Anthrax in Mail Was Newly Made, Investigators Say

By DAVID JOHNSTON and WILLIAM J. BROAD

WASHINGTON, June 22 — Scientists have determined that the anthrax powder sent through the mail last fall was fresh, made no more than two years before it was sent, senior government officials said.  The new finding has concerned investigators, who say it indicates that whoever sent the anthrax could make more and strike again.

Establishing the age of the anthrax that killed five people has strengthened the theory that the person behind the mailings has a direct and current connection to a microbiology laboratory and may have used relatively new equipment. "We're still looking for someone who fits the criteria of training, knowledge, education, experience and skill," a government official said.

The new finding casts serious doubt on another theory that had complicated the so far fruitless investigation: that the culprit had stolen or somehow obtained an old laboratory sample of powdered anthrax, from a strain first identified in 1981.

The dating of the anthrax as recent suggests that the person who mailed it prepared the germs on his own and has the ability to make more without relying on old material, possibly taken from the small supplies of anthrax that the government keeps for testing new kinds of defenses against dangerous microbes.

"It's modern," one official said. "It was grown, and therefore it can be grown again and again."

Officials said the F.B.I. determined that the anthrax was fresh by radiocarbon dating, a standard means of estimating the age of biological samples. It measures how much radioactive carbon a living thing has lost since it died or, in the case of anthrax spores, since they went into suspended animation. 

As the case now stands, investigators say they believe that the mailer, if ever caught, will fit the profile offered by F.B.I. behavioral scientists, who theorize that the anthrax killer is a male loner with a scientific bent and a grudge against society, a man who feels comfortable in the Trenton area, where the letters were postmarked.  The investigators are uncertain whether the perpetrator is American or foreign.

The new forensic evidence about the anthrax, usually referred to as the Ames strain, has been closely held among investigators. Laboratory experts and senior investigators will meet this coming week with the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, to discuss the evidence in the case. Among the topics will be the results of months of sophisticated studies conducted on the anthrax contained in the letter sent on Oct. 9, 2001, to Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont.

Even though they are making progress in the science of anthrax, officials acknowledge that they have no prime suspect and have not narrowed the list of possible subjects, which in fact appears to be expanding.  Investigators have a list of about 50 people, which is updated periodically as possible subjects are added or deleted. 

The Leahy letter, which investigators say holds new promise in their search, was the only one of the four letters recovered in the case that contained enough anthrax to permit extensive scientific testing. The sample retrieved from the envelope addressed to Mr. Leahy, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, at his Senate office address contained as much material as a sugar packet and weighed about a gram.

Along with earlier tests that showed the anthrax was an extremely fine powder that hung dangerously in the air, the scientific studies represent the leading edge of an investigation that has expanded far beyond the F.B.I.'s investigative norms. No active criminal case has a higher priority. The inquiry has consumed millions of dollars and vast amounts of manpower.

Under heavy pressure from Congress and the Bush administration to produce results in the country's first case of deadly bioterrorism, Mr. Mueller has presided over what has expanded into the bureau's second-biggest case after the investigation of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The anthrax case offers a glimpse into what may be the future of criminal investigation on a vast scale in an age of biological and other sophisticated forms of terrorism. The F.B.I. has collected huge amounts of personal information on hundreds of thousands of American citizens, combining it with a scientific arm that has moved far ahead of the Bunsen burners, fingerprints and microscopes of conventional forensic sleuthing.

The F.B.I. and the Postal Service, its partner in the case, have turned to experts beyond their own labs. A new high-level containment lab to hold deadly germs and a backup unit have been built at the Army's biodefense research facility at Fort Detrick, Md.

Scientists at labs in Massachusetts, Ohio, Utah and elsewhere have invented new protocols and tests to probe the molecular structure of the anthrax — a task complicated by the possibility that the culprit could be among the microbiologists assisting the F.B.I.

Officials say every investigative technique available to the F.B.I. has been used in the case, including round-the-clock surveillances, eavesdropping and searches conducted under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Agents have conducted 5,000 interviews and served more than 1,700 grand jury subpoenas.

Hundreds of people have been polygraphed. Investigators have compiled minute-by- minute chronologies of the lives of some subjects, examining their whereabouts when the letters were sent. Forty of the F.B.I.'s 56 field offices and many of its 44 overseas legal attachés have been asked to help. The F.B.I. has established 112 separate databases to store information about the case.

The scale of the investigation and the lack of progress in finding a suspect have prompted a number of people to criticize the F.B.I.'s approach to the case. These people, many of them science experts, have prodded the bureau to move more aggressively, unsuccessfully pushing it to narrow its focus.

So far, even the offer of a $2.5 million reward has failed to produce a breakthrough lead — even though in one case last fall, investigators said they were convinced they had their culprit. They passed the word of a pending arrest up the chain of command to President Bush, but their hopes were dashed when their quarry proved innocent. "We just can't seem to catch a break," one government official said.

Besides being one of its largest investigations, the anthrax case has also been one of the F.B.I.'s most frustrating. On Nov. 2, Mr. Mueller publicly acknowledged at a White House news conference that the F.B.I. was stymied and had no idea who was responsible for the attacks.

"We have not said it's domestic, we have not said it is international," Mr. Mueller said at the time. "We have not precluded any possibility."

Mr. Mueller was not the only senior official who has been impatient about the lack of progress. The anthrax case has been one that Mr. Bush has often asked about in morning briefings by Mr. Mueller and Attorney General John Ashcroft.  Mr. Mueller and Mr. Ashcroft have chafed at having little to report to the president, officials say.

Although there were five victims whose manner of death was apparent, hard leads were surprisingly scarce.  "We had four letters that had no evidence on them and one gram of powdered anthrax that would kill you if you mishandled it," one official said.

Agents subpoenaed pharmacy records for the names of people who obtained prescriptions for Cipro, an antibiotic used against anthrax, or anyone who obtained a vaccination, in hopes of finding someone who might have tried to ward off possible infection. The information from those searches was fed into a database containing lists of people who were stopped for traffic violations in the Trenton area or who traveled to or from nearby airports in the days before and after the mailings.

The government's multi-agency terrorism financial review unit, which traced the origins of money spent by the Sept. 11 hijackers, was brought in to examine whether any unusual stock trading or changes in stock prices might suggest whether anyone profited from the anthrax attacks. The stocks of more than 100 companies were inspected.

But at the center of the effort was an investigation of labs that had the ability to make anthrax or had an inventory of the Ames strain. Along with that effort was a second track in which agents compiled lists of the thousands of manufacturers and distributors, primarily in the United States, of specialized equipment needed to make anthrax, like hooded glove boxes or milling and drying machines.

Those results offer insight into the complexity of the case. One group under scrutiny is the biopesticide industry, a group of eight primary companies that has produced a list of about 80 people who remain under investigation.  Another group is the biopharmaceutical industry, a larger sector of more than 100 companies, which has produced a list of about 200 possible subjects. Finally, public and private labs with anthrax inventories or production capability account for another group of about 50 people who are under suspicion.

Early on, genetic testing of the anthrax in the letters yielded a major clue. The germs found in Florida, Washington and New York were all of the variety known as Ames, named after the Iowa city. Scientists in the United States frequently used the Ames strain in their work, raising the prospect that the deadly powder was American in origin.

Zeroing in on its presumed home, federal agents went to Iowa State University but discovered that the germ was isolated from a dead cow, not in Iowa but in Texas. It turned out that an Army scientist at Fort Detrick had obtained the Texas microbe to expand the military's collection of dangerous germs for vaccine testing but had misidentified its origins.

By early this year, military labs and contractors had become a focus of the inquiry. They not only had the germ, investigators reasoned; they also had the knowledge of how to turn Ames into a dry powder that would float as a lethal cloud for easy dissemination — exactly as the anthrax in the tainted letters had done.

One focal point of the F.B.I. inquiry was the Dugway Proving Ground in the Utah desert, an Army facility where scientists made powdered forms of anthrax to test decontamination methods. The Fort Detrick biodefense laboratory also came under scrutiny. But experts at Fort Detrick bristled openly at the idea of complicity. Arthur M. Friedlander, a senior scientist there, said the researchers used wet anthrax and had no idea how to make dry powders.

As part of the inquiry, agents are now questioning scientists about the possibility that lax security at Fort Detrick allowed someone to smuggle out a pilfered sample of the Ames strain and refine it at home or elsewhere.

Luann Battersby, a microbiologist who worked at Fort Detrick from 1990 to 1998, said two F.B.I. agents interviewed her for three hours on June 12 about the smuggling theory. "I said it was extremely easy to do," she recalled. "A quarter-million micro-organisms fit in the period at the end of a sentence. It doesn't take any great strategy to take this stuff out."

Suspicions of foreign ties remain a matter of serious debate in Washington, not only in intelligence circles but in the White House and Congress. Representative Mike Pence, an Indiana Republican whose office was contaminated by traces of anthrax last fall, wrote a letter to Mr. Ashcroft on June 11 saying he was troubled by the F.B.I.'s
"apparent lack of progress" and focus on domestic suspects to the exclusion of foreign sources.

In an interview, Mr. Pence said he learned from an F.B.I. briefing last week that investigators were having trouble scrutinizing possible foreign links because some countries were not cooperating. "They're leaving no stone unturned on the domestic front," he said. "But there are some stones they can't flip overseas."

One senior official said of the overseas inquiry: "It's more problematic and difficult. Some countries aren't going to tell you anything."

Search of Biologist Is Uneventful

By DAVID JOHNSTON

WASHINGTON, June 25 — Federal authorities today searched the home of a biologist who has done work on germ defenses for the government, but they found no evidence linking him to the mailing of deadly anthrax spores, law enforcement officials said today.

Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation examined the apartment of Dr. Steven J. Hatfill near Fort Detrick, Md., after he consented to the search, the officials said. They had said before the search that Dr. Hatfill was not a suspect, and today's results seemed to strengthen that position.

Dr. Hatfill, 48, had been the subject of Web site gossip among scientists, journalists and other professionals about possible domestic suspects in last year's anthrax attacks. After reporters pursued him, he was fired in March from his job at Science Applications International Corporation, a contractor for the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency that helps the government with germ defenses. From 1997 to 1999, he worked at the Army's biodefense laboratory at Fort Detrick.

In an interview, Dr. Hatfill said he had been the victim of a witch hunt.

"I've got a letter from the F.B.I. that says I'm not a suspect and never was," he said. "I just got caught up in the normal screening they were doing, because of the nature of my job."

A senior law enforcement official said Dr. Hatfill was one of several people on a floating list of subjects who, upon close examination, fade from view. Such people, who have also agreed to consensual searches, come and go as new information alters the picture of what is known and believed, the official said.

The bureau's investigation has failed to identify who was responsible for the anthrax-laced letters sent to two senators and the news media last fall. Five people were killed by the anthrax, and 13 others were infected. 
 

Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

Anthrax? The F.B.I. Yawns

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

The F.B.I.'s bumbling before 9/11 is water under the bridge. But the bureau's lackadaisical ineptitude in pursuing the anthrax killer continues to threaten America's national security by permitting him to strike again or, more likely, to flee to Iran or North Korea.

Almost everyone who has encountered the F.B.I. anthrax investigation is aghast at the bureau's lethargy. Some in the biodefense community think they know a likely culprit, whom I'll call Mr. Z. Although the bureau has polygraphed Mr. Z, searched his home twice and interviewed him four times, it has not placed him under surveillance or asked its outside handwriting expert to compare his writing to that on the anthrax letters. 

This is part of a larger pattern. Astonishingly, the F.B.I. allowed the destruction of anthrax stocks at Iowa State University, losing what might have been valuable genetic clues. Then it waited until December to open the intact anthrax envelope it found. The F.B.I. didn't obtain anthrax strains from various labs for comparison until March, and the testing is still not complete. The bureau did not systematically polygraph scientists at two suspect labs, Fort Detrick, Md., and Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, until a month ago.

Perhaps it's a cheap shot for an armchair detective to whine about the caution of dedicated and exceptionally hard-working investigators. Yet months pass and the bureau continues to act like, well, a bureaucracy, plodding along in slow motion. People in the biodefense field first gave Mr. Z's name to the bureau as a suspect in October, and I wrote about him elliptically in a column on May 24.

He denies any wrongdoing, and his friends are heartsick at suspicions directed against a man they regard as a patriot. Some of his polygraphs show evasion, I hear, although that may be because of his temperament. 

If Mr. Z were an Arab national, he would have been imprisoned long ago. But he is a true-blue American with close ties to the U.S. Defense Department, the C.I.A. and the American biodefense program. On the other hand, he was once caught with a girlfriend in a biohazard "hot suite" at Fort Detrick, surrounded only by blushing germs. 

With many experts buzzing about Mr. Z behind his back, it's time for the F.B.I. to make a move: either it should go after him more aggressively, sifting thoroughly through his past and picking up loose threads, or it should seek to exculpate him and remove this cloud of suspicion.

Whoever sent the anthrax probably had no intention of killing people; the letters warned recipients to take antibiotics. My guess is that the goal was to help America by raising preparedness against biological attacks in the future.

So it seems fair to ask the F.B.I. a few questions:

Do you know how many identities and passports Mr. Z has and are you monitoring his international travel? I have found at least one alias for him, and he has continued to travel abroad on government assignments, even to Central Asia.

Why was his top security clearance suspended in August, less than a month before the anthrax attacks began? This move left him infuriated. Are the C.I.A. and military intelligence agencies cooperating fully with the investigation?

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

Have you examined whether Mr. Z has connections to the biggest anthrax outbreak among humans ever recorded, the one that sickened more than 10,000 black farmers in Zimbabwe in 1978-80? There is evidence that the anthrax was released by the white Rhodesian Army fighting against black guerrillas, and Mr. Z has claimed that he participated in the white army's much-feared Selous Scouts. Could rogue elements of the American military have backed the Rhodesian Army in anthrax and cholera attacks against blacks? Mr. Z's résumé also claims involvement in the former South African Defense Force; all else aside, who knew that the U.S. Defense Department would pick an American who had served in the armed forces of two white-racist regimes to work in the American biodefense program with some of the world's deadliest germs? 

What now? When do you shift into high gear? 

Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

The Anthrax Files

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

When someone expert in bio-warfare mailed anthrax last fall, it may not have been the first time he had struck. 

So while the F.B.I. has been unbelievably lethargic in its investigation so far, any year now it will re-examine the package that arrived on April 24, 1997, at the B'nai B'rith headquarters in Washington D.C. The package contained a petri dish mislabeled "anthracks."

The dish did not contain anthrax. But a Navy lab determined that it was bacillus cereus, a very close, non-toxic cousin of anthrax used by the U.S. Defense Department.

Anybody able to obtain bacillus cereus knew how to spell "anthrax." An echo of that deliberate misspelling came last fall when the anthrax letters suggested taking "penacilin."

The choice of B'nai B'rith probably was meant to suggest Arab terrorists, because the building had once been the target of an assault by Muslim gunmen. In the same way, F.B.I. profilers are convinced that the real anthrax attacks last year were conducted by an American scientist trying to pin the blame on Arabs. 

In a column on July 2 I wrote about "Mr. Z," an American bio-defense insider who intrigues investigators and whose career has been spent in the shadowy world of counterterror and intelligence. He denies any involvement in the anthrax attacks.

On the date that the perpetrator chose for the B'nai B'rith attack, a terrorism seminar was under way in the Washington area and Mr. Z seemed peeved that neither he nor any other bio-defense expert had been included as a speaker. The next day, Mr. Z sent a letter to the organizer saying that he was "rather concerned" at the omission and added: "As was evidenced in downtown Washington D.C. a few hours later, this topic is vital to the security of the United States. I am tremendously interested in becoming more involved in this area. . . ."

Over the next couple of years, Mr. Z used the B'nai B'rith attack to underscore the importance of his field and his own status within it. "Remember B'nai B'rith," he noted at one point. In examples he gave of how anthrax attacks might happen, he had a penchant for dropping Arab names.

The F.B.I. must be on top of the B'nai B'rith episode, right? Well, it was told about it months ago. But B'nai B'rith says it hasn't been asked about the incident by the F.B.I.

The authorities seem equally oblivious to another round of intriguing anthrax hoaxes in February 1999. As with last fall's anthrax letters, a handful of envelopes with almost identical messages were sent to a combination of media and government targets including The Washington Post, NBC's Atlanta office, a post office in Columbus, Ga. (next to Fort Benning, an Army base), and the Old Executive Office Building in Washington (where Mr. Z had given a briefing three months earlier). 

I found a local policeman in Columbus willing to dig out his file on that 1999 anthrax hoax. There are several similarities with last fall's mailing. For example, one page of the 1999 letter says, in big, bold capitals: "WARNING: THIS BUILDING AND EVERYTHING IN IT HAS BEEN EXPOSED TO ANTHRAX  CALL 911 NOW AND SECURE THE BUILDING. OTHERWISE THE GERM WILL SPREAD."

Last fall's letters are also in bold capitals and use similar language patterns.

In contrast to the 1997 package with fake anthrax gelatin, the 1999 letters each contained a teaspoon of fake anthrax powder (roughly the same amount as of real anthrax in 2001). That's interesting because as of 1997, U.S. bio-defense scientists were working basically only with wet anthrax, while by 1999 some had experimented with making powders.

For example, Mr. Z apparently learned about powders during those two years. His 1999 résumé adds something missing from the 1997 version: "working knowledge of wet and dry BW [biological warfare] agents, large-scale production of bacterial, rickettsial and viral BW pathogens and toxins."

Two outside consultants used by the F.B.I. to examine documents in the anthrax case, Don Foster and Mark Smith, both say they have not been shown the 1997 or 1999 hoax letters. The 1999 envelopes carried stamps, which may have been licked.

It would be fascinating to know whose DNA that is. Perhaps when the F.B.I. is finished defending itself from charges of lethargy, it will check. 

Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

July 19 ,2002

It's bad enough that we can't find Iraqi anthrax hidden in the desert. But it turns out that we also misplaced anthrax and Ebola kept in a lab outside Washington D.C.

Internal Army documents about the U.S. biodefense program describe missing Ebola and other pathogens, vicious feuds, lax security, cover-ups and a "cowboy culture" beyond anyone's scrutiny. Moreover, germ warriors in the C.I.A. and the Defense Department decided - without bothering to consult the White House - to produce anthrax secretly and tinker with it in ways that arguably put the U.S. in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention.

It's time for Congress or an outside commission to investigate our nation's biodefense program and establish oversight.

"Shenanigans have been going on," declares one internal Army memo about the labs at ground zero of the biodefense world: Usamriid, the acronym for the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, based at Fort Detrick, Md.

The 400 pages of documents, which I've obtained and which were described by The Hartford Courant earlier this year, quote a newly arrived officer named Michael Langford as saying that he found "little or no organization," "little or no accountability," "a very lax and unorganized system" and signs of covert work and cover-ups.

Mr. Langford requested an inventory of pathogens acquired in 1991. The resulting memo shows that 62 samples had vanished, including Ebola, hantavirus, anthrax, S.I.V. (the monkey version of the virus that causes AIDS), and several described only as "unknown."

Usamriid says that it rechecked this year and was able to account for virtually all of the missing specimens except one set that would have been irradiated to render it harmless. But a decade's delay in bothering to look for missing Ebola seems a bit much, and conversations with scientists who have worked at Usamriid do not inspire confidence (although, in fairness, many who talk publicly have lawsuits pending against the lab).

"When I was laid off, I walked out for three days in a row with boxes, and no one looked inside them," recalled Richard Crosland, who worked at Usamriid from 1986 to 1997. "I was there for 11 years, and never once did anyone ask, `Where is the substance you ordered?'

"I could have walked out with it when I left, and no one would have known. I didn't, but I could have. 7-Eleven had better inventory control. And I was working with botulinum, which is one of the deadliest substances on earth.

"If you couldn't find a microscope, you were in real trouble. But if you misplaced five micrograms of botulinum that could kill thousands of people, nobody would notice."

In truth, many microbiology labs are pretty chaotic, and ultimately labs have to pick reliable people and then trust them. But that's what piqued my interest in Usamriid in the first place - my research about a man I've called "Mr. Z," who has been interviewed four times by the F.B.I. and whose home has been searched twice in connection with the anthrax investigation. Usamriid hired Mr. Z in 1997 to work with Ebola and Marburg viruses, although he had spent years in the armed forces of Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa.

Most researchers at Usamriid are dedicated patriots who could earn more in the private sector. When Mr. Z left Usamriid in 1999, he was making $58,000 a year - and jumped to a $150,000-a-year job with a private contractor. Many bio-defense scientists risk their lives working with deadly germs to improve vaccines for American troops, and they deserve our gratitude.

Still, the Army documents indisputably point out serious problems. They recount incidents in 1992 when someone appeared to be working secretly with anthrax at night and on weekends and then trying to cover it up. Memos describe how someone tried to roll back a numerical counter on an electron microscope to hide his work with anthrax.

As recently as April of this year, anthrax spores were found in a hallway and administrative area of Usamriid - shortly after Senator Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat, visited the complex. Anthrax spores seem to have it in for Democratic senators.

Apartment Searched Anew in F.B.I.'s Anthrax Inquiry

By DAVID JOHNSTON

WASHINGTON, Aug. 1 — Federal investigators seeking evidence related to last year's deadly anthrax attacks searched the apartment of a former Army scientist today for a second time, government officials said.

Armed with a search warrant, F.B.I. agents wearing protective gloves went through the apartment of the scientist, Steven J. Hatfill, and trash bins outside his multiunit building in Fort Detrick, Md.

Mr. Hatfill was not arrested and spoke briefly with investigators, the officials said. He is among a group of people whose backgrounds in biochemistry have led the F.B.I. to examine their activities.

But he is the only person known to have been subjected to such intensive scrutiny, indicating that investigators remained focused on Mr. Hatfill even as they emphasized in public that he was not a suspect and said that they had no evidence linking him to the mailings of letters containing anthrax.

Investigators first searched Mr. Hatfill's apartment on June 25, with his consent. It is not clear whether he consented to the search of his home today or whether agents had to present the search warrant. He is said to have told investigators that he knows nothing about the anthrax mailings.

One senior official said today's search was a follow-up to the one in June, when investigators were observed removing computer parts and plastic bags of material from the apartment. At that time, agents also searched a storage unit that Mr. Hatfill rented in Florida.

Officials have said they have no prime suspect in the attacks and have not narrowed the list of possible suspects. Investigators have a list of about 50 people, which is updated periodically. Mr. Hatfill's name remains on that list, the officials said.

Mr. Hatfill has not been accused of any wrongdoing, but he has been the subject of speculation by people outside the government, some with scientific training, who have closely followed the anthrax inquiry and have offered theories about who might be responsible for the attacks.

Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, would not comment on the latest search, except to say, "We're making progress in the case, but I can't comment on ongoing aspects of the investigation."

Five people died last fall after exposure to anthrax. They were an employee of a Florida tabloid, two postal workers in the Washington area, a New York City woman and a Connecticut woman. Four contaminated letters were recovered. They had been mailed to news organizations and to the offices of two Democratic United States senators, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the majority leader, and Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee.

Only one of the letters, which was addressed to Mr. Leahy, contained enough anthrax to permit extensive testing. That sample, the size of a sugar packet, has led the F.B.I. to commission a series of sophisticated forensic experiments by outside laboratories to try to determine when, where and how the anthrax was produced.

Mr. Hatfill once worked for a contractor at Fort Detrick, the Army's biowarfare research center. He previously worked for the Army Medical Institute of Infectious Disease, a center of research on defenses against biological warfare, for two years, until September 1999. He did not work with anthrax, although like other employees, he might have had access to anthrax and other hazardous substances.

Investigators have said they believe that the culprit, if he is caught, will fit the F.B.I.'s behavioral profile, which theorizes that the anthrax killer is a male loner with a scientific background and a grudge against society, a man who feels comfortable in the Trenton area, where the letters were postmarked.

Anthrax Inquiry Draws Protest From Scientist's Lawyers

By WILLIAM J. BROAD

This article was reported by William J. Broad, David Johnston and Kate Zernike and written by Mr. Broad.

A lawyer representing Steven J. Hatfill, a germ weapons expert, has protested to the Justice Department that the government is violating his client's rights in its search for the culprit in the anthrax attacks that killed five people last fall.

"We are very angry at the way they have treated this man, who has done nothing but cooperate fully with federal authorities," said Jonathan Shapiro, the criminal lawyer Dr. Hatfill hired to represent him after government inquiries about him intensified last week.

Mr. Shapiro would not describe how this anger had been conveyed to the Justice Department, except to say "we've made it clear."

Government officials say Dr. Hatfill is one of scores of scientists in and out of government who have been "persons of interest" in their investigation of the anthrax attacks. But their interest in him intensified recently. On Aug. 1, agents armed with a search warrant searched Dr. Hatfill's apartment complex in Frederick, Md., as a news helicopter beamed pictures of the hunt worldwide. Their search warrant, federal officials said, represented an escalation over a voluntary search conducted months earlier.

The next day, Dr. Hatfill was suspended with pay from a new job he was taking at Louisiana State University as associate director of the National Center for Biomedical Research and Training, a program financed by the Justice Department that teaches police, firefighters, health professionals and federal agents how to handle germ attacks. Officials said they decided to suspend Dr. Hatfill after investigators' interest in him appeared to intensify. 

Dr. Hatfill had already lost an earlier job at a federal contractor for reasons that are in dispute. In an interview in the spring, he said incessant questioning by reporters led to his dismissal. Company officials say publicly only that he was dismissed in March. Insiders at the company say he was let go because he lost security clearances after failing lie-detector tests last summer on matters unrelated to anthrax.

Senior law enforcement officials have disclosed the F.B.I.'s searches of Dr. Hatfill's home and related sites, even as they carefully avoided declaring him a suspect. 

In interviews, Mr. Shapiro complained bitterly about this technique. He conceded that the government had no obligation to keep Dr. Hatfill's name secret and could not control the activities of journalists. But the result has severely damaged his client, Mr. Shapiro said. "Through innuendo in the public eye they have begun to destroy this man's life, his standing in the scientific community, his ability to make a living," he said. "That is absolutely wrong."

He also accused the government of leaking details from the affidavit submitted with the application for the search warrant, details that he said are supposed to be kept secret. "That is outrageous," he said.

The situation is particularly offensive, Mr. Shapiro added, because Dr. Hatfill has cooperated fully with the anthrax investigation. 

Repeated efforts to reach Dr. Hatfill by telephone this week were unsuccessful.

Many of his colleagues describe Dr. Hatfill, a 48-year-old medical doctor, as a patriot, if at times abrasive, and law enforcement officials say they have found nothing but weak circumstantial evidence to tie him to the anthrax attacks.

In part, officials say, the F.B.I.'s investigative effort is intended to clear Dr. Hatfill of suspicion of the crime definitively. They say they are mindful of embarrassments like the deadly bombing at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, when F.B.I. agents focused on Richard Jewell, a security guard, as their suspect but were later forced to acknowledge that they were after the wrong man.

They are quick to say that repeated searches of Dr. Hatfill's apartment and related locations have yielded no incriminating evidence. Agents have examined his home computer, looked through documents and even brought in bloodhounds to sniff his clothing. Borrowing investigative techniques used in espionage cases, they have compiled a minute-by-minute timeline of Dr. Hatfill's whereabouts on days when the anthrax-tainted letters were mailed.

They say Dr. Hatfill is among dozens of people whose backgrounds in science and bioterror research have attracted close attention, yet no one else in the case has been subjected to such scrutiny, or such wide publicity.

For more than six months, some biowarfare experts in and out of government have spoken quietly of him as fitting their profile of the anthrax attacker: a knowledgeable person worried enough about the nation's vulnerability to germ weapons to send anthrax spores to the news media and Senate as a warning. By this theory, the attacker's motivation was never to kill or hurt but rather to alert the nation to a looming threat.

Dr. Hatfill's emergence comes as the larger F.B.I. investigation into the baffling case seems to be going nowhere and the agency is under heavy pressure to make progress, especially as the anniversary of the mailings draws near.

In the spring interviews, Dr. Hatfill denied any role in the anthrax mailings and expressed contempt for those who raised questions publicly about him as a possible culprit.

Mr. Shapiro, a criminal lawyer in Alexandria, Va., who has represented such high-profile clients as Brian P. Regan, a retired Air Force master sergeant charged with trying to sell American secrets to foreign countries, said in an interview that the government's publicizing the case had seriously hurt his client.

"We're extremely angry at the course of this investigation and the way the United States has seen fit to trash Dr. Hatfill," he said, adding that he and Victor M. Glasberg, Dr. Hatfill's civil lawyer, formally complained about it this week.

For their part, government officials say their interest in Dr. Hatfill has grown for several reasons. He clearly had the skills and access necessary to obtain anthrax spores and turn them into a weapon. He has also long complained publicly that the government was paying too little attention to the bioterror threat. Finally, investigators have uncovered aspects of his past that raise suspicions and have discovered inconsistencies in his accounts of his life.

Mr. Glasberg said yesterday that the focus of the legal work was on the government's investigation, not Dr. Hatfill's résumé. "Our hands are full," he said, "we have not been concerned to address matters going back 25 years. We are focusing on what's happening today."

Dr. Hatfill was born in St. Louis and grew up in Illinois. In 1975, he graduated from Southwestern College, in Winfield, Kan., where he studied biology and took time off to work in Zaire on rural health care. 

After that, his career is the subject of some dispute. Résumés he has produced at various times assert that he served with the Army Special Forces after college, from June 1975 to June 1977, but an Army spokesman says he "was never part of the Special Forces."

He moved to Rhodesia, joining the military there in 1978 and saying he had "combat experience" during the guerrilla war against white rule. In 1979 and 1980, while he was in Rhodesia, thousands of black tribesmen became infected with anthrax. Some analysts call it the first modern case of germ warfare. Dr. Hatfill has never been linked to the outbreaks.

He remained in Rhodesia after blacks won majority rule and the country was renamed Zimbabwe, graduating in 1984 from the Godfred Huggins School of Medicine in Salisbury, now Harare, with the British equivalent of an M.D. degree, his résumé says. One fact about his time in Zimbabwe later caught the eye of investigators: he lived near a neighborhood called Greendale, and a nonexistent "Greendale School" was the return address on the anthrax envelopes sent to Senators Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont last fall.

After leaving Zimbabwe, Dr. Hatfill practiced medicine in South Africa. At times he has listed on his résumé a Ph.D. in molecular cell biology from Rhodes University in South Africa. But Stephen Fourie, the university's registrar said, "Rhodes did not, repeat, did not award a Ph.D. to Hatfill."

As a medical doctor, Dr. Hatfill published more than a dozen scientific papers, many on his African research. One tracked untreated disease in rural Zimbabwe. Others focused on leukemia, H.I.V. and the Ebola virus.

He moved to England in 1994, according to his résumés, working at an Oxford University hospital as a clinical research scientist. At least one of his résumés says he was a member of the Royal Society of Medicine, but a spokeswoman for the society said it had no records of his ever being a member. 

Dr. Hatfill returned to the United States in 1995, when he went to work for the National Institutes of Health. From September 1997 to September 1999, he worked at the Army's biodefense laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md., home of the nation's abandoned program to make germ weapons. 

In this time, he became a protégé of an expert on germ warfare, William C. Patrick III. In the 1950's and 1960's, Mr. Patrick made germ weapons for the American military and, after the program was shut down, became a private consultant. In this period, Dr. Hatfill would say on a résumé, he gained "a working knowledge" of wet and dry biological warfare agents, their chemical additives, spray disseminators and designs for germ weapons. 

In the late 1990's, Dr. Hatfill became known around Washington as an outspoken advocate of bolstering germ defenses. In late 1998, he began working at Science Applications International Corporation, a contractor for the Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency that specializes in developing germ defenses.

In 2000, Dr. Hatfill trained in France to become a United Nations inspector ready to hunt for germ weapons in Iraq, said Ewen Buchanan, a United Nations spokesman. He never went there because the government refused to let inspectors in. 

Dr. Hatfill suffered a major setback at Science Applications last summer, federal officials and former colleagues said, when his application for a high-level federal intelligence clearance was rejected after he failed a lie-detector test. They added that he then lost his regular clearance as well.

Last fall, after the anthrax attacks killed five people and sickened more than a dozen others, Dr. Hatfill found himself among those questioned by federal authorities who administered more lie-detector tests, officials said.

As no clear suspects emerged, private experts began to argue that the culprit was probably a federal insider who meant to warn of terrorist dangers. As evidence of the mailer's benign intent, such analyses noted that the seams on the tainted envelopes were sealed with tape, presumably to keep spores from leaking out. In addition, the letters warned of anthrax and suggested that openers of the envelopes take antibiotics.

A main proponent of the insider view was Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, an expert on biological weapons at the State University of New York at Purchase. Publicly, Dr. Rosenberg never named any suspects. But Dr. Hatfill's name circulated on the scientific grapevine.

In an interview, Dr. Hatfill said he lost his Science Applications job in March after a reporter questioned senior managers about him. A spokesman said the company could say nothing about Dr. Hatfill's career except when he was employed and his job title, staff physician. Company officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Dr. Hatfill was fired because the loss of his clearance hindered his work.

Dr. Hatfill spoke to a reporter for The New York Times in late May and early June, before his name emerged publicly in the anthrax case. By turns, he was conciliatory, angry and acerbic. Protesting his innocence, he bristled at the private experts who had pursued him as a suspect, and belittled F.B.I. agents as having little or no "idea what they're doing."

Still, he claimed that the bureau had exonerated him. "I've got a letter from the F.B.I. that says I'm not a suspect and never was," he said in an interview in May. "I just got caught up in the normal screening they were doing, because of the nature of my job."

In June, he declined to show a reporter the F.B.I. letter. "Why should I?" he snapped. "My reputation is intact. I was caught up in the first round" of the federal investigation. "So what?"

In an interview this week, Dr. Stephen L. Guillot, director of the biomedical research center at L.S.U., said Dr. Hatfill had impressed him as a "technically very competent individual" but not in anthrax. "Steve's expertise is Ebola," Dr. Guillot said.

In recent weeks, some critics have faulted the F.B.I. investigation as well as the insider thesis as too narrow. Such approaches to the anthrax case, they argue, have too quickly ruled out foreign terrorists or hostile states like Iraq.
 

Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

The Anthrax Files

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

It's time for me to come clean on "Mr. Z."

Since May, I've written periodically about a former U.S. Army scientist who, authorities say privately, has become the overwhelming focus of the investigation into the anthrax attacks last fall. I didn't name him.

But over the weekend, Mr. Z named himself: He is Steven J. Hatfill, 48, a prominent germ warfare specialist who formerly worked in the Army labs at Fort Detrick, Md. Dr. Hatfill made a televised statement on Sunday, describing himself as "a loyal American" and attacking the authorities and the media for trying "to smear me and gratuitously make a wasteland of my life."

The first thing to say is that the presumption of innocence has already been maimed since 9/11 for foreign Muslims, and it should not be similarly cheapened with respect to Dr. Hatfill. It must be a genuine assumption that he is an innocent man caught in a nightmare. There is not a shred of traditional physical evidence linking him to the attacks.

Still, Dr. Hatfill is wrong to suggest that the F.B.I. has casually designated him the anthrax "fall guy." The authorities' interest in Dr. Hatfill arises from a range of factors, including his expertise in dry biological warfare agents, his access to Fort Detrick labs where anthrax spores were kept (although he did not work with anthrax there) and the animus to some federal agencies that shows up in his private writings. He has also failed three successive polygraph examinations since January, and canceled plans for another polygraph exam two weeks ago.

So far, the only physical evidence is obscure: smell. Specially trained bloodhounds were given scent packets preserved from the anthrax letters and were introduced to a variety of people and locations. This month, they responded strongly to Dr. Hatfill, to his apartment, to his girlfriend's apartment and even to his former girlfriend's apartment, as well as to restaurants that he had recently entered (he is under constant surveillance). The dogs did not respond to other people, apartments or restaurants.

Putting aside the question of Dr. Hatfill and the anthrax, there are two larger issues.

First is the F.B.I.'s initial slowness in carrying out the anthrax investigation. Why did it take nine months to call in the bloodhounds, or to read Dr. Hatfill's unpublished novel, "Emergence," which has been sitting in the copyright office since 1998 and draws on his experiences in South Africa and Antarctica to recount a biological warfare attack on Congress? 

Second is the need for much greater care within the U.S. biodefense program. Dr. Hatfill's résumé made claims (a Ph.D. degree, work with the U.S. Special Forces, membership in Britain's Royal Society of Medicine) that appear false, but these were never checked.

Moreover, what was a man like Dr. Hatfill who had served in the armed forces of two white racist governments (Rhodesia and South Africa) doing in a U.S. Army lab working with Ebola? With a new wave of funding for smallpox and anthrax research, we must be doubly careful that the spread of pathogens to new labs solves problems rather than creates them.

The White House is putting strong pressure on the F.B.I. to solve the anthrax murders. Top administration officials would love to find an Iraqi connection, but would settle for solving the case. The F.B.I. director, Robert Mueller, is pushing back, saying that nothing would be worse for the bureau than a premature prosecution that would fizzle in court.

To its credit, in the last few months, the bureau has finally picked up its pace. Its experts in Quantico are belatedly examining anthrax hoax letters sent in 1997 and 1999 that bear fascinating resemblance to the real anthrax letters. Investigators are looking at another hoax letter with intriguing parallels to the real one; that hoax was sent to Senator Tom Daschle from London in mid-November, when Dr. Hatfill was visiting a biodefense center in England.

Partly because of the newfound energy, the F.B.I. has lately been enjoying genuine progress in its anthrax investigation. People very close to Dr. Hatfill are now cooperating with the authorities, information has been presented to a grand jury, and there is reason to hope that the bureau may soon be able to end this unseemly limbo by either exculpating Dr. Hatfill or arresting him. 
 

Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

Anthrax Finding Prompts Questions in Princeton About Scientist

By IVER PETERSON

PRINCETON, N.J., Aug. 13 — Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, postal inspectors and police officers fanned out in downtown Princeton today, seeking links between a germ warfare expert and a single curbside mailbox here that was found last week to contain anthrax spores.

According to people whom the agents and officers interviewed, the investigators were looking for a connection between the mailbox and Dr. Steven J. Hatfill of Frederick, Md., a biological warfare expert who over the weekend criticized the F.B.I. for seeming to implicate him in last year's deadly anthrax mailings, which killed five people.

Dr. Hatfill has denied any involvement in the mail attacks.

Residents said agents showed a photograph that they recognized as being Dr. Hatfill from reports last weekend in the news media.

Anthony Federico, chief of the Princeton Borough police, said the F.B.I. agents had been in the borough's neighborhoods since Monday. He said he expected them to complete their rounds, with the help of his officers, before long.

"They're just going around and talking to people," Chief Federico said.

On Monday, Gov. James E. McGreevey said that anthrax spores had been found in a mailbox on the corner of Nassau and Bank Streets, opposite the Princeton University campus. The box's mail went into the Hamilton Township sorting station, now closed, which processed the anthrax-contaminated mail that was sent last fall to Senator Tom Daschle, the NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw and The New York Post.

Since Mr. McGreevey's announcement, state officials have stressed that the tainted box was removed last Thursday and posed no health hazard to the public. But people working in offices near the corner, who have been using the mailbox for months since last fall's anthrax attacks, wondered today why all this was coming to light only now.

"I've been sending things to my mother, my mother-in-law, my business associates," said Ross N. A. Woolley, an architect with Woolley & Morris. "And they're just getting around to testing this mailbox?" 

Mr. Woolley said the Postal Service had "no credibility" with him anymore. "They can write in the paper there's no problem all they want," he said.

Mr. Woolley said a postal inspector had shown him and an office worker, Mark Nye, a picture of Dr. Hatfill, and had asked the two if they had seen the scientist around Princeton. Both said they told the inspector that they had not.

Clifton R. Lacy, commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services, said in an interview today that the chances of mail being contaminated by the spores found in the mailbox were "vanishingly small."

"I think the most important take-home message from this is that since October of 2001, there have been no new cases of anthrax in humans in New Jersey," Dr. Lacy said.

A question left unanswered today was whether the spores found in the mailbox were genetically related to those found at the Hamilton sorting center in October, or whether they were a new strain. Dr. Lacy referred those questions to the United States attorney's office in Newark. The office did not return a phone call.

Dr. Lacy said his department's laboratories received swabs of the interiors of about 600 New Jersey mailboxes in the weeks before last Thursday, when the swab from the Princeton mailbox tested positive for spores. He said he did not know when the swabs were taken, or whether the recent arrival of the test suggested that the mailboxes had only recently been examined.
 

Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

Official Suspects Anthrax Is From Last Fall

By ROBERT HANLEY

New Jersey's health commissioner said yesterday that he suspected the anthrax spores found recently in a street-corner mailbox in downtown Princeton had been there several months, possibly since last fall.

But the commissioner, Dr. Clifton R. Lacy, cautioned that he and other state health experts did not know for certain when, or how, the spores got into the box.

Dr. Lacy said he thought it was unlikely that the spores had reached the box recently because there have been no reports of anthrax illnesses or anthrax-contaminated letters circulating in the mails for months. 

"I think this is probably a remnant from last fall," Dr. Lacy said. But he added that federal investigators and scientists would make the final conclusion on that issue and on the source of the spores. "We'll let our law enforcement colleagues do their investigation," he said after a news conference in Trenton.

During the conference, he disclosed that 76 more samples collected in recent days from 38 mailboxes in New Jersey had all tested negative for anthrax. Those specimens are the last of about 700 specimens gathered in recent months by the Postal Service and the F.B.I. — primarily from mailboxes in New Jersey — and sent to the state health lab for analysis.

The only specimen that tested positive for anthrax came from the mailbox at the corner of Nassau and Bank Streets, opposite the Princeton University campus. The box has been sent to a federal laboratory for testing. 

The 700 samples were collected as part of an federal investigation into the source of four anthrax-contaminated letters sent last fall to Senators Patrick J. Leahy and Tom Daschle, the NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw, and The New York Post.

The federal authorities have said that all four letters passed through a sprawling mail processing and distribution center in Hamilton Township, near Princeton. That center was heavily contaminated with anthrax, and three postal workers there were stricken with the disease. The center has been closed for de-contamination since mid-October.

Mail from all the boxes involved in the current testing was processed at the Hamilton center before it was shut. Princeton-area mail is now processed regularly at a postal center in Edison and sometimes at a center in Eatontown, according to Dan Quinn, a spokesman for the Postal Service.

Specimens from those two centers were gathered Sunday and are being analyzed for possible anthrax contamination from the Princeton mailbox. The results of that testing are expected tomorrow or Thursday. 

"This is being done as a precautionary measure only, just to be on the safe side and make sure everything is clean," Mr. Quinn said.

Dr. Lacy, the health commissioner, said the state lab had been unable to determine whether the spores found in Princeton matched the Ames strain of anthrax that contaminated the four letters that passed through the Hamilton processing center. He said the Princeton specimen had been sent to a federal lab for further analysis.

The F.B.I. yesterday declined to comment on the investigation.
 

Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

Scientist Fired After Warning on U.S. Funds

By DAVID JOHNSTON

WASHINGTON, Sept. 4 — A bioweapons scientist whose apartment has been searched twice in the F.B.I.'s anthrax inquiry was fired from his job at a Louisiana State University biomedical laboratory after the Justice Department warned the school that it could not use him on grants financed by the department, law enforcement officials said today.

L.S.U. officials said they received an e-mail message last month advising the university that it could not use the researcher, Steven J. Hatfill, on Justice Department grants.

The Aug. 1 message from the department's Office of Domestic Preparedness, which issues grants for research on terrorism-related subjects, said the university should "cease and desist from the subject matter expert and course instructor duties of Steven J. Hatfill on all Department of Justice-funded programs."

Mr. Hatfill, whose lawyer has said he has been unfairly singled out by the government in the anthrax investigation, had already been placed on administrative leave by the university after the highly publicized searches last month at his apartment in Frederick, Md. He had been hired as a teacher at the university's National Center for Biomedical Research and Training, which receives
much of its money from the Justice Department.

The university's chancellor, Mark A. Emmert, did not mention the e-mail message on Tuesday in announcing Mr. Hatfill's firing. Mr. Emmert simply said of Mr. Hatfill's dismissal, "I have concluded that it is clearly in the best interest of L.S.U. to terminate this relationship."

A spokesman for the university, Greg Sands, told The Associated Press that the decision to fire Mr. Hatfill had been made before senior school officials learned about the e-mail message.

Today, several senior law enforcement officials expressed embarrassment over the e-mail incident, saying the domestic preparedness office acted improperly because Mr. Hatfill has never been charged with any wrongdoing and has not been identified as a suspect in the anthrax attacks that killed five people last fall.

In a statement on Tuesday, Mr. Hatfill expressed outrage at the Justice Department warning, saying his life had been "utterly destroyed." 
 

Copyright The New York Times Company

Can These Boxes Be Locked Against Terror?

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

As postal authorities scramble to strengthen security of the mail, they face a daunting realization: the process will take years, it will cost at least a billion dollars and until it is finished the nation is probably even more vulnerable than it was last fall, when anthrax-tainted letters killed five people, sickened at least 17 more and caused widespread disruption and fear.

Engineers are rushing to devise steps to deter bioterrorist mailings, or to speed detection of any such attacks. They are reconsidering almost every step in the chain that moves 200 billion pieces of mail a year — from the design of the 350,000 street-corner mailboxes to the way postage stamps are printed and sold. Meanwhile, though, the postal system stands revealed as a potent tool for terrorism.

"We cannot believe that whoever did this is the only one capable or willing to do this," said Thomas G. Day, the Postal Service's vice president for engineering. The attacks last year served as a blueprint, he said. "Clearly anyone who hadn't thought of it now fully understands it."

In fact, despite their toll, some postal authorities view last year's attacks as a close call, not a true disaster. For one thing, the tainted letters were apparently designed to affect only the mail recipients. Their seams were carefully taped and they were precisely addressed. But as they passed through high-speed machinery, they spewed a trail of spores that infected postal workers and, apparently, people who received other mail moving through the system at the same time.

"If such an incident was repeated on a larger scale, the consequence to the economic health of the entire nation could be truly incalculable," said Patrick R. Donahoe, the Postal Service's senior vice president for operations, in an August letter to the General Accounting Office.

The Postal Service, consulting with several federal agencies, contractors, scientists, and the Royal Mail and other postal agencies overseas, is proceeding with the first stages of a long-term plan to secure its sprawling system, in which almost every collection box is an unguarded portal.

Private corporations and government agencies that are potential targets or that handle floods of mail, among them Pitney Bowes and the Internal Revenue Service, are also conducting their own searches for ways to defuse biological threats without impeding their work. The only mail being routinely irradiated with bacteria-killing electron beams or X-rays is that bound for government agencies in Washington, leaving other offices, like the many addresses for paying tax bills, unsecured.

The mail network — linking every address in America in a chain of boxes, trucks, letter sorters, 750,000 letter carriers and other postal workers — will never be immune to terror, postal officials and experts say. But a number of steps could reduce the threat.

Some efforts focus on reducing the volume of anonymous mail, which now constitutes about 17 percent of the daily flow of some 680 million items. 

For example, the Postal Service plans eventually to change most stamps from uniform bits of sticky paper to personalized, encrypted records that would provide the postal equivalent of caller ID. This would make it harder for someone to send a malicious letter anonymously.

Letters, either the postage itself or a return address label, would be imprinted with a box containing a dense checkered pattern that encodes far more information than a conventional bar code, according to the postal security plan.

Such postage is already being sold over the Internet by companies like Stamps.com to consumers seeking convenience. But the Postal Service and private mail companies are considering a vast expansion of this technology, even offering it door to door.

Letter carriers may eventually wield hand-held printers — somewhat like those used by workers checking in rental cars — that can spit out personalized postage for each outgoing letter.

Any concerns about reduced privacy would most likely be outweighed, officials and experts said, by the knowledge that such mail would be in the fast lane — in the same way that proposed special identification cards for frequent travelers might someday allow them to pass airport checkpoints.

Besides serving as a deterrent, the data-containing postage — read by sorting machinery all along a letter's path — would allow investigators of an attack to more easily trace an envelope back to its point of origin or sender.

The investigation of last fall's attacks remains hampered by a lack of any data trail pointing to a perpetrator. 

In fact, the only recent lead in the 11-month-old investigation is a chance trace of anthrax found on a single mailbox in Princeton, N.J., after swabs were done of more than 600 collection boxes in the central part of the state, where all the tainted letters are thought by investigators to have originated.

The tainted box was removed from a street corner and now sits in a sealed enclosure at the Army's Edgewood center, undergoing more analysis to see if its anthrax strain matches the deadly Ames variant used in the attacks, investigators said. In another effort to reduce the amount of potentially suspicious mail, the Postal Service is also working on certifying as secure the operations of the dominant users of its system: commercial mailing houses sending electric bills, fashion catalogs and the like.

With adequate security and screening of employees, such mail could be deemed "safe," postal officials say, cutting the volume of mail bound for biohazard detection systems or subject to irradiation.

The number of blue mailboxes is likely to be reduced, and those that remain may eventually be monitored by video cameras and have replaceable plastic liners that will prevent any contamination from spreading.

Other efforts focus on detecting the presence of pathogens in the mail.

At two mail-sorting hubs in Virginia, postal engineers and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health say they successfully tested new systems that check the dust that arises from sorting machinery as the mail moves through it. The checks, performed hourly using a process called polymerase chain reaction, would bathe dust samples in enzymes that cause DNA to explosively replicate, allowing quick comparisons to a library of known DNA sequences from anthrax, bubonic plague or other pathogens.

In theory, if DNA from one of the threats were present in the dust, the system would detect it and contaminated mail could be stopped before the first trucks rolled.

Detection systems are important, postal experts say, because even a single contaminated envelope can spread pathogens widely. This potential was vividly demonstrated in recent tests run on postal machinery assembled at the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center, the Army's main research center for testing chemical and biological defenses, in Aberdeen, Md.

Video cameras recorded close-up images as test envelopes containing spores of a harmless anthrax cousin moved through the machinery. "It's amazing how much comes out even when the corners on the envelope are taped shut," Mr. Day said.

The Postal Service is planning to award $200 million in contracts this fall to install the detection systems.

Meanwhile, companies like Lockheed Martin are developing more sophisticated detection systems for vulnerable agencies and businesses. These would set off extra biochemical tests if they detected particularly minute particles with the signature of bacterial spores.

In a separate effort to prevent spores from dispersing, the service also plans to spend an estimated $245 million on large networks of exhaust vents and vacuums that will draw dust out of the sorting machines and trap any particles in filters.

Until last fall's attacks, workers cleaned the machines by blowing compressed air through them, a process that is believed to have spread any anthrax that escaped from tainted letters.

It will take months to install the new equipment at all of the postal system's 282 hangarlike sorting centers.

Two sorting centers that handled the tainted mail, the Brentwood facility that serves Washington and one in Hamilton Township, N.J., where all the tainted letters apparently originated, remain sealed, awaiting cleansing with the same chlorine dioxide gas used to kill any lingering anthrax in the Hart Senate Office Building. That is where the anthrax mailings first came to light after the letter to Senator Tom Daschle, the Democratic majority leader from South Dakota, was opened in a cloud of powder on Oct. 15.

Other post offices and transfer points where trace contamination was seen, from Florida to Connecticut, were cleaned last fall and remain open.

It remains to be seen, however, whether the new security and safety measures will work the way engineers hope they will. Yesterday, for example, the General Accounting Office, the investigating arm of Congress, strongly recommended more testing and analysis before the Postal Service begins installing the vacuum exhaust systems. One concern, the G.A.O. analysts said, is that the vacuums could disrupt the separate effort to sample air and test for biological hazards. Another is the cost of running them and providing enormous amounts of electricity.

On Friday, a new federal task force under the White House Office of Homeland Security and drawn from eight agencies will hold the first of several meetings to assess the DNA detection method that postal officials prefer.

Dr. Lawrence D. Kerr, the director of bioterrorism research and development in the Office of Homeland Security, said it would be a mistake to invest heavily in a new system, only to find out that it was still porous.

"The Postal Service has been in an almost yearlong 24-hour, 7-days-a-week process of searching for the ideal system to implement nationwide," he said. "But as we look to this technology, we still need to make sure it passes rigorous scientific review."

The prospect of further delays is frustrating to postal officials and workers alike. Employees from Brentwood and Hamilton, still traumatized by the deaths and illnesses of co-workers, say they are worried that the pace of adopting new protections will be too slow to save them from the side effects of another assault.

Mr. Day, the Postal Service official, said he was confident that the bioterrorism plan would pass muster and that the American public would be willing to invest in improvements that would make the postal system safer for employees and mail recipients.

"We're convinced that the technical fix we have coming forward will reduce the threat," he said. "If you're going to send a biohazard through the mail, we're going to detect it very quickly, get it isolated and contained and, if necessary, get people medicated."

In the end, however, the last line of defense will simply be mail handlers and recipients on the alert for suspicious envelopes or contents, and health workers alert to symptoms of exposure to biological or chemical weapons.

Dr. Clifton R. Lacy, the New Jersey health and senior services commissioner, whose state remains a focal point in the anthrax investigation, said he was confident that from this perspective at least the response to any new assault would be far more effective.

"It's like what happens to the human body when it's exposed to a foreign substance — a virus, the flu, whatever," he said. "With the second exposure, the response is quicker, more coordinated and more decisive."

"Health care providers and the public have undergone quite an education," he said. "We're ready."
 

Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

WASHINGTON, Sept. 13 — Pentagon officials disclosed new details today about equipment found in a laboratory near Kandahar, Afghanistan, that they contend Al Qaeda intended to use to make biological and chemical weapons.

The officials said the equipment — a centrifuge for separating liquids and an oven in which slurried agents could be dried — supported the assessment that Al Qaeda might have acquired what it needed to make "a very limited production of biological and chemical agents," one official said. 

A senior Defense Department official presented photographs of the equipment today at a briefing on efforts by terrorist groups and by Iraq, Iran and other nations to acquire chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, as well as the means to deliver them.  The briefing was a more limited version of a classified presentation that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and senior aides have made to NATO allies and to legislators on Capitol Hill.

A senior Defense Department official said he did not know whether the centrifuge or the dryer had actually been used. Other officials said they believed that they had not been used, and added that no live agents had been found at the laboratory, which was still under construction when it was discovered by British forces in Afghanistan this past spring. Centrifuges and dryers are also used in making ordinary pharmaceuticals.

But, the senior official added, the equipment and documents found at the site left little doubt that Al Qaeda was trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

Pentagon officials said American intelligence officials had not known of the lab's existence before the British forces discovered it on the outskirts of Kandahar last spring. It was the only one of about 60 sites that American officials have investigated that was previously unknown. They said that about 370 samples have been taken from these sites. In only five cases were there any apparent indications of the presence of biological agents, and these were in tiny or trace amounts.

But the discovery of a lab previously unknown to American intelligence officials intensified concerns about Al Qaeda's intentions and the extent to which the United States and its allies can accurately monitor efforts by terrorist groups and what the Bush administration calls rogue states to develop unconventional weapons.

In an interview, another Defense Department official said the equipment and the documents found in the lab suggested that Al Qaeda had intended to make a wide variety of chemical and biological agents to use against people, plants and animals. Intelligence analysts say the lab could have been used eventually to make biological agents that cause anthrax, plague and cholera, as well as a variety of rusts and blights that attack plants, and foot and mouth disease to use against animals with cloven hooves. 

"They were actively hunting with shopping lists for equipment, materials, and expertise, and they were working with foreign scientists familiar with such agents," the official said.

Osama bin Laden and his senior aides made no secret of their desire to buy or develop unconventional weapons.  Testimony in terrorism trials in New York and other cities indicated that Al Qaeda was actively seeking nuclear and other unconventional weapons even in the early 1990's. Mr. bin Laden indicated that he considered the acquisition of such weapons a religious duty.

Discovery of the lab near Kandahar was first disclosed by The New York Times in March. The lab had been abandoned by Al Qaeda before production began, officials said.

"We got them before they got us," one official said.

The Department of Defense refused to make available the photos of the dryer and the centrifuge it said came from the lab, or any of the other photos and slides discussed at today's briefing. In response to a reporter's question, the senior official said the department had arranged the briefing in response to reporters' requests for an unclassified version of the secret briefing on these subjects that Mr. Rumsfeld had been giving.

Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

Seeking Terrorist Plots, F.B.I. Is Tracking Hundreds of Muslims

By PHILIP SHENON and DAVID JOHNSTON

WASHINGTON, Oct. 5 — The Federal Bureau of Investigation is trying to make an open book of the lives of hundreds of mostly young, mostly Muslim men in the United States in the belief that Al Qaeda-trained terrorists remain in this country, awaiting instructions to attack.

Senior law enforcement officials say the surveillance campaign is being carried out by every major F.B.I. office in the country and involves 24-hour monitoring of the suspects' telephone calls, e-mail messages and Internet use, as well as scrutiny of their credit-card charges, their travel and their visits to neighborhood gathering places, including mosques.

The campaign, which has also involved efforts to recruit the suspects' friends and family members as government informers, has raised alarm from civil liberties groups and some Arab-American and Muslim leaders. The men are suspected of ties to Al Qaeda or other groups affiliated with Osama bin Laden's terrorist network.

Law enforcement officials say the surveillance program has provided vital evidence to support a string of arrests and indictments around the country since late summer — in western New York, in Detroit, in Seattle and, on Friday, in Portland, Ore. — of Americans and others accused of conspiring in terrorist cells to assist Al Qaeda.

Still, the F.B.I. has acknowledged that it has no evidence of any imminent terrorist threat posed by the so-called sleeper cells connected to Al Qaeda. Federal law enforcement officials say there is no sign of a terrorist cell operating on American soil that, in its level of commitment and training, resembles anything like the team of suicide hijackers who trained in the United States for several months before carrying out the Sept. 11 attacks.

They concede that the domestic threat posed by Qaeda cells may at times have been overstated, especially after the arrest last May of Jose Padilla, an American also known as Abdullah al-Muhajir. Justice Department officials have backed away from their initial suggestion that they had compelling evidence linking him to a plot to build an explosive radiological device known as a dirty bomb.

Still, law enforcement officials say they are convinced that at least several dozen people now under F.B.I. surveillance in the United States — with different degrees of terrorist training, and with varying degrees of loyalty to Al Qaeda — would take part in an attack if ordered, and that they represent a clear threat.

"If you look at the number of people who went through the Al Qaeda training camps, and there are literally thousands who did, it stands to reason that a certain percentage of them are in this country," said John E. Bell Jr., who retired last summer as the special agent in charge of the F.B.I.'s field office in Detroit. Much of the surveillance campaign is centered in Detroit, since the region is the home to the nation's largest population of people of Arab descent. 

On Friday, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that an investigation based in Portland had resulted in charges against six people, five of them Americans, because they were members of a "suspected terrorist cell within our borders."

The suspects were accused of conspiring to "levy war against the United States" and to contribute services to Al Qaeda. One of the suspects was accused of joining the Army Reserve to get weapons and tactical training for use in what officials said was a "jihad" against the United States. It was the latest in a series of arrests of people around the United States accused of ties to Qaeda cells.

In the New York case, six Americans of Yemeni descent from a suburb of Buffalo were accused last month of traveling to Afghanistan last year to attend a Qaeda camp. 

In Detroit, four men were charged in August with membership in a "sleeper operational combat cell" tied to Al Qaeda that was preparing for attacks in the United States, Turkey and Jordan. In Seattle, James Ujaama, a local Muslim activist, was accused of providing Al Qaeda with training facilities, safe houses and computer services as part of a conspiracy to "murder and maim persons located outside the United States."

Within the Bush administration, there has been a fractious, mostly unpublicized debate over how many sleeper agents of Al Qaeda might be in the United States, and the amount of resources the F.B.I. and other law enforcement agencies should devote to their effort to ferret them out.

American counterterrorism officials have estimated that 10,000 to 20,000 young Muslims from around the world trained in Osama bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, with information gathered from abandoned Qaeda hideouts in Afghanistan and Pakistan and from captured terrorists, the officials have tried to compile the names of everyone who attended the camps. So far, the officials say, they have been able to identify and track down several hundred people around the world who trained at the camps and might be considered a threat.

Some law enforcement officials say that when they have detected Qaeda loyalists in the United States since Sept. 11, they have tended to be hapless malcontents and not disciplined terrorists.

"They are hangers-on and wannabe terrorists for the most part," said one official, adding, in reference to the leader of the Sept. 11 plot, "Mohammed Atta wouldn't have asked most of these guys to take out his trash."

But other senior officials emphasized that they were reluctant to dismiss the threat posed by these suspects, in part because they view terrorist acts like bombings as relatively easy to carry out — even by unskilled groups operating without much money or leadership.

Some Arab-American and Muslim groups have complained that the intense F.B.I. surveillance campaign, which they insist has been evident for months, has unfairly left the perception that all young men of Arab descent or the Muslim faith have some connection to terrorism.

"Young Arab men, in particular, are being treated as suspicious, possibly dangerous," said Hussein Ibish, communications director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. "I think there have been some really egregious instances of abuse."

But he said there was an understanding among Arab-Americans that a handful of young men of Arab descent in the United States might pose a terrorist threat, and that it was in the best interests of the community here to find and stop them. "I would be surprised if there are hundreds of them," he said. "But there could be 10, 20, 30."

In Buffalo, the F.B.I. said tips from local Muslims led to the arrest of the six men last month. Mr. Bell, the former special agent in Detroit, said that Arab and Muslim leaders in the city had "made it very clear that they were not interested in supporting terrorism, and that they were going to be the first to step forward if they learned about it."

The bureau's surveillance campaign has depended heavily on wiretaps obtained under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows electronic surveillance of terrorism suspects at a far lower standard of evidence than in normal criminal cases. 

Law enforcement officials said the bureau had worked closely with the National Security Agency in trying to monitor telephone calls and other communication between suspects in the United States and telephone numbers abroad that are known to be used by Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

The bureau's dependence on the surveillance act in the search for sleeper cells helps explain why the Justice Department has so aggressively defended its request to expand its authority under the law, passed in 1978, which has been the subject of a recent battle involving the secret court in Washington that reviews the bureau's surveillance requests.

"The terrorists don't know it, but we're listening in all the time," said a senior law enforcement official, noting that there had been extensive electronic surveillance of the six men charged near Buffalo, including reviews of e-mail messages between some of the men as they traveled in the Middle East in recent months.

In F.B.I. offices in Detroit, Newark, Los Angeles and other cities with large Arab-American and Muslim populations, officials say, the bureau is struggling to keep up with the mountain of tapes, transcripts and photographs from the surveillance.

Mr. Bell, the former director of the Detroit office, said that after Sept. 11, he doubled the number of agents assigned to work on counterterrorism — he says he is barred from providing an exact figure — and that he moved quickly to hire several Arabic-language translators to deal with the tapes and transcripts.

Prague Discounts an Iraqi Meeting

By JAMES RISEN

PRAGUE, Oct. 20 — The Czech president, Vaclav Havel, has quietly told the White House he has concluded that there is no evidence to confirm earlier reports that Mohamed Atta, the leader in the Sept. 11 attacks, met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague just months before the attacks on New York and Washington, according to Czech officials. 

Mr. Havel discreetly called Washington to tell senior Bush administration officials that an initial report from the Czech domestic intelligence agency that Mr. Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer, Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, in Prague in April 2001 could not be substantiated. 

Czech officials did not say precisely when Mr. Havel told the White House to disregard the reports of the meeting, but extensive interviews with leading Czech figures make clear that he did so quietly some time earlier this year in an effort to avoid publicly embarrassing other prominent officials in his government, who had given credibility to the reports through their public and private statements in the months after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The statements by those officials, including the Czech prime minister, had helped turn the reports of a meeting between an important Al Qaeda operative and an Iraqi spy into an international issue. 

When the reports of a meeting between Mr. Atta and Mr. Ani came to attention in October 2001, they appeared to provide the most direct connection yet uncovered between the Sept. 11 attacks and the government of Saddam Hussein, and they set off a debate in Washington that continues today over whether a possible war with Iraq should be considered an extension of the global war on Al Qaeda and terrorism. 

For months, American intelligence and law enforcement officials have cast doubt on the reports of the Prague meeting, which proved to be based on the statements of a single informant, and last week the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, told Congress that his agency could find no evidence to confirm that the meeting took place. 

The White House has generally been cautious about using the reports of the Prague meeting to help make the case for war with Iraq. Yet the Prague meeting has remained a live issue with other proponents of military action against Iraq, both in and out of the government. 

The disclosure of Mr. Havel's decision to inform the Bush administration that it should ignore the reports of a meeting comes after a year of confused and often contradictory statements from other Czech officials about the incident. 

Interior Minister Stanislav Gross first gave public credence to the reports when he held a news conference in October 2001 to announce that Mr. Atta had come to Prague in April to meet with Mr. Ani, an intelligence officer who was working under diplomatic cover in the Iraqi Embassy.

More significantly, Czech officials say that Milos Zeman, then the Czech Republic's prime minister, privately informed Secretary of State Colin L. Powell about the intelligence reports, while Mr. Zeman was holding meetings in Washington in November, thus placing the credibility of the Czech government even more squarely behind the reports. 

Mr. Zeman's statements, along with an assertion that Mr. Atta and Mr. Ani had met to plot an attack on the offices of Radio Free Europe in Prague, made it difficult for officials there and in Washington to easily brush aside the reports of the meeting. American counterterrorism specialists at the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. subsequently came under intense pressure to thoroughly investigate the matter. 

But Czech officials who have investigated the case now say that Mr. Zeman and Mr. Gross spoke without adequately vetting the information or waiting for the Czech internal security service to substantiate the initial reports. 

Officials say they also spoke without adequately consulting Mr. Havel, who was effectively excluded as others went to the press and the Bush administration. In the Czech political system, the president is the head of state, but the prime minister manages most day-to-day government affairs and is not necessarily from the same party as the president. 

Mr. Havel, the playwright and former dissident who led Czechoslovakia out of Communism in the Velvet Revolution of 1989, moved carefully behind the scenes in the months after the reports of the Prague meeting came to light to try to determine what really happened, officials said. He asked trusted advisers to investigate, and they quietly went through back channels to talk with Czech intelligence officers to get to the bottom of the story. The intelligence officers told them there was no evidence of a meeting.

It was also clear they were irked that Czech political leaders had spoken out despite the caveats that had been placed on the initial report of the meeting. "I'm sure that the report was written carefully, in guarded language," a Czech leader who has reviewed the matter said. 

The intelligence report of the Czech domestic intelligence agency on a possible meeting between Mr. Atta and Mr. Ani had come from a single informant in the local Arab community, and the information was treated skeptically by Czech intelligence experts because it had been provided only after the Sept. 11 attacks, after Mohamed Atta's picture had been broadcast on television and published in newspapers around the world, and even after the Czech press reported that records showed that Mr. Atta had traveled to Prague. 

Officials of the intelligence service were said to be furious that Mr. Zeman had taken the information straight to the top of the American government, before they had a chance to investigate further. 

After Mr. Havel's advisers reported back to him, the president told the Bush administration that reports of an Atta-Ani meeting could not be substantiated. "I think he tried to do it politely because he didn't want to embarrass anyone," a Czech leader familiar with the matter said. 

Mr. Zeman declined to comment about his role in the case. Mr. Gross could not be reached, but in May he told a Czech newspaper that he stood by his initial statements about the meeting. 

Today, other Czech officials say they have no evidence that Mr. Atta was even in the country in April 2001. In fact, American records indicate he was in Virginia Beach, Va., in early April. "The interior minister claims they did meet, but the intelligence people have told me that they didn't, that the meeting didn't happen," a senior official said. 

The Czechs say border police records show that Mr. Atta, an Egyptian who was then living in Hamburg, Germany, did come to Prague in June 2000, after obtaining a visa late in May. Shortly after arriving in Prague on that occasion then, Mr. Atta flew to Newark. Now, some Czech and German officials say that their best explanation of why Mr. Atta came to Prague was to get a cheap airfare to the United States. 

Czech officials also say they have no hard evidence that Mr. Ani was involved in terrorist activities, although the government did order his ouster in late April 2001. Those officials say that while the Iraqi was photographed outside the Radio Free Europe building, there is scant evidence that Radio Free Europe had been chosen as a target. 

Czech officials say the very small Iraqi Embassy here has usually had only one intelligence officer. Iraqi intelligence has used a larger office in Vienna as a regional base for Central Europe, and Prague appears to be little more than a satellite office. 

Over the years, Czech security officials also say they have never seen any other evidence that Iraqi intelligence officers stationed in Prague were involved in terrorist activities. Instead, Czech officials say Iraqi intelligence officers here typically spends their time tracking the small community of Iraqi opposition figures, sometimes pressing them to return home. The Iraqis may also have been involved in illegal arms deals, seeking weapons and spare parts for the Iraqi military in violation of international sanctions.

Plague in Perspective

Every now and then we're really glad not to be living in the 14th century. That was particularly true this week, when a New Mexico man who fell sick in New York City was diagnosed as having bubonic plague. There was a time when the so-called Black Death — a mix of bubonic and pneumonic plague — wiped out a third of Europe's population, some 20 to 30 million people in all, as it spread inexorably from village to village. What a contrast with today, when the plight of the visitor from New Mexico and his wife, who may also be afflicted, scarcely caused a ripple of anxiety.

Plague, a bacterial disease that causes high fever and either inflammation of the lymph nodes (bubonic plague) or a severe lung infection (pneumonic plague), afflicts some 10 to 15 people a year in this country, mostly in rural areas of the Southwest and Far West. If not treated quickly, it is often fatal. But today, unlike the Middle Ages, we have antibiotics to quell the germ, and good
supportive care. 

Bubonic plague, the more common form, does not spread from human to human. Instead, fleas pick up the germ from infected rodents and transmit it by biting humans. The plague spread so widely in the 14th century because hordes of flea-infested rats lived in human homes and workplaces, and many people developed the pneumonic form, which can be spread by sneezing or coughing.

Even though plague currently poses little threat to Americans, it has been cited as a potential bioterror weapon. The Japanese reportedly dropped plague-infected fleas on Chinese cities in World War II, and the Russian and American biological weapons programs developed techniques to deliver plague germs as aerosols that would cause the more lethal pneumonic plague. A disease that has been tamed by modern medicine thus remains on the list of potential horrors.

C.I.A. Hunts Iraq Tie to Soviet Smallpox

By JUDITH MILLER

The C.I.A. is investigating an informant's accusation that Iraq obtained a particularly virulent strain of smallpox from a Russian scientist who worked in a smallpox lab in Moscow during Soviet times, senior American officials and foreign scientists say. 

The officials said several American scientists were told in August that Iraq might have obtained the mysterious strain from Nelja N. Maltseva, a virologist who worked for more than 30 years at the Research Institute for Viral Preparations in Moscow before her death two years ago. 

The information came to the American government from an informant whose identity has not been disclosed. The C.I.A. considered the information reliable enough that President Bush was briefed about its implications. The attempt to verify the information is continuing.

Dr. Maltseva is known to have visited Iraq on several occasions. Intelligence officials are trying to determine whether, as the informant told them, she traveled there as recently as 1990, officials said. The institute where she worked housed what Russia said was its entire national collection of 120 strains of smallpox, and some experts fear that she may have provided the Iraqis with a version that could be resistant to vaccines and could be more easily transmitted as a biological weapon.

The possibility that Iraq possesses this strain is one of several factors that has complicated Mr. Bush's decision, expected this week, about how many Americans should be vaccinated against smallpox, a disease that was officially eradicated in 1980.

The White House is expected to announce that despite the risk of vaccine-induced illness and death, it will authorize vaccinating those most at risk in the event of a smallpox outbreak — 500,000 members of the military who could be assigned to the Middle East for a war with Iraq and 500,000 civilian medical workers.

More broadly, the Russian government's refusal to share smallpox and other lethal germ strains for study by the United States, or to answer questions about the fate of such strains, has reinforced American concerns about whether Russia has abandoned what was once the world's most ambitious covert germ weapons program. 

A year ago in Crawford, Tex., Mr. Bush and Russia's president, Vladimir V. Putin, issued a statement vowing to enhance cooperation against biological terrorism. But after an initial round of visits and a flurry of optimism, American officials said Russia had resisted repeated American requests for information about the Russian smallpox strains and help in the investigation into the
anthrax attacks in the United States in October 2001. 

"There is information we would like the Russians to share as a partner of ours," William Winkenwerder Jr., assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, said in an interview. "Because if there are strains that present a unique problem with respect to vaccines and treatment, it is in the interests of all freedom-loving people to have as much information as possible." 

Cooperation on biological terrorism was not discussed at the meeting last week between Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin in St. Petersburg, American officials said, mainly because administration officials are not certain just how willing Mr. Putin is to enhance cooperation in this delicate area. They wonder if he is not doing more because of the military's hostility to sharing the information.

"The record so far suggests he is either unable or unwilling to push the military on this front," an administration official said. "We think it may be a little of both, but we're not really sure at this point or what to do about it."

Administration officials said the C.I.A. was still trying to determine whether Dr. Maltseva traveled to Iraq in 1990, and whether she shared a sample of what might be a particularly virulent smallpox strain with Iraqi scientists.

World Health Organization records in Geneva and interviews with scientists who worked with her confirmed that Dr. Maltseva visited Iraq at least twice, in 1972 and 1973, as part of the global campaign to eradicate smallpox.

Formerly secret Soviet records also show that in 1971, she was part of a covert mission to Aralsk, a port city in what was then the Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, north of the Aral Sea, to help stop an epidemic of smallpox. The Soviet Union did not report that outbreak to world health officials, as required by regulations.

Last June, experts from the Monterey Institute of International Studies, drawing on those Kazakh records and interviews with survivors, published a report saying the epidemic was a result of open-air tests of a particularly virulent smallpox strain on Vozrozhdeniye Island in the Aral Sea.

The island, known as Renaissance Island in English, is between Kazakhstan and another Central Asian country, Uzbekistan. The United States recently spent $6 million to help both countries, which are now independent, to decontaminate anthrax that the Soviet military buried in pits on the island. 

Alan P. Zelicoff, co-author of the Monterey report and a scientist at Sandia National Laboratories, said the Aralsk outbreak was a watershed because it demonstrated that the smallpox virus was more easily spread than previously thought and that there may be a vaccine-resistant strain.

The organism can indeed be made to travel long distances, city-size perhaps, and there may be a vaccine-resistant strain or one that is more communicable than garden-variety smallpox, he said in an interview.

The Monterey report led American officials to question whether America's smallpox vaccine would be effective against the Aralsk strain or whether new vaccines or drugs might be needed if the strain was used in an attack. American concern increased in recent months after the White House was told that Dr. Maltseva might have shared the Aralsk strain with Iraqi scientists in
1990, administration officials said. 

David Kelly, a former United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq, said there was a "resurgence of interest" in smallpox vaccine in Iraq in 1990, "but we have never known why." 

A spokesman for the Russian Research Institute for Viral Preparations declined to comment on Dr. Maltseva or her work. Her daughter, a physician in Moscow, said she had no recollection of her mother's ever going to Iraq.

Svetlana Sergeyevna Marennikova, Dr. Maltseva's deputy in the Moscow laboratory, said in an interview that Dr. Maltseva had never gone to Iraq as far as she knew.

"She worked, and then when she got sick, she took a sick leave when she was no longer able to work," she said. "I don't know about Iraq. I didn't know about a trip there. I don't think she was there. I would know."

Donald A. Henderson, a senior adviser to the Department of Health and Human Services and a leader of the smallpox eradication campaign, described Dr. Maltseva as an "outgoing, hard-working scientist." He said she had traveled widely for the W.H.O in the eradication campaign.

While the organization's records show that she visited Iran, Iraq and Syria, Dr. Henderson recalled that he had also sent her to Pakistan to follow up on an outbreak there. "She clearly enjoyed the international travel circuit," he said.

Scientists and American officials have speculated that Iraq may have tried to buy the Aralsk strain from Dr. Maltseva, whose institute, like so many other scientific labs in Russia, has fallen on hard times since the Soviet Union's collapse.

Dr. Henderson said he was deeply disappointed that Dr. Maltseva and other Russian scientists with whom he had worked closely had helped cover up outbreaks of infectious diseases that should have been reported to the W.H.O.

The Russian government has never publicly acknowledged that Aralsk outbreak or that it tested smallpox in the open air. At a World Health Organization meeting in Lyon, France, last August, officials said, Russian virologists argued privately, in response to the Monterey report and news accounts, that there was no reason to believe that the Aralsk incident was anything other than a
natural outbreak and that the strain was not particularly virulent — assertions with which some American experts concur. 

American officials familiar with discussions about Aralsk said Russians scientists had confirmed that Dr. Maltseva took tissue samples from Aralsk back to her Moscow lab in 1971. But Russians have insisted that the material was destroyed when Russia quietly moved its smallpox strain collection from the Moscow lab to Vector, where the collection is now stored. 

Many American scientists and officials, even those who doubt that the Aralsk strain is unusually potent, are deeply skeptical that the strain was destroyed. Former Soviet germ warfare scientists have privately told American officials that the military took control of these strains when the collection was moved.

American health and defense officials have tried without success to press Russia for help in securing a sample of the strain from the Aralsk smallpox outbreak.

The American officials have also been unable to obtain information that they believe could help federal investigators with their stalled inquiry into the anthrax attacks of October 2001, in which 5 people died and at least 17 were infected.

After 9/11, Universities Are Destroying Biological Agents

By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO

WASHINGTON, Dec. 16 — As federal officials search for more powerful tools to investigate biological terrorism, universities across the country are destroying collections of laboratory agents crucial for understanding how biological weapons work and tracing their sources.

New federal laws require only that such biological materials be registered, but many universities are pressing researchers to clean out their freezers and destroy materials they are not currently working on.

While there is no official count of how many biological specimens have been destroyed, concern that laboratories have gone overboard prompted the White House to ask institutions, through the American Society of Microbiologists, to reconsider their haste in doing away with specimens that could prove "difficult or impossible to replace," said Rachel Levinson, of the White House Office on Science and Technology Policy.

"Obviously, these materials are valuable as research tools, and in terms of developing countermeasures should these agents be used as weapons, or if there's an unintentional natural outbreak," Dr. Levinson said. "They're valuable research tools, and we would not like to see them destroyed."

Under laws enacted since last year's anthrax mailings, which killed five people, research institutions, clinical and diagnostic laboratories must inventory and register the presence of 61 select agents that could be used to make biological weapons, including ebola, herpes B, smallpox and a variety of toxins. The materials must be kept under lock and key, with access to them restricted to people cleared by government background checks. Scientists must also demonstrate a "bona fide research purpose" for working with a given material.

The problem appears to lie in conflicting messages from Washington and in overly zealous compliance with the new laws on select agents, said Ronald Atlas, president of the American Society of Microbiologists. The prosecution of Tomas Foral, a University of Connecticut scientist arrested after he pocketed an anthrax specimen in cleaning out a laboratory freezer, caused many researchers to think twice, Dr. Atlas recalled.

"Many say Tomas Foral at Connecticut was a clear message from the Justice Department to the scientific community: If you can't justify having it, clear it out," Dr. Atlas said. "When you have these criminal penalties hanging over your head, you ask, `Why should I be the one to bear that legal risk?' "

The most spectacular example of the wholesale destruction of specimens came last year, when Iowa State University at Ames destroyed its entire collection of anthrax specimens. The university acted after an Ames strain was tied to the fatal anthrax letters, and with the criminal investigation in full swing.

John McCarroll, a spokesman for Iowa State, said copie