U.S. Germ Warfare Research Pushes Treaty Limits

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

This article was reported and written by Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William J. Broad.

Over the past several years, the United States has embarked on a program of secret research on biological weapons that, some officials say, tests the limits of the global treaty banning such weapons.

The 1972 treaty forbids nations from developing or acquiring weapons that spread disease, but it allows work on vaccines and other protective measures. Government officials said the secret research, which mimicked the major steps a state or terrorist would take to create a biological arsenal, was aimed at better understanding the threat.

The projects, which have not been previously disclosed, were begun under President Clinton and have been embraced by the Bush administration, which intends to expand them. 

Earlier this year, administration officials said, the Pentagon drew up plans to engineer genetically a potentially more potent variant of the bacterium that causes anthrax, a deadly disease ideal for germ warfare. 

The experiment has been devised to assess whether the vaccine now being given to millions of American soldiers is effective against such a superbug, which was first created by Russian scientists.  A Bush administration official said the National Security Council is expected to give the final go-ahead later this month. 

Two other projects completed during the Clinton administration focused on the mechanics of making germ weapons. 

In a program code-named Clear Vision, the Central Intelligence Agency built and tested a model of a Soviet-designed germ bomb that agency officials feared was being sold on the international market.  The C.I.A. device lacked a fuse and other parts that would make it a working bomb, intelligence officials said.

At about the same time, Pentagon experts assembled a germ factory in the Nevada desert from commercially available materials. Pentagon officials said the project demonstrated the ease with which a terrorist or rogue nation could build a plant that could produce pounds of the deadly germs. 

Both the mock bomb and the factory were tested with simulants — benign substances with characteristics similar to the germs used in weapons, officials said.

A senior Bush administration official said all the projects were "fully consistent" with the treaty banning biological weapons and were needed to protect Americans against a growing danger. "This administration will pursue defenses against the full spectrum of biological threats," the official said. 

The treaty, another administration official said, allows the United States to conduct research on both microbes and germ munitions for "protective or defensive purposes." 

Some Clinton administration officials worried, however, that the project violated the pact. And others expressed concern that the experiments, if disclosed, might be misunderstood as a clandestine effort to resume work on a class of weapons that President Nixon had relinquished in 1969.

Simultaneous experiments involving a model of a germ bomb, a factory to make biological agents and the developoment of more potent anthrax, these officials said, would draw vociferous protests from Washington if conducted by a country the United States viewed as suspect.

Administration officials said the need to keep such projects secret was a significant reason behind President Bush's recent rejection of a draft agreement to strengthen the germ-weapons treaty, which has been signed by 143 nations. 

The draft would require those countries to disclose where they are conducting defensive research involving gene-splicing or germs likely to be used in weapons. The sites would then be subject to international inspections. 

Many national security officials in both the Clinton and Bush administrations opposed the draft, arguing that it would give potential adversaries a road map to what the United States considers its most serious vulnerabilities.

Among the facilities likely to be open to inspection under the draft agreement would be the West Jefferson, Ohio, laboratory of the Battelle Memorial Institute, a military contractor that has been selected to create the genetically altered anthrax.

Several officials who served in senior posts in the Clinton administration acknowledged that the secretive efforts were so poorly coordinated that even the White House was unaware of their full scope. 

The Pentagon's project to build a germ factory was not reported to the White House, they said. President Clinton, who developed an intense interest in germ weapons, was never briefed on the programs under way or contemplated, the officials said. 

A former senior official in the Clinton White House conceded that in retrospect, someone should have been responsible for reviewing the projects to ensure that they were not only effective in defending the United States, but consistent with the nation's arms-control pledges.

The C.I.A.'s tests on the bomb model touched off a dispute among government experts after the tests were concluded in 2000, with some officials arguing that they violated the germ treaty's prohibition against developing weapons. 

Intelligence officials said lawyers at the agency and the White House concluded that the work was defensive, and therefore allowed. But even officials who supported the effort acknowledged that it brought the United States closer to what was forbidden. 

"It was pressing how far you go before you do something illegal or immoral," recalled one senior official who was briefed on the program.

Public disclosure of the research is likely to complicate the position of the United States, which has long been in the forefront of efforts to enforce the ban on germ weapons. 

The Bush administration's willingness to abandon the 1972 Antiballistic Missile treaty has already drawn criticism around the world. And the administration's stance on the draft agreement for the germ treaty has put Washington at odds with many of its allies, including Japan and Britain. 

The Original Treaty

During the cold war, both the United States and the Soviet Union produced vast quantities of germ weapons, enough to kill everyone on earth. 

Eager to halt the spread of what many called the poor man's atom bomb, the United States unilaterally gave up germ arms and helped lead the global campaign to abolish them. By 1975, most of the world's nations had signed the convention. 

In doing so, they agreed not to develop, produce, acquire or stockpile quantities or types of germs that had no "prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes." They also pledged not to develop or obtain weapons or other equipment "designed to use such agents or toxins for hostile purposes or in armed conflict."

There were at least two significant loopholes: The pact did not define "defensive" research or say what studies might be prohibited, if any. And it provided no means of catching cheaters.

In the following decades, several countries did cheat, some on a huge scale. The Soviet Union built entire cities devoted to developing germ weapons, employing tens of thousands of people and turning anthrax, smallpox and bubonic plague into weapons of war. In the late 1980's, Iraq began a crash program to produce its own germ arsenal.

Both countries insisted that their programs were for defensive purposes.

American intelligence officials had suspected that Baghdad and Moscow were clandestinely producing germ weapons. But the full picture of their efforts did not become clear until the 1990's, after several Iraqi and Soviet officials defected. 

Fears about the spread of biological weapons were deepened by the rise of terrorism against Americans, the great strides in genetic engineering and the collapse of the Soviet Union, which left thousands of scientists skilled in biological warfare unemployed, penniless and vulnerable to recruitment. 

The threat disclosed a quandary: While the United States spent billions of dollars a year to assess enemy military forces and to defend against bullets, tanks, bombs and jet fighters, it knew relatively little about the working of exotic arms it had relinquished long ago.

Designing a Delivery System

In the mid-1990's, the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies stepped up their search for information about other nations' biological research programs, focusing on the former Soviet Union, Iran, Iraq and Libya, among others. Much of the initial emphasis was on the germs that enemies might use in an attack, officials said.

But in 1997, the agency embarked on Clear Vision, which focused on weapons systems that would deliver the germs.

Intelligence officials said the project was led by Gene Johnson, a senior C.I.A. scientist who had long worked with some of the world's deadliest viruses. Dr. Johnson was eager to understand the damage that Soviet miniature bombs — bomblets, in military parlance — might inflict.

The agency asked its spies to find or buy a Soviet bomblet, which releases germs in a fine mist. That search proved unsuccessful, and the agency approved a proposal to build a replica and study how well it could disperse its lethal cargo.

The agency's lawyers concluded that such a project was permitted by the treaty because the intent was defensive. Intelligence officials said the C.I.A. had reports that at least one nation was trying to buy the Soviet- made bomblets.

A model was constructed and the agency conducted two sets of tests at Battelle, the military contractor. The experiments measured dissemination characteristics and how the model performed under different atmospheric conditions, intelligence officials said. They emphasized that the device was a "portion" of a bomb that could not have been used as a weapon. 

The experiments caused concern at the White House, which learned about the project after it was under way. Some aides to President Clinton worried that the benefits did not justify the risks. But a White House lawyer led a joint assessment by several departments that concluded that the program did not violate the treaty, and it went ahead.

The questions were debated anew after the project was completed, this time without consensus. A State Department official argued for a strict reading of the treaty: the ban on acquiring or developing "weapons" barred states from building even a partial model of a germ bomb, no matter what the rationale. 

"A bomb is a bomb is a bomb," another official said at the time.

The C.I.A. continued to insist that it had the legal authority to conduct such tests and, intelligence officials said, the agency was prepared to reopen the fight over how to interpret the treaty. But even so, the agency ended the Clear Vision project in the last year of the Clinton administration, intelligence officials said.

Bill Harlow, the C.I.A. spokesman, acknowledged that the agency had conducted "laboratory or experimental" work to assess the intelligence it had gathered about biological warfare. 

"Everything we have done in this respect was entirely appropriate, necessary, consistent with U.S. treaty obligations and was briefed to the National Security Council staff and appropriate Congressional oversight committees," Mr. Harlow said. 

Breeding More Potent Anthrax

In the 1990's, government officials also grew increasingly worried about the possibility that scientists could use the widely available techniques of gene-splicing to create even more deadly weapons.

Those concerns deepened in 1995, when Russian scientists disclosed at a scientific conference in Britain that they had implanted genes from Bacillus cereus, an organism that causes food poisoning, into the anthrax microbe. 

The scientists said later that the experiments were peaceful; the two microbes can be found side-by-side in nature and, the Russians said, they wanted to see what happened if they cross-bred.

A published account of the experiment, which appeared in a scientific journal in late 1997, alarmed the Pentagon, which had just decided to require that American soldiers be vaccinated against anthrax.  According to the article, the new strain was resistant to Russia's anthrax vaccine, at least in hamsters. 

American officials tried to obtain a sample from Russia through a scientific exchange program to see whether the Russians had really created such a hybrid. The Americans also wanted to test whether the microbe could defeat the American vaccine, which is different from that used by Russia.

Despite repeated promises, the bacteria were never provided.

Eventually the C.I.A. drew up plans to replicate the strain, but intelligence officials said the agency hesitated because there was no specific report that an adversary was attempting to turn the superbug into a weapon. 

This year, officials said, the project was taken over by the Pentagon's intelligence arm, the Defense Intelligence Agency. Pentagon lawyers reviewed the proposal and said it complied with the treaty.  Officials said the research would be part of Project Jefferson, yet another government effort to track the dangers posed by germ weapons. 

A spokesman for Defense Intelligence, Lt. Cmdr. James Brooks, declined comment. Asked about the precautions at Battelle, which is to create the enhanced anthrax, Commander Brooks said security was "entirely suitable for all work already conducted and planned for Project Jefferson."

The Question of Secrecy

While several officials in both the Clinton and Bush administrations called this and other research long overdue, they expressed concern about the lack of a central system for vetting such proposals.

And a former American diplomat questioned the wisdom of keeping them secret.

James F. Leonard, head of the delegation that negotiated the germ treaty, said research on microbes or munitions could be justified, depending on the specifics.

But he said such experiments should be done openly, exposed to the scrutiny of scientists and the public. Public disclosure, he said, is important evidence that the United States is proceeding with a "clean heart."

"It's very important to be open," he said. "If we're not open, who's going to be open?" 

Mr. Leonard said the fine distinctions drawn by government lawyers were frequently ignored when a secret program was exposed. Then, he said, others offer the harshest possible interpretations — a "vulgarization of what has been done."

But he concluded that the secret germ research, as described to him, was "foolish, but not illegal."

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company

Sunday, October 14, 2001
By Eric Liption with Jim Rutenberg
The New York Times

Officials in New York, Florida and Nevada reported new incidents or information involving anthrax yesterday, heightening concerns nationwide but demonstrating no links among the cases.

In New York, investigators announced that they had located the source of the anthrax that sickened one, and perhaps two, NBC employees at Rockefeller Center: a letter mailed to the television network from Trenton on Sept. 18.

That finding meant a sharp turn for an investigation that until yesterday had been focused on a separate set of three letters, all postmarked from St. Petersburg, Fla., and sent to NBC, to The New York Times and to The St. Petersburg Times. Tests on those letters have been negative, leading health officials in New York to all but dismiss the possibility that they posed a health threat.

"We're very confident that at this point we're ruling it out," New York City's health commissioner, Dr. Neal L. Cohen, said at an afternoon news conference with Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and officials from the federal government and NBC.

In Nevada, Gov. Kenny Guinn and other state officials said that tests had shown that pictures contained in a letter sent from Malaysia to a Microsoft office in Reno were contaminated with anthrax. Several people at the office may have come into contact with the letter, but no one has tested positive for exposure, officials said.

In Florida, five more employees at American Media tested positive for anthrax exposure. Three employees of the Boca Raton publishing company had previously tested positive, including one who died.

The New York Times reported yesterday that both letters sent to NBC, from Trenton and St. Petersburg, were turned over to the F.B.I. on Sept. 26.

But Barry W. Mawn, the assistant director in charge of the F.B.I.'s New York office, said yesterday that the bureau did not learn of the Trenton letter until Friday, when investigators went to the network's studios at 30 Rockefeller Plaza following confirmation that an assistant to the NBC anchor Tom Brokaw had tested positive for anthrax. They picked it up and turned it over to health officials who tested it and confirmed the presence of anthrax.

"Now we have identified the missing link, so to speak, the actual cause of the anthrax that created this whole situation," said NBC's chairman, Robert Wright. "So we are no longer dealing with an unknown time, date and place and that is very important."

Several people handled the Trenton letter when it was first received at NBC, perhaps as early as Sept. 19, including Mr. Brokaw's assistant, Erin M. O'Connor, and the woman who opened it, a clerical employee whom network and health officials would not identify. That woman, they said, has had a fever, a rash and swollen lymph nodes, symptoms consistent with anthrax exposure, and is being treated with antibiotics. Officials are awaiting results on a definitive exposure test, which should be available within the next day or two. Health officials said that like Ms. O'Connor, the woman was thought to have been exposed through her skin, not as a result of inhaling anthrax spores, and was expected to fully recover.

Officials at NBC have not been able to say definitively when the woman first opened the Trenton letter in the offices of NBC Nightly News on the third floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, only that it was between Sept. 19 and Sept. 25. The letter arrived in a white envelope with no return address. The president of NBC News, Neal Shapiro, said that when the clerical employee opened it, a brown granular substance fell out. The woman brushed much of the sand like material into a trash can near her desk, he said, and the letter was eventually placed in another envelope and added to a stash of hate mail that the company collects and occasionally forwards to authorities. It is unclear when Ms. O'Connor came into contact with the Trenton letter, or if she was initially told of the substance that had fallen from the envelope.

Other than a small group of people who handled that letter, estimated at no more than half a dozen, health officials said yesterday that there appeared to be very little risk to other NBC employees and that they thought there was no remaining danger of infection at the building.

To ensure that no else has been exposed or infected, more than 400 NBC employees who had visited the NBC Nightly News offices around the time the letters were received have been tested, but the results of those tests were not yet available. Yesterday, NBC employees continued to line up at the network's offices to get the tests, which now are being recommended for anyone who may have been in the area between Sept. 19 and Sept. 25.

Last night, NBC News broadcast its evening news from the Today Show studio across the street from 30 Rockefeller Plaza, as employees were still being kept away from the "NBC Nightly News" offices.

"The public health risks associated with that building right now are minimum, and pretty close to negligible," said Stephen M. Ostroff, chief epidemiologist at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "So people who work in that building, spend time in that building, should go about their business."

Health officials were awaiting a final round of tests on the letter sent to The New York Times, which was received Friday morning by Judith Miller, a reporter who covers bioterrorism. After opening that letter, which had been sent from St. Petersburg, a white powder dusted Ms. Miller's face, hands and sweater. But Dr. Cohen said he was very confident that these final tests would also come back negative, meaning that none of the letters sent from St. Petersburg are contaminated.

Since the first case of anthrax was confirmed in Florida earlier this month, dozens of reports of other possible cases have spawned investigations.

Many reports, though, turned out to be false.

Yesterday, passengers who had flown from Chicago were temporarily detained aboard their United Airlines jet after landing in San Jose when a passenger reported that a man had stood up in mid-flight and released a powdery substance from an envelope.

Fire department personnel boarded the plane, took the man off, stripped him of his clothing, washed him down with detergent and dressed him in a hazardous materials suit that prevents vapors from passing out of it. The substance turned out to be confetti that spilled out of a greeting card.

A suspicious powder at a post office in Parker, Colo., turned out to be pudding mix.

As reports of anthrax findings continued to spread, Tommy G. Thompson, the secretary for health and human services, convened a conference call yesterday with federal health leaders and public health directors around the country.

One person who participated, Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, described it as "an information-sharing update call," and said while such calls have occurred in the past, this is the first time he can remember that a cabinet official participated.

"The real number of letters with anthrax could continue; we don't know how long that will happen," he said. "The bigger risk right now to the system are the hoax letters in terms of just choking the system up."

Work has already started in New Jersey to try to determine the source of the anthrax sent to NBC. But an F.B.I. official there said that the Trenton postmark means that the letter could have come from a wide section of central New Jersey, since there is a regional postal center in Trenton.

"There are over 100 different collection boxes or post offices it could have come from," said Sandra Carroll, an F.B.I. spokeswoman.

NEWS ANALYSIS
Daschle Letter Called First Use of Anthrax as Weapon
By STEPHEN ENGELBERG and JUDITH MILLER

he discovery of what government officials say is high-grade anthrax in a letter mailed to Congress is the most worrisome development yet in a series of bioterrorist attacks that has already rattled the nation.

The officials and weapons experts said yesterday that it suggested that somewhere, someone has access to the sort of germ weapons capable of inflicting huge casualties.

So far, the officials said, the attacker or attackers have used a rudimentary delivery system: the mail. Their intent and capabilities remain unknown, as does the amount of anthrax available to them. But what worries the officials in Washington is the possibility that an adversary with even a small quantity could easily find much more effective means of spreading the disease.

Until yesterday's preliminary analysis of the letter received by Tom Daschle, the Senate majority leader, the spate of anthrax-laced envelopes stirred considerable anxiety but posed a limited threat. Some experts assumed that the anthrax being sent around the country was crudely made, composed mostly of large particles that fell to the ground and thus endangered primarily those in the immediate area.

What government officials say arrived in Senator Daschle's office was significantly more threatening. Following the use of anthrax in Florida, it suggests that for the first time in history a sophisticated form of anthrax has been developed and used as a weapon in warfare or bioterrorism.

The key to understanding the danger, experts said, is in the size of the particles. The anthrax sent to Mr. Daschle, government officials said, was finely milled so that it would float a considerable distance on the smallest of air currents.

Producing germs that could be spread as a mist had been the main technical challenge facing germ warriors throughout the 20th century. Anthrax is what the Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg calls a "professional pathogen," a hardy germ that could wreak havoc if inhaled. The trick was turning it into an aerosol that lingers.

Decades ago, Soviet and American scientists separately devised methods to dry and grind anthrax into the tiny particles — five microns or less — that could easily enter the nostrils and lodge in the lungs.

Experts say an adversary armed with anthrax in this form would have a host of possible targets for mass terrorism. Experiments by the United States in the 1960's showed that anthrax released in the New York City subway could spread widely underground, infecting large numbers of people. Federal officials used a benign germ related to anthrax to demonstrate the possible effects.

An enemy with large quantities of high-grade anthrax could mount a credible attack on a city or large office building. Dried anthrax could be spread using a crop-duster or small airplane equipped with the appropriate nozzles. Buildings are an easier target and could be contaminated with a much smaller amount of anthrax pumped through a garden spray bottle, experts say.

Victims of an anthrax attack can be easily treated with antibiotics, but that requires that public health officials recognize the germ has been dispersed at a particular location. Experts say that detection equipment is far from reliable, which means the first signs could come when people show up in the emergency room with flulike symptoms.

Anthrax was one of the most important weapons in both the Soviet Union's and the United States' germ weapons arsenals.

Officials from both countries say they never used germ weapons, though Ken Alibek, a prominent defector from the Soviet germ warfare program, maintains that Moscow may have used germs as weapons against Germany and in Afghanistan.

The United States abandoned its own germ program in 1969, and soon after most of the world's nations signed an international treaty banning the development and possession of such weapons.

The Soviet Union also signed the pact, but cheated on a massive scale, say former Soviet officials who worked to refine the strains of anthrax, among other germs, until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990.

In the 1980's, other nations, notably Iraq, began developing the germ as a weapon. Iraqi scientists spent more than five years on the project, cultivating anthrax and processing it into a wet slurry that was loaded into bombs and missiles.

United Nations inspectors who later studied the Iraqi program said Baghdad did not manage to produce dry anthrax that could be delivered as an aerosol though it did buy specialized nozzles for its fleet of crop- dusters.

In the years since, United Nations officials say, Iraq has acquired the capability to produce the high-grade, dry anthrax of the appropriate particle size.

None of this history gives investigators much of a hint as to the origins of the current attack. It is not clear whether the anthrax sent to Senator Daschle was produced by the attacker or attackers, bought from a foreign nation or made with the help of a rogue scientist.

Nor was it known whether the attacker or attackers could make or obtain larger quantities.

Former germ weapons scientists say that neither is easy. It took experienced Iraqi scientists several years to figure out how to cultivate large amounts of anthrax, which is the crucial first step to making a weapon.

Drying the germs is relatively straightforward. But that process creates a mix of particles that stick together, and most of them are far too large for use as an effective weapon. Grinding the material to a small, uniform size without damaging a significant portion of the germs is not easily done, former American and Soviet germ scientists say.

The discovery of expertly processed anthrax, one former scientist said, casts serious doubt on the theory advanced by some investigators that the germ attacks were the work of a lone amateur with a smattering of knowledge about biology.

"I do think in one form or another, a state was involved," one former American scientist said. "It could be employees of a former state, such as a Russian scientist."

Nor is it clear whether Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden's network, was involved in any way. American intelligence officials say Mr. bin Laden has tried to acquire nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

Until now, there has been no suggestion that he has succeeded in this goal, although there have been reports of testing chemicals and crude biological weapons on animals at one of his training camps in Afghanistan.

The attempted use of anthrax against a United States senator takes President Bush into a new, uncharted realm, particularly if the attack is ever linked to a specific nation. On the eve of the gulf war, his father weighed the question of whether to respond with nuclear weapons to a germ attack against the United States-led coalition. After a discussion among his senior advisers, President George Bush decided against such retaliation. Instead, American officials sent Baghdad an ambiguously phrased warning that was delivered in a letter from Mr. Bush to Saddam Hussein.

"Your country," the letter said, "will pay a terrible price if you order unconscionable acts."

By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN
Published: October 18, 2001

Three days before anthrax was first detected in Florida, a Manhattan doctor called the New York City Department of Health to report a suspicion: one of his patients might have contracted anthrax.

The doctor, Richard P. Fried, said his concern was based on the irritating skin lesion that his patient, Erin O'Connor, an NBC employee, had developed on her chest after powder from an envelope had spilled on her at work.

''I expressed my concerns about what this could be'' to the health department, Dr. Fried said. He stated those concerns, he said, first on Oct. 1 and in later conversations with a health department epidemiologist, but the department did not notify the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or send specimens there.

Dr. Marcelle Layton, an assistant commissioner in the health department's communicable disease bureau, confirmed the gist of the account by Dr. Fried, a specialist in infectious diseases. The C.D.C. was not notified, Dr. Layton said, because the initial culture tests performed on Ms. O'Connor and on the letter showed no evidence of anthrax.

''Everything Dr. Fried did was right and reasonable,'' Dr. Layton said, but the initial situation ''did not reach a level of concern because it was too early to do so.''

Ms. O'Connor's case of cutaneous anthrax was diagnosed on Oct. 9, rattling the city and setting off an intense investigation into its source.

Dr. Fried said that on Oct. 1, after he first examined Ms. O'Connor, he told her she might have an infected spider bite or Lyme disease, but he did not mention anthrax. ''I just did not want to alarm her,'' he said.

Nevertheless, Dr. Fried said he took the precaution of prescribing Cipro in the event that Ms. O'Connor did indeed have the disease.

Dr. Fried said he re-examined Ms. O'Connor on Oct. 3 and on Oct. 8, when the lesion had developed into a black crust, which is characteristic of cutaneous anthrax. But Dr. Fried and the health department were perplexed because anthrax did not grow on the culture taken from the skin lesion.

News reports of anthrax in Florida raised Ms. O'Connor's concern, and she sought other opinions.

The second infectious-disease specialist, who asked not to be identified, had seen many anthrax cases while working in a developing country. When he saw Ms. O'Connor's chest, he said, the lesion ''was as classic-looking as you can get.''

Ms. O'Connor then went to Dr. Marc Grossman, a dermatologist at Columbia-Presbyterian Center, who had never seen a case of anthrax. But on Oct. 4, when the first case of anthrax was reported in Florida, Dr. Grossman had readied and given a lecture on cutaneous anthrax to young doctors at the school.

So when Ms. O'Connor came to his office on Oct. 9, the diagnosis was obvious, he said.

The source of her anthrax became evident only when it was found in the powder from a different envelope.

Ms. O'Connor did not wish to be interviewed, an NBC spokeswoman said.

By Judith Miller and Sheryl Gay Anthrax
The New York Times
Thursday, October 25, 2001

Washington, Oct. 24 - After a day of recriminations over how the government handled information about anthrax attacks, public health and law enforcement authorities gathered at the White House tonight to devise a strategy for responding to future strikes, which they say are almost certain to occur.

The closed session in the Roosevelt Room, led by Tom Ridge, director of the Office of Homeland Security, followed complaints by several government officials that better sharing of information might have saved the lives of two postal workers and prevented others from falling ill.

Officials at the Department of Health and Human Services, the parent agency of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have complained privately that the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which is leading the anthrax inquiry, did not pass along information about the potency of the anthrax contained in the letter sent to Tom Daschle, the Senate Democratic leader.  That letter, which was opened by an aide to Mr. Daschle on Oct. 15, passed through post offices in Trenton and Washington, where postal workers became sick this week.

For their part, F.B.I. officials said they had fully shared what they knew about the deadly anthrax.

And they moved today to alert the public to the possibility of additional attacks.  "We are assessing threats in real time and providing warnings to your cities and your nation," Robert S. Mueller III, the bureau’s director, told the U.S. Conference of Mayors.  "And I must tell you that the threat level remains very high.  More attempts and possible attacks are a distinct possibility."

The question of how dangerous the Daschle anthrax was has been the subject of intense debate.  Despite Bush administration officials’ earlier efforts to minimize the threat, scientists, and public health and law enforcement officials agreed today that the anthrax in the letter to Senator Daschle was especially dangerous.

"When I saw that, I said to myself, this is material that is quite formidable, that is infecting people with inhalation anthrax, infecting them in the absence of direct contact," Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said.  "You can call it whatever you want to call it with regard to grade and size or weaponized or not weaponized.  The fact is, it is acting like a highly efficient bioterrorist agent."

Dr. Fauci added, "If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, the it is a duck."

Several public health officials complained today of a failure of communications that they said began on the day the Daschle letter was opened.  Instead of being sent to the C.D.C., the agency analyzing anthrax samples from Florida and New York, the letter was sent by the Capital police to the Army’s biological laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md.

Stung by Criticism, Officials Try to Join Anthrax Efforts

As postal workers began falling sick this week, tensions erupted between these two agencies as well as with the F.B.I., which was supposed to be sharing information each laboratory was producing.  At issue is whether a communications failure prevented the centers from taking more aggressive steps to protect postal workers.

"It’s fair to say that had we known the concentration of the material, that would probably have given people cause to say, boy, we had better go look at this more carefully," said a person who has been briefed on the investigation.  "I’m not sure that it meant you would have done any more with the mail people, but you sure might have."

F.B.I. officials said today that senior law enforcement officials and a scientist from the Army laboratory discussed the potency of the Daschle anthrax in a conference call on Oct. 15, the day the letter was opened.  The disease control agency participated, they said.

John Collingwood, the bureau’s spokesman, said in a statement tonight, "On the same evening after the letter was opened, the Army laboratory described to the F.B.I. along with other appropriate agencies, law enforcement and public health alike, the extreme virulent nature of the anthrax.  Thanks to their quick work the seriousness of the situation was unmistakable and was widely broadcast.  We have nothing but the highest praise for both the Army laboratory and the C.D.C."

But centers officials said the tests on the anthrax were not completed by the time of that conference call.  They said that only after postal workers died did they realize that the anthrax sent to Mr. Daschle was probably deadlier than the material they had analyzed from NBC in New York and from the American Media building in Florida.

What distinguished the anthrax in the Daschle letter, experts said today, was its ability to waft easily through the air like an aerosol.

Dr. Jeffrey P. Koplan, the director of the disease control agency, said tonight that the agency now believed that the Daschle letter, and possibly others, "contained in a form that permits it to permeate the letter or escape through the letter in some way."

One official said, however, that the agency had not initially been made aware that the anthrax particles in the Daschle letter were small enough to have escaped a sealed envelope.

Had the agency known this from the outset, the official said, it might have moved quickly to test post offices in Washington and New Jersey, and screen workers there to determine if they had been exposed to anthrax.  Instead, the agency advised postal officials that there was no need for immediate testing and screening.

Officials at Health and Human Services, Ft. Detrick and the disease control agency declined to comment on the discrepancies in testing or on their different approaches.

Tensions over what the disease control agency was told, and when, erupted during a closed session in the office of Tommy G. Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, on Tuesday morning.  One official said Dr. Fauci, in particular, was angry about public statement by administration officials that suggested the Daschle anthrax posed only a limited threat.

The lapses have been compounded by a culture of mistrust between the Army laboratory, which focuses on defending American forces against biological attack, and the Atlanta-based disease control agency, which only recently has become involved in antiterrorism preparedness.  Scientists at the Army laboratory have long been concerned that their agency counterparts underestimate the threat posed by bioterrorism.

Normally, scientists prefer to analyze all samples from an investigation in the same laboratory.  In this case, officials from both laboratories said the reason that they did not communicate directly about their respective findings was that the letters were the subject of a criminal investigation that was being led by the F.B.I.  Therefore, they felt that it was incumbent upon them to report only to the bureau and to let law enforcement make the decision about what information to disseminate.

Some officials said, however, that the miscommunications may not have affected the public health response.  "This is the first time something like this has happened," one official said.  "There was no way of knowing that the anthrax in the post office would ever have spread that far." 

By William J. Broad
The New York Times
October 25, 2001

Scientists in and out of government said yesterday that the anthrax strike on Capitol Hill involved an advanced, highly refined powder that is quite dangerous and not the primitive form of the germ that some federal officials have recently described.

Three top scientists - all with experience in germ weapons and knowledge of the federal investigation - said in interviews yesterday that the powder was high-grade and in theory capable of inflicting wide casualties.

And, two of the scientists said, the anthrax was altered from its natural state to reduce its electrostatic charge, a process that prevents small particles from sticking together and to nearby objects, thus making them more likely to become airborne.

The experts noted that turning anthrax into a weapon of mass destruction still required added steps, like making the powder in quantity and learning how to disseminate it effectively.  One expert said that only the United States, the Soviet Union and Iraq were known to have developed the necessary technique.  But the experts said some officials were playing down the powder’s potency out of ignorance or an impulse to reassure a frightened public.

Federal officials and weapons experts have given varying descriptions of the powder in the 10 days since an aide to Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the majority leader, opened a letter containing the anthrax.

Some federal officials have said the germs were an unrefined preparation of microbes, while others have warned that they were potent and easily turned into a cloud that could infect many people.  Anthrax spores in the powder contaminated at least 28 people in Senate offices.

None of these people have become sick, but federal investigators said the Daschle letter may have leaked anthrax in transit from New Jersey and infected postal workers there and in Washington.  Two Washington postal workers have died of anthrax.

William Patrick III, a microbiologist who designed germ weapons for the United States before President Richard M. Nixon renounced them in 1969, said he had learned details of the federal inquiry from a senior investigator.   The Senate powder, Mr. Patrick said, was quite capable of sailing far through the air to hurt many people.

He said the makers of the anthrax spores sent to Mr. Daschle’s office had produced a dry powder that was remarkably free of extraneous material.

"It’s high-grade," said Mr. Patrick, who consults widely on making germ defenses.  "It’s free flowing.  It’s electrostatic free.  And it’s in high concentration."

Experts in germ weaponry agree that the removal of electrostatic charges is a major step toward making an effective munition.  The Soviet Union and United States developed sophisticated ways of diminishing this attraction and helping the particles float more freely, increasing their ease of dissemination and likelihood of inhalation.

Mr. Patrick said that whoever sent the Daschle letter had clearly achieved this step.  "It’s fluffy," he said, quoting experts who examined the powder.  "It appears to have an additive that keeps the spores from clumping."  Removing the charge, he added, is a black art, few details of which are known publicly.

Assertions by some federal officials that the material was not the type that would be used in weapons are "nonsense," he said.  "The only difference between this and weapons grades is the size of the production.  You can produce a very good grade of anthrax in the lab.  The issue is whether those efforts can be expanded in scale, so you can make large quantities."

Richard Spertzel, a microbiologist and former head of biological inspection teams in Iraq for the United Nations, said he, too, had talked to federal investigators about the Senate powder.

"There is no question this is weapons quality," Dr. Spertzel said.  "It has all the characteristics - fine particles and readily dispersible."  Particles must be small to penetrate deep into human lungs, where they can start a lethal infection.

Al Zelicoff, a physician and expert on biological weapons at the Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, who is developing a computerized system to allow epidemiologists to track suspicious disease outbreaks, said his conversations with federal investigators had alarmed him.

"These people know what they’re doing," Dr. Zelicoff said of the anthrax terrorists.  "I’m truly worried.  They have the keys to the kingdom."

He cautioned, however, that the federal investigation was continuing and had produced results that were preliminary, with no firm conclusions.

"But if they have indeed perfected the aerosolization process," Dr. Zelicoff said of the terrorists, "it’s strongly suggested they can do large-scale dissemination when they wish."

The Epidemic

Anthrax Outbreak of '57 Felled a Mill but Yielded Answers
By PAM BELLUCK

MANCHESTER, N.H., Oct. 25 — It started with a scratchy throat, a parched sensation that would not go away no matter what Albert Langlois did. It was 1957 and Mr. Langlois had started a new job just two months earlier, working at the Arms Textile Mill, pulling out wool and goat hair that was too short to be made into fabric.

But one day in late October, Mr. Langlois, 33, told his wife that he did not feel well.

"For a few days he says, 'Gee my throat is so dry,' " recalled his wife, Stella, 73. "All he did was drink water. He kept drinking and drinking. We thought it was the flu or something. We didn't know what it was."

It turned out to be anthrax, and Mr. Langlois, the father of two young sons, died a few days later. He was one of nine men at the mill who were infected. Four died of inhalation anthrax in what is still the nation's only outbreak of the disease.

The mill on the banks of the Merrimack River is now gone, destroyed in what was then one of the world's largest decontamination projects ever, and most people in Manchester have forgotten about the outbreak. Nevertheless, the millworkers who died left a legacy that reverberates now as the nation confronts a battery of anthrax attacks. The episode enabled science to show that the anthrax vaccine works.

"It's the only anthrax epidemic we've had in this country," said Dr. Philip S. Brachman, an expert in anthrax epidemiology, who in 1957, the year the Arms Textile Mill workers became ill, was in the process of testing an anthrax vaccine for the Centers for Disease Control. By coincidence, he had chosen the Manchester mill as a site for his experiment. The fact that no vaccinated workers got anthrax during the epidemic, he said, "really suggested that the vaccination was effective."

Equally important, the Manchester outbreak gave scientists glimpses of how hardy and opportunistic anthrax bacteria can be. The nine victims — five with inhalation anthrax and four with cutaneous anthrax — became infected while working at the Arms Textile Mill here, but not in the same room or at the same time. Some worked in the carding room, some in the weaving department, and some operated the combing machines, where they removed short lengths of hair or wool called noils. The men became ill over a period of 10 weeks.

What they had in common, epidemiologists later discovered, was that at some point all had handled the fibers of a single shipment of black goat hair from Pakistan. The anthrax, Dr. Brachman said, must have been stubbornly present in that shipment.

"It was the only lot that all the workers had contact with," he said. "The hair from this one particular lot was going to machinery that all these employees were working at when they got ill. But some were at the beginning of the process, some were in the middle of the process, and some were at the end."

Cutaneous, or skin, anthrax, characterized by black lesions on the hands, was not unheard of in textile manufacturing at that time. The Arms Textile Mill, which turned goat hair and wool into lining for fashionable suits, recorded more than 100 cases of it from 1941 to 1957.

Anthrax is caused by bacteria that typically infect animals. For this reason, it was considered, in its cutaneous form, to be such an occupational hazard that it was known as wool-sorter's or ragpicker's disease. It was treatable with antibiotics.

"My guess is at some level anthrax was accepted back then," said Frederick A. Rusczek, director of the Manchester Health Department. "It was an occupational illness."

Perhaps that is why more workers did not participate in the vaccine study that Dr. Brachman was conducting. Few, if any, would have known about inhalation anthrax, rarer and more deadly than skin anthrax. The study sprang out of the cold war fear that enemies would seek to use anthrax as a biological weapon, and Dr. Brachman's task was to see if the vaccine worked.

In May 1957 he enlisted participants at three mills in Pennsylvania and at the Arms mill, one of a cluster of imposing 19th-century red brick buildings near downtown Manchester. At Arms, about 300 of the 600 employees agreed to participate in the study. Half of those received the vaccine, half a placebo.

During the epidemic, from late August to early November, four of the nine who got infected had received the placebo. Two of those infected, including Mr. Langlois, began working at the mill after the study began and therefore could not participate. The other three chose not to participate, Dr. Brachman said.

One of those was Antonio Jette, 49, who worked in the carding room, placing the goat hair, wool and fibers into machines, which straightened and aligned the strands.

Both carding and combing, Mr. Langlois's work, generate dust, and the epidemiologists found that most of the anthrax infections occurred in those two departments.

Mr. Jette's daughter, Anita Simonds, now 74, said her father never mentioned anything about the vaccination experiment.

"We never heard of that," she said. "In them days you never knew anything unless you were very intelligent and asked a lot of questions." She remembers her father became ill in September, cutting short a Labor Day trip to a state fair to come home. A few days later, he went upstairs and lay down on his bed.

"He never seemed to wake up," Mrs. Simonds said. "My God, he'd never been sick a day."

After the epidemic, Dr. Brachman's team decided to jettison the experiment and vaccinate all workers at the mill. With vaccination a condition of employment, no more millworkers became infected, but in 1966, Norbert Lemoine, a 46-year-old worker at a machine shop across the alley from the mill, died after contracting inhalation anthrax, presumably from spores that had wafted over from the building.

The nation's current supply of anthrax vaccine, derived from the experiments of 1957, was licensed in 1970 by the Food and Drug Administration to prevent the form of anthrax that afflicts the skin. The vaccine is given to military personnel and is not commercially available.

In 1968, Arms Textile went out of business and the mill was sealed while health officials figured out how to make sure that anthrax spores there could not escape.

Unlike the epidemic, which received little attention in newspapers, the mill's future was big news. "Lethal Spores Could Menace All Manchester," declared a 1970 headline in The Manchester Union Leader.

In 1971, the decontamination process began, with workers who were vaccinated and dressed in protective suits and oxygen masks and tanks spraying first a detergent solution and then concentrated formaldehyde over the mill. In 1976, faced with trying to revitalize Manchester's fading factory row, the city decided to raze the building, worried that anthrax might still be hiding in the crevices of the old timber and brick, Mr. Rusczek of the Manchester Health Department said.

As the building came down, it was sprayed with a chlorine solution, he said. The timber was incinerated, and the bricks, doused in chlorine again, were buried a half-mile away.

Today, there is no sign of the epidemic that hit this sturdy river town. The site of the mill is now a parking lot, bordered by a hip bistro called Cotton and another factory building, which is now home to high-tech firms and tae kwon do gyms.

The place where the bricks were buried is a parking lot, too, for the Singer Family Park, where ball games and concerts are held.

For those who never forgot the anthrax epidemic, today's events are a chilling reminder of their helplessness long ago.

"We're learning more about anthrax now," Mrs. Simonds said, "than we ever knew then."

WASHINGTON, Oct. 26 - The Czech interior minister said today that an Iraqi intelligence officer met with Mohammed Atta, one of the ringleaders of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States, just five months before the synchronized hijackings and mass killings were carried out.

The official confirmation of the meeting, the details of which remain a mystery, does not amount to proof of Iraqi involvement in the attacks.  But after weeks of speculation and conflicting reports about Iraqi contacts with a cell leader who plotted the attacks, today's
confirmation raises fresh questions about whether Iraq's foreign intelligence arm in recent years established secret ties with Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden's organization.

Federal law enforcement officials say that the meeting, in Prague, fit into Mr. Atta's itinerary this way: on April 4 he was in Virginia Beach.  He flew to the Czech Republic on April 8 and met with the Iraqi intelligence officer, who was identified as Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani. By April 11, Mr. Atta was back in Florida renting a car.

A senior Bush administration official tonight indicated that the Czech decision to go public with the information about the meeting had taken Washington by surprise.

As for the meeting itself, the official said, "We are not sure we know exactly the full meaning of this, but we have known about it for some time." He said the administration would pursue the investigation "wherever it leads", adding, "We are relying on the intelligence agencies, investigators and law enforcement officials around the world to help us."

The public linkage of Iraq's intelligence service and the Al Qaeda terrorists also raises the question of whether those ties suggest Iraqi complicity - either through financing, training or the providing of forged travel documents - in the attacks last month.

The Czech authorities confirmed the meeting at a time of spirited debate in the Bush administration over whether to extend the antiterrorism military campaign now under way in Afghanistan to Iraq at some point in the future. Such a widening of the campaign is opposed by Arab countries and European allies already nervous that the American campaign is being seen as a Western assault on Muslims, despite repeated assurances that the target is not Islam but terrorism.

Speaking at a news conference in Prague, the Czech interior minister, Stanislav Gross, said that Mr. Atta met Mr. Ani, an Iraqi diplomat identified by Czech authorities as an intelligence officer, in early April.

Mr. Gross and other Czech officials suggested earlier this month that while there was evidence that Mr. Atta had visited Prague, there was none he had actually met with Iraqi agents. It was unclear what prompted them to revise their conclusions, although it seemed possible that American officials, concerned about the political implications of Iraqi involvement in terror attacks, had put pressure on the Czechs to keep quiet.

Mr. Atta, who had lived as a student in Hamburg, Germany, was unknown to Western intelligence services at the time, and did not attract the attention of the Czech authorities, according to Hynek Kmonicek, then deputy foreign minister and now ambassador to the United Nations.  Mr. Kmonicek on April 20 informed Mr. Ani that he was being expelled from the Czech Republic for activities incompatible with his diplomatic status, a code phrase for espionage.

"It's not a common thing," Mr. Kmonicek said, "for an Iraqi diplomat to meet a student from a neighboring country, though it is still premature to speculate further" on what transpired during the meeting.

Although Mr. Atta had been a student in Hamburg, he had, by April of this year, shifted his operations to the United States, where he and other members of the hijacking teams attended flying schools in Florida and elsewhere, conducted surveillance of airports and financed their preparations with large cash transfers from banks in the United Arab
Emirates and elsewhere abroad.

Mr. Ani was under surveillance because he had been observed near the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty headquarters in Prague, which Czech officials think has been selected for attack and is now heavily guarded.  After Sept. 11, Czech officials worked frantically to trace Mr. Atta's movements, and his identity was established with help from airline passenger lists and passport records.

"The Czech confirmation seems to me very important," said R. James Woolsey, former director of central intelligence who has become a strong advocate outside government for a rigorous investigation of Iraq's possible role in terror against the United States. "It is yet another lead that points toward Iraqi involvement in some sort of terrorism against the United States that ought to be followed up vigorously," he said.

Today's news from Prague fits into a matrix of circumstantial evidence that is emerging on the question of Iraqi support or contact with terrorist groups, but none of it directly connects Saddam Hussein to the events of Sept. 11.

A senior Israeli official said today that the country's intelligence services had not come up with any evidence linking Iraq to those attacks, or to the anthrax scare in the United States. "We don't see any evidence of Al Qaeda in Iraq," the official said. "Not as a base, not as financial support." Still, he said, proof could emerge. "The only reason they might cooperate is the basic common hate of America and Israel," the official said. "But we don't think he's the bad guy - he's the bad guy, but not for this story."

New information does suggest that Mr. Hussein was actively training terrorists to attack American interests throughout the 1990's.

One example is the testimony of Sabah Khodada, a captain in the Iraqi army who emigrated to Texas in May after working for eight years at what he described as a terrorist training camp at a bend in the Tigris River just southeast of Baghdad.

Mr. Khodada's past was unknown to American officials until an Iraqi intelligence officer, who defected to Turkey earlier this year, told his debriefers about the training camp, at Salman Pak, and said Mr. Khodada had been an instructor there.

Mr. Khodada was interviewed for the PBS documentary program "Frontline," and he described the camp as a highly secret installation run by an international terrorist known only as the Ghost to the staff.

The camp brought non-Iraqi Arabs from Persian Gulf countries, including Saudi Arabia, Mr. Khodada said, and gave them training "on assassinations, kidnapping, hijacking of airplanes, hijacking of buses, hijacking of trains, and all other kinds of operations related to terrorism."

Though security was tight there, Mr. Khodada said the Ghost and the other trainers who instructed the non-Iraqi Arabs talked about operations they were proud of.

"For example," he said, "they were telling us about how they were able to penetrate the American forces during the 1991 gulf war, where they went inside Saudi Arabian territory, and they were able to bring coordinates, exact coordinates of the Dhahran air base, which was hit by Scud missiles and many Americans were killed."

Such an account of Iraqi penetration behind American lines in the Persian Gulf war has not been asserted before, but an Iraqi Scud missile did hit an American barracks on Feb. 25, 1991, killing 28 soldiers and wounding nearly 100.

Mr. Khodada's account has yet to be independently confirmed, but the existence of the terrorist base where he worked was confirmed by United Nations inspectors, who searched Iraq for secret defense and weapons facilities during much of the 1990's.

Raymond Zalinskas, a member of the United Nations inspection force in 1994, said that during searches for biological weapons facilities at Salman Pak the inspectors learned of an "antiterrorist" training camp nearby that was in fact a terrorist training camp, according to intelligence reports they read.

"They called it an antiterrorist training camp, but there was intelligence given to us that they actually were training terrorists there," he said today. One of the prominent features of the camp, he added, was a Boeing 707 that was used in hijacking simulations.
The importance of Mr. Khodada's account is that, if true, it establishes a link between Iraqi intelligence and the training of non-Iraqi Arabs from Persian Gulf countries for international operations. But that is where the linkage ends for the moment, unless other witnesses emerge and fill out the account.

Mr. Khodada's identity might never have been known, were it not for the Iraqi National Congress, an opposition group headed by Ahmed Chalabi, a math teacher turned banker who emerged at the end of the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88 to call for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

His group was involved in an abortive C.I.A. attempt to build an alliance in northern Iraq to challenge Mr. Hussein's rule. The recriminations over the failure of that effort have left bitter feelings on both sides and in Congress, where Mr. Chalabi continues to have some support. But senior officials in the State Department and the C.I.A. view information that comes from the group with skepticism.

In the case of Mr. Khodada, American officials appear to have concluded that since he cannot provide hard evidence that the terrorist training he observed resulted in specific acts of terror, his information is of limited use. Still, a significant group of senior administration officials, nominally led by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz,
continue to push the investigation into Iraq's possible involvement.  One of the figures they have focused on is Faruk al-Hijazi, Iraq's ambassador to Turkey, who is also known as the former chief of Iraq's intelligence service.

One of the most persistent assertions, again arising from information provided by Mr. Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, is that Mr. Hijazi was dispatched by Mr. Hussein in 1998 to meet with Osama bin Laden and offer him and his supporters in Al Qaeda a safe haven in Iraq.

Mr. Hussein was said to be so impressed with Al Qaeda's bombing strikes on American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that he wanted to take control of the group's operations to serve Iraqi interests.

Turkish intelligence officials said this week that they had no information that Mr. Hijazi had traveled to Afghanistan or anywhere else to meet with Mr. bin Laden.

Still, Mr. Hijazi's connection to Iraq's secret service, notorious for internal repression and overseas assassinations, has caused embarrassment for Turkey, and Mr. Hijazi raced home to Baghdad on Sept. 24 after reports in the United States, still unconfirmed, asserted that he had met with Mr. bin Laden in 1998.

Zaben al-Kubaisay, the undersecretary of the Iraqi Embassy, said today from Ankara that Mr. Hijazi returned to Turkey this week. He also maintained he was unable to speak to reporters because of his heavy workload.

Bush administration officials seem at a loss to say how they would react if a smoking gun emerged on Iraqi terrorism against the United States, something that Mr. Wolfowitz at the Pentagon has warned the administration to prepare for.

Mr. Woolsey, a member of the Defense Policy Board that advises Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, says the answer is simple: "It is perfectly reasonable for the administration to focus first and foremost on the Taliban while gathering information about other possible states involved."

If such information proves such involvement, he added, the administration should, after careful consideration, take action, including military steps against Baghdad.

Another member of the Defense Policy Board and a former defense secretary and C.I.A. chief, James R. Schlesinger, is more circumspect.  "We should be cautious before taking action against Iraq which might destabilize one of the more moderate Arab regimes," he said, "but more importantly, such action must be successful, or it should be avoided for
the time being. Therefore, any presidential decision on Iraq must be carefully weighed on the basis of sound intelligence and political information."

Excruciating Lessons in the Ways of a Disease

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

This article was reported and written by William J. Broad, Stephen Engelberg, Judith Miller and     Sheryl Gay Stolberg.

The diagnosis of inhalation anthrax in a New York hospital worker throws into question many of the assumptions about an outbreak for which the scientific and medical wisdom was already being revised daily, sometimes hourly.

Just a few days ago, it seemed possible that the spate of infections could be traced to a handful of anthrax-laced letters, in particular a remarkably potent one that wound its way from New Jersey to a Washington mail collection center and then, finally, to the office of Tom Daschle, the Senate Democratic leader.

That now seems increasingly unlikely. And what was striking yesterday as officials struggled to explain the latest twist — the infection in the hospital employee, who works in a basement stockroom and neither handles the mail for a living nor appears to have been the target of an anthrax-tainted letter — was their acknowledgement of how much they do not know.

"It is unclear whether this particular instance is part of a pattern of other cases or whether it represents something different," said Dr. Jeffrey Koplan, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "We are making no assumptions as to where this exposure occurred."

Since the first case was diagnosed in Florida a month ago, almost every assumption about anthrax has been challenged, if not disproven outright. Finely ground anthrax, it now seems, can form a lethal mist with no more sophisticated a delivery system than an envelope in the mail. Powerful antibiotics, doctors have learned, can offer a fighting chance of survival even after symptoms have appeared. Yet the amount of spores needed to produce inhalation anthrax, the deadliest form of the disease, could be far smaller than previously believed. 

The most recent case is even more confounding. Could a wisp of the anthrax mailed to Washington have found its way to the basement of a Manhattan hospital before settling in the lungs of the worker? Were there other letters and, if so, where are they? Or is this latest infection a harbinger that something worse is to come — an anthrax outbreak in which the spores are being spread in some way other than the mail?

The inability of scientists to answer these questions points up how little experience they have with the illness.

Anthrax is an ancient disease, refined in the 20th century into a weapon of war. But there is little human data on how the infection takes hold in individuals or how an outbreak moves through populations.

There is also enormous uncertainty over who might have the capability to produce such a weapon. While only a few nations are known to have made anthrax in the form found in the letter to Senator Daschle, the technology for producing such finely ground particles is now widely available. While it might take more than a Ph.D. in microbiology to make the weapon, it is not beyond the ability of a terrorist group or even a lone individual trained in the arts of pharmacology.

"This is a classic who, what, when, where and why," said Dr. Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research at the University of Minnesota. He added: "We are going to have to start getting used to this uncertainty in the short term, because it is going to take a while for these cases to be fully investigated."

A Public Health Puzzle

From a public health standpoint, the troubling, unanswered question about the 61-year-old New York hospital worker, who has been identified as Kathy T. Nguyen, a Vietnamese immigrant, is whether she is what epidemiologists term an outlier — someone who fails to fit the pattern of an outbreak and therefore represents a harbinger that an epidemic is about to grow more dire.

"The obvious thing here is, it is not clear what her source of exposure would be," said Stephen S. Morse, director of the Center for Public Health Preparedness at Columbia University. "She doesn't fit the normal pattern. She's not a mail handler who was working in a facility where there was a lot of mail going to the media, or government offices, or an obvious target."

Before the outlier question can be settled, some old-fashioned disease detective work must be done.  Authorities must track Ms. Nguyen's habits and whereabouts in the weeks before she became ill — all without her help, since she is too ill to talk. They must test for anthrax in her home and workplace; the stockroom where she worked shared space with the hospital mailroom until recently. Some tests have already been conducted, and the few results that have come back so far have been negative.

"We are making no assumptions as to where this exposure occurred," Dr. Koplan said today, "and we have to both investigate and rule out where she worked, did she have other jobs and where else she might have been exposed, what were her patterns of activity."

He added, "And we don't have answers on all of those yet."

In any public health investigation, authorities zero in on the "mode of transmission" — the way a disease is spread. In the case of anthrax, the mode of transmission so far has been the mail. But anthrax germs are being spread intentionally, not naturally, so officials must be open to the possibility that the mode of transmission may have changed.

One important clue is that the woman has developed inhalation anthrax, which occurs when microscopic spores lodge in a person's lungs. Although experts have theorized in recent weeks that anthrax might be spread when letters cross- contaminate one another in postal facilities, many are skeptical that the woman got infected this way.

One comforting sign, experts say, is that so far, no one else has gotten sick. If someone intentionally released anthrax spores in the hospital or some other place the woman visited, "you would probably see an epicenter of several people being infected," said Dr. Irwin Gelman, an infectious disease expert at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan.

So it may take additional anthrax cases — if any emerge — before authorities can determine whether the woman's infection is the result of exposure in the mail, or whether anthrax is being disseminated in a different way. That will help experts determine who else may be at risk.

"If you're investigating a serial killer, it's very hard to know the pattern of that serial killer after one or two murders," said Dr. Osterholm, of the University of Minnesota. "By the seventh or eighth murder, things start to appear in a particular way. As more cases come in, we will learn a lot about the epidemiologic pattern, and the risk factors for developing this infection."

Today, New York City public health officials urged doctors and hospitals to be alert for additional cases of inhalation anthrax. "You need to be watchful for those first cases that don't fit any established pattern," said Dr. Morse, of Columbia, "because they may tell you that there is another pattern that you need to be looking for."

The Contamination Chain

In theory, a single letter containing anthrax, like the letter sent to Mr. Daschle, could contaminate other letters moving with it through the postal system with enough anthrax to infect a person.

To some, that situation seems unlikely.

"The whole secondary spread is very dubious to me," said Dr. Philip S. Brachman, the researcher who did the pioneering studies of anthrax in the United States in the 1950's following an outbreak at a textile mill in New Hampshire. "If you did have an envelope that had spores in it and some of the powder gets out and lands on something else, I'm not sure it becomes aerosolizable. I can envisage large particles coming out, but for them to re-aerosolize in a manner in which they would be inhalable, that would take a tremendous amount of energy. I don't know if that's aerodynamically possible."

But other experts said that, given recent events, spreading of the spores in this way could not be ruled out.

The issue arises because anthrax spores, if properly grown and processed, are incredibly potent. Federal officials have disclosed that the powder in the Daschle letter was an advanced formulation, with a compound added to keep the anthrax spores from sticking together, enabling them to float more freely, spread more widely and potentially infect more people.

One gram, or one twenty-eighth of an ounce, of such high-grade anthrax can hold up to 100 billion spores, said Ken Alibek, a former top official of the Soviet germ weapons program who is now president of Advanced Biosystems Inc., a consulting company in Manassas, Va. Estimated conservatively, at 10,000 spores to a lethal dose, one gram in theory could cause about 10 million deaths.

Representative Mike Pence, an Indiana Republican whose office last week was found to be contaminated with a few spores, said in an interview that he had been told by federal investigators that the letter sent to Mr. Daschle contained two grams of anthrax — enough to make about 20 million lethal doses, assuming it could be distributed with perfect efficiency.

But this letter caused only minor problems in the Senate office building itself, because most of the spores probably stayed put and only a fraction rose into the air, weapons experts said. Moreover, only a tiny fraction of the floating particles were inhaled.

The anthrax in the Daschle letter was found to have contaminated 28 people. None of these people became sick. But federal investigators said the Senate letter may have leaked anthrax in transit from New Jersey and infected postal workers there and in Washington. And perhaps it could even have tainted other letters, spreading the germs to other buildings in Washington.

"If you shake it somehow," Dr. Alibek said, a contaminated letter might let loose a lethal puff of anthrax spores.  "It's possible to re- aerosolize enough to become infected," he said. "The probability is low but you cannot rule it out."

Another possibility, he said, was that a poisoned letter could hold so little anthrax that the spores would be essentially imperceptible. "It might be that you wouldn't see the actual product," Dr. Alibek said.

"It could be a very tiny amount," he said, but still harbor enough spores so more than one person would come down with the disease.

Dr. Alibek said that when he directed the production of mass quantities of anthrax in the Soviet Union, scientists were amazed at its ability to spread. The anthrax he perfected at the Stepnogorsk plant in remote Kazakhstan, he noted, was found in many unlikely places. 

"We found them in zones of our production building where they were never supposed to be," he said. "But you can't control wind direction, and you really can't control their movement."

The scientists did not fall ill, however, "because we had a very powerful vaccine, and we were all vaccinated, repeatedly."

Other Means to an End

As investigators and scientists study the question of whether tainted letters alone could have caused all of the cases of infection and contamination, they find themselves confronting an array of other possibilities, some more likely than others.

The most improbable would be a large-scale outdoor release of spores by an airplane or sprayer driven around by car or van, experts agreed. Such attacks are hard to pull off successfully, especially in urban areas, because fickle winds, heat effects and other meteorological variables would tend to disperse spores harmlessly. Also, they said, such an attack might produce more cases of anthrax than have been reported so far.

"You'd think there would be more cases by now, because people are so vigilant," said Jonathan B. Tucker, a germ-weapons expert in the Washington office of the Monterey Institute of International Studies. "It seems unlikely that this is the first of a wave of new cases."

But strikes in indoor spaces, like buildings and subways, would be easier, experts said, though they agreed that medical evidence for such attacks is so far lacking.

Moreover, hitting a building through its ventilation system can be risky and highly unreliable, said Ashok Gadgil, a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., who studies germ terrorism.

For instance, he said, if the two grams of anthrax powder sent to the Senate in a letter had instead been scattered at the building's air intake, the results could have ranged from catastrophic to nothing at all. The outcome, he said, would depend on the quality of the air system.

"If the filters were good — and that's a big if — two grams of the stuff going into the air intake wouldn't have killed anybody," Dr. Gadgil said. "But if they were lousy, it would have killed everyone." (This, of course, assumes that the attack went undetected and that no one received treatment.)

Dr. Alibek, the former Soviet germ official, said that medical evidence of a large strike, if it occurred, would emerge within days as patients began streaming into hospital emergency rooms.

"If not, if we see nothing in two or three days, it means the attack was maybe small" and most probably the result of mail contamination, he said, referring to the most recent case of the New York hospital worker.

Steven M. Block, a germ-terror expert at Stanford University, noted that science rests on the philosophical view known as Occam's razor, which holds that the simplest explanation of an event is usually the best and most likely to be correct.

By that logic, he said, it is only after the mails have been ruled out in the New York case as a source of contamination that "we'll have to look for a second source."

A Question of Numbers

Much of what is known about anthrax has been drawn from studies of monkeys by the United States and other nations that developed germ weapons. There has been little research on the effect of the disease on people since it is unethical to perform human experiments with a germ that is fatal if left untreated.

Dr. Brachman, the scientist who closely studied the pattern of anthrax infections among millworkers in New Hampshire and elsewhere, is one of the few researchers to have ever looked closely at inhalation anthrax. He said in an interview that the recent outbreak offered important insights on both the course of the disease and its treatment.

The victims of inhalation anthrax, he said, appear to be faring far better than similar patients a half-century ago. Modern intensive-care units, with respirators, intravenous antibiotics and fluids, have allowed several people to survive the sort of massive infections that killed millworkers. 

One of the key uncertainties that remains about anthrax is the dose of spores necessary to cause the disease. At the mills he studied in the 1950's, Dr. Brachman found that workers were exposed to approximately 500 spores each eight-hour day. It is not clear how many of these reached the lungs, or how few spores could cause inhalation anthrax.

The monkey studies suggest concentrations of 8,000 to 10,000 spores will kill half of those exposed. Experts note that this finding means some of the animals were susceptible to far smaller concentrations of spores.

Dr. Matthew Meselson, a Harvard University biologist who has studied biological warfare, said some monkey experiments suggested that a single spore would be enough to infect and kill particularly vulnerable animals. 

This may be relevant to people. For every case of inhalation anthrax, many more people breathe spores and fight off the infection, Dr. Meselson said. But the spores can remain suspended in the air for a considerable time, and a susceptible person distant from any known source of anthrax could inhale a single spore and become sick, he said. 

Dr. Bradley Perkins, a leading anthrax expert at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who directed the investigation of the Florida cases, told reporters today that "we can be pretty assured that if you have 1 or 2 or 5 or 10 spores, that they pose very little danger."

Dr. Meselson questioned this assumption and said it might be leading authorities to assume that there may be a second letter somewhere causing further infections or that postal workers would not be harmed by tiny releases from sealed letters.

"There is no theoretical justification for assuming there is any threshold at all," Dr. Meselson said. "A single organism has a chance of initiating infection, although in monkeys that chance seems to be very small," he said.

The issue could be significant in understanding the recent progression of cases. If relatively small amounts of anthrax can be lethal for some people, it might explain how someone with a limited exposure — a recipient of a letter coated with a few hundred spores, for example — might become ill. 

Dr. Martin Hugh-Jones, a microbiologist at Louisiana State University, said epidemiologists would learn much from studying the current round of cases, particularly those that proved fatal. In a 1979 accident at Sverdlovsk in the Soviet Union, when powdered anthrax was released from a weapons factory, researchers found that a disproportionate number of the 68 reported victims were older men.

Dr. Hugh-Jones said this suggested a link between susceptibility to inhalation anthrax and a compromised immune system. 

Similarly, he said, the victims of the biological attack on the United States were all older, over 45. "Did they have bronchitis, a cold?" he asked. "Is the lethal dose closer to 3,000 spores for people over 60 or someone who has been smoking all their lives?"

Search for an Origin

Bush administration bioterrorism experts remain befuddled by the origin of the anthrax. 

So far, all the anthrax samples discovered have characteristics of the so-called Ames strain, a variety the United States used in its germ weapons program. That suggests the possibility that the anthrax was domestically produced, the experts say. So too, they say, does the presence of silica in the anthrax sent to Mr. Daschle. Silica was the additive American bioweapons developers chose to remove electrostatic charges from anthrax spores to prevent them from sticking together. Other countries used different materials.

But those who favor the theory that the anthrax has a foreign source say that both the Ames strain and silica along with other hallmarks of the American program have become well known to foreign scientists.

While some experts initially contended that only three countries — the United States, the former Soviet Union and Iraq — were known to have made the high-grade anthrax powder that floats easily in the air, many others disagreed.

They say that the techniques used in those programs are now sufficiently common that a well-trained scientist in a private laboratory could have produced similar results, at home or abroad.

Reluctantly, White House officials have come around to that view.

Experts also agree that the list of countries that could have produced the high-quality anthrax is long and growing. A National Intelligence Council report issued last January concluded that more than a dozen states either have or are actively pursuing germ weapons capabilities.

The report identified only Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea and Syria, along with Russia. But the Monterey Institute of International Studies has complied a list of 13 countries, including Algeria, China, Egypt, Pakistan, Taiwan and Israel.

While a great deal is known about the former Soviet program — the world's most sophisticated — much less is known about the others. After the Gulf War, United Nations inspectors learned that Iraq had mastered the techniques for making a powdered form of a bacterium closely related to anthrax. But it is unclear whether Iraq ever made powdered anthrax of the sort found in the letter to Senator Daschle.

Even less is known about Iran's program. In the January report, intelligence analysts wrote that Iran had the "technical infrastructure to support a significant BW program." Iran has also hired at least four Russian scientists from institutes associated with the former Soviet Union's program. Iran and the scientists say they are pursuing peaceful research.

Experts are increasingly dismayed by the growing number of possible sources of such anthrax, not just overseas but also in the United States.

Richard H. Ebright, a microbiologist at Rutgers University, said the starter strains, chemical additives and drying and milling machines for processing spores into the small sizes needed to penetrate deep into lungs were widely available around the world. 

"A disgruntled professor who didn't get tenure, he could do it," said Dr. William C. Patrick 3d, a microbiologist who designed germ weapons for the United States before President Richard M. Nixon renounced them in 1969. "He wouldn't provide the ultimate, like we did. But he'd do all right."

THE LETTER 

Fear Hits Newsroom in a Cloud of Powder

By JUDITH MILLER

It looked like baby powder. A cloud of hospital white, sweet- smelling powder rose from the letter — dusting my face, sweater and hands. The heavier particles dropped to the floor, falling on my pants and shoes. An anthrax hoax, I thought.

My mind had been on something else. At my desk at The New York Times, I was already focused on what I thought was going to be the story of the day: the Bush administration's effort to seize the assets of more people and groups it said supported terrorism. It was after 9:15 a.m. on Friday, and Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill would soon begin discussing the list of 39 additions to his agency's roster of rogue financiers of terror. I was on the phone, talking to Jeff Gerth, my colleague and friend, about the article we were planning to write. As we spoke, I was picking my way through the pile of unopened mail beside my computer.

I had been getting many letters since Sept. 11. Some were complimentary; others were angry about the government's failure to protect Americans from terrorism. But most writers wanted to know how they could protect themselves and their families from bioterrorism, having seen two colleagues and me on television discussing our book, "Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War."

Had I not been distracted, I probably would not have opened the stamped letter in the plain white envelope with no return address and a postmark from St. Petersburg, Fla. My sources and I had been discussing the threat of anthrax attacks ever since the death of a man this month who contracted an inhaled form of the disease at a newspaper office in Boca Raton, Fla. — not far from where one of the hijackers of the Sept. 11 attacks had done his flight training.

But I wasn't thinking. I was rushed, absorbed in my work, and only half paying attention to the mail.

The powder got my full attention. I immediately asked the reporters and editors around me to call security. I didn't want to touch the phone.

They looked alarmed. It's O.K., I told them. It's probably just a hoax.

Just then the phone rang. Instinctively, I pressed the headphone button. It was a source. Had I heard, he asked, about Tom Brokaw's assistant? She had contracted anthrax from powder in a letter she opened in late September.

The envelope, he said, had a Florida postmark.

Calm down, I thought. It's still probably a hoax. But when The Times security officials arrived — promptly — I was relieved to see that they were carrying a plastic garbage bag and wearing gloves. As I moved away from the desk, they gingerly placed the letter and envelope in the bag, and sealed it, along with the glove that had touched them. Perfect, I thought.

As I washed my hands and tried to dust off the powder that clung to my pants and shoes, I thought about what Bill Patrick, my friend and bio-weapons mentor, had told me: anthrax was hard to weaponize. To produce a spore small enough to infect the lungs took great skill. Bill knew that firsthand. He had struggled to manufacture such spores for the United States in the 1950's and 60's as a senior scientist in America's own germ weapons program, which President Richard M. Nixon had unilaterally ended in 1969.

Growing anthrax that would penetrate the skin — cutaneous infection, it was called — was less difficult, though still not easy.

That's why Bill had been very concerned when he heard about the Florida case. Whoever had done this had been able to produce the tiny spore of roughly one to five microns that could enter the lungs.

The other cases, Bill told me, could well have involved a larger spore that was cut with baby powder or another substance to mask the deadly pathogen with a smell that was reassuringly familiar. Anthrax itself had no smell. And it was almost never white.

By now, I was no stranger to this deadly agent. My education had started with Bill Patrick's demonstration of how easily anthrax could be slipped past airport security. Bill had shown me how the fine powder in the small vial he kept on his desk dissolved like magic into the air when the vial was shaken and poured. Since 1998, I had been touring the laboratories and plants that had been part of the Soviet Union's vast germ empire. I had visited the decaying laboratories in once secret cities and interviewed some of the tens of thousands of Soviet scientists who had worked to perfect mankind's most vicious, efficient killers. I was now familiar with the stench of such places — the haunting mix of bleach, dust, animal waste — the smell of death.

The research had terrified me at first. Not even the terrorism I had covered as a Times correspondent in the Middle East in the 1980's had so unnerved me. But I had remained, through it all, detached from the reality of my often awful subjects. To do our work, journalists had to be. We were trained to be the cool, professional observers that our business requires and readers demand.

Yet now I was no longer covering a story. I was the story.

Returning to my desk, I was determined to remain calm. Or at least appear calm. If my exquisitely observant colleagues felt that one of their in-house experts was frightened, they, too, might lose their professional cool. 

Had The Times planned for such an emergency, I would have been isolated from my colleagues and the potentially deadly letter. But like most organizations, we had not conducted drills for a biological or chemical attack. So a senior editor and friend put his arm around me and went with me to the medical department on another floor. When I returned, concerned colleagues and editors also rushed to my side. Someone brought a cup of tea for me. They, too, are now taking Cipro.

Within 20 minutes of the incident, almost a dozen law enforcement officials from almost as many agencies had arrived in the building, each with its own idea of what to do. While the newsroom floor was evacuated, photographs were made and tests conducted at my desk by police officers, many of them in tan head-to-toe bio- suits with gas masks. I stayed with them to show them where the powder had fallen and where I went after I had opened the letter. I shall never forget the sight of these moon men moving through our normally bustling, now empty newsroom, silent save for the ringing of unanswered phones.

They began questioning me almost immediately. Whom did I know in Florida?

Had I been there recently? Did I usually open my own mail? Was there a reason for someone to want to send me such a letter? Could I describe the powder; where and how had it fallen? I knew they were checking to verify the particle size. The joint terrorism task force officers, dressed in civilian clothes, were polite, professional and clearly concerned. So was Don Weiss, the doctor who headed a surveillance unit of New York City's Department of Health Communicable Disease Program.

Calm, reasoned and well informed, he answered questions from reporters and editors, many of whom had by then drifted back into the newsroom. He and his team stayed with us most of the day, taking swab samples from our noses, dispensing Cipro to those who were at risk and answering the questions all of us had about the situation in New York.

Several times, he was called away to the phone.

At 6 p.m., I started writing my part of the Treasury Department article for the Saturday paper. 

By Saturday evening, it was still unclear whether the powder contained anthrax. Two preliminary tests had come back negative and a third definitive test seemed to suggest that the powder was benign.

But I was sure of one thing: similar letters had been sent to a nationally distributed supermarket tabloid published in Florida and to NBC, and now one had been sent to The New York Times. Maybe there was anthrax in my letter, or maybe there wasn't.

It almost didn't matter. What did matter was that this was a relatively inexpensive way to spread maximum terror without having to solve the technical challenges of spreading the disease widely. Whoever did this had spread panic with only a few anthrax spores, or perhaps only baby powder, and the price of a few stamps.

November 1, 2001

WASHINGTON, Oct. 31 - The Bush administration has rejected a proposal by France to win Security Council condemnation of the anthrax attacks in the United States, senior administration and European officials said today.

The administration told the French government that a United Nations condemnation would be appropriate only if there was clear proof that the origin of the anthrax or the plot behind the outbreak was foreign, a senior administration official who opposed the move said.

"Let's assume this was the work of a bunch of right-wing nuts or a Unabomber kind of thing," the official said. "That would make it a domestic criminal matter. The Security Council just has no legitimate role in this."

The rejection came after a debate inside the State Department, with officials disagreeing on whether the anthrax attacks violate the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, administration officials said.

"The French told us this was a clear violation of the convention, but I don't know how it would be if it's a domestic nut case," said the official opposing the initiative.

But another senior administration official said, "I'm not going to deny that there were two schools of thought on this."

The Biological Weapons Convention, which 143 nations, including the United States, have ratified, prohibits the development, production and possession of biological weapons. But when that treaty was negotiated, it had no provision for verification, a major drawback since most of the nations suspected of making biological weapons have signed the accord.

The Bush administration has rejected a draft agreement supported by its European allies and a host of other countries that would have created new measures to monitor the ban. The administration argued that the agreement would have granted foreign inspectors too much access to American installations and companies, and that a nation determined to cheat would find a way to do so.

Much to the dismay of America's allies, the United States is now trying to introduce alternate ways of implementing the convention.

European officials called the administration's rejection of the French proposal condemning the anthrax outbreak shortsighted and a missed opportunity.

"This was the first time that a biological agent was used against a civilian population, and we felt that it was important at the very least that the international community say something about it," said one senior European official. "The goal was to reaffirm the value of the convention and assure solidarity. But the answer clearly was `No.' "

The resolution would have noted that the use of biological weapons under the Biological Weapons Convention was prohibited, and that the United States had the unilateral right of military  self-defense against a biological weapons attack under the United Nations charter.

Experts have said that the United States, the former Soviet Union and Iraq are the only countries known to have made the dangerous, high- grade anthrax powder that was found in the office of the Senate majority leader, Tom Daschle. But the techniques used in those programs are believed to be common enough that a well-trained scientist in a well- equipped private laboratory could have produced similar results.

THE OUTBREAKS
Clusters of Illness Suggest That Most Infections Came From Two Mailings

By NICHOLAS WADE

The known cases of anthrax fall into a pattern suggesting that most, perhaps all, result from two mailings, one on or around Sept. 18 and the other on Oct. 9, according to data issued yesterday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The centers' compilation, presented in the latest issue of its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, shows two different clusters of anthrax cases, of which the report said there were 16 confirmed and 5 suspected. The centers added a sixth suspected case after the report was released.

The first cluster, with onset of the first case on Sept 22 and onset of the last on Oct. 1, includes seven cases of cutaneous anthrax and two inhalation cases. The second cluster, from Oct. 13 to Oct. 25, has a reverse pattern of disease: eight inhalation cases and four cutaneous cases.

Only three anthrax-tainted letters have been found; officials do not know if there are others. Of the three known letters, two were sent to New York news organizations and were postmarked Sept. 18; the third, postmarked Oct. 9, was sent to Senator Tom Daschle.

The letters postmarked Sept. 18 contained material that was brown and granular, while the Oct. 9 letter to Senator Daschle held a fine white powder that the authorities say contained more finely milled anthrax spores.

The difference might help to explain why the cases in the first cluster were mostly cutaneous while those in the second cluster were mostly of the inhalation variety. The smaller the spores, the more likely they will lodge deep in the lungs.

In the first cluster, the first cases of anthrax occurred four days after the New York letters were postmarked. A similar pattern appears in the second cluster, with illnesses developing four days after the Daschle letter was postmarked.

The two known mailings cannot yet be connected with some anthrax cases, including that of Kathy T. Nguyen, a stockroom worker at the Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital who died of inhalation anthrax on Wednesday. A centers official, Dr. Julie Geberding, said today that the agency was reviewing the routes by which mail might have reached Ms. Nguyen or her hospital's mailroom but had found no clues so far to indicate that mail was the source.

Some experts said that no conclusions could yet be drawn from the clusters of cases. But others said they feared that a series of experiments was unfolding along an escalating scale of infection.

Dr. Jerome M. Hauer, former director of New York City's Office of Emergency Management and now with the Science Applications International Corporation, said he was not yet convinced that there were differences between the two attacks and that it was too early to draw any conclusions. The material in the first mailing might have been lumpy because the envelope got wet, he said.

But Dr. Matthew Meselson, a bioterrorism expert at Harvard University, said it was possible that the designers of the attack had made spores, maybe in one or more batches, and were using the public as their laboratory.

"That is the chilling part, because if they have no limit to their evil intent, the first step is to see if you can infect people, the second is to make the spores readily aerosolizable, and the third would be to release a heck of a lot of it somewhere," he said. "This isn't just a duty cycle with no end point, it may be a series of experiments that are escalating."

Dr. Henry Niman, a molecular biologist at NetCog, an online financial newsletter, wrote in an article on Wednesday that the existing anthrax cases fell into two clusters following the Sept. 18 and Oct, 9 mailings.

Dr. Niman said it appeared that the mailings were conducted like experiments that had been modified in the light of experience. After official warnings against letters with no return address, like those of the Sept. 18 mailings, a return address was put on the Daschle letter, Dr. Niman noted.

Dr. Niman said he expected that in another attack a different location would be used if the attack were by mail, or a different method of dispersion.

Dr. Meselson, too, expected innovation, saying that "It would be wise for the authorities to be one step ahead, as I assume they are."

THE INVESTIGATION
Anthrax Investigators Are Hoping Bronx Case Leads Them to Source
By N. R. KLEINFIELD

Investigators are intensifying efforts to trace the last encounters and daily routines of a New York hospital worker before she died of anthrax last week, hoping to unravel the mystery of who is behind the attacks that killed her and three other people and sickened a dozen more.

The focus remains on 61-year-old Kathy T. Nguyen, according to senior federal law enforcement officials, because investigators believe her habits or relationships may take them somewhere other than the routes of three anthrax-tainted letters mailed from Trenton, N.J., a trail that baffled investigators seem to feel has grown frustratingly cold.

"We're missing something," a senior government official said. "There's something wrong here."

Of the anthrax cases, Ms. Nguyen's stands alone in defying comprehension. She contracted a lethal dose of inhalation anthrax, but no traces of the bacteria have been found anyplace she is known to have been in her last few weeks or on any item of clothing she might have worn.

Ms. Nguyen died Oct. 31, three days after checki