecutor and Justice Department lawyer, said the term is not necessarily bad.

“It seems to me we really need a term to describe a person who might turn out to be a witness and might turn out to be a suspect, but at this stage is only thought to be a person who knows something,” Uviller said.

In Baton Rouge, La., Cpl. Mary Ann Godawa said the billboards and fliers have not brought forward a man seen in the vicinity of one of five murders linked to the serial killer.  But it has stirred up speculation that he is the murderer, Godawa said.

“We said person of interest. Everyone else heard suspect,” she said.

FBI investigators have stumbled on a new theory of the 2001 anthrax attacks

Newsweek

May 26 issue —  After months of frustration, FBI investigators have stumbled on a new theory of the 2001 anthrax attacks that some sleuths hoped could crack the case. Earlier this year, acting on a tip, FBI divers recovered a plastic container from the depths of an ice-covered pond near Frederick, Md. Some suspect it could have been used as a crude piece of lab equipment.

THE BUREAU HAS long believed that the anthrax perp is a disgruntled bioweapons researcher. One of the “persons of interest” the bureau has focused on is Steven J. Hatfill, a doctor and bioterrorism researcher who formerly worked at the U.S. Army Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Frederick. (Hatfill has steadfastly denied any involvement in the attacks and has criticized the FBI for singling him out.) 

Earlier this month The Washington Post reported the discovery of the new evidence, a clear plastic container resembling a “glove box,” a device often used by researchers handling deadly pathogens to protect them from contamination. The Post also reported a tantalizing new theory. Some investigators believed that the perp may have submerged the box underwater to manipulate the spores into envelopes without sickening or killing himself. While some law-enforcement officials are taking the novel theory seriously, others have dismissed it as fantasy. “It got a lot of giggles,” says one FBI source.

But what is more intriguing to the FBI is the source of the tip in the first place. NEWSWEEK has learned that the tipster was an acquaintance of Hatfill’s; agents searched the pond after interviewing the friend, who relayed a provocative conversation he’d had with the bioweapons researcher. 

Hatfill, the source told the bureau, was questioning the FBI’s current theory of the case, that whoever manufactured the anthrax would have needed access to sophisticated equipment and a lab. He said the toxic bacteria could be made in the woods and the evidence could be tossed “in a lake.” When agents found the box in the Frederick pond, they thought they had a eureka moment. The FBI tested the box for residue of anthrax bacilli, and at first got a positive result. But subsequent tests have been negative. (It is possible that the spores would wash off underwater.) Investigators still have no physical evidence linking Hatfill, or anyone else, to the crime. 

Hatfill’s lawyer, Tom Connolly, would not comment on the discovery of the box or his clients’s alleged conversation. “Dr. Hatfill had nothing to do with the anthrax attacks. Period,” Connolly told NEWSWEEK. 

Next month the FBI may drain the entire pond in hopes of finding new evidence. One item agents might be looking for: a wet suit that could have been used and disposed of by the anthrax attacker.

  —Daniel Klaidman and Michael Isikoff

NBC - 9/4/2003

MATT LAUER, co-host: 

It's been almost two years now since anthrax was sent through the mail in this country, killing five people and spreading fears of biological terrorism. Still no one has been arrested for the crime. In the October issue of Vanity Fair magazine, Don Foster, an English literature professor at Vassar College, looks at the investigation and comes up with some interesting conclusions of his own. 

Don Foster, good morning. Nice to have you here. 

Mr. DON FOSTER (Author of Vanity Fair Article on 2001 Anthrax Attacks): Good morning, Matt. Good to be here. 

LAUER: Let's get to the basics right now. How does an English literature professor from Vassar end up working with the FBI on some fairly high-profile cases like the Unabomber, JonBenet Ramsey, the Atlanta Olympic Park bombing? How did that happen? 

Mr. FOSTER: Well, for generations, literary scholars have had to decide who wrote what because so many literary texts were first published without author's names. And over the years, scholars have developed techniques for looking at spelling and source material and... 

LAUER: Word choices, vocabulary, return addresses on envelopes, all that sort of thing? 

Mr. FOSTER: Exactly, and come up with authors for a text. 

LAUER: So October 2001, your phone rings, it's the FBI. They start to talk to you about being a part of the anthrax investigation. When you saw the letters that they presented you, you immediately discounted foreign terrorism, why? 

Mr. FOSTER: Well, one wants to decide first what can be learned from the information we've got here, and this writer says, "Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is great." That sounds like it might be an Islamic terrorist. The first incident was down in Palm Beach, Florida, where Bob Stevens died where many of the terrorists had been located. The next letters turned up being mailed from New Jersey where other 9/11 terrorists were located. So this looks like maybe it could be associated with terrorists... 

LAUER: Maybe, but... 

Mr. FOSTER: ...but there are some warning signs. 

LAUER: Yeah, what were the warning signs? 

Mr. FOSTER: Well, for example, the--the writer didn't mail these letter on 9/11, but puts
"9/11" at the top. It's someone who wants the authorities to think that these letters have
something to do with 9/11. The letters were very carefully sealed as if to prevent the anthrax from getting out of the envelope along the way. 

LAUER: Yeah, I think outside there's Scotch tape on the back, right? 

Mr. FOSTER: And then inside is a warning--yes, and inside is a warning, you know, "Get medical treatment." So this looks like someone who didn't really want to kill someone but wanted to send some kind of a message or a warning. 

LAUER: All right, so when you looked at the letter that was sent to Tom Brokaw here at NBC, and we'll put a graphic up of--of what we have of that, what stood out immediately in your mind? 

Mr. FOSTER: Well, the--there's--when you have just such a short letter like this, there's not going to be too many indicators of who might have written it, so you want to look at what clues you do have. And there were few in the Brokaw letter. We got a few more on the Daschle letter. 

LAUER: Let's take a look at what we have on the Daschle letter and what--and what stood out in your mind from this? 

Mr. FOSTER: Well, for example, the envelope. It was mailed, supposedly, from students at Greendale School. That tells you a couple of things. One is that it's someone who may know that school kids in America do, in fact, send letters to their senators. 

LAUER: And they're not suspicious because, oh, it's just another group of school kid letters. 

Mr. FOSTER: Yes, exactly. It's not something that an al-Qaeda terrorist from Afghanistan or whatever is likely to do. And then there's the--the name itself, Greendale School. This could be someone who attended a Greendale School or who had read about one or lived near a Greendale School in the past. There's a question of where the addresses came from. Where did this offender get the addresses for Senator Leahy and Daschle? 

LAUER: You start to gather all this information in your own investigation, and it leads you to what I guess would best be described as your own person of interest in this investigation, and that person of interest is Steven Hatfill, who's a name we've heard--his name is one we've heard with the investigation for the last year or so. Give me his 10-second resume. Who's Steve Hatfill? 

Mr. FOSTER: Well, he's--he got his start in biological issues as a medical student in Africa, in Rhodesia, in 1970s. During that time, he professed doing combat duty with Selous Scouts who were later identified as having been responsible for the worst anthrax outbreak in--in--in human history with 11,000 cases in just two years. 

LAUER: While he doesn't confess to working with anthrax directly, he's worked with anthrax stimulants? 

Mr. FOSTER: Anthrax stimulants are--are bacteria that are used by military researchers that have the properties of anthrax. And Hatfill has professed a good deal of experience with those.

LAUER: And--and he's been labeled a person of interest by those investigating the anthrax attacks. You do not say he is the suspect in the case, but is it fair of me to say you connect enough dots along the way that you intentionally lead the reader in his direction? 

Mr. FOSTER: Well, I don't do anthrax spores, I just follow the paper trail. And in this case, the--the paper trail made Steven Hatfill a--certainly a person of interest to me. 

LAUER: So what's the most compelling piece of evidence against him, in your opinion? 

Mr. FOSTER: Well, the--I think what's been happening now is that forensic evidence and the linguistic and documentary evidence are kind of focusing on the same person. The task force guys and woman are--are very hard-working, dedicated agents, and they feel they're one spore away from an arrest. If we don't find that one spore, then we want to look closer at the documentary trial, which I think also leads to Hatfill as person of remarkable interest. 

LAUER: Of remarkable interest. OK, you've upped the ante there. We asked his lawyers for a comment, they've declined. Are you concerned? I mean, he's already filed suit against the government. Are you concerned that you might be targeted with a lawsuit by Steven Hatfill?

Mr. FOSTER: Well, of course, everyone should be concerned. What we want to be sure of that we don't make assumptions that Steven Hatfill or any other American scientist was involved in this terrible attack, but consider the evidence fairly and objectively and not jump to conclusions. 

LAUER: I want to also mention in addition to looking at the letters that actually contained anthrax, you--you looked very carefully at the hoax letters as well. 

Mr. FOSTER: Yes. When--when you get something like this, you want to find out where else have we had someone threatening to do something like this. And as it turns out, even through we're in the 21st century, the FBI does not yet have an archive of threat letters. And... 

LAUER: So, in other words, they--they have all the real anthrax letters in one pile, and
they--and they put the others in kind of a--an area where they don't pay much attention to them? 

Mr. FOSTER: Well, they're--we get so many of these, and they're scattered about the country.  The FBI is now taking steps to create a national archive of threat letters so that when you get an incident that's threatening a--a leader, threatening an anthrax attack, whatever, you can look and find other documents that would be similar. What I had to do was to actually go to news archives and find evidence of similar incidents in the past. 

LAUER: And did you trace any of those hoax letters and connect them possibly to Steven Hatfill as well? 

Mr. FOSTER: Well, what needs to be done still is to gather all of these documents. There
are--there are many that are related to abortion clinic attacks, there are others that are just pranks by teen-agers, but there are some incidence of a particular interest which choose particular targets, including NBC, that use similar language to the anthrax letters. 

LAUER: And just in 10 seconds left, would you be surprised if in the next year or so Steven Hatfill's arrested by the FBI? 

Mr. FOSTER: Well, I--I--I think the FBI will get its man, whoever that might be. The FBI does a very good job, and they do want to solve this case. 

LAUER: Well put. All right, Don Foster, thanks very much. I appreciate it. 

Mr. FOSTER: You're welcome.

WASHINGTON - Detectives hunt a criminal’s fingerprints. Scientists hunt a germ’s genetic fingerprints. Tracing the origin of bioterrorism takes both specialties. So the FBI is teaming up with public health experts and other scientists to create a national laboratory network dedicated to this field of “microbial forensics,” analyzing evidence from crimes committed with germs.

It's the same type of partnership invoked in the investigation of the 2001 anthrax-by-mail attacks. Although that case remains unsolved, the FBI consulted experts in anthrax genetics to learn that the type used was the virulent Ames strain, narrowing the probe to people with access to that particular microbe.

Formally establishing a laboratory network for future investigations promises to enhance the field, said Dr. Steven E. Schutzer of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, who is helping to draft quality-assurance guidelines for lab participants.

In Friday’s edition of the journal Science, FBI scientist Bruce Budowle, who is heading the project, and Schutzer describe the lab plans and call for scientific critique of the quality guidelines.

“Scientists can play a substantial role in thwarting the use of bioweapons,” by developing ways to detect them and trace their origin, they wrote.

Scientists from government agencies and university laboratories nationwide will participate in the network, with a hub at Fort Detrick, Md., they wrote.

One goal is to have on-call all the necessary experts on a particular bioweapon — for some types, there may be only one or two specialists in the country — whose home labs know how to handle evidence so that it’s admissible in court, Schutzer said.

Another goal is to foster research ensuring all the analytical methods used are scientifically solid, he added.

“It’s an unusual law-enforcement partnering with scientists,” he said.

April 12 issue - According to documents obtained by NEWSWEEK, Al Qaeda mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed told U.S. investigators after his capture last year that a high-ranking Qaeda lieutenant known as Khallad originally was "selected" to participate in the 9/11 attacks as a "bouncer"—one of the musclemen assigned to corral and subdue passengers on a hijacked plane. Khallad, a one-legged Yemeni also known as Tawfiq bin Attash, attended a January 2000 "summit" meeting in Malaysia at which he allegedly went over plans for 9/11 with two future hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi. After the meeting, Almihdhar and Alhazmi traveled to the United States. But Khallad apparently was unable to get a U.S. visa; instead, authorities say, he went on to mastermind the October 2000 suicide attack on the USS Cole in Yemen. He was finally captured in Karachi, Pakistan, a year ago.

According to other reports generated during U.S. interrogations of "Hambali," an Indonesian terrorist leader captured in Thailand last summer, a Malaysian named Yazid Sufaat, who helped organize and host the Kuala Lumpur terror "summit," traveled to Afghanistan in June 2001 for a one-month training course. Hambali claimed that, after training, Sufaat worked with him "supporting" a Qaeda "anthrax program" in the Afghan city of Kandahar. After 9/11, Hambali says, he again met Sufaat and had discussions about "continuing the anthrax program in Indonesia." Though U.S. intelligence officials say there is evidence that Al Qaeda was interested in acquiring chemical, biological and atomic weapons, there is little if any proof that the bin Laden network ever acquired weapons of mass destruction other than poisons like cyanide and ricin. A CIA spokesman had no comment on the interrogations of Mohammed and Hambali.

—Mark Hosenball

POSTED: 2:02 pm EDT August 5, 2004
UPDATED: 4:40 pm EDT August 5, 2004

LAVALETTE, N.J. -- A house at the Jersey Shore was surrounded Thursday by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The FBI is looking for the person responsible for the deadly anthrax attacks that terrorized the nation three years ago.

The postal inspection service joined the FBI in searching homes in Ocean Beach, just north of Point Pleasant, and in Wellsville, N.Y., southeast of Buffalo.

The house in New Jersey belongs to an older couple in Connecticut, but it is their son whom the FBI said it is interested in. NBC 10 is not identifying the man, but he is in 40s and at one time he was president of the American Council of Emergency Room Physicians. Sources told NBC 10 that he does have some expertise in anthrax. Sources say he was given a polygraph test and it came back inconclusive.

Federal sources told NBC 10 News that the doctor has been of interest to investigators in the past. However, those sources said the doctor is not high on the list of suspects. Investigators conducted the raids Thursday in an effort to completely cross him off the list of suspects, the source told NBC 10 News. No charges have been filed.

At this point, no one is saying what, if anything, has been found in the homes. However Gov. Jim McGreevey released a statement saying the FBI told him there was not danger to public health or safety in the area of the search.

In the fall 2001, someone used the U.S. mail to spread anthrax. Some of those anthrax-tainted letters were processed at a postal facility in Hamilton, N.J.

There were at least five confirmed anthrax infections and two suspected infections in New Jersey. There were no fatalities in New Jersey.

For more than two years, Steven Hatfill has lived life in legal limbo. Publicly branded a “person of interest” in the anthrax case, he’s never been charged with any crime. Now Hatfill is striking back, in a libel lawsuit against one of his many armchair accusers.

Court documents show that Hatfill has filed suit against Donald Foster, an English professor at Vassar College who wrote about Hatfill in the October 2003 issue of Vanity Fair. Hatfill claims Foster and other defendants defamed him by leaving “no doubt in the minds of reasonable readers that he was imputing guilt for the anthrax attacks (as well as some anthrax hoaxes) to Dr. Hatfill.” The lawsuit seeks $10 million in damages and, along the way, makes folly of a novel investigative tool called “literary forensics.”

In the fall of 2001, someone mailed anthrax-laced letters to two U.S. senators and to a number of media organizations, including NBC News. The finely milled anthrax spores were remarkably buoyant, and five people who inhaled them were killed.

Foster's ‘literary forensics’

Enter Donald Foster. A practitioner of “literary forensics,” Foster is perhaps best known for fingering the author of the political novel “Primary Colors.” Foster is skilled at identifying the authors of anonymous texts by examining word usage, grammar, punctuation and slang. His usual suspects, he jokes, are dead poets — Shakespeare and Wordsworth. But in October 2001 the FBI contacted the English professor to examine some documents in the growing anthrax investigation.

Foster eagerly jumped in, examining letters the FBI sent him and then snooping around on his own. “I searched for stories of past so-called hoaxes — and uncovered a trail of seemingly related biothreat incidents,” he writes. After months of Internet research and collaboration with molecular biologist Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, Foster says he became interested in virologist Steven Hatfill: “Steven Hatfill was now looking to me like a suspect, or at least — as the FBI would denote him eight months later — ‘a person of interest.’ When I lined up Hatfill’s known movements with the postmark locations of reported biothreats, those hoax anthrax attacks appeared to trail him like a vapor cloud,” Foster writes in Vanity Fair.

One example Foster cites took place in August 1998, in Wichita, Kan., when someone spread powder throughout several floors of the Finney State Office Building. Without presenting evidence that Hatfill was anywhere near Kansas in 1998 or that his handwriting matched that of the author of an anonymous letter later taking credit for the threat, Foster seems to draw a link. He notes that the Finney building is “40 miles southeast of Southwestern College, Hatfill’s alma mater.” Hatfill graduated from Southwestern in the 1970's.

Hatfill’s legal response

“Each of these implied accusations is false,” Hatfill's lawsuit states, and the article “betrays complete inattention to even a rudimentary sense of balance or fairness toward Dr. Hatfill.”

The lawsuit also attacks comments made prior to publication of the article, that suggest Foster at first believed a foreigner was responsible for the anthrax mailings. In a Dec. 26, 2001, article in The Times of London, for example, Foster says: “It is my opinion that the documents are at least compatible with that of a foreign speaker of Urdu or Arabic — although it's quite possible that it's someone using it as a smokescreen. There are some other indications that this person may be a Pakistani.”

The suit concludes that Foster failed to mention any contradictory statements in the Vanity Fair piece “because Foster’s purpose was to portray ‘literary forensics’ as a valuable technique and Don Foster as a skilled practitioner of that technique.” It takes Vanity Fair’s editors to task for not challenging Foster’s methodology and conclusions: “When a professor of English literature says that he has identified a criminal who has eluded the FBI for two years, deep skepticism is warranted.”

Foster concedes in Vanity Fair that when the FBI first approached him, “I was perfectly willing to believe that the anthrax was ‘garden variety’ and that it had been sent by Muslim extremists.” He changed his mind, he writes, after plotting Hatfill’s travels next to the delivery dates of several suspicious hoax letters, reading old interviews of Hatfill in which he warned how easy it would be to carry out a biological attack and after reviewing Hatfill’s unpublished novel, "Emergence." The novel, Foster writes, revolves around an Iraqi virologist who launches a bioterror attack on the United States.

The coincidences are too much for Foster, as is the FBI’s incompetence in the case. He writes: “I have worked with the FBI for only six years, on no more than 20 investigations. But never have I encountered such reluctance to examine potentially critical documents.” Foster concludes that Hatfill is not being unfairly targeted like Richard Jewell, an early FBI suspect in the 1996 Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta. The FBI is on the right track with Hatfill, Foster writes, referring to the unemployed scientist as “my suspect.”

Don Foster is out of the country and did not return a phone message. His lawyer would not comment to NBC News. A separate lawyer representing Conde Nast Publications, which publishes Vanity Fair, stands by the story. “We intend to vigorously defend the story,” the lawyer tells NBC News, adding that Conde Nast has until Oct. 20 to file a response to the suit in federal court.

WASHINGTON - Federal prosecutors heard an earful Thursday from the federal judge handling a lawsuit against the government brought by Steven Hatfill, the man publicly identified by Attorney General John Ashcroft as a “person of interest” in the anthrax case.

Hatfill claims the U.S. Justice Department violated his privacy by leaking his name to reporters and harassed him to the point that he can't get a job.  But Thursday the government asked for a delay of at least six more months before any depositions of federal officials can begin in his civil case, saying Hatfill's lawsuit would interfere with its sprawling anthrax investigation.

In court, U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton said he'd consider the request but indicated he thinks the government has stalled already. Hatfill has "the right to vindicate himself, so he doesn't have this taint hanging over his head," Walton said.

In an extraordinary rebuke, Judge Walton, a Republican appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush, took the Justice Department to task for failing to indict or clear Hatfill after nearly three years of investigation.

Thundering from the bench, Walton told a federal prosecutor: "If you don't have enough information to indict this man, you can't keep dragging him through the mud." He added, “That's not the type of country I want to be part of. It's wrong!"

Hatfill was not present in court Thursday. His lawyer, Thomas Connolly, argued that FBI leaks to the media have smeared his client's reputation. A federal prosecutor, Elizabeth Shapiro, said that top Justice Department officials have been trying to stop the whisper campaign against Hatfill. "Leaks have occurred. We don't know who made those leaks," Shapiro said.

Three years have passed since the first anthrax letters were sent through the mail, first to news organizations, including NBC News, then to the U.S. Senate. FBI agents say it's one of their most complex investigations ever.

A spokeswoman for the FBI revealed new figures to NBC News showing the scope of the probe. She says FBI agents have now conducted more than 6,000 interviews, served almost 5,000 subpoenas and searched four dozen separate locations.

In a potentially key new development, the FBI say its agents have now determined that 16 U.S. laboratories actually had the strain of anthrax used in the attacks and the bureau has identified more than 1,000 employees of those labs who had access to it, all of them since questioned.

The most recent analysis, NBC News has learned, has further narrowed the number of potential source labs to four, though officials decline to specify which facilities are on that list.

The FBI remains optimistic that scientific analysis of the spores will help lead to the anthrax mailer, but some experts aren't so sure.

In one sign that there's still a long way to go, the FBI has not yet ruled out the possibility that the anthrax was made overseas.

Jim Popkin is NBC's senior investigative producer. Pete Williams is NBC's justice correspondent.

WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek
Updated: 5:49 p.m. ET Dec. 1, 2004

Dec. 1 - A hard-edged tactic used by a Justice Department special counsel to smoke out anonymous sources in a CIA leak case is about to be expanded to the 2001 anthrax investigation—despite profound misgivings within the department about the legitimacy of the practice.

As many as 100 FBI agents, federal prosecutors and other department employees are likely to be asked—possibly as early as the next few weeks—to sign broadly worded statements waiving any confidentiality agreements they had with journalists about the anthrax case, Justice officials tell NEWSWEEK. The waiver statement was recently ordered by a federal judge at the urging of lawyers for bioterrorism expert Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, who has filed a lawsuit alleging that government officials leaked damaging personal information about him  in an effort to connect him with the anthrax attacks.

The language is to be patterned on a similar statement distributed last year to White House officials and others in the investigation headed by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, a U.S. attorney in Chicago, to determine who leaked the identify of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame to columnist Robert Novak. Like the upcoming Hatfill waiver, the so-called “Plame waiver” was designed to be an end run around journalists’ claims that they are protecting the confidentiality of sources when they refuse to testify in leak investigations. The statement asserts that a government official who talked to the news media waives “any promise of confidentiality, express or implied” that was offered to them by a reporter, according to a copy of the Plame waiver obtained by NEWSWEEK.

It further authorizes any reporter with whom the official talked to disclose to investigators “any communications that I may have had … regarding the subject matters under investigation, including any communications made ‘on background,’ ‘off the record,’ ‘not for attribution,’ or in any other form.” 

The Plame case, including the validity of such “waiver” statements, is headed for a showdown next week when a federal appeals court hears arguments about whether two reporters, Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, should be incarcerated for refusing to answer questions about their contacts with administration officials who signed the waivers. But largely overlooked is that the Plame waiver appears to be catching on as an accepted practice to pressure reporters to reveal their sources.

This is happening even though some top officials within the Justice Department have serious doubts about the waivers. Indeed, although it got little attention at the time, a Justice lawyer recently acknowledged to the judge overseeing the Hatfill suit that the theoretically voluntary waiver poses “significant issues” for the government, including the fact that they could well be construed as coercive by officials who are asked to sign them.

The lawyer, Elizabeth Shapiro, also questioned whether the waivers would even be effective in persuading a journalist to disclose confidential communications with a source. “I can’t imagine that the breadth of such a waiver would have significant meaning to a reporter,” she said, according to a transcript of an Oct. 7 hearing before U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton, who is on the bench for the Hatfill case. 

“It’s very disturbing that this is starting to become used as a way to out the relationship between reporters and sources,” said Floyd Abrams, a prominent First Amendment lawyer who is representing both Miller and Cooper in the Plame case. “On the face of it, [the waivers] are coercive. How could they be anything but?” 

In the Plame case, special counsel Fitzgerald has persuaded a federal judge to hold both Miller and Cooper in contempt of court for refusing to testify about conversations they had with White House officials about Plame’s identify. (Plame, a former CIA undercover officer, is the wife of former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had become a critic of the president’s Iraq policy.) In pressing his case that both Miller and Cooper should be jailed if they don’t testify, Fitzgerald has invoked the waiver statements signed by the White House officials as evidence that whatever “reporters’ privilege” the journalists are claiming no longer applies.

But Miller and Cooper have countered exactly how Shapiro, the Justice Department lawyer in the Hatfill case, suggested they would: the waivers are meaningless. One reason is that White House officials were effectively compelled to sign them—and risked even losing their jobs if they did not, according to the journalists. “Whatever may have been said publicly or privately within the government to any source of mine that may have cajoled him or her to sign the form prepared by the government—and I am aware of public statements of the president himself urging all officials to cooperate with the investigation—does not affect my promise of confidentiality to my sources in any way,” Miller said in an affidavit submitted in the case. “I do not feel at all confident that such a form presented to individuals by their employer … is not signed under extraordinary pressure.”

Just how much pressure the government has used can be gleaned from the experience of one former White House official who, after the leaving the government, was still pushed repeatedly by the FBI to sign the waiver form. The former official, who asked not to be identified, said he refused to do so because “I didn’t think it was fair to the reporters. It struck me as a backdoor way to use pressure.” An arrangement between a reporter and a source “has to be all or nothing. It can’t be changed after the fact.”

At that point, the FBI agents called up the former official’s lawyer and stepped up the pressure, saying that other witnesses at the White House had signed the statements. “If he’s got nothing to hide, why won’t he sign,” one of the agents asked, according to the former official’s lawyer.

The new use of the Plame waiver stems from claims by Hatfill’s lawyers that government officials violated his rights under the Privacy Act by allegedly leaking damaging information about him—to NEWSWEEK, among other publications. (The lawsuit is separate from, and unrelated to, a libel suit filed by Hatfill against New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff that was dismissed by a federal judge last week.)

Although he was once described by Attorney General John Ashcroft as a “person of interest” in the deadly anthrax attacks, and was widely reported to be a principal focus of the investigation, Hatfill has never been charged in the case. Still, Hatfill lost his job with a government contractor and remains both unemployed and “unemployable” as a result of the widespread publicity he received in the matter, according to a source close to him.

In the civil suit, Hatfill’s lawyers demanded that the Justice Department conduct a vigorous leak investigation into who provided the news media with incriminating information about Hatfill. As a prod to make them do so, they seized on the idea of pushing Justice to distribute “Plame waivers” to a list of between 50 and 100 federal prosecutors, FBI agents and others who were working on the anthrax case.

Justice Department public affairs chief Mark Corallo said that no pressure will be put upon agents, prosecutors and others asked to sign the waivers in the Hatfill case. “We are simply the facilitators,” Corallo said. “The individuals who will receive these waivers will be informed they are under no obligation to sign them. It is totally voluntary, and no matter what their decision, it will not reflect on their employment.”

But Hatfill’s lawyers clearly have their own ideas. They intend to depose a long list of the agents and prosecutors who have worked on the anthrax case and intend to, they have indicated, target first and foremost any that declined to sign the waivers.

WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek
Updated: 6:27 p.m. ET Nov. 2, 2005

Nov. 2, 2005 - Just as President George W. Bush is launching an ambitious plan to guard against an avian flu pandemic, an administration program to prepare for a potential anthrax attack is running into new and unexpected hurdles. VaxGen Inc., a California biotech firm that last year was awarded an $877.5 million contract to supply a newly invented, and so far unlicensed, anthrax vaccine, acknowledged this week that it won't begin to start deliveries to the federal government until the latter part of next year—six months later than it originally intended. 

The company blames regulatory questions and production issues. But the production delay, along with apparent accounting difficulties and unanswered questions about the safety and effectiveness of the company's product, is likely to attract new attention on Capitol Hill. For months, investigators on both sides of the aisle have expressed concerns that the administration may have invested too big a chunk of the nation's biodefenses in one obscure and relatively untested company.

The need to build up the country's anthrax defenses first gained urgency four years ago following the mysterious mailings of anthrax powder to congressional offices and news organizations—an attack that killed five people and has yet to be solved by the FBI. The case prompted officials of the Department of Health and Human Services to begin searching for a reliable supplier of large quantities of anthrax vaccine that could be stockpiled and then distributed to the public in the event of another attack. The government has already stockpiled antibiotics that can be used to treat millions of people in the event of anthrax exposure, according to an HHS spokesman. But an anthrax vaccine would be an important second line of defense. “Vaccine can be given with antibiotics to potentially shorten the duration of post-exposure prophylaxis,” the spokesman said.

But last year's decision by HHS to award the contract to the little-known VaxGen is being scrutinized by at least two congressional committees over issues such as VaxGen’s repeated delays in filing timely financial reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission—a problem that last year caused the firm to be "delisted" from Nasdaq. In addition, VaxGen was hit with lawsuits claiming the firm misinformed investors about an AIDS vaccine it was heavily promoting that later turned out to be ineffective. The HHS spokesperson said, “Delays in these aggressive and accelerated development programs are not unexpected or unprecedented,” adding that the government’s eventually successful efforts to create a smallpox vaccine also took longer than originally expected. 

This week’s announcement from VaxGen, ironically, came the same day that President Bush unveiled a $7.1 billion program to step up preparations for protecting the U.S. population against a possible catastrophic bird flu pandemic. The president's plan, which involves stepping up research and stockpiling vaccines and antiviral drugs, was announced in the wake of criticism from Congress and the media that the administration responses to recent natural disasters, particularly Hurricane Katrina, were so inadequate that they raised questions about the extent to which the United States is prepared for either natural disasters or man-made catastrophes like terrorist attacks. The newly revealed delay in anthrax-vaccine deliveries is likely to spur further complaints among Democrats and other Bush critics that the administration is still not effectively managing emergency preparedness programs. 

In a telephone interview this week with NEWSWEEK, Lance Gordon, VaxGen's chief executive officer, stoutly defended the company's performance, maintaining that the newly announced delays in financial reporting and vaccine delivery are attributable to developments that ultimately will produce benefits both for investors in his company and for taxpayers who are funding the government’s purchase of his company's so-far unproven anthrax vaccine. Gordon said that one of the reasons the company decided to announce a delay in its plans for delivering the first of 75 million doses of anthrax vaccine was to ensure that new quality-control procedures are fully installed and tested before the company starts full-scale production.

In a press release issued earlier this week, VaxGen attributed the delay to “evolving regulatory requirements and product enhancements.” Gordon and another company spokesman acknowledged, however, that at present, VaxGen’s anthrax vaccine, which it is making using ultramodern recombinant DNA technology originally invented by the U.S. Army, has so far been tested only on rabbits, monkeys and healthy human volunteers. According to company officials, the animal tests indicate that the new vaccine is effective when combined with antibiotics in curing anthrax in rabbits and rhesus monkeys, while the tests on healthy people show that the vaccine produces anthrax antibodies in humans and does not make test subjects gravely ill with side effects.

But the company's product will have to pass more large-scale tests proving its safety and effectiveness on people before it is fully licensed by the Food and Drug Administration for use on humans, and company officials say they do not expect it to be fully licensed at least until 2007. However, according to Gordon, under emergency "bioshield" legislation approved by Congress in the wake of the 9/11 and postal anthrax attacks of 2001, the government can buy and stockpile all 75 million doses of VaxGen's anthrax vaccine before the product is fully licensed and tested. Company officials also say that in an emergency—an anthrax attack by terrorists for example—the bioshield legislation allows the government to administer the not-fully-licensed vaccine to people who might be attack victims. But the product cannot otherwise be administered to members of the public until it is fully tested and licensed.

Publicly traded VaxGen also says that the company plans to file updated and current financial statements with the Securities and Exchange Commission by the second quarter of 2006. According to a press release issued by the company last year, Nasdaq delisted its stock after VaxGen failed to file two scheduled quarterly financial reports in 2004. The company’s stock is currently traded via a penny-stock listings service known as the "pink sheets."

In this week’s press release, the company said that it currently was behind in filing its annual reports for 2003 and 2004, and quarterly reports for 2004 and 2005. Gordon said that VaxGen on three occasions had issued new projections for when its financial statements, which are being restated for 2001, 2002 and 2003, as well, would be brought up to date. In a conference call with securities analysts earlier this year, a company official said the reason the company fell behind in producing financial information is “because VaxGen refused to cut corners with its accounting.” Gordon told NEWSWEEK that on the recommendation of its auditors, the company initially decided it had to review financial statements for several years because of questions over whether it had "underreported" revenues it got from government contracts it received for researching and developing its vaccine. Later, when accountants had sorted out that issue, Gordon said, they found other questions about possible underreporting of the value of an investment VaxGen had made in a drug production facility in South Korea.

Even before the company announced the latest delays, VaxGen’s anthrax deal with the government was attracting critical attention on Capitol Hill. In a letter to HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt in January, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley noted that VaxGen’s vaccine “has not been proven in people.” Grassley’s letter asserted that the administration’s decision to procure a vaccine from a “single manufacturer”—VaxGen—was “highly suspect.” Last April, Grassley sent a second letter to Leavitt, questioning why, in a March 2004 press release, HHS had asserted that the new vaccine that VaxGen was developing had “already been stronger and more effective” than an older vaccine made by BioPort, a Michigan company that is VaxGen’s rival and competitor. Grassley noted that the HHS press release’s assertion about the VaxGen drug “appears to have no basis in fact.” 

HHS later informed Grassley that it had withdrawn the press release, according to an aide to Grassley. VaxGen officials said they had nothing to do with the issuing of the government press release. An HHS spokesman said, “VaxGen met strict U.S. government requirements, particularly technical ones, to be considered for this contract. … The U.S. government is aggressively managing this program and monitoring performance. We are in active discussion with the company and are reviewing their development plans and timelines in order to determine the appropriate path forward. We remain committed to the goal of meeting the U.S. government requirement for 75 million doses of the next-generation anthrax vaccine.”

VaxGen’s government contracts totaling nearly $1 billion have been the subject of intermittent controversy over the last two years both because of the company’s troubles with its financial statements and because of questions surrounding the government's handling of the contract. In addition to the $887 million anthrax contract, the firm received $100 million from the National Institutes of Health to research and develop the vaccine. (VaxGen won’t actually receive any of the $887 million until it actually begins to deliver vaccine doses to the government.)

A New York Times report last December noted that in addition to its problems in producing financial statements, the company had faced lawsuits filed by investors who claimed VaxGen misinformed them about an AIDS vaccine that the company had heavily promoted but which later failed to work. At least one such lawsuit was dismissed and another was settled.

A Forbes article last June also noted that VaxGen CEO Gordon was a “long time acquaintance” with a former research official from the U.S. Army bioweapons research agency based at the Pentagon and Fort Detrick, Md., that gave VaxGen a license to make its anthrax vaccine using technology developed by the Army. The former Army scientist later became a top contracting official at HHS. Gordon said that while he served on the board of a nonprofit medical foundation with the former Army official, during the period VaxGen was negotiating its main contract with the government, he and the official never met unless government lawyers were present. Gordon added that although the delay in producing financial statements may make it difficult for investors to gauge the company's financial health, government auditors have carefully monitored the company on a monthly basis and are fully aware of its financial condition.

Government and industry experts have defended the basic notion of the government giving vaccine development and supply contracts to companies like VaxGen without extensive track records by arguing that major drug firms have shied away from vaccine research and production because it carries too many legal and financial risks. Administration critics suggest this policy of throwing money at the problem was a product of post-9/11 hysteria about terrorism in general and biological terrorism in particular. These critics say the Hurricane Katrina experience has now raised big questions about government spending on bioterrorism and a whole range of other emergency-management priorities that were rushed to the top of the national agenda after September 11, 2001.

By Evan Thomas
Newsweek

Feb. 27, 2006 issue - Dick Cheney has never been your normal politician. He has never seemed as eager to please, as needy for votes and approval and headlines as, say, Bill Clinton. Cheney can seem taciturn, self-contained, a little gloomy; in recent years, his manner has been not just unwelcoming but stand-offish. This is not to say, however, that he is entirely modest and self-effacing, or that he does not crave power as much as or more than any office-seeker. This, after all, is a man who, in conducting a search for George W. Bush's vice president, picked himself. Indeed, since 9/11, Cheney has struck a pose more familiar to readers of Greek tragedies than the daily Hotline. At times, he appears to be the lonely leader, brooding in his tent, knowing that doom may be inevitable, but that the battle must be fought, and that glory can be eternal.

If, as he ponders the Threat Matrix at his daily intelligence briefing, Cheney really sees himself as a modern Achilles or Hector on the plains at Troy, he is not just being grandiose. A few weeks after 9/11, NEWSWEEK has learned, Cheney worried that he and his family and his staff might have been exposed in an anthrax attack. According to knowledgeable former officials, a mysterious letter turned up at the vice president's mansion. (A former senior law-enforcement official recalled that sensors went off.) The alarm turned out to be false. Still, to be safe, Cheney and his entourage began taking Cipro, the powerful antibiotic. The story was hushed up. (Cheney's office referred NEWSWEEK to the Secret Service, which declined to comment.) Cheney prefers to be a quiet warrior, severe perhaps, but not bleak—just resolute.

Stoicism can be a great attribute in a leader. "I have no feelings," the statesman Gen. George C. Marshall once said, "except for those I reserve for Mrs. Marshall." And there can be no doubt that, privately, Cheney was badly upset by shooting another man, 78-year-old Texas lawyer Harry Whittington, in a hunting accident. That night Cheney sat alone on the porch of his guesthouse, saying very little as others came and went. "He was shaken, crushed, miserable," his host, Katharine Armstrong, told NEWSWEEK. "I could have gotten up and wrapped my arms around the vice president." But she didn't; no one did. (Lynne Cheney had not accompanied her husband on the trip.)

In human terms, it is perfectly understandable why Cheney was in no mood to talk to reporters then or for several days thereafter. It is a little odd, however, that he did not speak to President George W. Bush until Monday morning, 36 hours after the shooting, and just as peculiar that Bush did not call him. The talking heads immediately speculated that Bush had somehow cooled on the vice president for his handling of the shooting incident, for pushing the invasion of Iraq, for becoming a lightning rod for administration critics.

Cheney is often lauded as that rare No. 2 who, having no political ambition for himself, can give his all to the president. But Cheney's aloofness from the ebb and flow of politics and public opinion has apparently dulled his senses in a way that is not helpful to his boss, who has been busy lately defending his administration from criticism that it was badly out of touch during Hurricane Katrina.

Sounding less than convinced himself, Bush tried to calm down the hunting-accident press flap. Cheney, said Bush, had done "just fine" with Fox News anchorman Brit Hume, who was granted an exclusive interview with the veep four days after the shooting.

Cheney's words and manner in that 20-minute session were indeed affecting: "Ultimately, I'm the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the round that hit Harry," he said, speaking in a monotone but looking grave and sad. "That is something I'll never forget ... It was ... one of the worst days of my life." Cheney's backers lashed out at the pundits and comics for taking ghoulish delight in the accident. "The vice president has so pissed off the establishment media that they've been waiting for anything to get him," says former senator Alan Simpson, Cheney's old Wyoming friend of 40 years.

But the shooting incident once again drew attention to the unusual nature of Cheney's power. He remains by far the most powerful vice president in history, and one of the most secretive and mysterious public officials to ever hold such high office in America. He is caricatured as a Darth Vader, spooky, above the law; nefarious.

What happened to the genial, gently amusing Dick Cheney of the 2000 vice presidential debate? After he and Al Gore's running mate, Sen. Joe Lieberman, exchanged good-humored quips, more than a few voters wondered why the tickets couldn't be flipped—allowing a couple of affable, common-sensical Washington hands to run for president instead of Bush and Gore, who at times seemed like the wounded sons of great political dynasties, groaning under the burden of expectation. Cheney, the conservative that moderates once seemed to like, has strangely iced over in recent years. Even his old friends sometimes wonder if he has not grown angrier, more suspicious, even paranoid. Last fall, Brent Scowcroft, national-security adviser in the George H.W. Bush administration, caused a stir by telling The New Yorker magazine, "I consider Cheney a good friend—I've known him for thirty years. But Dick Cheney I don't know anymore."

Has Cheney changed? Has he been transformed, warped, perhaps corrupted—by stress, wealth, aging, illness, the real terrors of the world or possibly some inner goblins? The few who know him (and few really do) aren't saying much, except to argue that he takes a longer view than the mean politics of the moment. But there is no doubt that Cheney has become less amiable, less open, less willing to conciliate and seek common ground than he was as a younger politician. A man who was shepherded by the Secret Service to his bunker during 9/11 has stayed there—even when that has not been helpful to the president.

Guessing at the causes of his darkening persona is a favorite Washington pastime. A widely held theory is that Cheney, 65, was affected by heart surgery (he has had four heart attacks, angioplasty, a quadruple bypass and a pacemaker). It is true that heart patients sometimes undergo mood or even personality changes, but there is no solid evidence in Cheney's case.

A surer bet may be that he changed with his circumstances. As President Gerald Ford's young (age 34) chief of staff, as a six-term congressman and then as secretary of Defense in the Bush 41 administration, Cheney was surrounded by, and required to work with, moderate Republicans. Though his own politics were very conservative, there was always someone around like former Reagan chief of staff and Bush secretary of State James A. Baker to rein him in.

Then, in 1995, Cheney became CEO of Halliburton Co., the giant military contractor. He entered the exclusive preserve of very rich men who could, by and large, get their way. The new role suited Cheney. He began going on frequent hunting trips, partaking of a sport he had enjoyed since youth. (His partners in recent years have included various tycoons and sports heroes including oilman T. Boone Pickens and Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach.) He flew around on corporate jets; aides and retainers attended to his whims. His political ties were to True Believer conservatives—especially his wife, Lynne, a feisty ideologue and, by most reports, a bit of a diva, though an engaging one.

The VIP world inhabited by Cheney is perfectly symbolized by the Armstrong Ranch, where the hunting accident occurred. More than 50,000 acres of rolling country, the ranch is "Gosford Park" with a twang—not quite as gilded or as pampered as an English country house on a shooting weekend between the wars, but just as private and entitled in an understated, elegant way. Quail hunting is an elaborate ritual on the great Texas ranches, performed with outriding guides to find the birds and trained dogs to flush and point and fetch. There are servants and cocktails and barbecues and not a reporter for miles around. The ranch is as insular, in its own way, as the vice president's official bubble.

Cheney's shooting party was a cozy group of rich Republicans and Texas "squirearchy." The owner of the ranch is Anne Armstrong, a grande dame of the GOP, onetime ambassador to the Court of St. James and a former member of the Halliburton board that picked Cheney to be CEO. (She was also mentioned as a possible vice president for Gerald Ford.) Armstrong's daughter Katharine, strong-willed and lively (Laura Bush chose her to sit beside Prince Charles at a recent White House dinner), accompanied Cheney on the shoot and described the scene to NEWSWEEK:

It was late afternoon, and the hunters were ready to call it a day. Harry Whittington, a prominent Austin lawyer and big-time GOP donor, had bagged two birds with two shots. "Great shot, Harry, you got a double!" called out Katharine. While Whittington went off with his dog and his guides to find the dead birds, Cheney and Pam Willeford, the U.S. ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein and another major GOP donor, went ahead to look for another covey of birds. Cheney spotted a bird flying behind him, swung around with his Italian-made 28-gauge shotgun toward the setting sun and pulled the trigger. Whittington, wearing a regulation orange vest, was approaching out of a slight gully, some 30 yards away.

Armstrong, watching from an off-road vehicle about a hundred yards away, saw Whittington fall. A team of Secret Service agents bolted out of the car and ran past her, one of them shouting an expletive. Gun in hand, Cheney rushed over to the fallen Whittington. Later, the vice president rode back with Armstrong. "You'd have to be an idiot not to see what the poor man was going through," recalled Armstrong. "It was very quiet. I remember leaning forward and squeezing him on the shoulder." At one point Cheney said, "I never saw him."

Back at Cheney's lodgings at the ranch—guest quarters called Uncle Tom's House—there was no discussion of a public statement. The White House was at first informed in surprisingly cryptic and cursory fashion—the Situation Room was told of an unspecified shooting accident in the vice president's hunting party. It took a phone call from presidential counselor Karl Rove to Katharine Armstrong ("Karl's one of my closest friends in life," she told NEWSWEEK) to sort out what had happened and report back to President Bush—that the vice president was the shooter and that Whittington had been wounded, though apparently not fatally. That night, according to a senior White House official who refused to be identified discussing a sensitive matter, Cheney did not speak to either Bush or the White House staff or his own press people. He did speak with David Addington, his chief of staff and former lawyer who is a strong proponent of executive power and secrecy.

Cheney's aides would later say that he wanted to be absolutely sure of the facts before going public, and Whittington's condition remained a little uncertain. At first, the wounds were deemed to be minor, but on Sunday morning the hospital was reporting that some of the tiny birdshot had penetrated his body in potentially dangerous ways. In Washington, White House staffers were quietly urging Cheney's staff to somehow go public with the shooting. But Bush never picked up the phone to call Cheney, either to console or to offer counsel.

Shortly after 8 a.m., a local deputy sheriff arrived at the ranch to take a statement from Cheney. By then, it was clear the story could not be contained. Cheney and Katharine Armstrong talked about how to get the story out. "What do you want me to do?" Armstrong asked. "What do you feel comfortable doing?" Cheney replied. Armstrong knew a reporter at the local paper, Jaime Powell of the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. Powell understood hunting and had written a sensitive and favorable obituary of her father the year before. Frantically leaving messages ("Jaime, I need you immediately"), Armstrong couldn't find Powell on her cell phone, and it was nearly 2 p.m., after much back and forth between Armstrong and the paper, that the Corpus Christi Caller-Times finally put up a short story on its Web site.

VICE PRESIDENT SHOOTS MAN, as some news services announced the story Sunday afternoon, was a headline guaranteed to create a press frenzy. Armstrong proved to be a less-than-ideal spokesperson for Cheney. She appeared to blame Whittington for the accident, noting that he had failed to announce himself as he approached Cheney from behind. (Most hunters squarely put the responsibility on the man with the gun.) She said there had been "no, zero, zippo" drinking at lunch, whereas, as Cheney later acknowledged, he had drunk a beer.

Cheney has long had a chilly relationship with the press. Some of his advisers say he is merely indifferent to reporters, while his wife and daughters are more aggressively hostile. But in any case, journalists are usually left guessing at his whereabouts and activities, and the vice president seems to take a certain pleasure in keeping it that way. NEWSWEEK once accompanied Cheney on a trip to upstate New York, where he met with several Marines just returning from Iraq. After about 30 seconds, Cheney asked his handlers to "kick the press out." Eying the departing reporters, he offered his slightly lopsided grin and announced, "It always makes my day."

Cheney's chief press adviser through a series of press secretaries and communications directors has been Mary Matalin, longtime GOP politico, wife of fellow media celebrity James Carville, and now a private consultant. If anything, Matalin reinforces the Cheney family's disdain for the Fourth Estate (Matalin did not return several phone calls from NEWSWEEK).

Matalin is about the only one who could even try to persuade Cheney to talk. His official staff is a little afraid of him. NEWSWEEK once asked his press secretary (there have been seven of them since he became vice president) if Cheney went to church on Sundays. The spokesperson confessed she really couldn't ask the veep; the question was just "too personal."

By Monday, Matalin was toying with some kind of public statement by Cheney, but then on Tuesday Whittington's condition took a slight turn for the worse—a birdshot pellet was inflaming some tissue near his heart. On Tuesday the vice president remained silent. White House aides were becoming increasingly restive, anxiously joking that if Cheney were more of an ambitious veep, like Al Gore, he would be crying on "Oprah."

The president had met with Cheney privately on Monday morning at the White House before the daily intelligence briefing. According to a White House aide speaking, as usual, anonymously, Bush listened closely and watched Cheney's body language to see how emotional the accident had been for someone not given to public displays of feeling. "The president wanted to give him some room to handle this," the senior aide said. "The president could visibly tell this was weighing heavily on him and he felt, in his judgment, that he should not push him too hard."

Finally, on Wednesday, as the press continued to fulminate and the late-night comics had their fun, Cheney decided—apparently on his own initiative—to go public. A press conference was out of the question; it would have turned into a circus, Matalin told radio host Don Imus. Fox News's Brit Hume was chosen as a friendly but also serious and credible interrogator, which he was.

Cheney told Hume that hunting has "brought me great pleasure over the years," but that "the season is ending, and I'm going to let some time pass over it and think about the future." Cheney's hunting friends, who describe him as a crack shot (the veep has downed as many as 70 pheasants in a single day) as well as a by-the-book and safety-conscious hunter, don't believe he will permanently lay his gun down. "You have to learn from these things, and that's the kind of hunter he is," says Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, a close friend. "He'll be back. He'll be out there as soon as he can. It's in his blood."

Cheney is accustomed to being feared and even loathed; still, to be an object of ridicule cannot be easy. Last week Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi, the former majority leader who was pushed out by the White House in 2002, told The Washington Post that he had greeted the vice president, who had gone to Capitol Hill to meet with some lawmakers, as the "Shooter-in-Chief." Cheney, Lott reported, did not seem amused.

Cheney may simply accept that his lot is to be vilified—and that history can be his only redeemer. In the late fall of 2002, as the Bush administration was readying for the invasion of Iraq, Victor Davis Hanson, an agrarian classicist whose writings about the 9/11 attacks, primarily in the National Review online, had attracted Cheney's attention, was invited to dine at the vice president's mansion. Hanson found Cheney to be intellectually curious, well read, and not at all zealous. "He had no illusions about going to war with Iraq," Hanson said. "It was to him a least bad choice." Over dinner, Hanson recalled, "we talked about Lincoln, about leaders who had gone through hell. I had a vague feeling of tragedy," Hanson said, then corrected himself: "Tragedy is the wrong word. There was a sort of resignation. I think he understands that the vilification of the moment is not the final word."

Others close to Cheney had suggested that he was profoundly affected by 9/11. It is hard for anyone who was not in Cheney's shoes that day, and in the weeks and months that followed, to appreciate the stress and uncertainty of that time. Around 9:35 on the morning of 9/11, Cheney was lifted off his feet by the Secret Service and hustled into the White House bunker. Cheney testified to the 9/11 Commission that he spoke with President Bush before giving an order to shoot down a hijacked civilian airliner that appeared headed toward Washington. (The plane was United Flight 93, which crashed in a Pennsylvania field after a brave revolt by the passengers.) But a source close to the commission, who declined to be identified revealing sensitive information, says that none of the staffers who worked on this aspect of the investigation believed Cheney's version of events.

A draft of the report conveyed their skepticism. But when top White House officials, including chief of staff Andy Card and the then White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, reviewed the draft, they became extremely agitated. After a prolonged battle, the report was toned down. The factual narrative, closely read, offers no evidence that Cheney sought initial authorization from the president. The point is not a small one. Legally, Cheney was required to get permission from his commander in chief, who was traveling (but reachable) at the time. If the public ever found out that Cheney gave the order on his own, it would have strongly fed the view that he was the real power behind the throne.

Cheney spent much of his time after 9/11 in his "undisclosed location." The threat seemed terribly real. Cheney spent a great deal of time working on a "decapitation plan"—i.e., shaping a fill-in government in a horrific event in which he and the president and other top leaders were taken out by a terrorist chem-bio or nuclear attack. After the suspected anthrax attack, a gallows humor permeated the veep's office. Watching Cheney load his hunting guns into his car as he prepared to leave the mansion on a trip that fall, an aide cracked, "I hope it's not that bad." Actually, Cheney was getting in plenty of hunting—in upstate New York, South Dakota, southern Georgia and Maryland's Eastern Shore.

Cheney unquestionably exerted enormous influence on Bush in those early days. But Bush's aides say that the president has become less dependent on Cheney for advice, particularly in foreign affairs. The two men still have private lunches, but no longer every week. There are signs now that Bush listens to more-moderate voices on national security. On a range of foreign-policy crises, from Iran to North Korea, Cheney's forward-leaning posture has given way to the mainstream, multilateralist approach advocated now by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

It was possible to dimly discern Cheney's shakier footing last week in the ongoing dispute with Capitol Hill over warrant-less eavesdropping. Uneasy about the administration's disregard for the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires court warrants to eavesdrop on communications into the United States, three Republicans on the Senate intelligence committee were agitating for greater oversight. Cheney, who has been the most aggressive defender of the administration's power to wage war (including spying) without congressional approval, went up to the Hill to quell the rebellion. For several hours on Tuesday, he met behind closed doors in the intelligence committee's secret hearing room with the senators. Two days later intelligence committee chairman Pat Roberts, a staunch Bush ally, was able to put off a vote on whether to open an investigation.

It appeared that Cheney, though pale and obviously distressed by his hunting accident, was still capable of quietly exerting influence. But then Roberts began showing some restlessness. He began suggesting that perhaps the wiretapping program should be brought under FISA after all. His remarks came after the White House seemed to soften a little and suggest that it would be willing to disclose more information about the program and talk to senators about changing the law. Suddenly, Cheney no longer seemed so all-powerful, so sure of getting his way.

With Michael Isikoff, Daniel Klaidman, Richard Wolffe, Holly Bailey, Mark Hosenball and Eleanor Clift in Washington and Carol Rust in Texas

By Joby Warrick
The Washington Post
Updated: 1:52 a.m. ET July 30, 2006

WASHINGTON - On the grounds of a military base an hour's drive from the capital, the Bush administration is building a massive biodefense laboratory unlike any seen since biological weapons were banned 34 years ago.

The heart of the lab is a cluster of sealed chambers built to contain the world's deadliest bacteria and viruses. Scientists will spend their days simulating the unthinkable: bioterrorism attacks in the form of lethal anthrax spores rendered as wispy powders that can drift for miles on a summer breeze, or common viruses turned into deadly superbugs that ordinary drugs and vaccines cannot stop.

The work at this new lab, at Fort Detrick, Md., could someday save thousands of lives -- or, some fear, create new risks and place the United States in violation of international treaties. In either case, much of what transpires at the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC) may never be publicly known, because the Bush administration intends to operate the facility largely in secret.

n an unusual arrangement, the building itself will be classified as highly restricted space, from the reception desk to the lab benches to the cages where animals are kept. Few federal facilities, including nuclear labs, operate with such stealth. It is this opacity that some arms-control experts say has become a defining characteristic of U.S. biodefense policy as carried out by the Department of Homeland Security, the NBACC's creator.

Since the department's founding in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, its officials have dramatically expanded the government's ability to conduct realistic tests of the pathogens and tactics that might be used in a bioterrorism attack. Some of the research falls within what many arms-control experts say is a legal gray zone, skirting the edges of an international treaty outlawing the production of even small amounts of biological weapons.

The administration dismisses these concerns, however, insisting that the work of the NBACC is purely defensive and thus fully legal. It has rejected calls for oversight by independent observers outside the department's network of government scientists and contractors. And it defends the secrecy as necessary to protect Americans.

"Where the research exposes vulnerability, I've got to protect that, for the public's interest," said Bernard Courtney, the NBACC's scientific director. "We don't need to be showing perpetrators the holes in our defense."

Tara O'Toole, founder of the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and an adviser to the Defense Department on bioterrorism, said the secrecy fits a larger pattern and could have consequences. "The philosophy and practice behind NBACC looks like much of the rest of the administration's philosophy and practice: 'Our intent is good, so we can do whatever we want,' " O'Toole said. "This approach will only lead to trouble."

Although they acknowledge the need to shield the results of some sensitive projects from public view, critics of the NBACC fear that excessive secrecy could actually increase the risk of bioterrorism. That would happen, they say, if the lab fosters ill-designed experiments conducted without proper scrutiny or if its work fuels suspicions that could lead other countries to pursue secret biological research.

The few public documents that describe the NBACC's research mission have done little to quiet those fears. A computer slide show prepared by the center's directors in 2004 offers a to-do list that suggests the lab will be making and testing small amounts of weaponized microbes and, perhaps, genetically engineered viruses and bacteria. It also calls for "red team" exercises that simulate attacks by hostile groups.

The NBACC's close ties to the U.S. intelligence community have also caused concern among the agency's critics. The CIA has assigned advisers to the lab, including at least one member of the "Z-Division," an elite group jointly operated with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that specializes in analyzing and duplicating weapons systems of potential adversaries, officials familiar with the program confirm.

Bioweapons experts say the nature of the research envisioned for the NBACC demands an unusually high degree of transparency to reassure Americans and the rest of the world of the U.S. government's intentions.

"If we saw others doing this kind of research, we would view it as an infringement of the bioweapons treaty," said Milton Leitenberg, a senior research scholar and weapons expert at the University of Maryland's School of Public Policy. "You can't go around the world yelling about Iranian and North Korean programs -- about which we know very little -- when we've got all this going on."

Created without public fanfare a few months after the 2001 anthrax attacks, the NBACC is intended to be the chief U.S. biological research institution engaged in something called "science-based threat assessment." It seeks to quantitatively answer one of the most difficult questions in biodefense: What's the worst that can happen?

To truly answer that question, there is little choice, current and former NBACC officials say: Researchers have to make real biological weapons.

"De facto, we are going to make biowarfare pathogens at NBACC in order to study them," said Penrose "Parney" Albright, former Homeland Security assistant secretary for science and technology.

Other government agencies, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, study disease threats such as smallpox to discover cures. By contrast, the NBACC (pronounced EN-back) attempts to get inside the head of a bioterrorist. It considers the wide array of potential weapons available. It looks for the holes in society's defenses where an attacker might achieve the maximum harm. It explores the risks posed by emerging technologies, such as new DNA synthesizing techniques that allow the creation of genetically altered or man-made viruses. And it tries in some cases to test the weapon or delivery device that terrorists might use.

Research at the NBACC is already underway, in lab space that has been outsourced or borrowed from the Army's sprawling biodefense campus at Fort Detrick in Frederick. It was at this compound that the U.S. government researched and produced offensive biological weapons from the 1940s until President Richard M. Nixon halted research in 1969. The Army continues to conduct research on pathogens there.

In June, construction began on a $128 million, 160,000-square-foot facility inside the same heavily guarded compound. Space inside the eight-story, glass-and-brick structure will be divided between the NBACC's two major divisions: a forensic testing center tasked with using modern sleuthing techniques to identify the possible culprits in future biological attacks; and the Biothreat Characterization Center, or BTCC, which seeks to predict what such attacks will look like.

It is the BTCC's wing that will host the airtight, ultra-secure containment labs where the most controversial research will be done. Homeland Security officials won't talk about specific projects planned or underway. But the 2004 computer slide show -- posted briefly on a Homeland Security Web site before its discovery by agency critics prompted an abrupt removal -- offers insight into the NBACC's priorities.

The presentation by the NBACC's then-deputy director, Lt. Col. George Korch, listed 16 research priorities for the new lab. Among them:

"Characterize classical, emerging and genetically engineered pathogens for their BTA [biological threat agent] potential.

"Assess the nature of nontraditional, novel and nonendemic induction of disease from potential BTA.

"Expand aerosol-challenge testing capacity for non-human primates.

"Apply Red Team operational scenarios and capabilities."

Courtney, the NBACC science director, acknowledged that his work would include simulating real biological threats -- but not just any threats.

"If I hear a noise on the back porch, will I turn on the light to decide whether there's something there, or go on my merry way?" Courtney asked. "But I'm only going to do [research] if I have credible information that shows it truly is a threat. It's not going to be dreamed up out of the mind of a novelist."

Administration officials note that there is a tradition for this kind of biological risk assessment, one that extends at least to the Clinton administration. In the late 1990s, for example, a clandestine project run by the Defense Department re-created a genetically modified, drug-resistant strain of the anthrax bacteria believed to have been made by Soviet bioweaponeers. Such research helped the government anticipate and prepare for emerging threats, according to officials familiar with the anthrax study.

Some arms-control experts see the comparison as troubling. They argued, then and now, that the work was a possible breach of a U.S.-negotiated international law.

Legal and other pitfalls

The Bush administration argues that its biodefense research complies with the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, the 1972 treaty outlawing the manufacture of biological weapons, because U.S. motives are pure.

"All the programs we do are defensive in nature," said Maureen McCarthy, Homeland Security's director of research and development, who oversees the NBACC. "Our job is to ensure that the civilian population of the country is protected, and that we know what the threats are."

Current and former administration officials say that compliance with the treaty hinges on intent, and that making small amounts of biowarfare pathogens for study is permitted under a broad interpretation of the treaty. Some also argue that the need for a strong biodefense in an age of genetic engineering trumps concerns over what they see as legal hair-splitting.

"How can I go to the people of this country and say, 'I can't do this important research because some arms-control advocate told me I can't'?" asked Albright, the former Homeland Security assistant secretary.

But some experts in international law believe that certain experiments envisioned for the lab could violate the treaty's ban on developing, stockpiling, acquiring or retaining microbes "of types and in quantities that have no justification" for peaceful purposes.

"The main problem with the 'defensive intent' test is that it does not reflect what the treaty actually says," said David Fidler, an Indiana University School of Law professor and expert on the bioweapons convention. The treaty, largely a U.S. creation, does not make a distinction between defensive and offensive activities, Fidler said.

More practically, arms experts say, future U.S. governments may find it harder to object if other countries test genetically engineered pathogens and novel delivery systems, invoking the same need for biodefense.

Already, they say, there is evidence abroad of what some are calling a "global biodefense boom." In the past five years, numerous governments, including some in the developing world -- India, China and Cuba among them -- have begun building high-security labs for studying the most lethal bacteria and viruses.

"These labs have become a status symbol, a prestige item," said Alan Pearson, a biologist at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. "A big question is: Will these labs have transparency?"

Secrecy may have a price

When it opens in two years, the NBACC lab will house an impressive collection of deadly germs and teams of scientists in full-body "spacesuits" to work with them. It will also have large aerosol-test chambers where animals will be exposed to deadly microbes. But the lab's most controversial feature may be its secrecy.

Homeland Security officials disclosed plans to contractors and other government agencies to classify the entire lab as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF.

In common practice, a SCIF (pronounced "skiff") is a secure room where highly sensitive information is stored and discussed. Access to SCIFs is severely limited, and all of the activity and conversation inside is presumed to be restricted from public disclosure. There are SCIFs in the U.S. Capitol, where members of Congress are briefed on military secrets. In U.S. nuclear labs, computers that store weapons data are housed inside SCIFs.

Homeland Security officials plan to operate all 160,000 square feet of the NBACC as a SCIF. Because of the building's physical security features -- intended to prevent the accidental release of dangerous pathogens -- it was logical to operate it as a SCIF, McCarthy said.

"We need to protect information at a level that is appropriate," McCarthy added, saying she expects much of the lab's less-sensitive work to be made public eventually.

But some biodefense experts, including some from past administrations, viewed the decision as a mistake.

"To overlay NBACC with a default level of high secrecy seems like overkill," said Gerald L. Epstein, a former science adviser to the White House's National Security Council and now a senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. While accepting that some secrecy is needed, he said the NBACC plan "sends a message that is not at all helpful."

NBACC officials also have resisted calls for the kind of broad, independent oversight that many experts say is necessary to assure other countries and the American public about their research.

Homeland Security spokesmen insist that the NBACC's work will be carefully monitored, but on the department's terms.

"We have our own processes to scrutinize our research, and it includes compliance to the bioweapons convention guidelines as well as scientific oversight," said Courtney, the NBACC scientific director.

In addition to the department's internal review boards, the agency will bring in small groups of "three or four scientists" on an ad-hoc basis to review certain kinds of potentially controversial experiments, Courtney said. The review panels will be "independent," Courtney said, but he noted that only scientists with government security clearances will be allowed to participate.

Some experts have called for unusual forms of oversight, including panels of well-respected, internationally known scientists and observers from overseas. While allowing that the results of some experiments should be kept confidential, O'Toole, of the Center for Biosecurity, argues that virtually everything else at the NBACC should be publicly accountable if the United States is to be a credible leader in preventing the proliferation of bioweapons.

"We're going to have to lean over backward," O'Toole said. "We have no leverage among other nation-states if we say, 'We can do whatever we want, but you can't. We want to see your biodefense program, but you can't see ours.' "

In recent weeks, the NBACC's first officially completed project has drawn criticism, not because of its methods or procedures, but because heavy classification has limited its usefulness.

The project was an ambitious attempt to assess and rank the threats posed by dozens of different pathogens and delivery systems, drawing on hundreds of studies and extensive computer modeling. When delivered to the White House in January, it was the most extensive survey of its kind, and one that could guide the federal government in making decisions about biodefense spending.

Six months later, no one outside a small group of officials and advisers with top security clearances has seen the results.

"Something this important shouldn't be secret," said Thomas V. Inglesby, an expert at the Center for Biosecurity who serves on a government advisory board that was briefed on the results. "How can we make policy decisions about matters of this scale if we're operating in the dark?"

By Casey Chamberlain
Executive Assistant
NBC News
September 13, 2006

NEW YORK - Every September, like many, I feel sick and frightened around the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. But it was the weeks following September 11th that would forever change my life. During that time, I was the victim of terrorism when I opened a letter containing a lethal amount of anthrax.

You may remember hearing about Tom Brokaw’s assistant who got sick after coming in contact with a letter containing a deadly amount of anthrax. I was the person who first opened that letter, before Tom's assistant became sick. You have not heard my story.

Around September 18, 2001, I headed to work as a desk assistant at ‘NBC Nightly News.’ One of my jobs was opening Mr. Brokaw’s mail. There was one letter that looked as if it were written by a child. Something seemed unusual. I’d never seen a letter containing a granular substance. I mentioned the strange letter to my friends. 

Nothing happened for about 10 days. Then one Friday night my throat began to swell up. A cold, I thought. But it worsened over the weekend. My glands were soon enormous. Monday morning came and my face was barely recognizable. I went to the doctor, who said it was a reaction to my Accutane medication, and I should rest in bed. For the next few days, I felt like an awful virus was running through me.

A few days later, I went back to work, but I still felt a bit off. My glands were still swollen. A week or so after I was sick, Mr. Brokaw’s assistant became sick. Both of our symptoms were unusual. Authorities became involved. When Bob Stevens died at the American Media Building in Florida at the end of September, the pieces slowly began to come together.

On Oct. 12, having planned on heading into the office late after an appointment, I was surprised to hear from one of my bosses early in the morning. She asked that I head into the office as soon as possible. Immediately, I knew there was something about the letter that was terribly wrong. I soon learned why I had been sick — anthrax poisoning. Like Mr. Brokaw’s assistant, I had contracted cutaneous anthrax.

The events over the next few months changed my life. I had carried anthrax back on my clothes and had contaminated my home. I chose to have all of my things destroyed. I lost my most personal belongings. All my precious pictures and mementos. I worried I might die.

I’ll have to see doctors the rest of my life.

Every day I wonder: Who sent the letter? There have been some leads. But the case remains unsolved. If authorities find the person who sent this letter, I hope I have the opportunity to tell him how my life was changed forever. Every time I hear the word terrorism or anthrax, it makes me sick. I often become a bit paranoid and feel as if people are staring at me. Whenever various media outlets alert Americans about “a white substance” that was found or some chemical smell or spill, the speculation that these things might be anthrax conjures up many negative emotions. I’ll never have an overall sense of security again. That’s what I lost. But what I gained was the deep, true appreciation for my family, friends, and co-workers, whose support was incredible.

Despite the hardships, I know I’m the lucky one. I survived 9/11. I survived anthrax. Five people died from inhaling anthrax, and others contracted both inhalation anthrax and cutaneous anthrax.

With the case unsolved five years later, I feel compelled to share my story. I have never gone public before, never wanting to draw attention to myself. Only those close to me before knew my story. Simply writing this story is cathartic, because I feel I am a voice for those anthrax victims who are no longer living. They do not have the chance to remind the world that this case remains unsolved.

By Jim Popkin and the NBC News Investigative Unit
Senior Producer
NBC News
Updated: 4:18 p.m. ET Sept 18, 2006

WASHINGTON - The top FBI official in charge of the investigation into the deadly anthrax attacks has left the case, NBC News has learned. Richard "Rick" Lambert had been the inspector of the so-called AMERITHRAX case since September 2002, and had run every aspect of the five-year-old investigation. Just last month, he was transferred to the Knoxville, Tenn., field office of the FBI as its special agent in charge, according to the FBI.

Lambert was the public face of the case, and his transfer is sure to fuel speculation that the massive investigation has stalled. No one has been arrested, five years after the first anthrax-laden envelopes were mailed from a New Jersey post office, and officials familiar with the case tell NBC News that no criminal charges are expected to be filed anytime soon. 

Lambert was not available for comment Monday, but an FBI official tells NBC it's unfair to read too much into his transfer. The case "is not stuck in the mud," the FBI official says, adding that it's standard practice in the FBI to rotate senior officials on and off major cases. (A series of senior FBI agents ran other high-profile investigations, including the hunts for serial bomber Eric Rudolph and the Unabomber, "Ted" Kaczynski.)

Later Monday, the FBI plans to issue a press statement stating that hard work on the case continues. The FBI will say that it is one of the largest, most complex cases in its history and the the FBI is "committed to solving the case."

NBC NIGHTLY NEWS, NBC TV, 7 PM, OCTOBER 5, 2006:

"Investigators tell NBC News that the water used to make them came from a northeastern U.S., not a foreign, source."

NBC NIGHTLY NEWS, NBC TV, 7 PM, OCTOBER 5, 2006:

***
The Anthrax Attacks:

BRIAN WILLIAMS: One of the often-forgotten anniversaries in the war on terrorism - it was five years ago today that a photographer in Florida became the first person to die from what was to become a wave of anthrax attacks throughout the United States mail. Five people were killed; 17 others were made sick. One letter was sent here to NBC News.

Our justice correspondent, Pete Williams, reports tonight on what investigators now know and what they don't.

PETE WILLIAMS: Within days after a photo editor at a Florida tabloid, Bob Stevens, opened a letter bearing a suspicious power, he was dead, the victim of highly dangerous anthrax mailings, the first postmarked just a week after the 9/11 hijackings. His widow wonders if the killer will ever be caught.

MAUREEN STEVENS (widow of anthrax victim): I would really like to know, you know, how they did it. Why they did it. What they hoped to achieve.

PETE WILLIAMS: But five years later, not a single arrest. Some who had worked the case complained the trail had gone cold. It's one of the largest FBI investigations ever with more than 9,000 interviews, 6,000 subpoenas, and 67 separate searches. The FBI insists this case remains active.

The anthrax spores themselves, recovered from one of the letters found before it was opened, have yielded a surprising amount of information. Investigators tell NBC News that the water used to make them came from a northeastern U.S., not a foreign, source. Traces of chemicals found inside the spores revealed the materials used to grow them. And scientists have also mapped the entire DNA chain of the anthrax hoping to narrow down the laboratories where it came from.

But one possible clue evaporated. The FBI concluded the spores were not coated with any chemical to make them hang longer in the air.

DAVID SIEGRIST (bioweapons expert): Because there was no evidence that the powder was highly engineered in a military fashion, that increases the universe of potential suspects that could have done this.

PETE WILLIAMS: As for Steven Hatfield, once called 'a person of interest' in the case, his lawyers are now gathering evidence in their lawsuit against the government for leaking his name.

Tonight officials say no arrests are near in a case where even cutting edge science has yet to produce a breakthrough.

Pete Williams, NBC News, Washington.

POSTED: 5:22 pm PDT October 17, 2006
UPDATED: 9:31 am PDT October 18, 2006

LOS ANGELES -- It was five years ago this month that America learned firsthand what bioterrorism is. In a series of anthrax attacks, five people died and 17 more were infected. NBC4's Kelly Mack reported on answering the question, 'Are we any safer now from such a threat?'

Following is a verbatim script from the on-air report.

KELLY MACK: In response to the anthrax attacks of 2001, a team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, headed by Dr. Adrian Ponce, developed the BSM 2000, a high-tech bacterial spore monitor that can detect deadly anthrax spores in the air. It was based on NASA technology that ensures spacecraft leaving Earth for Mars are sterile.

But in the years since the BSM 2000 was unveiled at JPL, the relatively inexpensive microwave-oven-sized device has been installed in only a handful of public areas. The distributor of the BSM 2000 blames when he calls a "creeping complacency" in the American public.

JACQUES TIZABI, UNIVERAL DETECTION TECHNOLOGY: What this country got in October of 2001 was a sampling of what bioweapons are like.

MACK: Indeed, just last month an FBI scientist revealed that, contrary to public impression, the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks was not weapons grade. That scientist added that such "erroneous preconceptions may misguide research and preparedness efforts and detract from the magnitude of hazards posed by simple spore preparations."

AMIR ETTEHADIEH, UNIVERAL DETECTION TECHNOLOGY: Anyone with a master's degree in biology could have manufactured that anthrax.

MACK: The FBI has never made an arrest in the anthrax attacks.

To be sure, the U.S. government is spending enormous time and money trying to secure America from any kind of terrorist attack. Earlier this month Congress passed legislation to beef up security at the country's ports, including Los Angeles and Long Beach. But nowhere in that legislation is there mention of the importance of detecting potential biological toxins.

TIZABI: There's nothing there on bioweapons. It's just really radiation.

MACK: In the meantime experts are hoping to develop technology like the BSM 2000 to detect not just anthrax, but smallpox and plague that are two other potential biological weapons.

Their concern, however, is that such potentially life saving technology will never actually be installed and used.

TIZABI: If we haven't learned the lesson to expect the unexpected, then we haven't come anywhere at all in this war on terrorism.

MACK: Perhaps Americans should not forget what former CIA director George Tenet said at the Sept. 11 hearings: an airborne anthrax attack is the number one biological threat to this country. And hoping that the threat never materializes may not be enough.

By Jim Popkin
Senior Producer
NBC News Investigative Unit
October 24, 2006

WASHINGTON - Congress and the FBI are now openly battling over the pace and direction of the anthrax investigation.

Late Monday, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, sent a damning six-page letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales requesting a briefing on the FBI investigation, now five years old.  The letter faults the agency for its handling of the case, saying "the FBI has little in the way of results to show for its work."

Meanwhile, in an unusual move, the FBI's top lobbyist has informed members of Congress that the bureau will no longer brief them on the case. The FBI's Assistant Director for Congressional Affairs wrote, "After sensitive information about the investigation citing congressional sources was reported in the media, the Department of Justice and the FBI agreed that no additional briefings to Congress would be provided."

FBI on defense

FBI critics consider the letter rich irony, since the FBI itself is under attack for leaking key details of the case to the media.

In the fall of 2001, someone mailed anthrax-laced letters to two U.S. senators and to a number of media organizations, including NBC News. The finely milled anthrax spores were remarkably buoyant, and five people who inhaled them were killed.

After the anthrax incident, Dr. Steven Hatfill was publicly branded a “person of interest.” He’s never been charged with any crime and has since brought a libel and defamation suit against columnist Nicholas Kristof and The New York Times.

On Oct. 20, a federal magistrate judge ruled that The New York Times must reveal the names of the confidential sources on whom Kristof relied for a series of columns about the anthrax case. The judge revealed that two of Kristof's unnamed sources were FBI agents.

Meanwhile, the FBI recently installed a new team of top investigators to head up the anthrax case. Sources familiar with the case tell NBC News that the new managers are looking anew at all possible suspects, with a much broader focus than before. The sources say that the previous head of the case, inspector Richard Lambert, was moved to a new position within the FBI, in part because he had focused too much on Hatfill.

Grassley's letter picks up on that, stating that Lambert's transfer to a Tennessee FBI office "raises questions about why he was replaced [and] the focus of the FBI's investigation under his leadership." Lambert now is the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI's field office in Knoxville, Tenn.

Lambert did not return several phones calls seeking comment.

After the suicide last week of Bruce Ivins, the FBI’s prime suspect in the 2001 anthrax mailings that killed five people and had a nation fearing to open its mail, a friend and former colleague of the microbiologist says federal investigators were going after the wrong person and that it was their pressure on Ivins that led to his demise at his own hands.

“It’s possible somebody could hide that from all of your co-workers and nobody would ever hear about it,” Dr. Russell Byrne acknowledged to TODAY co-host Meredith Vieira on Monday. “But I really, really doubt it.”

Byrne, an infectious-disease specialist who worked as a research scientist at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases from 1993 to 2000, described himself as a friend of Ivins for 15 years. They attended the same Roman Catholic church in Frederick, Md., where Ivins was a member of the church band. After viewing a pre-interview report about the FBI’s investigation of Ivins, Byrne appeared so visibly shaken that Vieira commented on it.

“A lot of it is just consternation at the ridiculous motives they’re attributing, and I get upset whenever I hear that,” Byrne explained.

From scientist to suspect

Ivins, 62, was a leading anthrax researcher at the U.S. Army’s main biodefense laboratories at Fort Detrick, Md. His work investigating vaccines and cures for exposure to anthrax earned him the Pentagon’s highest honor for civilian employees.

Ivins took an overdose of Tylenol with codeine and died Tuesday after being told the FBI planned to charge him with producing the powdery anthrax spores used in the deadly mailings that terrorized the nation in the weeks following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Like many colleagues at Fort Detrick’s Army medical lab, Ivins served as an occasional consultant for the FBI during the investigation. But it was Ivins himself who emerged as a prime suspect for federal prosecutors because of his access to the specific strain of anthrax used in the mailings, and to equipment that could convert it to the ultrafine power that killed five people and sickened 22 others.

Though Byrne’s direct contact with Ivins was limited as the investigation accelerated, he told Vieira that others painted him a portrait of Ivins as a man crumbling under pressure.

“I got information mostly second- and third-hand from the people who were still working with him,” Byrne told Vieira. “And the changes really began to accelerate in the past year.

“One of my friends who worked with him said he would sit at his desk and weep. He really couldn’t do his work anymore. The pressure was tremendous.”

Unlikely motive?

Officials say they had been preparing an indictment against Ivins and would have sought the death penalty for his involvement in the anthrax-laced letters mailed from a New Jersey post office box that crippled mail delivery for months.

Some reports suggested prosecutors were working on the theory that Ivins may have sent the anthrax-filled letters to test a vaccine he had helped developed for the toxin. But Byrne considers that motive ludicrous, because the government restricts income from inventions produced in its laboratories to no more than $150,000 per year.

“[Ivins] was one of five researchers who patented that,” Byrne pointed out. “The patent is owned by the United States government. There may be some small monetary incentives, but the government owns that patent.”

To illustrate the intensity of the investigation’s pressure on Ivins, Byrne related an anecdote. He said that the FBI had inquired as to why Ivins might have borrowed a set of Byrne’s camouflage uniforms. Byrne explained to them that Ivins had borrowed the uniforms to dress as a member of ’70s music group the Village People at a Halloween costume party.

“It became a running joke how he never returned them to me,” Byrne recalled. “One week after I saw the FBI, [Ivins] brought them back to the house — but neither one of us could talk about that. That was the big elephant in the room that we couldn’t discuss [because] I had signed a paper saying [that] if I discussed anything about this interview, I could be liable for criminal  prosecution.”

A downward spiral

Despite Byrne’s doubts about Ivins’ guilt, a former therapist of Ivins told a Maryland court on July 24 that Ivins was a “sociopathic, homicidal killer” who planned to “go out in a blaze of glory” by killing his co-workers because of his impending indictment.

The New York Times exclusively obtained audiotape of a court hearing where Jean Carol Duley, a psychotherapist who had treated Ivins for six months, described Ivins as a “revenge killer” who had purchased a gun and a bulletproof vest. She also feared for her own life and successfully obtained a restraining order against him.

“When he feels that he has been slighted, and especially toward women, he plots and actually tries to carry out revenge killings,” Duley said on the tape.

Duley also said she had been cooperating with the FBI in its anthrax investigation and was planning to testify against Ivins before a federal grand jury.

“I don’t know what to make of the restraining order,” Byrne said. “I don’t have direct information on that. I knew him for 15 years. He was in the division for a lot longer than that, and that kind of thing never came up.”

Ivins’ lawyers have blamed the “relentless pressure of accusation and innuendo” for his suicide.

Ultimately, Byrne feels Ivins’ apparent suicide was triggered when he was removed from Fort Detrick by police after ranting about weapons and making death threats, and admitted to a psychiatric ward.

“I think he committed suicide when he walked out of the building, escorted by law enforcement officials,” Byrne told Vieira. “That meant the end of his career. That meant he never had a scientific career.”

POSTED: 3:15 pm EDT August 20, 2008
UPDATED: 3:21 pm EDT August 20, 2008

WASHINGTON -- Committees in both the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives are planning hearings on the FBI's investigation into the anthrax mailings that killed five people in 2001.

Staff members for the congressional committees will begin pre-interviewing potential witnesses next week.

Among the people who will be questioned is the lawyer representing Dr. Bruce Ivins, the Fort Detrick, Md., scientist identified as the government's top suspect.

Some of the letters containing the deadly anthrax were mailed to Capitol Hill. Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and fellow Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont both received anthrax-laced letters in their Senate offices.

Now Congress wants to know why it took so long to identify a suspect. There was no word of a suspect until last month when Ivins committed suicide as federal prosecutors prepared to indict and seek the death penalty against the Army microbiologist.

Ivins' attorney Paul Kemp told News4 by phone that he anticipates a lot of questions when he is interviewed about the FBI's handling of the investigation.

Kemp said more than 100 people had access to the anthrax strain in Ivins' lab at Fort Detrick. The FBI said it interviewed those people and cleared everybody but Ivins. Kemp said his client wasn't responsible for the anthrax attacks. He also questioned investigators' methods.

The FBI admitted earlier this week that FBI scientists had -- but destroyed -- the unique strain of anthrax used in the deadly 2001 attacks that years later would lead them to Ivins.

FBI Assistant Director Vahid Majidi said the initial anthrax sample that Ivins took from his Army lab in February 2002 and gave investigators did not meet court-ordered conditions for its preparation and collection.

By Pete Williams, NBC News Justice Correspondent

Government documents made public Tuesday shed new light on the FBI's interest in Dr. Steven Hatfill, the former government scientist who was an early focus of much of the government's energy in investigating the 2001 anthrax mail attacks.

The government later ruled him out and agreed to pay him nearly $6 million to settle a lawsuit alleging violations of his privacy. The documents were drawn up to seek court approval for searching Hatfill's home, car, and storage locker, and the apartment of his girlfriend. They show that the FBI was deeply interested in Hatfill's background and what it considered an inconsistency in his statements about his activities around the time the letters were mailed.

According to an FBI investigator who sought the search warrants, Hatfill boasted of serving as a mercenary for the military in Rhodesia from 1979 to 1980, "during the very years Rhodesian military and intelligence units are believed to have employed toxic chemicals and biological agents against rebels in the closing years of a long and brutal civil war." During that period, the documents said, Rhodesia experienced the worst outbreak of anthrax in world history, confined to areas held by anti-government insurgents.

The search warrant applications said he also claimed to have advised Rhodesian sources on how to lace clothing with poison for distribution in provinces held by rebels.

The FBI also showed an intense interest in Hatfill's prescriptions for the antibiotic Cipro, which was then, and is now, considered the most effective for treatment of anthrax infections. FBI agents said he twice filled a prescription for Cipro at a pharmacy near his house -- each time, exactly two days before anthrax letters were mailed in September and October of 2001. But, the documents say, Hatfill denied that he took any of the medication during that period.

The search warrant applications also contain publicly known aspects of Hatfill's past, including a novel he wrote but never published about how terrorists could release deadly materials like anthrax in the US. They also note that he had once said that anthrax would be the biological agent most likely to be used in a terror attack.

"Our repeated experience has been that people make wild accusations in secret, only to retract them under public questioning," said Tom Connolly, Hatfill's lawyer, in response to Tuesday's document release. "Whether or not it was right for the government to rely on this kind of information to obtain a search warrant in 2002, we know in 2008 that Steven Hatfill had nothing to do with the anthrax attacks. It will be unfortunate for all involved if the release of these documents misleads anyone into thinking otherwise," he said.

Both Hatfill and the Justice Department opposed making the documents public, but a federal judge ordered them released at the request of news organizations. They claimed the material would provide a window into the FBI's performance during a case of national importance.