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FBI draws blank in anthrax probe By Richard Hollingham BBC News Tuesday, 5 August, 2003, 13:07 GMT 14:07 UK Despite a massive FBI investigation, those responsible for the anthrax attacks on the United States in October 2001 still have to be brought to justice. The US TV crime show America's Most Wanted still features the anthrax letters, but the special reward of up to $2.5m for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the perpetrators remains unclaimed. This is surprising because it was a crime that gripped the entire nation. "We had people in Montana bringing powdered hotdog buns to their state public health laboratories because they were afraid that white powder - which the day before had been flour - was now suddenly anthrax," Dr Elin Gursky from the Anser Institute for Homeland Security. She has just completed a study into the attacks and found the authorities could barely cope. "It was not only the cases of illness but the fact that it was our mail system, which is pervasive in our offices and our homes, that was used against us," she told the BBC. Within a few weeks, five people were dead and 17 had been taken seriously ill. Small clue The FBI now believes only four letters were sent - addressed to the New York Post, TV channel NBC, Democrat Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. They were laced with spores of a highly virulent form of the anthrax bacterium - known as the Ames strain. The investigation has been termed Amerithrax, but the FBI refuses to discuss its progress. Detectives are taking a particular interest in an area surrounding the US army biodefence research centre at Fort Detrick near Washington DC. Reports claim divers searching ponds nearby found vials and an airtight container in which the letters could have been sealed. A germ warfare expert and former US army scientist, Steven Hatfill, has been interviewed several times and is followed on a daily basis by a convoy of FBI personnel. He maintains his innocence and has yet to be charged with anything. The former head of the Fort Detrick research programme and now vice-president of the Southern Research Institute, Dr David Franz, urged investigators to keep an open mind. "The individual or individuals who prepared the formulation were experienced, they need not have special degrees and they were good in the laboratory. It could be a laboratory the size of your kitchen not requiring a load of equipment," he says. "This expertise would be found in many countries in the world, including the US and the UK." Unprepared In her report for the Anser Institute, Dr Gursky warned that if there was another, even small, bioterror attack on the United States, "public health resources are barely adequate". "Biological warfare will be a grave concern in the next few decades and deserves strong attention in terms of our preparedness," she says. In the meantime, the person (or people) behind the attacks of autumn 2001 is still at large. Even if they do discover who did it, the question is, could it happen again? And the answer is almost certainly yes. New owner delays anthrax inspection of AMI building By Kathy Bushouse Staff Writer Posted August 7 2003 A scheduled foray this month into the anthrax-contaminated American Media Inc. building has been postponed indefinitely. Representatives for David Rustine, who owns the Boca Raton building, told the Palm Beach County Health Department they were putting off a planned entry to collect samples, destroy documents and do other work inside the building that has been under quarantine since October 2001, said Health Department spokesman Tim O'Connor. A new date for entering the three-story, 67,000-square-foot building on Broken Sound Boulevard wasn't given, O'Connor said. Rustine could not be reached for comment Wednesday. In April, he paid $40,000 for the building once valued at more than $5 million. With the purchase, he assumed all cleanup costs for the building. Rustine has hired a company to work on those cleanup plans, which must pass muster with the county Health Department and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency before any decontamination happens. When crews do go inside the building, it will be the first time anyone has been inside since the fall. That's when investigators from the FBI and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spent 12 days searching the former home of the National Enquirer, Star and other tabloids for clues about who was responsible for an anthrax-laced letter that contaminated the building. Bob Stevens, an AMI tabloid photo editor, died of inhalation anthrax on Oct. 5, 2001. THE NATION Traffic Court Gets Its Man: Figure in Anthrax Inquiry The FBI trailed Steven Hatfill, but D.C. police brought him to justice in a $5 pedestrian case. By Richard B. Schmitt Times Staff Writer August 16, 2003 WASHINGTON — Steven J. Hatfill is guilty, at least according to the District of Columbia traffic bureau. Hatfill, designated a "person of interest" by Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft in the investigation into the October 2001 anthrax attacks, showed up in a Washington traffic court on Friday. The issue: a ticket he received May 17 in connection with an incident involving an FBI agent who had been tailing him and his girlfriend. Hatfill was cited in the trendy Georgetown section of the city after he approached the agent's parked sport-utility vehicle outside a grocery store and tried to take his picture. The agent, who was videotaping Hatfill, pulled away — and ran over Hatfill's foot. Washington police officers responded to the scene and issued Hatfill a $5 ticket, saying he had created a hazard by stepping into traffic outside of a crosswalk. The FBI agent involved wasn't cited. In a rare public appearance, the former Army biomedical researcher contested the ticket on Friday before a Department of Motor Vehicles hearing officer. He brought two lawyers and a dozen reporters, turning the event into one of the better-attended traffic-court proceedings in recent memory. He did not speak during the proceedings, other than to utter a one-word denial in response to a question from the judge. At the hearing, the government stuck to its guns. Under questioning from Nick Bravin, a lawyer for Hatfill, the ticketing officer, Clyde Pringle, acknowledged that it was the first time he had ever issued such a ticket to a pedestrian. But he said the circumstances fully justified it. "The accident wouldn't have happened if Mr. Hatfill had walked on the sidewalk," declared Pringle, a four-year veteran of the city's force. The officer also acknowledged that although the FBI agent involved had captured the incident on videotape, he didn't obtain a copy for the hearing. Bravin argued that the tape was "the best evidence" of what happened, and that without it the city could not possibly establish the "clear and convincing evidence" needed to establish that Hatfill was guilty. Bravin also introduced several photographs, including one showing his client's badly bruised foot. After roughly 15 minutes' deliberation, the hearing examiner, Stephen Lawson, issued his ruling, saying that Hatfill had broken the law the moment he had stepped onto the road. He also ruled that the issue of whether the FBI agent was justified in running over his foot was, essentially, irrelevant. After the hearing, Thomas Connolly, another lawyer for Hatfill, said the traffic incident was the result of an "unrelenting campaign of harassment" of his client by the FBI. He said Hatfill did not intend to appeal the decision, and that he would pay the $5 ticket. Interest in Hatfill as a potential suspect in the anthrax attacks stems from his work in the late 1990s at the nation's primary biodefense lab, the Army Medical Research Institutes of Infectious Diseases, at Ft. Detrick, Md. The facility was a repository of the virulent strain of anthrax used in the attacks that killed five people and sickened others in Florida, Washington and New York. The government has never declared Hatfill a suspect in the case, much less charged him with anything, but federal agents have been following him for about a year. They have searched his apartment three times, taken his blood, and in June, drained a man-made pond in the Frederick, Md., area where they had discovered over the winter what appeared to be part of a plastic glove box similar to the kind scientists use in lab work. Some investigators have theorized that such a box might have been used to slip deadly anthrax spores into four envelopes linked to the outbreak and sent through the mail. The dredging operation has turned up a street sign, bottles and a tire, but no signs of anthrax. Through a spokesman, Hatfill has emphatically denied any involvement in the deadly attacks. FBI letter shows anthrax taint 2 years later Saturday, August 16, 2003 BY KEVIN COUGHLIN Star-Ledger Staff Anthrax sent through New Jersey during the deadly attacks of 2001 has turned up in Arkansas -- in an FBI evidence locker, authorities said yesterday. Agents came upon the sealed letter while cleaning out the locker, and decided to have it tested by Arkansas health officials as a precaution before forwarding it to the FBI in Newark, said Special Agent William Temple in Little Rock. A swab-test of the letter produced a positive finding Monday. The result was confirmed Thursday by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is doing further analysis to determine the strain of anthrax and other details, said Nancy Rosenstein of the CDC. Authorities believe the letter, bearing a Trenton postmark of Oct. 9, 2001, was cross-contaminated by anthrax-laced letters processed there that day. Nobody in Arkansas appears to have been infected, officials said yesterday. The 2001 anthrax attacks killed five people, sickened 17 others -- including seven who lived or worked in New Jersey -- and disrupted postal operations in a nation that was still reeling from the Sept. 11 terror strikes. At least four tainted letters to government and media offices were processed in September and October 2001 in Hamilton Township, near Trenton. The FBI and postal authorities hunted for letters that were processed there around the same time as the anthrax letters. As part of that search, an FBI agent and a postal inspector retrieved a letter in April 2002 from a resident of Beebe, Ark. Details of the letter were relayed to FBI investigators in Newark, Temple said. The letter itself, triple-bagged for safety, then was stored in the locker. "We did not have any reason to think this was an anthrax letter," said Temple, who runs that office. "We were asked to find these random letters. The purpose was not to test for anthrax, but to determine information from these letters that would help in the investigation -- the senders of the letter, that type of thing," he said. Temple said the belated decision to forward the letter to Newark was "just an effort to get rid of that piece of evidence. It was a routine thing." The letter, for now, remains with the Arkansas Department of Health. One expert suggested that the discovery, nearly two years after the attacks, proves the hardiness and potency of the bioweapon. "If they swabbed it and were able to grow a culture from it, that's fairly strong contami nation, I would think," said David Siegrist, a bioterrorism researcher at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies. The anthrax case has frustrated the FBI and fueled its critics. Some have questioned the agency's focus on Steven Hatfill, a former federal virologist called a "person of interest" by Attorney General John Ashcroft. Hatfill maintains he is innocent. In June, the FBI drained a Maryland pond near Hatfill's former home. A search for anthrax-processing equipment came up empty. Through a spokesman, Hatfill has complained about FBI harassment. But yesterday a judge in Washington, D.C., ordered Hatfill to pay a $5 traffic ticket, issued after he was struck by an FBI vehicle that was tailing him. Hatfill had tried to photograph the vehicle. A $65 million decontamination of the Hamilton Township postal center, closed since October 2001, is scheduled for November. One year ago, officials announced they had found a trace of anthrax in a Princeton mailbox, prompting speculation that the attacks originated there. The case has yielded few developments since. Web site tracks cleanup efforts at AMI By John Murawski, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer Tuesday, September 2, 2003 A new Web site gives amateur anthrax aficionados and bioterror buffs a venue to track the decontamination of the Boca Raton site of the country's first anthrax attack in 2001. The Internet site's main attraction is the "Milestones" link with a timeline of work accomplished and upcoming developments in the building formerly occupied by The National Enquirer and other supermarket tabloids. The "History" link shows a photograph of photo editor Bob Stevens, who died from inhalation anthrax mailed to the building. The site, www.buildingupdates.com, was launched last week. It also contains background on contractors who will do the work at the former office of American Media Inc., information about the building's new owner and links to local media and relevant government agencies. Boca Raton developer David Rustine, who bought the quarantined AMI office for $40,000 this year, and the cleanup's project manager, Atlanta's Consultants in Disease and Injury Control, launched the web site as a community service for local residents concerned about safety and curious about the project, said Consultants Vice President John Taylor. Rustine's Crown Companies will occupy space in the three-story, 68,000-square-foot building in the Arvida Park of Commerce once its cleaned up, the Web site says. Rustine will then try to lease space to other tenants. Consultants is collecting data in preparation for entering the building. All the contents of the building will be destroyed, including corporate records, periodicals library and personal effects, according to filings with the Palm Beach County Health Department. Predicting the cleanup date is a futile exercise, Taylor said. "We will be in the building as soon as our plan is approved, and it will be approved as soon as the plan is written, and it will be written as soon as we're done collecting information," Taylor said. Wed Sep 3 09:49:02 2003 Pacific Time University of Maryland Researchers Develop Anthrax Tracking Method COLLEGE PARK, Md., Sept. 3 (AScribe Newswire) -- University of Maryland researchers have developed a technique to help the FBI track the origins of deadly anthrax spores. The FBI asked Maryland professor Catherine Fenselau to turn her mass spectrometry lab to the forensic task of sleuthing how bacillus spores, such as anthrax, are prepared. "There are several common types of chemicals that are used to grow anthrax spores," said Fenselau. "One is agar, and another is a blood-based medium containing heme. People tend to develop and use their own recipe to grow the spores." "By analyzing for traces of these media, we can say a lot about how the spores were grown. That information can help investigators connect the growth with a certain recipe." Molecules of organic compounds have specific weights. Mass spectrometry can determine what even a single molecule is based on its unique weight. Mass spectrometry analysis has been accepted as evidence in court cases for about 35 years. "It's very sensitive and very specific," said Jeff Whiteaker, the post-doctoral researcher who developed the process for detecting the heme medium. "The mass spectrometry-based method is more specific for the heme molecule compared to the traditional methods. Even if we encounter compounds that have the same weight, we can confirm which molecule it is by the way it breaks up in the mass spectrometer." "Our theory was that if you look at what is stuck to the outside of a spore, you can find out how it became a spore." Fenselau said. "Even when you try to clean up the spores, there are still scraps of stuff on the surface." The Maryland team worked with five of the most frequently used recipes for blood agar to develop a method to detect and identify heme in any medium. "These bacteria grow on anything that has lots of nutrients available, which the heme medium does," Whiteaker explained. "Microbiologists like to use blood agar to grow bacteria like anthrax, because it mimics conditions in the body." The Maryland researchers worked with non-toxic bacillus spores, "first cousins that have a similar genome to anthrax, but don't have the capability to synthesize the killer toxins," said Fenselau. The Maryland researchers worked on the analysis from August, 2002 to February, 2003, producing a method where, said Whiteaker, "the heme medium jumps out." The heme analysis was developed in collaboration with scientists at the FBI Academy. The team presented its results at an international conference in Montreal in June and expects to publish the technique in a scientific journal soon. The University of Maryland's mass spectrometry laboratory is one of the most sophisticated in the Washington-Baltimore region. Other research in the lab includes studies of how drug resistance develops in breast cancer patients and development of methods for rapid characterization of airborne microorganisms. VANITY FAIR - OCTOBER 2003 THE MESSAGE IN THE ANTHRAX After fingering Joe Klein for Primary Colors and helping snare the alleged Atlanta Olympics bomber, the author, a professor of English at Vassar, was asked to analyze the 2001 anthrax letters. Frustrated with the F.B.I.”s anthrax task force, he unseals his investigation of a most intriguing -- and disturbing -- suspect. BY DON FOSTER In the spring of 1998, an officer at the Dugway Proving Ground, in Utah, called the veteran biowarrior William C. Patrick III to ask for his help. The army wanted to convert some of its deadly anthrax into a dry powder, but, in Patrick’s words, “didn’t have a freeze-dryer, didn’t have a spray dryer, no drying capability at all.” The Soviets hadn’t let the 1972 biological-and-toxinweapons convention stop them from producing 4,500 metric tons of anthrax per year. But when the Americans signed it, they put Bill Patrick out to pasture and then seemingly forgot the art, developed by Patrick in 1959, of weaponizing Bacillus anthracis without milling. Now Patrick had to re-educate the army’s top microbiologists, showing them how to freeze-dry a slurry of anthrax simulant; how to purify it to a trillion spores per gram in a centrifuge; and how to remove the electrostatic charge, to prevent clumping. On one visit to Dugway, Patrick said he had employed the less sophisticated method of acetone extraction to produce a pound of dry anthrax in a single day -- enough to kill thousands of people. (Patrick now says that he misspoke when he claimed to have produced the pound of anthrax.) For nearly two decades -- until Richard Nixon shut down America’s offensive bioweapons program in 1969 -- Bill Patrick worked in secret government laboratories, designing and testing germ agents. His skull and- crossbones calling card describes him as a “Biological Warfare Consultant.” An old-school warrior, Patrick, 77, looks like a big teddy bear, but he continually slips into talk of mass destruction. When lecturing on biodefense, he speaks of “beautiful bomblets” and of how many people the U.S. could kill in good weather with a dry bioweapons agent “especially in the Middle East.” On February 19, 1999, Patrick briefed two dozen officers at Maxwell Air Force Base, in Montgomery, Alabama, on his recent visits to Dugway: “The principles of biological warfare that we discovered 35 to 40 years ago have not changed.” Patrick held up a sealed vial containing eight grams of highly refined powder. “Now you’re very fortunate today,” he said, “that I’ve carried in my suitcase here a sample of anthrax. The only requirement I have is that you don’t drop it.” His audience tittered nervously as the bottle passed from hand to hand. ”I want to bring several things to your attention,” said Patrick. “Look how easily that powder flows. It is composed of three to five microns, the particle size that gets down into your lungs and causes the infection.” Then he came clean. It was not really anthrax but rather Bacillus globigii, or B.g., the army’s anthrax simulant of choice. “Now if you think I’m stupid enough to release anthrax in that powdered form,” Patrick said with a grin, “you’re giving me too much credit.” Patrick”s B.g. sample was purified to a trillion spores per gram -- near the theoretical limit -- and better than anything ever produced by Iraq, South Africa, or the Soviet Union. An untrained eye could not differentiate it from the anthrax powder that Patrick had produced in 1959. The purpose of the exercise at Dugway, however, was defensive: to prepare our nation for a bioterror attack. In April 1999, Patrick told Fox News that in two years there will be an attack with a sophisticated agent manufactured overseas. His prediction was not far off the mark. By October 12, 2001, the press was reporting that Bob Stevens, the 63-year old tabloid photo editor at American Media Inc. in Boca Raton, Florida, who had mysteriously succumbed to inhalational anthrax on October 5, had been infected at work.(Inhalational anthrax comes from breathing in spores, and is far deadlier than the cutaneous form of the disease, which is usually contracted through cuts and scratches in the skin.) Spores were found throughout the A.M.I. building, with hot spots in the mailroom and on the victim’s keyboard. That day I got a call from supervisory special agent James R. Fitzgerald, a top F.B.I. profiler and threat-assessment expert. He said that anthrax had been discovered at NBC, and that he might be sending me some documents. For my first 10 years as a professor of English literature at Vassar College, I got no closer to real-life tragedy than Titus Andronicus. Today, much of my time off campus is taken up by police detectives, F.B.I. agents, and district attorneys. My home phone number is unlisted, and my unexpected mail must be X-rayed or discarded. On the shelves of my office, the Great Books have been displaced by the writings of hoaxers, terrorists, kidnappers, the D.C. sniper, the anthrax killer. It all began in January 1996, when Random House published Primary Colors, “by Anonymous.” The editors of New York magazine asked me to figure out who had written it by applying the same methods I had always used for assigning authorship to ancient poems and anonymous plays. Relying mostly on old-fashioned linguistic analysis, I concluded that “Anonymous” was the Newsweek columnist Joe Klein” who promptly announced on national TV that I was wrong. Literary scholars look at punctuation, spelling, word usage, regionalisms, slang, grammar, sentence construction, document formatting, topical allusions, ideology, borrowed source material -- but most of our ascribed attributions are for writers like Shakespeare, Pope, or Wordsworth. A dead poet cannot stand up and say, as Joe Klein did, “It’s not me. I didn’t do it. This is silly.” Five months later, when Klein finally admitted that he had written Primary Colors after all, lawyers and law-enforcement agencies were quick to see a real-world application for the kind of work that I and other scholars perform. I never dreamed that my correct answer would lead me from fiction to Quantico, or to the Montana cabin where the Unabomber scrawled his manifesto, or to the Boulder Police Department to help with the Jon Benet Ramsey homicide investigation, or to Boston’s Irish Mafia, or to Centennial Olympic Park and the so-called Army of God bombings, much less to deadly anthrax at the heart of our own biodefense establishment. Every day, crimes are committed that involve unsigned or forged documents. When confronted with a “questioned document,” most police detectives seek out experts to analyze the physical evidence. It took Primary Colors for law-enforcement agencies to realize how much can be learned from the writing itself. A first-rate special agent in charge, such as Woody Enderson of the Southeast Bomb Task Force, can turn an investigation around by getting expert help with the linguistic evidence. Following the Centennial Olympic Park bombing at the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta, traditional profiling techniques had at first focused investigative attention on Richard Jewell, who was innocent. Enderson’s task force gathered the Army of God letters from other bombings, along with envelopes, school papers, a grocery list, even marginal annotations in a Bible -- linguistic evidence that helped direct attention to Eric Robert Rudolph. He was arrested on May 31, 2003, after five years on the lam. The main obstacle to the investigation of anonymous writing is simply that there is so much of it. Take the epidemic of hoax anthrax letters. Since April 1997 (the first recorded incidence of a major mailed anthrax hoax), law-enforcement agencies have responded to countless chemical and biological hoaxes -- an estimated 10,000 of them in October 2001 alone, following the news of Bob Stevens’s infection. Most mailed biothreats contain harmless household powder and an anonymous message from the offender. Police and F.B.I. officials have established a routine for this entire class of documents: Confiscate both the letter and the envelope from the recipient without allowing any copies to be retained. Test the powder to confirm that it is nontoxic. Announce to the press that “the incident will be investigated as a serious crime.” Then place the documents in what’s known as a zero file and never look at them again. Unfortunately, when that same strategy is applied to the questioned documents in a case as important as the 2001 anthrax murders, critical evidence may be overlooked. Everyone saw reproductions of the New Jersey anthrax letters calling for “DEATH TO AMERICA DEATH TO ISRAEL.” More information has been gleaned from those brief letters than you may suppose. But many of the questioned documents pertinent to the anthrax case have been zero-filed. That is why I have decided finally to speak out. On the phone that day, S.S.A. Fitzgerald told me that Erin O’Connor, an NBC aide, had been diagnosed with cutaneous anthrax 17 days after opening a powder-filled letter addressed to NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw. The letter, postmarked on September 20 in St. Petersburg, Florida, began: “THE UNTHINKABEL” [The Ns are backward Cyrillic Ns in the original] SAMPLE OF HOW IT WILL LOOK Brief but ominous, the handwritten note threatened bioterror attacks on New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. I found the text curious for a number of reasons. First, the quotation marks were done Russian-style, with the opening quotes below the line, and the document’s backward N’s resembled the letter I in Russia’s Cyrillic alphabet. But a bilingual Russian would be unlikely to confuse English and Cyrillic characters. This appeared to be someone’s attempt to make his writing look Russian, or at least foreign. The same went for the block letters, which Russian adults don’t use. The Brokaw letter matched two other biothreat letters, also from St. Petersburg, mailed 15 days later -- same writing, same backward N’s and Russian quotes, same threats of imminent bioterror. One was sent to New York Times reporter Judith Miller, a co-author of Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War, and the other to Howard Troxler, a columnist for the St. Petersburg Times. Troxler opened his powder-packed letter on Tuesday, October 9. Miller opened hers at her office on Friday the 12th”the same day the NBC infection was diagnosed. “THE UNTHINKABEL” looked like a deliberate misspelling, but why had it been placed in quotation marks” Turning to the Internet, I found announcements for a disaster-management conference to be held in Orlando called “It Could Happen to You -- Preparing for the Unthinkable” and featuring talks on bioterror readiness. The St. Petersburg letters, with their arrows and lists and dashes, vaguely resembled a slide from a Power- Point presentation, a common feature at scientific conferences. Then, too, Howard Troxler’s surname -- in the letter proper, though not on the envelope -- was spelled “TOXLER.” Could the error have been in-advertent, I wondered, a reflexive misspelling by someone used to writing such words as “toxic,” “toxicity,” “toxins,” “toxicology,” “toxoid?“ Linking bioterror to 9/11, the Florida letter writer warned of the destruction of Tampa Bay’s Sunshine Skyway Bridge and Chicago’s Sears Tower. Those threats were not credible -- terrorists do not send advance notice of their targets -- but the powder seemed to be “THE REAL THING,” as the sender phrased it. One NBC aide was infected, and a man in Florida was dead. On balance, the St. Petersburg letters looked to me to be the work of a scientist. The linguistic evidence and choice of targets pointed to an offender interested in biodefense: 9/11, he seemed to be saying, could be the prologue to something worse -- a sweeping epidemic of biological terrorism, for which our nation stood unprepared. It soon came out, however, that the F.B.I. had recovered the wrong threatening letter. Laboratory analysis indicated that the white substance enclosed in the three St. Petersburg biothreats was nontoxic. Erin O’Connor must have been infected from another source. A fresh search of segregated NBC mail turned up a second letter, one with anthrax traces, likewise addressed to Tom Brokaw but written by someone else and postmarked on September 18 in Trenton. The letter read: 09-11-01 THIS IS NEXT TAKE PENACILIN NOW DEATH TO AMERICA DEATH TO ISRAEL ALLAH IS GREAT Here, then, were two powder-filled biothreats addressed to the same news anchor, two days and 1,000 miles apart. Neither writer could have known of the other unless they were in cahoots. But the powder in the New Jersey Brokaw letter was indeed the real thing. America, still reeling from September 11, was under attack by biological terrorists. On Monday, October 15, a taped-up envelope ostensibly sent by schoolchildren was delivered to the office of then Senate majority leader Tom Daschle in Washington, D.C. When it was opened, a cloud of powder burst into the air. This letter read: 09-11-01 YOU CAN NOT STOP US. WE HAVE THIS ANTHRAX. YOU DIE NOW. ARE YOU AFRAID? DEATH TO AMERICA. DEATH TO ISRAEL. ALLAH IS GREAT. Powder samples from both the Brokaw and Daschle letters were couriered to Fort Detrick, headquarters of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), in Frederick, Maryland. The USAMRIID scientists were alarmed by what they discovered. It was the same stuff that had killed Bob Stevens, the tabloid photo editor, in Florida: the Ames strain, used in the U.S. biodefense program. The distribution of Ames, regulated by USAMRIID, was limited to about a dozen labs under tight security controls. Moreover, the anthrax had been weaponized, refined to its most lethal particle size of one to three microns. Most astonishing was its purity: the powder had been concentrated to a trillion spores per gram. Speaking to the press on Tuesday afternoon, October 16, Senator Daschle described the dry anthrax sent to his office as “very potent.” Dr. Richard Spertzel, the former chief bio-inspector for the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, went a step further. Describing the powder as “weapons grade,” Spertzel told ABC that he knew of fewer than five experts in the United States with the capability to produce such material. While East Coast postal workers expressed alarm, commanders at Fort Detrick objected to the term “weaponized.” The F.B.I. and USAMRIID convened for an emergency interagency conference call. They agreed upon the terms “professionally done” and “energetic.” Government spokespersons were instructed to use these words, not “weaponized,” to describe the anthrax contained in the New Jersey letters. On Wednesday, a somber Senator Daschle sponsored a news conference. At his side stood Fort Detrick’s commander, Major General John Parker, who called the Daschle powder “a garden variety” anthrax “sensitive to all antibiotics.” Two weeks later, appearing before the Senate’s Governmental Affairs Committee, Parker testified that the terms “professionally done” and “energetic” were chosen “as more appropriate descriptions in lieu of any real familiarity with weaponized materials.” Parker seemed unaware that the army for the past decade has conducted extensive biodefense research on weaponized materials, both at USAMRIID and at the Dugway Proving Ground, and has even pushed to duplicate a hybrid anthrax produced by the old Soviet program. But by the time Parker explained his choice of words to the Senate committee, two Washington postal workers, Joseph Curseen Jr. and Thomas Morris Jr., who had credited reports that mail handlers were not at risk, had died, and several others were critically ill. When the F.B.I. first approached me about this case, I was perfectly willing to believe that the anthrax was “garden variety” and that it had been sent by Muslim extremists. In fact, I was puzzled at first that the government was so quick to announce that this was probably a case of domestic, not foreign, terrorism. But as I analyzed the letters from New Jersey, I did see some red “flags” or, rather, red-white-and-blue ones. The Brokaw and Daschle letters were dated “09-11-01.” Most Americans write their dates in that order -- month, day, year -- while most of the rest of the world writes the date in day-month-year sequence. Might the offender be American? Maybe, maybe not. All who come to this country, including terrorists, learn from the moment they fill in their I.N.S. port-of-entry cards that American practice calls for the form MM-DD-YY. But why write the date at all? And why that date? The New Jersey Brokaw letter was postmarked September 18 and the Daschle letter October 9. Neither letter was stamped on September 11. This offender wanted the authorities to explore a connection between the anthrax attacks and 9/11. But when an offender gives you unnecessary information that tells you what to think, you probably want to think twice. The return address on the Daschle letter supplied more extraneous information: “FRANKLIN PARK, NJ 08852.” From an online search I learned that there is a Franklin Park in New Jersey, 22 miles north of Trenton, where the letters were postmarked. But the Zip Code, 08852, corresponds to another New Jersey town, Monmouth Junction. The three communities run parallel to I-95. Clearly, the offender knew something about New Jersey, and with all of those dropped geographic clues, he surely knew that the authorities would look for him there. I had a hunch he’d turn up somewhere else, though probably within driving distance. The Daschle letter -- which was identical to a letter sent to Senator Patrick Leahy that remained undiscovered until November 16, 2001 -- had this return address: “4TH GRADE, GREENDALE SCHOOL.” The fictional school address was designed to make the envelope look harmless, and fourth graders in this country do indeed write letters to their elected representatives, often as a class project. Is that a piece of cultural information that would be known and referenced by an al-Qaeda cell? Since there is no such school in New Jersey, I searched for Greendale schools elsewhere and found several, two of which, in Canada, had made headlines the year before, one for an arson fire and the other for a case of child molestation. A third Greendale School, in Maryland, had made news in 1973 in connection with forced desegregation. I made a note of it. It’s not uncommon for the writers of criminal threats to draw on their own experience and reading. On Tuesday, October 23, I appeared on ABC’s Good Morning America to offer a few observations. Were we supposed to believe that this “professionally made” anthrax powder was packaged and mailed by someone who thought penicillin would be the antibiotic of choice, and who didn’t even know how to spell it? That “penacilin” was the offender’s way of saying, “Look, I don’t know much about antibiotics. I don’t even know how to spell “penicillin.” So don’t start thinking that I’m an American scientist. I’m just a semi-literate foreign fanatic.” Five days earlier, Johanna Huden, an assistant for the New York Post editorial page, was diagnosed with cutaneous anthrax. Searching a bag of segregated mail at the Post’s editorial office in Manhattan, F.B.I. agents discovered a letter identical to the New Jersey Brokaw letter. The powder tested positive. That same week in New York, a staffer at CBS and the infant son of an ABC News producer were diagnosed with cutaneous infections, but no contaminated letters were recovered. A Florida tabloid, ABC, CBS, NBC, the Post, the U.S. Senate. Well-taped envelopes with a note inside warning the recipient to seek medical treatment because Muslim bioterrorists were on the loose. None of this added up to an al- Qaeda operation, but neither did it look like the work of a random serial killer. Somebody was trying to deliver a message -- a message that kept getting lost in the shuffle. I tried to imagine the culprit’s point of view, based on my hypothesis that an American scientist might be responsible: September 11: America is under attack. John Doe, American biowarrior, knows that if the enemy escalates from airplanes to anthrax we’re in trouble. There is too little spent on biodefense, and the F.D.A. has halted production of the BioPort anthrax vaccine. It might take a dose of the real thing to put the nation on high alert and straighten out our government’s priorities. Taped envelope seals will prevent the powder from escaping before the letters reach their destination. And the enclosed message will ensure that all recipients are given the antibiotic Cipro in time to prevent fatalities. America’s leading biowarriors -- including, perhaps, John Doe himself -- will receive the kind of recognition and respect they have long deserved. Within days of the 9/11 attack, the F.B.I. announces that several of the hijackers had been based in Delray Beach, Florida. Wasting no time, John Doe takes his cue: the nation’s first anthrax attack will take place in Palm Beach County. The authorities will associate the anthrax attack with that Delray terror cell. An Internet search supplies John Doe with an apt target: American Media Inc., a publisher of supermarket tabloids. When the letter arrives, the police will be called, and the powder tested. When they discover it is the real thing, biodefense will become the nation’s top concern. Out goes the first Florida letter, to A.M.I. Oddly, nothing happens. To John Doe, it seems as if his anthrax letter has been discarded without being opened. Meanwhile, the F.B.I. has learned that some of the remaining hijackers were based in New Jersey. John Doe prepares a fresh salvo. His targets this time will include NBC and the New York Post, possibly ABC and CBS. On September 18, from New Jersey, John Doe mails a new batch of anthrax letters, this time with a more explicit message: “DEATH TO AMERICA. DEATH TO ISRAEL. ALLAH IS GREAT.” Surely, one of those letters will be opened. John Doe watches the news from September 18 through October 1. Still nothing. Then, on October 4, comes the grim news that a photo editor at American Media Inc. in Boca Raton has been diagnosed with inhalational anthrax. So the letter was opened after all, and not credited. It’s too late now to save the victim. On October 5, Bob Stevens dies. John Doe has now killed a man, and the nation has not heard the wake-up call because the authorities think Stevens, an outdoorsman, may have gotten the disease “naturally.” John Doe waits a few more days, hoping that one of his September 18 letters will be opened. Not one scores a hit. The offender is now in the uncomfortable position of having to warn the nation not only about the al-Qaeda threat but also about his own unnoticed handiwork. On October 9, he mails letters to two liberal U.S. senators, adding about a gram of his best material to each envelope, his deadliest payload yet. This time, the whole nation will sit up straight. The two senators will be put on Cipro, and no one else will get hurt. On October 12, John Doe’s NBC letter of September 18 is discovered. Finally, all Americans will understand our vulnerability to biological terrorism. Unfortunately, the post-office sorting machines were a little too rough on the envelopes. A lot more people than John Doe ever intended are about to get sick. On October 31, 2001, Fort Detrick’s commander was on Capitol Hill speaking to a congressional committee about “energetic” anthrax hours after Kathy Nguyen, 61, a South Bronx hospital worker, died from inhalational anthrax. Swabs were taken from her home, her workplace, and her mailbox, but not a single spore was discovered. I sent an e-mail to a friend in the F.B.I.’s New York field office. Forensics are not my department, I wrote, but has the Amerithrax Task Force assigned to the investigation taken swabs from garbage dumpsters? If Nguyen dropped her trash into a Dumpster that already contained anthrax discarded by the offender, or, possibly, an anthrax-laced letter discarded by ABC, CBS, NBC, or the Post, then might those spores have spread into the air in sufficient quantity to be inhaled? My source wrote back to say that “they think Nguyen got a real snout full of anthrax.” The task force hoped that this latest fatality would lead them straight to the killer. Perhaps there was a person or location that could account for her exposure to airborne anthrax. “They are still looking for that secret place,” my source wrote. In the end, though, Kathy Nguyen’s death was written off as an insoluble mystery. In November, some of the West’s top biowarriors converged on Swindon, England, for an advanced training course for the United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission. One of the big names on hand for the conference was Steven J. Hatfill, a former USAMRIID virologist and a protégé of Bill Patrick’s. Those who completed the course and were certified would have a chance to join the search for Saddam’s bioweapons in Iraq. While the 12-day course was under way, someone sent another biothreat letter, postmarked in November in London, to Senator Daschle. When the powder proved nontoxic, the letter was filed away and escaped further scrutiny. Ninety-four-year-old Ottilie Lundgren of Oxford, Connecticut, succumbed to anthrax on November 21, making her the fifth fatality. The infection was believed to have come from a cross-contaminated letter. If you have a compromised immune system, it takes only a few spores for B. anthracis to begin its silent work inside your body. Lundgren had simply been unlucky. An estimated 85 million pieces of mail were processed by the Washington, D.C., and New Jersey postal facilities while the Daschle and Leahy letters were in the system; it's surprising how few of us got sick. By the time the F.B.I. showed up in Connecticut to investigate the Lundgren case, the press was hungry for news, but the Amerithrax Task Force was saying little about its search for the killer. After an F.B.I. agent mentioned something about “the Camel Club,” Dave Altimari and Jack Dolan of the Hartford Courant searched online legal archives for the phrase. They found a lawsuit, not yet resolved, involving Dr. Ayaad Assaad, an Arab-American scientist who worked at USAMRIID until he was laid off in 1997. Dolan and Altimari gave Assaad’s attorney a call and got an earful. An American citizen since 1981, the Egyptian-born Assaad, 54, is grateful to his adopted country and proud of the ricin vaccine that he developed during his eight years as a civilian research scientist for the U.S. Army. But after Assaad transferred to USAMRIID, in 1989, he claimed in his lawsuit, several white, American-born pathologists founded “the Camel Club,” whose purpose was to harass and humiliate him. Assaad says he experienced continued harassment until his unexpected layoff in March 1997. Given 60 days to vacate, Assaad packed up on May 9, 1997, said goodbye to his colleagues, and headed for the door. He says he was stopped by USAMRIID guards who, with a superior’s help, rummaged through his belongings in a vain search for stolen army property. (The U.S. Army denies that Assaad was discriminated against or wrongfully dismissed. The case is currently in appeals court.) New USAMRIID hires that year, following Assaad’s departure, included Steven J. Hatfill, a recruit from the National Institutes of Health. Hatfill was a concept man with a detailed vision for building mobile germ labs. Assaad, meanwhile, took a job with the Environmental Protection Agency, where he now works as a toxicologist testing pesticides. Assaad told Dolan and Altimari that he was at home in Frederick, Maryland, on October 2, 2001, when he received a call from Agent Gregory Leylegian of the F.B.I., summoning him to a meeting the next morning. It was the same day American Media’s Bob Stevens entered J.F.K. Medical Center in Atlantis, Florida. Assaad and his attorney, Rosemary McDermott, arrived at the Washington, D.C., field office at 10 A.M. They were met by Agents Leylegian and Mark Buie, who explained that an anonymous letter had been mailed to the “Town of Quantico Police,” identifying Assaad as a fanatic with the will and means to launch a bioterror attack on the United States. Buie read the one-page, single-spaced, computer-generated 212-word letter aloud. Assaad, who holds a Ph.D. in physiology from Iowa State University in Ames and is married to a Nebraskan, was shocked by the letter's depiction of him as a potential terrorist. Agent Buie asked what the letter writer might have meant by “further terrorist activity.” “Put it this way,” McDermott said, “Dr. Assaad is suing the army for discrimination and wrongful dismissal. Some people are pretty upset with him about that.” Buie and Leylegian had no reason to think that a bioterror attack was imminent. The Quantico letter was postmarked September 21, a day after the Florida Brokaw letter and three days after the New Jersey Brokaw letter that contained the real thing, but those documents had not yet come to light. Dr. Assaad wondered what he would do if the government revoked his citizenship or if he could no longer work at the Environmental Protection Agency. When Assaad left USAMRIID in 1997, he thought his ordeal was over. Now, four years later, he stood accused as a traitor to his country, a corrupter of his sons, a dangerous psychopath, a bioterrorist. It was now December 2001, yet Dolan and Altimari’s Hartford Courant story was the first I had heard of the Quantico letter. S.S.A. Fitzgerald had not heard of it, either. In fact, there were quite a few critical documents that Fitzgerald had not yet seen. What, I wondered, has the anthrax task force been doing” Hoping that the Quantico letter might lead, if not to the killer, at least to a suspect, I offered to examine the document. My photocopy arrived by FedEx not from the task force but from F.B.I. headquarters in Washington. Searching through documents by some 40 USAMRIID employees, I found writings by a female officer that looked like a perfect match. I wrote a detailed report on the evidence, but the anthrax task force declined to follow through: the Quantico letter had already been declared a hoax and zero-filed as part of the 9/11 investigation. When Assaad’s attorney sought, under the Freedom of Information Act, to obtain a copy, the Justice Department denied her request: releasing the document “could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of the personal privacy of third parties” and “disclose the identities of confidential sources.” Six months after the first deadly powder-bearing letter was mailed, five months after my initial call from the F.B.I., I still had only the four anthrax letters and envelopes, the three biothreats mailed nearly simultaneously from St. Petersburg, and the Quantico letter. The F.B.I. hadn’t identified a suspect and had only the anthrax itself by which to search for the offender. Barring further incidents, we would have to look for other extant writings by the anthrax killer. But where does one even begin looking? Because the New Jersey and Florida letters seemed related and possibly collaborative, I searched for stories of past so-called hoaxes -- and uncovered a trail of seemingly related biothreat incidents, several of which exhibited language and writing strategies similar to those of the New Jersey and Florida documents. The earliest incident occurred in April 1997. Signing himself “The Counter Holocaust Lobbyists of Hillel” -- phraseology borrowed from the Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel -- someone sent a petri dish to the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Jewish organization B’nai B’rith. The dish, broken in the mail, contained Bacillus cereus, or B.c., an anthrax simulant used for biodefense research. A hazardous materials team was called in. Whole city blocks were evacuated. But the writing was not examined, the document was zerofiled, and no arrest was made. Net cost to taxpayers: $2 million. It was while looking for information on the B’nai B’rith incident that I found a Washington Times interview with Steven Hatfill, then a virologist with the N.I.H., who was said to have “thought carefully about bioterrorism.” The Times paraphrased Dr. Hatfill”s explanation of the “four levels” of possible biological attack: The first is the B’nai B’rith variety, in which no real organisms are used. (“Hello. This is Abdul. We have put anthrax in the food at Throckmorton Middle School.” In fact, Abdul hasn’t.) We empty public buildings for bomb threats, how about for anthrax threats” After all, sooner or later, one might be real. The second level consists in the release of real bacteria, but without the intention of infecting many people. Probably only a few people would get it, and perhaps none would die. The third level consists in trying to get a lot of people sick, and maybe dead. Anthrax spores put into the ventilation system of a movie theater would do the trick. The result would be horrendous panic even if only 100 people got sick or died. ... The fourth level consists of a self-sustaining, unstoppable epidemic. How hard, really, would it be to carry out a bio-attack? Not very, Hatfill said. Culturing bacteria is easy and almost universally understood. I searched the Internet for a Throckmorton school and found nothing of interest outside Throckmorton, Texas, except for the Throckmorton Plant Sciences Center at Kansas State University, where courses are taught on agricultural pathogens. Could there be a connection, I wondered, between the “Throckmorton Middle School” scenario and the anthrax killer’s “Greendale School?” Searching further, I learned that the B’nai B’rith episode occurred a few months after mysterious gas incidents at Washington National Airport (now Reagan National) and Baltimore- Washington International Airport. On both occasions, passengers were overcome with noxious fumes not publicly identified by investigators. Ten months later, people again fell ill at Washington National and had to be hospitalized after reporting fumes. In January 1998, after the third airport incident in a year, The Washington Times’ magazine, Insight, published a second interview with Hatfill, who said, “These types of incidents could be a form of testing for a possible future terrorist attack -- perhaps next time using anthrax.” This ominous commentary was accompanied by a photograph of Hatfill at home, in his kitchen, wearing garbage bags, gloves, and an army-supply gas mask, illustrating how a bioterrorist might cook up bubonic plague in a private laboratory and cause havoc using a homemade spray disseminator such as the one Hatfill had designed himself. All of which seemed, to me, an unusual hobby for a virologist then employed by the National Institutes of Health. Then I found another interesting news item. Shortly after Insight published its ghoulish photograph of Hatfill in his home laboratory, a white male, wearing a gas mask, deposited a bottle outside the U.S. Treasury Building. An anonymous call was then placed alerting the U.S. Secret Service that it contained “liquid chemical warfare agent.” The bottle, though found, was not preserved -- it was, after all, just a “hoax.” In its interview with Hatfill, Insight reported that he had worked in Zimbabwe in the late 1970s when “an epidemic of anthrax from natural causes affected 10,000 people.” In fact, Hatfill had been in apartheid Rhodesia from 1978 to 1980 (the year it was renamed Zimbabwe), and witnessed the worst outbreak of anthrax ever recorded -- in a part of Africa where anthrax was rarely encountered. During the civil war to topple the apartheid government, the southern Tribal Trust Lands were ravaged by an epidemic that caused 10,738 recorded human infections in about two years. Today, black Zimbabweans and their livestock are still becoming ill and dying from the biological fallout. That the outbreak was “natural” is debatable. In 1992, Dr. Meryl Nass, an American physician, and Jeremy Brickhill, a Zimbabwean journalist, published separate reports supporting what was already suspected: that the Rhodesian anthrax epidemic was deliberate, a biowarfare attack on the black townships, probably carried out by Rhodesia’s notorious government-backed Selous Scouts militia. In January 2002, while compiling documents by and about Hatfill, including his unclassified scientific publications, I found a brief autobiography. In it, Hatfill, though American, boasted of having served in the late 1970s with the Selous Scouts in Rhodesia. In that same brief bio, Dr. Hatfill indicated that he had taken his medical degree from the Godfrey Huggins School of Medicine in Harare, Rhodesia, which he attended from 1978 to '84. Next I searched the Internet for a Greendale School somewhere in Africa and discovered the Courteney Selous School, situated in the wealthy, white Harare suburb of Greendale, a mile from the medical school where Hatfill spent six years obtaining his M.D. while serving, by his own unconfirmed account, with the Selous Scouts. Steven Hatfill was now looking to me like a suspect, or at least, as the F.B.I. would denote him eight months later, “a person of interest.” When I lined up Hatfill’s known movements with the postmark locations of reported biothreats, those hoax anthrax attacks appeared to trail him like a vapor cloud. But in February 2002, shortly after I advanced his candidacy to my contact at F.B.I. headquarters, I was told that Mr. Hatfill had a good alibi. A month later, when I pressed the issue, I was told, “Look, Don, maybe you’re spending too much time on this.” Good people in the Department of Defense, C.I.A., and State Department, not to mention Bill Patrick, had vouched for Hatfill. I decided to give it a rest. But first, I faxed a comparative-handwriting sample to F.B.I. headquarters, with examples of Hatfill’s printing on the left and printing by the anthrax offender on the right. I am not a handwriting expert, so I supplied the document without comment. A week later, I got a thank-you call. In 1999, Hatfill was fired by USAMRIID. He was then hired at Science Applications International Corporation (S.A.I.C.), a contractor for the Department of Defense and the C.I.A., but he departed S.A.I.C. in March 2002, a month after he took a polygraph concerning the anthrax matter that he says he passed. Hatfill at the time was building a mobile germ lab out of an old truck chassis, and after S.A.I.C. fired him he continued work on it using his own money. When the F.B.I. wanted to confiscate the mobile lab to test it for anthrax spores, the army resisted, moving the trailer to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where it was used to train Special Forces in preparation for the war on Iraq. The classes were taught by Steve Hatfill and Bill Patrick. In March 2002, as the F.B.I. continued to investigate, Hatfill moved on to a $150,000- a-year job in Louisiana, funded by a grant from the Department of Justice. That same month, from Louisiana, came a fresh batch of hoax anthrax letters. L.S.U.’s Martin Hugh-Jones, a World Health Organization director, examined the powder they contained and found it to be nontoxic. The letters were then put into a zero file without their language being examined by a trained professional. On the night of March 12, Ayaad Assaad received a call from a person representing himself as a Louisiana F.B.I. agent. The caller demanded to know if Assaad had been told who wrote the Quantico letter. To prove his credentials, the caller rattled off personal information from as far back as Assaad’s Egyptian high school -- the Arabic name of which he pronounced correctly. Assaad believes he recognized the caller’s source of information: he was likely reading from Assaad’s confidential SF-171, a U.S.-government employment application form that had been on file at USAMRIID. Frightened, Dr. Assaad hung up, then called me at home at 10 P.M. to tell me of the incident. I assured him the call was fraudulent. The F.B.I. does not conduct its business in that way. There were, in my opinion, a few people whose recorded voices should be played back to Assaad to see if he recognized one of them as his anonymous caller. Though it is a felony to impersonate an F.B.I. agent, the task force decided not to investigate. According to Assaad, when he finally called the F.B.I., he was told to get caller ID. In December 2001, Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a noted bioweapons expert, delivered a paper contending that the perpetrator of the anthrax crimes was an American microbiologist whose training and possession of Ames-strain powder pointed to a government insider with experience in a U.S. military lab. In March 2002, she told the BBC that the anthrax deaths may have resulted from a secret project to examine the practicability of sending real anthrax through the mail -- an experiment that misfired despite such precautions as taped envelope seals. That surprising hypothesis made Rosenberg a target for knee-jerk criticism, but competent sources within the biowarfare establishment thought she might well be right. In April, I met Rosenberg for lunch at an Indian restaurant in Brewster, New York, and compared notes. We found that our evidence had led us in the same direction, though by different routes and for different reasons. The weeks dragged on. Prodded publicly by Rosenberg and privately by myself, the F.B.I.’s anthrax task force nevertheless seemed stubbornly unwilling to consider the evidence pointing toward a military insider or to examine the Quantico letter or those few “hoax” biothreats that I believed, and still believe, may shed light on the anthrax murders. The additional documents that I had been expecting from the F.B.I. never arrived. S.S.A. Fitzgerald, the F.B.I.’s top in-house text analyst, asked to examine the same set of documents and received the same answer: no. I'm not an insider, nor an old hand. I have worked with the F.B.I. for only six years, on no more than 20 investigations. But never have I encountered such reluctance to examine potentially critical documents. Meanwhile, friends of Fort Detrick were leaking to the press new pieces of disinformation indicating that the mailed anthrax probably came from Iraq. The leaks included false allegations that the Daschle anthrax included additives distinctive to the Iraqi arms program and that it had been dried using an atomizer spray dryer sold by Denmark to Iraq. Her patience exhausted, Dr. Rosenberg met with the Senate Judiciary Committee staff on June 18, 2002, and laid out the evidence, such as it was, hers and mine. Van Harp, head of the Amerithrax Task Force, sat in on the briefing. The senators were attentive. So, too, evidently, was Harp: exactly one week after Rosenberg’s meeting with the Judiciary Committee staff, the F.B.I. searched Hatfill’s residence. A bureau spokesman described it to The Washington Times as a “voluntary search” without a warrant, “requested” by Dr. Hatfill to clear his name. Suddenly I was being flooded with documents from reporters and concerned scientists: letters, e-mails, curricula vitae, handwriting samples, and original .fiction by Steve Hatfill. I learned from one document that Hatfill had audited a Super Terrorism seminar in Washington, D.C., on April 24, 1997, the day of the B’nai B’rith incident. The next day, in a letter to the seminar’s organizer, Edgar Brenner, he wrote that he was “tremendously interested in becoming more involved in this area” and noted that the petri-dish scare, so soon after the seminar, showed that “this topic is vital to the security of the United States.” Hatfill’s original fiction included a cut-and-paste forgery of a diploma for a Ph.D. from Rhodes University, which he used to obtain his jobs at the N.I.H., USAMRIID, and S.A.I.C. No less interesting to me, as a professor of English literature, was Hatfill’s unpublished novel, Emergence, which I examined in Washington at the U.S. Copyright Office. In the book, an Iraqi virologist launches a bioterror attack on behalf of an unnamed sponsor, using an identity acquired from the Irish Republican Army and a homemade sprayer like the one Steven J. Hatfill demonstrated for The Washington Times. A fictional scientist named Steven J. Roberts comes to the rescue, tracing the outbreak to Iraq. The Strangelovean novel ends with America nuking Baghdad. As the warheads fall, the pilot remarks, “Beautiful . . . just beautiful. Welcome to Fuck City, Ragheads! Let”s get the hell out of Dodge.” I was reminded of Bill Patrick’s words in his talk at Maxwell Air Force Base: “The beauty of biological warfare, good people, is that you can pick an agent with a short period of incubation, or a moderate period of incubation, or a long period. And this, I think, would be very attractive to terrorists, because they can do their dirty work and get out of Dodge City, and you won’t know that you”re infected till they’re long gone.” Hatfill’s novel, however, has a surprise ending. In a three-page epilogue, the narrator, a Russian mobster, reveals that his own organization, not Iraq, is responsible for the bioterror attack: “The reaction was as great as we had hoped for the entire focus of the American F.B.I. has now shifted towards combating chemical/ biological terrorism and this is allowing us to formulate the unprecedented expansion of our organization.” Biowarfare fiction was no mere lark for Steven Hatfill. It was his specialty. His responsibilities at USAMRIID included the writing of bioterror scenarios, at least one of which actually happened. Hatfill envisioned someone spreading a pathogen throughout several floors of a public office building. It would take only one reported illness, he predicted, “to shut down the entire building, especially if the bug had been sprayed on several .floors. Then the call comes: “Let our man loose, or we’ll do a school.”“ In August 1998, in Wichita, Kansas, 40 miles southeast of Southwestern College, Hatfill’s alma mater, powder was spread throughout several floors of the Finney State Office Building. Then came “the call,” in the form of a letter from a team of Christian Identity extremists and a group calling itself Brothers for Freedom of Americans. A few days later, Hatfill and Bill Patrick arrived in San Diego for the Worldwide Conference on Antiterrorism, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense. I asked my F.B.I. contact for the Wichita documents. Again, my requests were denied. The ink was hardly dry on Emergence when the government hired Hatfill, now working for S.A.I.C., to commission a paper from Bill Patrick focusing on how to respond to a biological terror event. I have read Patrick’s 1999 report “Risk Assessment.” Though it’s a classified document, it contains little that he hasn’t said before elsewhere. I did, however, find in it something that surprised me: Patrick describes a hypothetical incident in which an attacker uses the U.S. mail service to deliver a business envelope containing no more than 2.5 grams of aerosolized anthrax, refined to a trillion spores per gram, in particles smaller than five microns. Patrick explains that 2.5 grams is the amount that can be placed into a standard envelope without detection. “More powder makes the envelope bulge and draws attention.” As prophecies go, that one’s right on the money. The “DEATH TO AMERICA” letters sent two years later to Senators Daschle and Leahy contained about a gram of aerosolized anthrax, particle size one to three microns, refined to a trillion spores per gram. Bill Patrick plus the Dugway scientists make up Richard Spertzel’s short list of four U.S. experts who know how to make such a fine dry powder. The anthrax killer, whoever he may be, represents a fifth expert with Patrick’s bench skills. But until the Daschle powder appeared, every quoted expert I had seen except Patrick said it couldn’t be done at all. After rumors broke that Bill Patrick, in a classified paper, had foreseen a bioterror attack using the mail service, a transcript of his paper was leaked to the press. The leaked version represents Patrick’s original text for S.A.I.C., typos and all, but with one critical omission: a footnote in which Patrick claims that the U.S. has refined “weaponized” powder to a trillion spores per gram has disappeared. By midsummer 2002, the F.B.I. and even Attorney General John Ashcroft were obliged to call Steve Hatfill a “person of interest,” despite diehard assurances from other government sources that he wasn’t. That August, the F.B.I. returned to Hatfill’s Maryland apartment. Searching his refrigerator, agents found a canister of Bacillus thuringiensis, or B.t. -- a mostly harmless pesticide widely used on caterpillars -- which USAMRIID adopted for study in 1995, after UNSCOM discovered that B.t. was Iraq’s favored anthrax simulant. On August 25, in a second dramatic press conference, Hatfill, having shaved his mustache of 20 years, protested his persecution. This was the first I had seen of my suspect. He was five feet eleven and 210 pounds, with pale-blue eyes and a downturned mouth. He would not mind being investigated, he said, except that Attorney General Ashcroft “has broken the Ninth Commandment: Thou shalt not bear false witness.” With these words, Hatfill’s voice cracked and his eyes welled up with tears. His emotional display won over many hearts, even among the usually cynical Washington press corps. The American press seems to enjoy dumping on the F.B.I. For the first nine months of the investigation, it was said that the F.B.I. was spinning its wheels. Ever since, it’s been said that the F.B.I. has ruined a man’s life -- that Steve Hatfill is a second Richard Jewell, the long-suffering suspect in the Centennial Olympic Park bombing. In May, one F.B.I. team trailed Hatfill so closely that its S.U.V. ran over his foot. Then the Washington police ticketed him for “walking to create a hazard.” I know something about the Centennial Olympic Park serial bomber, because I helped -- using linguistic evidence gleaned from the Army of God letters -- to direct investigative attention on to Eric Robert Rudolph. And it is my opinion, based on the documents I have examined, that Hatfill is no Richard Jewell. The F.B.I.”s early Centennial Olympic Park bombing suspect was said to fit a behavior profile of domestic bombers, but I found nothing in Jewell’s use of language to implicate him as a terrorist. As for Hatfill, it was the F.B.I.”s best team of trained bloodhounds, not an offender profile nor my text analysis, that finally persuaded the Amerithrax Task Force in July 2002 to associate Hatfill with the anthrax letters and put him under 24-hour surveillance. The bureau’s description of him as a “person of interest” is neither inaccurate nor unfair. (Through his lawyer, Hatfill maintained his innocence and declined to comment for this article.) One thing I’ve learned about the F.B.I. in my years as a civilian consultant is that the bureau is a compartmentalized house of secrets. Each field office and task force guards its information and documents like a treasure trove, and no one office, not even F.B.I. headquarters, has direct access to the whole picture. But the F.B.I. is an open book compared with our biowarfare establishment. The Pentagon has a long history of clandestine experimentation on human guinea pigs that bears looking into. In 1952, for example, the army conducted open-air tests at Fort McClellan, Alabama, with bioweapons simulants that, though bacterial, were supposedly harmless. When local respiratory illness skyrocketed and dozens of civilians died, the army quietly discontinued use of the problem simulant and carried on with another. Then there’s the 1965 simulated attack on the New York City subway. On June 8 of that year, under Bill Patrick’s direction, the subway was targeted with the anthrax simulant B.g. Lightbulbs, each containing 87 trillion spores, were dropped onto the tracks. Trains then sucked the clouds of live bacteria into the subway system. C.I.A. and military scientists, bearing fake ID”s, were on location to count the spores. More than a million riders were exposed to B.g. that day; many inhaled more than a million spores per minute. Patrick, when telling this story, still chuckles about how “we clobbered the Lexington line with B.g.” What he doesn’t say is that, during a similar test in San Francisco in 1950, one person died from B.g. complications and many others fell ill. The cause of the fatality was not discovered until 1977, when the U.S. Army, in Senate subcommittee hearings, finally disclosed its mock biological attack on San Francisco. (“We clobbered downtown San Francisco with Bacillus globigii,” Bill Patrick told his Maxwell Air Force Base audience in February 1999. “This was very successful.”) No one knows how many riders may have become sick from the 1965 New York” subway test. The experiment was kept secret for 20 years. By then, the statute of limitations for lawsuits was long past and contemporary medical records were hard to come by. It’s also a matter of record that in 1965 military scientists gassed Washington National Airport and a Greyhound bus terminal, using B.g. Most Americans would like to think that our government doesn’t do that kind of thing anymore. I’d like to report, for example, that our military had nothing to do with those three gas incidents at Baltimore- Washington and Washington National airports in 1997. Though the F.B.I. won’t confirm it, I’ve been told at least one of those three events involved the dissemination not of B.g. but of B.t., the same substance the F.B.I. discovered in Hatfill’s refrigerator in August 2002. It is not my job to indict or to try my own suspect for the anthrax murders. And even if the F.B.I. should find hard evidence linking Hatfill to a crime, he will remain innocent until proved guilty. But all Americans have a right to know more about the system that allowed Steven Hatfill to become one of the nation’s leading bioterror experts. Here is a fellow with a fake Ph.D. who posed for The Washington Times as a bioterrorist with a homemade plague disseminator, and who boasted as recently as last year of having served with the apartheid government’s notorious Selous Scouts during the Rhodesian anthrax epidemic. I have three different editions of his curriculum vitae, each one a tissue of lies. How did such a rascal come to be instructing the C.I.A., F.B.I., Defense Intelligence Agency, army, navy, Marines, U.S. marshals, and State Department on such matters as the handling of deadly pathogens and of bioterror incidents” How did he happen to acquire, to quote from his résumé, a “working knowledge of the former U.S. and foreign BW [biowarfare] programs, wet and dry BW agents, largescale production of bacterial, rickettsial, and viral BW pathogens and toxins, stabilizers and other additives, former BG simulant production methods, open air testing and vulnerability trials, single and 2 fluid nozzle dissemination, [and] bomblet design?” How did he obtain clearance to operate in top military labs on exotic viral pathogens, such as Ebola, and on Level 3 pathogens such as bubonic plague and anthrax? In August 2000, Hatfill trained forces at MacDill Air Force Base, in Tampa, using a makeshift bioterror “kitchen” lab that he built himself out of scavenged parts, as well as biosafety cabinets taken from USAMRIID. The borrowed cabinets, suitable for turning germs into weapons, are still missing and are said to have been destroyed. Hatfill, a certified scuba diver, once spoke of how to use a pond in the Frederick Municipal Forest”a few miles from his former residence in Maryland” to dispose of toxins. On that information, the F.B.I. searched Whiskey Springs Pond and found a homemade biosafety cabinet. The pond, when later drained, disclosed a rusty bicycle and a street sign but no new evidence. This summer, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Associated Press ran stories on Hatfill’s activities as a designer of simulated bioterror labs. None mentioned that Hatfill sprayed his trainees with samples of aerosolized B.g. When questioned about these activities, Hatfill, in apparent contradiction of his 2002 résumé, denied having knowledge of how to refine a dry bacterial powder to the level achieved by army scientists. The most curious piece of fieldwork noted on Steven Hatfill’s most recent C.V. is that of “open air testing and vulnerability trials.” In a 2001 paper, “Biological WarfareScenarios,” Bill Patrick called the 1965 simulated attack on the New York subway “one of the most important vulnerability studies” of the 70 he conducted. In 1969, when the army’s biowarfare program was officially terminated, Steven Hatfill was still in fifth grade. By 1998, Hatfill was Patrick’s sidekick in what one colleague has described as a “Batman and Robin” team. But it is from USAMRIID that Hatfill claims to have acquired his working knowledge of army-sponsored “vulnerability” trials. Several of America’s bioweaponeers have said, for the record, that the anthrax attack has an upside. The killings have forced long-awaited F.D.A. approval of the Bioport anthrax vaccine facility and prompted increased federal spending on biodefense -- by $6 billion in 2003 alone. But the anthrax offender also diverted law-enforcement resources when we needed them most and wreaked havoc on the U.S. Postal Service. He has shown the world how to disrupt the American economy with minimal expense, and how to kill with minimal risk of being caught. Now that it”s been done once, it seems likely to happen again. Bill Patrick -- whose expertise, in the wrong hands, may be deadly -- even though he is not --has advised our military to be prepared for something far worse: “People say to me, ‘BW”s not effective.’ Ladies and gentlemen, I”m here to tell you, you look at atomic energy, you look at chemical method of infection -- nothing, I mean nothing, produces what biological warfare does when you do your planning, and you have the right agent and the right dissemination-and-delivery system. Any questions?” FBI commissions anthrax tracking method by Debra George Siedt Capital News Service Sep. 11, 2003 ANNAPOLIS -- A new method, developed by a University of Maryland research team, to trace the growth of anthrax spores could aid the FBI in its ongoing anthrax investigations. The College Park campus researchers, led by Catherine Fenselau, studied how spores such as anthrax are developed, which could help the FBI connect spores found in an investigation with their method of growth. The University of Maryland team worked on the analysis from August 2002 to February 2003 in collaboration with FBI Academy scientists. The team submitted the report within the last month and the research will be submitted for scientific publication. The FBI is still investigating the anthrax scare that struck in October 2001. Five people died and at least 18 others were infected with anthrax in Washington, D.C., New York and Florida. As part of that probe, the bureau in June drained a 1-acre trout pond in Frederick County to hunt for anthrax spores or discarded biological equipment. "I don't think there's been a precedent for determining growth conditions," said Jeff Whiteaker, an analytical chemist and post-doctoral researcher at the University of Maryland. "There has never been a case where you would want to know." Anthrax spores are grown using different media, including agar, a gelatin-like substance, and a blood-based medium containing heme, an iron-containing component of blood. After the spores are harvested, traces of these media are left behind like fingerprints. The team used five different types of blood-based mediums to develop the heme-detecting method. "Our theory was that if you look at what is stuck to the outside of a spore, you can find out how it became a spore," said Fenselau in a news release. "Even when you try to clean up the spores, there are still scraps of stuff on the surface." A mass spectrometer -- a laboratory device that can distinguish a molecule by its weight and other characteristics -- can determine if heme was used as the medium to produce the anthrax spores. "It's very sensitive and very specific," said Whiteaker. "Even if we encounter compounds that have the same weight, we can confirm which molecule it is by the way it breaks up in the mass spectrometer." Neither Whiteaker nor the FBI would discuss the potential uses of the research. "We were funded to develop the method and they (the FBI) are free to do what they want with it," he said. Department of Justice guidelines and pending anthrax investigations do not allow the FBI to comment on the new method or how it will be used, a spokeswoman said. Post Magazine: The Puzzling Case of Steve Hatfill Marilyn Thompson Post Staff Writer Monday, September 15, 2003; 1:00 p.m ET It's not easy being "a person of interest" in post-9/11 America. Hatfill has been associated with the 2001 anthrax attacks--but never charged. And, in a lawsuit filed last month, he accused Ashcroft and the FBI of engaging in a "patently illegal campaign of harassment" to cover up their own failure to solve the case. Marilyn Thompson, whose article about Hatfill's case appeared in yesterday's Washington Post Magazine, will be online Monday, Sept. 15 at 1 p.m. ET to field questions and comments about the article. Thompson, a Post investigative reporter, is the author of "The Killer Strain: Anthrax and a Government Exposed." The transcript follows. Editor's Note: washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control over Live Online discussions and choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions. Galveston, Tex.: Regardless of the guilt or innocence of Hatfill, I'm disturbed by the FBI's narrow-minded methods. What if Hatfill is innocent and they have invested all their time and effort in the wrong guy? I used to debug network software for a living and trying to leap frog to a solution without investigating all the possibilities usually wastes time and causes embarrassment eventually. Marilyn Thompson: The FBI contends that it has pursued many other avenues, with thousands of interviews all over the country. Many months ago, the FBI made a couple of publicized searches of scientists' homes in Chester, Pa., and Milwaukee. They focused considerable attention on a former USAMRIID anthrax researcher who now lives in New Jersey. Agents say that they continue to put certain interesting people on the investigative "hot seat" from time to time to update their information and theories. The recent re-interviewing of inhalational anthrax victim Ernesto Blanco is a sign of their strategy -- to keep revisiting people and places looking for possible new clues or details missed during the initial hurried sweep. Yes, of course the bureau faces the prospect of major humiliation if this case remains unsolved, but officials talk confidently of bringing it to closure. They make clear that they operate on their own careful timetable and will not rush the case just to appease the public. Fredericksburg, Va.: Ms. Thompson, Thank you for helping keep the anthrax investigation alive. Hypothetical question: What if the anthrax mail was prepared by Hatfield, but delivered by another person? While many red flags do point to Hatfield, I am convinced he could escape prosecution with the workplace timecard alibi. Being hours away from the New Jersey mailbox where anthrax spores were found, and from where the notorious mail was postmarked, certainly pales the other circumstantial evidence piled against him at this time. While this defense argument seems to rest on the fact he cannot be placed in the vicinity of the mailings, it does not preclude the notion, however, that he could have prepared the package and an accomplice mailed it. Do you think more emphasis should be placed on investigating this possibility? Did two (or more) persons working together on some high-scale bioterrorism project, create and commit this "perfect crime"? Marilyn Thompson: I believe that the FBI has thought for some time that the commission of this crime involved more than one person. It is likely that an accomplice or accomplices helped mail the letters from their scattered locations. If you recall, a few bore a St. Petersburg postmark but the most virulent were stamped in Trenton. Hoax letters from other locations are believed to be involved. College Park, Md.: There seem to be numerous instances in which Hatfield seems easily connected with the anthrax mailings. So what evidence does the FBI actually need in order to make an arrest? Marilyn Thompson: Ideally, the FBI needs hard physical evidence - actual spores found in the possession of a suspect. The bureau does not have such evidence. That means that it would have to present a less convincing body of facts to a jury and run a higher risk of losing the case. Baltimore, Md.: So, how does someone with dim creditials -- no Ph.D. and difficulty in med school -- work his way from studying viruses in 1997 to reportedly having "close ties to U.S. military intelligence or the CIA?" Why did Leahy's committee have to prod the FBI to investigate this guy? Marilyn Thompson: Good questions. Mr. Hatfill seems to have benefitted from inattentiveness to detail and to some loopholes. The Phd. certificate he submitted to NIH could have easily been tracked back by authorities and exposed as a forgery, but it was overlooked and Hatfill's credentials helped him gain access to sensitive government agencies. USAMRIID allowed him in as a contract researcher because it depended on his funding agency to vet his credentials, and so on and so on. As for the influence of Leahy's committee, I think it is safe to say that this FBI investigation has been more closely watched and prodded than any other -- since two of the intended victims were members of the U.S. Senate. Chicago, Ill.: Has Dr. Hatfill even been notified that he is a target of the grand jury? Marilyn Thompson: His attorneys say that he has not. Washington, D.C.: They dredged and drained a pond. They surveilled him for over two years. They have taken apart every computer the man ever touched. Please -- remind me -- exactly what further evidence against Hatfill do they purport to have? Is it lawful for them to continue hounding him? Marilyn Thompson: The FBI contends that it is lawful for the agency to watch anyone that it considers a public threat, and certainly, under the new powers of the Patriot Act, the bureau has authority to pursue anyone suspected of any connection whatsoever to a terrorism act. That being said, I think that the FBI is increasingly aware that it needs to produce a case or back off of this particular individual. Washington, D.C.: Doesn't it seem a little suspicious that Hatfill threatened The Post reporter's career, a la John Mitchell during Watergate? It seems that an innocent man wouldn't mind the news media -- during their fact-finding stages -- talking to his acquaintances. Any thoughts on this? Marilyn Thompson: Of course, I have many thoughts on this. Having worked on many stories of this kind over far too many years, threats of this sort are fairly unusual and more than a little unsettling. Los Angeles, Calif.: Does it seem credible to you that John Ashcroft's handling of the Hatfill affair could have been unaffected by input from his boss, President George W. Bush? Marilyn Thompson: I certainly believe that this case is being monitored by the highest levels of government. The President, however, has made no public comment on it since the early days of the attacks. Ilion, N.Y.: Does Attorney Glasberg still represent Dr. Hatfill (in addition to the lawyers at the other firm)? His presentations in the summer of 2002 were very impressive. Marilyn Thompson: Yes, Dr. Hatfill's press conferences were very well managed, mostly due to the input of his then-spokesman Pat Clawson, a former television investigative reporter with media savvy. Glasberg is a civil lawyer and Hatfill consulted him early on about possible lawsuits against the media and government agencies. His new team specializes in criminal law but also is handling his lawsuit against the Justice Department and FBI. Los Angeles, Calif.: Have you been able to confirm the story which appeared in SEED magazine and the The Observer newspaper that Hatfill fabricated his MSc research? Do you know who fed that story to researchers, and what their motivation is? Marilyn Thompson: I do not know who fed that story to SEED magazine or leaked an old email in which Hatfill's Professor Bohm was complaining about the student's research techniques. Dr. Bohm declined to speak with me but did tell me that he understands Hatfill's research has now been successfully duplicated. Angers, France: Can you tell us anything about the status of the grand jury? Thank you for the story! Marilyn Thompson: Numerous friends and associates of Dr. Hatfill told me that they have received document subpoenas from a federal grand jury supervised by U.S. Attorney Roscoe Howard. I have found no one who has actually been called to testify. Virginia: How many lawyers and spokesmen does he have? They seemed to changed all the time. Must be stressful to work for. Marilyn Thompson: I think there has been some tension in the legal team, resulting recently in Pat Clawson's decision to have nothing more to do with the case. This followed on the heels of a very lively City Paper story in which Hatfill and Clawson allowed a reporter to ride with them while they were purportedly pursued by the FBI. Usually, criminal defense lawyers frown on this kind of antics, which may not sit well with a federal judge. West Chester, Pa.: Ms. Thompson -- Thanks for your continuing scientific investigation of the anthrax story. Your detailed description of Steven Hatfill's pinpointing by the FBI was the most comprehensive account I've seen. However, equally as plausible is to take the notes in recovered envelopes at face value and assume that the perpetrator(s) is(are) Muslim extremists. Some points perhaps worthy of note: 1. Each of the postmarks recovered was on a Tuesday (following soon after 9/11, a Tuesday); 2. Bob Stevens, the first anthrax casualty, worked for a tabloid which had recently published a scathing article regarding unsavory habits of the Saudi royal family; 3. Two of the highjackers (Atta and el-Shehhi) had rented an apartment in Ft. Lauderdale from an AMI editor's wife while taking flight lessons; and 4. One of the highjackers had presented himself to a doctor in Ft. Lauderdale with a black-scabbed skin lesion in July 2001, which, in retrospect, the doctor admitted could have been cutaneous anthrax. I'd like your opinion on this alternative scenario, which, I believe, has as much credence as the trumped up case against Steven Hatfill. Thanks. Marilyn Thompson: I appreciate your question. I wrote extensively about the hijacker theory in a book I did on the anthrax attacks. The FBI contends that it pursued a hijacker connection in the early days and became convinced that they were not involved in these mailings -- mainly because the anthrax strain used was a military research strain. Many people in Florida, however, who know about the hijackers' movements in that part of the country in the months before 9/11, do not believe the FBI pursued this with enough vigor. Easton, Md.: Good article. Thank you. In the current issue of Vanity Fair, literary analyist Don Foster infers that Hatfill was present in a part of Africa that suffered a devastating outbreak of anthrax, where no anthrax had been before. Would you care to comment on Professor Foster's article? Marilyn Thompson: I have read Mr. Foster's article with great interest. His frustrations with the FBI are shared by other consultants who have worked on the peripheries of this case. I believe you are referring to Mr. Hatfill's years in Rhodesia at the time of a massive outbreak of anthrax poisoning the Tribal Trust Lands, an event that has been extensively analyzed as a possible bioterror event. Angers, France: Yes, the issue of Pat Clawson is interesting. He was such a passionate supporter of Mr. Hatfill. Is there any info on what caused him to abandon his support (or at least his public support)? Marilyn Thompson: He has not abandoned his support of Hatfill. He truly believes that Hatfill had nothing to do with these crimes and is being unfairly targeted. But he has differed with the new lawyers on several crucial issues -- including how much Hatfill should be allowed to say publicly in his own defense. Washington, D.C.: I heard that at the time of Barbara Rosenberg's meeting with Senators Leahy and Daschle, many Senators had publicly made it known that they were displeased with how the FBI had handled domestic terrorism cases and were considering turning those responsibilities over to another government agency. Do you think this had anything to do with why the FBI turned up the heat on Hatfill in the following weeks? Marilyn Thompson: Yes, there had been much displeasure on the Hill with the FBI's performance on terrorism cases. I do not know about your theory that the responsibilities could have been turned over to others. But it seems very clear that the FBI cannot afford to have a high-ranking Senator, at that time the Judiciary Committee chairman, convinced that it was not aggressively pursuing leads and trying to solve this important case. The pressure from Capitol Hill continues to be intense. Bethesda, Md.: Great article! Way to present both sides throughout the story. It is hard to tell whether he did it or not, you seem to have created a planned the confustion in your article. It seemed to really represent the confusion of the FBI in the investigation. Being a graduate with a degree in Biology and working in the research field, this was a very interesting article. Everything seems to be pointing to Hatfill, but somehow and someway the FBI can't pin-point him or anyone else for that matter. If I were a betting man, which I am not, I would say it was someone that is close to Hatfill and that new his actions, and by knowing his location, especially in London, the blame and evidence could be traced to Hatfill and not the real perpetrator. Again, great article. Thank you Marilyn Thompson: Thanks for your feedback. Yes, confusion has been a very real factor in this investigation. Confusion over the science especially. As I reported, lab analysis alone has cost $13 million and it is not yet complete. McLean, Va.: If Hatfill does not have either an MD or a Ph.D, why do you continue to refer to him as "Dr. Hatfill?" Marilyn Thompson: Hatfill has a medical degree. The Phd. is the one in question. Deale, Md.: Greeting, Marilyn: Sandra here at Bay Weekly. Is this person of interest or someone else indeed likely to get away with a "perfect crime?" It's vastly puzzling -- as curious as the twists and turns of the investigation of the assassination of Marilyn Thompson: The FBI has made it clear that it considers solving this case extremely important, partly because of the message it wants to send to anyone else who would ever contemplate using a deadly agent against American citizens. Let's hope the agency is successful in solving it. Death by anthrax is a ghastly proposition. Long Beach, Calif.: Two questions: 1. If Mr. Hatfill seemed to often talk hypothetically about how to conduct bio-terror attacks, perhaps someone close to him learned techniques from him. Has this avenue been explored? 2. Isn't it interesting that the letters were sent to news organizations and Democratic politicians. Has anyone investigated Mr. Hatfill's political leanings, or anyone elses, that would lead a would be attacker to target such individuals? Marilyn Thompson: Yes, the avenue you describe has been explored. As for political leanings, the FBI has said from the start that it believes this person is of a conservative bent, which might explain the intended targets to some degree. VANITY FARCE? Hatfill lawyer rips mag’s anthrax article LAURA PELNER , Staff Writer The Trentonian 09/15/2003 Ask Steven Hatfill’s lawyer about the new October issue of Vanity Fair magazine, and you’ll hear a little chuckle. It’s not that Thomas Connolly dislikes George Clooney, who graces the cover. What really irks him is the small headline next to Clooney’s arm, the one about missed anthrax clues. The story is about Connolly’s client, Hatfill, who was named the lead "person of interest" in the deadly anthrax outbreak in 2001. Within the story’s 11 glossy pages in Vanity Fair, the author tells a compelling tale about Hatfill. One that implicates the virologist in an evil plot to gain recognition for his passion -- biological weapons and weapons of mass destruction -- by any means, including launching a home-grown attack in the U.S. so people realize how important his work is. The author, Don Foster, is considered a linguistics expert by many people. In addition to teaching at Vassar College, he’s credited with pioneering the field of textual analysis, which involves studying written works to determine their author. Even before the anthrax outbreak in 2001, Foster had worked on high-profile cases that involved a literary angle, such as the Unibomber and the JonBenet Ramsey murder. And after the terrorist attacks, he was sought after to study the anthrax-laced letters that killed a handful of Americans and crippled the U.S. Postal Service. According to his Vanity Fair article, the government hoped Foster would be able to determine who sent the letters. It’s this notion of Foster as a super-sleuth that makes Connolly laugh, especially after reading the Vanity Fair piece. "It’s impossible for me to comment," Connolly told The Trentonian. "The article is ripe with so many errors. The real story is what a fraud (Foster) actually is." The lawyer said he could not squeeze his rebuttal to the magazine piece into a short enough format for print. Though he did say the team working forHatfill would respond to the article somehow. And, he added, he was "absolutely" upset that Vanity Fair ran the piece as it did. "I don’t care to offer an opinion on it, we’ll deal with Mr. Foster when we have to," Connolly explained. "I’m going to take action. You’ve got a guy who claims he’s got this incredible skill, textual analysis, but when you read the article you think, where is the evidence that Steven (Hatfill) authored these letters. There’s nothing there." What is in the article is a frightening take on the anthrax fiasco. Foster talks about the anthrax letters and discusses his interpretation of their meaning. For example, Foster says the misspellings "penacilin" and "unthinkabel," (written with backwards N’s) in the letters were deliberate and used to throw off investigators. "That ‘penacilin’ was the offender’s way of saying, ‘Look, I don’t know much about antibiotics. I don’t even know how to spell penicillin. So don’t start thinking that I’m an American scientist. I’m just a semi-literate foreign fanatic,’" Foster says in the article. The literary expert goes on to discuss the geography of the letters -- where they were sent and what their return addresses mean. The "Franklin Park, NJ 08852," tag was another hoax, he said, to lead authorities in the wrong direction. In reality, the 08852 zip code is from Monmouth Junction, not Franklin Park. So, Foster reasons, whoever sent the letters must be familiar with the area, and he probably wanted police to go to those towns. Hatfill doesn’t become a major player in the Vanity Fair piece until Foster links the government scientist to the Zimbabwe anthrax outbreak in the late 1970’s, in which more than 10,000 people died. Foster says Hatfill was in Zimbabwe studying for his M.D. at the time and that the virologist bragged in writings about supporting a zealous militia group in the country. "When I lined up Hatfill’s known movements with the postmark locations of reported biothreats, those hoax anthrax attacks appeared to trail him like a vapor cloud," Foster wrote in Vanity Fair. In his article, Foster writes that the government became increasingly less helpful as it became more apparent Hatfill might be dangerous. At one point, when Foster mentioned Hatfill as a potential suspect, the literary expert says officials told him he was "spending too much time on this" and that Hatfill had a good alibi. The Vanity Fair piece also links Hatfill to the Maryland Pond that was drained and searched for bioweapons and Foster charges the manfabricated his resume and literally created his Ph.D. on the computer. "It is not my job to indict or to try my own suspect for the anthrax murders," Foster says in Vanity Fair. "And even if the FBI should find hard evidence linking Hatfill to a crime, he will remain innocent until proved guilty. But all Americans have a right to know more about the system that allowed Steven Hatfill to become one of the nation’s leading bioterror experts." ©The Trentonian 2003 Sep 19, 7:33 PM Tax collector at war with anthrax By Alan Snel FLORIDA TODAY Two years after anthrax-laden mail killed several Americans and stoked fears nationwide, Brevard County's tax collector still is checking every piece of mail for anthrax and other biohazards in two special trailers in Titusville. "We're still at war," Brevard County Tax Collector Rod Northcutt said. "We care about our employees." No other Brevard County offices test their mail for anthrax. And a spokesman at the Centers of Disease Control in Atlanta said he is unaware of any local government that test their mail for anthrax. The county ended its daily practice of testing its mail for anthrax about nine months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, recalled Hugh Muller, Brevard's facilities management director. "It was an economic decision based on the perception that it was no longer a viable threat," Muller said. Northcutt began anthrax testing at a time when the bacteria began showing up in mail after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The photo editor of a supermarket tabloid based in Lantana died from the bacteria, and mail to leaders in New York and Washington tested positive for it. In all, 22 people were sickened and five died after a series of anthrax attacks that targeted news agencies in New York and a congressional office building in Washington in the days following the terrorist attacks. The hysteria caused sheriff's deputies and other emergency personnel to chase false alarms around Brevard County for weeks. Today, Northcutt rents two special mail trailers behind the county court records building and sheriff's office in Titusville for $340 a month. Northcutt also spends $35 a day for the Wuesthoff Reference Laboratory to test a giant swab that wipes the office's letter-opening machine and the surface where the letters pass by below a protective hood. The culture is placed in a Petri dish at the lab. There have not been any anthrax deliveries since the testing began. Northcutt said his office even paid $400 to an employee's father who was an anthrax expert to discuss biohazard issues with tax collector workers. Northcutt justified the continuing anthrax testing by explaining the "anthrax guy was not caught" and that "we get mail from across the world." As a favor to Property Appraiser Jim Ford, the tax collector's trailers also are used to test the property appraiser's office mail. "If he has the equipment set up, we might as well take advantage of it," Ford said. Scott Ellis, the county clerk of courts, said Northcutt's anthrax testing represents "a different philosophy." "He feels it's important to have it tested. I can be sympathetic, but the odds of sending something to Brevard County are virtually nil. I'd hate to let these terrorist SOBs control our lives," Ellis said. County Commissioner Truman Scarborough said he was unaware that Northcutt was testing mail for anthrax and didn't know why only the tax collector tests mail for anthrax in Brevard. He theorized that the tax collector's office could be a target because, "The payment of taxes is one of those things that people get irritated with." CDC spokesman Von Roebuck said Northcutt should contact the health department if he has anthrax concerns. "Perhaps Mr. Northcutt is a very forward-thinking individual on this," Ford said. September 19, 2003, 9:00 a.m. The National Review No Question About It Saddam and the terrorists. by James S. Robbins - contributing editor When President Bush stated that "we've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the September 11th" attacks, his critics quickly spun this into "Saddam Hussein had no links to terrorism." This was despite the fact that in the same breath the president had said, "there's no question that Saddam Hussein had al Qaeda ties." According to Editor & Publisher, the story got little play, though it is certain to come back to haunt the president during the election campaign when Democrats seek to wedge the Iraq and al Qaeda issues. Thus, it is useful to review the bidding on the known facts of the relationship between the two. While it is still debatable to what degree Saddam Hussein supported the global terrorist network, it is becoming increasingly clear that Iraq provided terror groups with some forms of logistical, intelligence, transportation, training, weapons, and other support. The emerging evidence points to the conclusion that al Qaeda had a cooperative relationship — that is, a strategic alliance — with Iraq. The conventional wisdom has been that this could not have been the case because bin Laden, an Islamic fanatic reactionary, and Saddam, a secular Baathist modernizer, could never align or cooperate. On a personal level, they probably hated each other. If intelligence analysts approach their task with the premise that a relationship could not exist, they will lack the analytical framework necessary to piece together the clues that could demonstrate that it did. Maybe an Elvis Presley/Richard Nixon-type photo of the two would convince them, but not much else. INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 101 But the premise is facile. The principle that drove Iraq and al Qaeda together is one of the oldest in international-relations theory — the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The motive for their alliance was a common hatred for the United States and Israel. Ideology seldom determines wartime-alliance structures, and for both Saddam and Osama the 1990s were wartime. The Iraq/al Qaeda combination is as reasonable as the temporary strategic alliance between the U.S. and the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany, or Syrian and American troops fighting side by side during Operation Desert Storm. (Note that it is hard to distinguish Syria from Iraq ideologically, and Baathist solidarity was certainly not a motivating factor in the relationship between the two countries.) Moreover, despite their personal dislike for each other, Saddam Hussein was the only state leader openly to praise bin Laden's attacks on the U.S. (if not bin Laden himself). Saddam Hussein showed no reluctance to support terrorism per se during his career. The fact that he gave money to the families of Palestinian suicide terrorists and had a close working relationship with the PLO was well known, and something he admitted. The Iraqi regime maintained a terrorist training camp at Salman Pak near Baghdad where foreign terrorists were instructed in methods of taking over commercial aircraft using weapons no more sophisticated than knives (interesting thought that). Saddam also harbored Abu Nidal and other members of his international terror organization (ANO) in Baghdad. Abu Nidal died under suspicious circumstances in Baghdad in August 2002, an apparent multiple gunshot suicide. Abd-al-Rahman Isa, ANO's second in command based in Amman, Jordan, was kidnapped September 11, 2002, and has not been heard from since. Coalition forces did recently apprehend ANO member Khala Khadr al-Salahat, the man who reputedly made the bomb for the Libyans that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. He was hiding out in Baghdad. Another bomb maker, Abdul Rahman Yasin, was also a Baghdad resident. He was one of the conspirators in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing who had fled there after being detained briefly by the FBI. Recent document finds in Tikrit show that Iraq supplied Yasin with both money and sanctuary. The 1993 WTC attack was masterminded by Yasin's associate Ramzi Yousef, who received financial support from al Qaeda through Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a key 9/11 planner. There is also the case of Abu Zubayr, an officer in Saddam's secret police who was also the ringleader of an al Qaeda cell in Morocco. He attended the September 5, 2001 meeting in Spain with other al Qaeda operatives, including Ramzi Bin-al-Shibh, the 9/11 financial chief. Abu Zubayr was apprehended in May, 2002, while putting together a plot to mount suicide attacks on U.S. ships passing through the straits of Gibraltar. He has allegedly since stated that Iraq trained and supplied chemical weapons to al Qaeda. In the fall of 2001 al Qaeda refugees from Afghanistan took refuge in northern Iraq until they were driven out by Coalition forces, and Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, an al Qaeda terrorist active in Europe and North Africa, fled from Baghdad during Operation Iraqi Freedom. He has reportedly been sent back to Iraq to coordinate al Qaeda activities there. Iraq made direct payments to the Philippine-based al Qaeda-affiliated Abu Sayyaf group. Hamsiraji Sali, an Abu Sayyaf leader on the U.S. most-wanted terrorist list, stated that his gang received about one million pesos (around $20,000) each year from Iraq, for chemicals to make bombs. The link was substantiated immediately after a bombing in Zamboanga City in October 2002 (in which three people were killed including an American Green Beret), when Abu Sayyaf leaders called up the deputy secretary of the Iraqi embassy in Manila, Husham Hussain. Six days later, the cell phone used to call Hussain was employed as the timer on a bomb set to go off near the Philippine military's Southern Command headquarters. Fortunately, the bomb failed to detonate, and the phone yielded various contact numbers, including Hussain's and Sali's. This evidence, coupled with other intelligence the Philippine government would not release, led to Hussain's expulsion in February 2003. In March, ten Iraqi nationals, some with direct links to al Qaeda, were rounded up in the Philippines and deported as undesirable aliens. In addition, two more consulate officials were expelled for spying. The most intriguing potential link is reflected in documents found by Toronto Star reporter Mitch Potter in Baghdad in April, 2003. The documents detail direct links between al Qaeda and Saddam's regime dating back at least to 1998, and mention Osama bin Laden by name. The find supports an October 2001 report by William Safire that noted, among other things, a 1998 meeting in Baghdad between al Qaeda #2 Ayman al Zawahiri and Saddam's vice president, Taha Yasin Ramadan. Other reports have alleged bin Laden himself traveled to Iraq around that time, or at least planned to. Former Iraqi ambassador to Turkey, Farouk Hijazi, now in custody, allegedly met with bin Laden before the 9/11 attacks. THE ATTA CASE The alleged meeting between 9/11 team leader Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence agents in Prague, Czech Republic (CR) is a unique case in that the Czechs have been more adamant about proving it than the United States. Interior Minister Stanislav Gross held a press conference on October 26, 2001, revealing the details of the Prague connection. According to Czech police, visa records indicate that Atta visited Prague twice in 2000. His first confirmed visit was while he was in transit from Hamburg to Newark, New Jersey, June 2-3, 2000. The German newspaper Das Bild reported on October 25, 2001 that according to unnamed FBI sources, Atta met with Iraqi diplomat Ahmad Samir al-Ani in a cafe in Prague on June 2. Another report has it that Atta did not leave the airport terminal since he lacked a visa. Later that summer Atta flew back to the CR. He stayed one night in the Prague Hilton, and may have spent a brief period of time in the town of Kutna Hora, 35 miles north of Prague, under the name Mohammed Sayed Ahmed. During his second visit, he allegedly met with Ahmed Hedshani, the former Iraqi ambassador to Turkey. The more controversial part of the story is the alleged meeting between Atta and al-Ani in the Iraqi embassy in Prague in the spring of 2001. Atta was identified based on photographs published after the 9/11 attacks by an informer who was at the embassy at the time and had met Atta, though said he was "not 100 percent sure" it was him. The Czech counterintelligence service (BIS) gives it a 70 percent probability. Al-Ani was expelled from the Czech Republic in April 22, 2001, for "activities which conflicted with his status." He was allegedly plotting an attack on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), which was also supporting Radio Free Iraq. But if they met, why? It is unlikely they were discussing the alleged RFE/RL operation, since Atta had more important things to do and the Iraqis did not need his help with that one anyway. They might have been discussing the 9/11 attacks, but there is no evidence to support that claim. The article in Das Bild raised another, more intriguing possibility: The Iraqis were supplying Atta with anthrax spores for use in attacks on the United States. The anthrax attacks had commenced shortly before the article was published, and the idea seemed plausible at the time. In fact, it still does — the anthrax used in the attacks was weapons grade, the attacks originated from areas near where the hijackers had been active, and two years of investigation have not turned up the presupposed domestic perpetrator. At some point, you would think Occam's Razor would come into play. The US Justice Department disputes most of the above. Because the US has no independent evidence that the 2001 meeting occurred, and since an examination of INS records published in May 2002 showed no movements corresponding to the Czech timeline, Justice concluded that the meeting could not have taken place. (The report did however show Atta going to Madrid for a week in January 2001, and to Zurich for twelve days in July 2001.) Yet, the Prague meeting came and went in a day or so. If Atta had traveled under an assumed name, a possibility the Justice Department acknowledged, he could have been there and back before anyone noticed. (Iraqi deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz also denied the meetings took place.) The affair has been a matter of contention between the U.S. and CR. Interior Minister Gross, BIS chief Jiri Ruzek, and Jan Klas, chairman of the parliamentary commission overseeing the BIS, have stated that thus far they have seen no evidence to challenge their conclusions. Clearly, the essential person to talk to is al-Ani. He was reportedly apprehended by U.S. forces on July 2, 2003, though where he was caught, where he is now, and what he has had to say about the alleged meetings, are all unanswered questions. Last June, former CIA Director James Woolsey said that "there were enough connections [between al Qaeda] and Iraq and Iraqi intelligence that we ought to be looking at this very hard, as we capture files and people and hard disk drives in Iraq and so on, and see what we can turn up." There are more open-sourced links than those noted here — I would refer readers to Appendix A of Richard Miniter's Losing Bin Laden for some more noteworthy incidents and possible evidence of collusion. As I have noted before, Saddam Hussein had means, motive, and opportunity to be involved with global terrorism, and al Qaeda in particular. Much remains to be revealed, and one hopes the administration is compiling a dossier to make the case in detail and beyond doubt. The president has stated that there is no question these ties existed, and it is frustrating that something unquestionable keeps being questioned so persistently. Widow of Boca newsman killed by anthrax sues U.S. for $50 million The South Florida Sun-Sentinel By JILL BARTON Associated Press September 24, 2003, 4:40 PM EDT WEST PALM BEACH -- The widow of the photo editor killed in the nation's first anthrax attack in 2001 sued the federal government on Wednesday, alleging that lax security at an Army lab caused his death. Maureen Stevens is seeking more than $50 million in what is believed to be the first lawsuit to hold the federal government accountable for producing and mishandling the deadly strain of anthrax that allegedly killed her husband. Robert Stevens, an editor for The Sun tabloid, is believed to have contracted the disease in October 2001 from a tainted letter sent to the Boca Raton headquarters of American Media Inc. Anthrax was also sent through the mail to media outlets in New York and a congressional building in Washington, killing four others and sickening more than a dozen people. Maureen Stevens hopes the lawsuit forces the government to take action on its languishing investigation and provides answers to the victims' families, said her attorney, Richard Schuler. ``She doesn't want this to get wrapped up in government red tape when there's a killer that has used this deadly anthrax and was able to get this stuff because of lax security at a government lab,'' Schuler said. ``Missing a little bit here or there is not good enough when you're dealing with the deadly anthrax bacillus.'' Army spokesman Chuck Dasey declined to comment on the lawsuit. Another victim who survived an anthrax attack, postal worker Leroy Richmond, also has sued, but his claim targets postal officials at Washington's Brentwood facility. He's asking for $100 million alleging that postal managers endangered his life by waiting too long to close the postal facility where he worked after anthrax contamination was discovered. Schuler said he believed DNA tests on the anthrax found at Stevens' office would prove it was from the same strain as the anthrax produced at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md. The lab develops vaccines and drugs to protect service members from biological warfare agents. The lawsuit alleges that government officials failed to act when security was breached at the facility and have failed to put new policies in place that would prevent a future attack. Posted on Wed, Sep. 24, 2003 Widow of anthrax victim files lawsuits alleging negligence BY KATHY BUSHOUSE AND JON BURSTEIN South Florida Sun-Sentinel FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. - (KRT) - The widow of inhalation-anthrax victim Bob Stevens filed two lawsuits Wednesday, alleging negligence by either the federal government or by a handful of laboratories that handle the anthrax bacteria that may have led to her husband's death. Attorneys representing Maureen Stevens filed lawsuits in both state and federal court. The federal lawsuit is against the U.S. government; the state lawsuit is against two companies _Battelle Memorial Institute, a Columbus, Ohio, nonprofit research company with numerous U.S. military contracts; BioPort Corp., a Lansing, Mich. company that manufactures the only FDA-approved anthrax vaccine. The state and federal lawsuits outline the same arguments - that negligence and bad practices by either the federal government or the companies led to someone getting a sample of Bacillus anthracis that was later mailed to American Media Inc. in Boca Raton, in the letter that Bob Stevens handled. Bob Stevens died Oct. 5, 2001, from inhalation anthrax. His was the first death in a wave of bioterrorism attacks that killed five people. West Palm Beach attorney Richard Schuler, who is representing Stevens, said the purpose of the lawsuits is simple: "To find out how this was done and who did it." The federal lawsuit comes after a $50 million claim filed in February against the Department of Defense and the Department of the Army. Since that claim wasn't settled, the federal lawsuit was filed, Schuler said. Maureen Stevens had until Oct. 5 to file a claim in state court, because that is when Florida's two-year statute of limitations for a wrongful-death lawsuit would have run out. In addition, filing the case in state court would ensure that a jury of Maureen Stevens' peers would consider the case. In federal court, the law requires a judge, not a jury, to consider the case since the legal action was filed against the federal government, Schuler said. Schuler said he has filed a series of Freedom of Information Act requests with the federal government, but many of them gone ignored. However, he said, he has received some employee records from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in Maryland. It is from that government facility that Schuler believes the anthrax may have come. The federal lawsuit accuses the federal government of failing to adequately secure samples of the anthrax bacteria, and claims that as early as 1992, "samples of this formidable, dangerous and highly lethal organism were known to be missing from the lab at Ft. (sic) Detrick … along with samples of the Hanta virus and the Ebola virus." Those allegations surfaced in a whistleblower's lawsuit filed against the government by two scientists who claim they were fire because they asserted there was a severe lack of security at the Army facility. Schuler said he talked to one former U.S. AMRIID employee who described walking out of a secured-area facility with three cardboard boxes that were never examined by guards. While the boxes he had contained nothing harmful, he was coming out of a containment area where potentially deadly diseases were handled. Chuck Dasey, a spokesman for the U.S. AMRIID, declined to comment Wednesday. Officials at the Department of the Army at the Pentagon could not be reached, despite two phone calls seeking comment. Thomas McClain, vice president of corporate communications for Battelle Memorial Institute, said the company had not received the complaint and declined to comment. Officials at BioPort Corp. could not be reached. To this day, the source of the anthrax that killed Stevens has not been revealed, nor has it been revealed if investigators ever found the letter that killed the longtime tabloid photo editor. The FBI still has not named a suspect, though it has have identified "persons of interest" in connection with the anthrax case. Federal investigators made two trips to the AMI building in their search for clues, removing hundreds of letters and office machinery. FBI officials also could not be reached for comment Wednesday. AMI's Boca Raton office building was quarantined Oct. 7, 2001 by the Palm Beach County Health Department, and today remains under that quarantine. Maureen Stevens has collected worker's compensation insurance, and AMI also helped pay her husband's medical bills. Maureen Stevens could not be reached for comment Wednesday, but Schuler said she and her three children continue to mourn their loss. "They miss their father and husband," Schuler said. "He was one of those guys liked by everyone." --- (South Florida Sun-Sentinel correspondents Peter Franceschina and Patty Pensa and researcher Barbara Hijek contributed to this report.) Science Magazine September 26, 2003 PUBLIC HEALTH: Building Microbial Forensics as a Response to Bioterrorism (Illustrations omitted) By: Bruce Budowle,1 - Steven E. Schutzer,2 - Anja Einseln,1 - Lynda C. Kelley,3 - Anne C. Walsh,4 - Jenifer A. L. Smith,1 - Babetta L. Marrone,5 - James Robertson,1 - Joseph Campos 6 - (credentials listed below) Bioterrorists use microbes or their toxins to invoke fear, to inflict harm, and to impact economic well-being (1, 2). Although microbes have been used as weapons for centuries (3, 4), the anthrax letter attacks of 2001 generated great terror in the public. The attacks and subsequent public reactions revealed the need for an infrastructure with analytical tools and knowledge bases to rapidly provide investigative leads and help determine who was responsible for the crime (i.e., attribution), the source of the anthrax, and how and where the weapon was produced. There are examples of well-developed practices for handling and analyzing pathogenic agents (5, 6). However, many of these assays address epidemiological concerns and do not provide sufficient information on the strain or isolate to allow law enforcement to better identify the source of the evidence sample. The continued development of additional assays for individualization of microbial strains is needed. For example, determining the microbe sent in a letter as Bacillus anthracis identifies the causative agent. At this point anyone who had access to B. anthracis is considered a potential perpetrator of the crime. But determining it was the Ames strain, an uncommon strain in nature, limits the investigation to those who had access to the specific strain and exculpates innocent scientists investigating B. anthracis. All of the above must be defined adequately and validated sufficiently to meet forensic needs. Furthermore, there are not many laboratories with adequate biocontainment facilities to handle forensic cases. Partner laboratories with specialty expertise will assist in investigations. There is little guidance on the logistics and financial commitment required to construct a microbial forensics laboratory or to retool partner laboratories to perform microbial forensic work. The U.S. government now has the goal of instituting a dedicated national microbial forensics system. Microbial forensics can be defined as a scientific discipline dedicated to analyzing evidence from a bioterrorism act, biocrime, or inadvertent microorganism/toxin release for attribution purposes. Law enforcement has had the traditional role and infrastructure for investigating crimes and is now enhancing its capabilities to confront the new challenge of biological weapon usage and bioterrorism through partnership with the scientific community. To lay a proper foundation for the field of microbial forensics, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) initiated the Scientific Working Group on Microbial Genetics and Forensics (SWGMGF) on 29 July 2002 (7). This working group provides an avenue for scientists from diverse disciplines within the government, academia, and the private sector to address issues collaboratively and to develop guidelines related to the operation of microbial forensics. The FBI has hosted scientific working groups for other forensic disciplines. Perhaps the most notable is the Scientific Working Group on DNA Analysis Methods (8). Its success can be seen by the common use of DNA analysis in crime laboratories, the existence of standards of performance and practices, and the overwhelming acceptance of DNA analysis in the courts. Similarly, the SWGMGF aims to contribute to the infrastructure and development of tools for microbial forensics. The members of SWGMGF, whose expertise spans multiple diverse scientific disciplines, represent a number of government agencies (9) and academia (10). Substantial input can also come from industry, and representatives from the private sector will be invited on a case-by-case basis for consultation. The cost of operations of the working group is relatively inexpensive because participants serve voluntarily. The SWGMGF initially has focused on (i) defining quality assurance (QA) guidelines for laboratories performing microbial forensic casework analyses; (ii) establishing criteria for development and validation of methods to characterize or individualize various threat agents in ways that can be used forensically to attribute criminal acts; (iii) prioritizing efforts on those pathogens and toxins that would most likely be used in biocrimes; (iv) understanding and enhancing microbial population genetic data so that a finding can be interpreted; and (v) establishing design criteria for information databases. Because quality practices are so important for establishing a solid foundation and maintaining credibility, the top priority was to develop a QA document for laboratories performing microbial forensic analyses. The QA guidelines document has been completed and is presented here (see supporting online material). We address the whole laboratory infrastructure and processes encompassing the analytical typing process including organization, management, personnel education and training, facilities, security, documentation, data analysis, quality control of reagents and equipment, technical controls, validation, proficiency testing, reporting of results, auditing of the laboratory procedures, and safety. These QA guidelines are based on the standards for human forensic DNA typing (11), clinical laboratories standards (12), and the International Standards Organization (13), as well as the experience of a broad range of scientists. Earlier drafts of this QA guidelines document were presented for commentary to members of several universities, public health departments, hospitals, and professional societies to obtain broad input from the scientific community. The QA guidelines must be continuously reviewed so that they can evolve on the basis of experiences and current challenges. Comments for improving these guidelines are necessary and welcomed and should be sent to the authors. We also welcome input that may facilitate implementation. We believe these guidelines will provide a basis for uniform quality practices for laboratories performing microbial forensics work, as well as others in various fields of science. Microbial forensics draws on the expertise of many disciplines. For example, an investigation may require a microbiologist for evaluating culture morphology, a chemist for isotope analysis, a molecular biologist for genetic typing, and a forensic scientist for fingerprint analysis. Each of these scientists will need to carry out analyses under quality practice conditions appropriate to a forensic investigation. Documents such as the QA guidelines provide focus and guidance for scientists who perform analytical work. Moreover, these guidelines can serve as a template for microbiology, molecular biology, and other application-oriented laboratories. In addition, our efforts may stimulate development of new approaches and technologies. The recommendations of the SWGMGF will be implemented in the national microbial forensics laboratory network, other partner laboratories, and, where applicable, subcontracted laboratories. The United States is developing the National Bioforensics Analysis Center (BFAC), which is part of the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC) and the Fort Detrick (Frederick, MD), interagency biodefense campus (14). The BFAC and partner laboratory network will serve as the national forensic reference center to support homeland security for the attribution of the use of biological weapons. The laboratory will be supported primarily by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in partnership with the FBI, and the BFAC will execute and coordinate microbial forensic casework. To be successful, this national microbial forensic laboratory must rely on at least three major components. The first is a knowledge center composed of databases on genomics, microbiology, forensics methods, associated materials and related evidence assays (including traditional forensic analyses such as fingerprints), bioinformatics, and standardized tools. The second component is the maintenance of strong partnerships between existing government, academic, and private-sector assets. These will include Plum Island, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Department of Health and Human Services, National Science Foundation, National Laboratories, specialty technology laboratories, and other centers of excellence. No single laboratory or institution can address all microbial forensic needs. Although the FBI has at times reached outside its own laboratory for scientists to provide assistance in casework, analysis of materials from the anthrax letter attacks may be the first time that so many outside scientists with diverse expertise were employed. This may well be standard practice in future cases. The third component is the SWGMGF. The SWGMGF's first contribution to the BFAC and bioforensic network is these QA guidelines. All of these components will form a partnership network with the capability of efficiently investigating potential bioterrorist activity. In conclusion, scientists can play a substantial role in thwarting the use of bioweapons by developing tools to detect and to determine the source of the pathogen and to identify those who use such biological agents to create terror or to commit crime. By developing a robust microbial forensics field, security can be enhanced beyond physical locks and barriers. * Partnership network. Microbial evidence, either from real events or from hoaxes, may enter the bioforensic laboratory network by different routes. If an event is immediately recognized as an act of bioterrorism, any evidence will be sent directly by first responders, the intelligence community (IC), or the Department of Defense (DoD) to the national bioforensic laboratory. Alternatively, an event may be thought to be naturally occurring and therefore evidence will be sent to the public health sector, i.e., the Laboratory Response Network (LRN) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Once the evidence is deemed to be from an act of bioterrorism, the materials will be sent by the LRN to the national bioforensic laboratory for attribution analysis. That laboratory will carry out a suite of applicable assays, as well as use the partnership network to enhance attribution characterization capabilities. References and Notes 1. National Research Council and Committee on Science and Technology for Countering Terrorism, Making the Nation Safer: The Role of Science and Technology in Countering Terrorism (National Academy Press, Washington, DC, 2002). 2. J. Lederberg, Science 288, 287 (2000). 3. R. J. Hawley, E. M. Eitzen Jr., Annu. Rev. Microbiol. 55, 235 (2001). 4. W. S. Carus, "Bioterrorism and biocrimes: The illicit use of biological agents since 1900," Working Paper, National Defense University; available at http://www.ndu.edu/centercounter/Full_Doc.pdf . 5. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Biosafety in Microbiological and Biomedical Laboratories (Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, ed. 4, April 1999). 6. D. O. Fleming, D. L. Hunt, Biological Safety Principles and Practices (ASM Press, Washington, DC, ed. 3, 2000). 7. For further information see www.promega.com/profiles/601/ProfilesInDNA_601_07.pdf. 8. B. Budowle, Crime Lab. Dig. 22, 21 (1995). 9. Central Intelligence Agency, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice, Department of Defense, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Food and Drug Administration, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, National Academy of Science, National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, New York State Department of Health, Office of Science and Technology Policy, and U.S. Department of Agriculture. 10. Children's National Medical Center, North Carolina State University, Northern Arizona University, University of Cincinnati, University of Louisville, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey-New Jersey Medical School, and The Institute for Genome Research. 11. FBI, Quality Assurance Standards for Forensic DNA Testing Laboratories (Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1998). 12. Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments 1988 (CLIA '88). Code of Federal Regulations (C.F.R.), 57 C.F.R. 7139, 883 (2001). 13. International Standards Organization (ISO)/International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), "General requirements for the competence of testing and calibration laboratories" (ISO/IEC 17025, American National Standards Institute, New York, 1999), 26 pp. 14. B. Budowle, J. Burans, M. R. Wilson, R. Chakraborty, in: Microbial Forensics, S. Shutzer, R. Breeze, and B. Budowle, Eds. (Academic Press, San Diego, in press). 15. This is publication number 03-12 of the Laboratory Division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Supporting Online Material www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/301/5641/1852/DC1 1Federal Bureau of Investigation, Laboratory Division, Quantico, VA 22135, USA. 2University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey-New Jersey Medical School, Department of Medicine, Newark, NJ 07103, USA. 3Russell Research Center, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Athens, GA 30604, USA. 4Wadsworth Center, New York State Department of Health, Albany, NY 12201-0509, USA. 5Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA. 6Department of Laboratory Medicine, Children's National Medical Center, Washington, DC 20010, USA. *To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: bbudowle@fbi.gov. Sleuth fuels row over anthrax case 27.09.2003 By ROGER FRANKLIN The New Zealand Herald Back in 1986, doctoral student Don Foster pulled off quite a coup. Working late in the library, the specialist in Elizabethan literature decided to look at one last roll of microfilm. He was tired, his eyes sore, and while he didn't hold much hope of finding anything of real interest among the photographic images of documents recently unearthed in an English archive, he had nothing better to do. The last bus didn't leave for 40 minutes and the library was safer than waiting on the dark street outside. Then one of those frames caught his eye. It was a facsimile of what even Foster admits is a mediocre poem, A Funeral Elegy For William Peter. As he read, observing not so much the words but the placement of punctuation and other stylistic tics, his heart pounded. By the time he reached the last line and found the initials "W.S.", there was no doubt: He had found a long lost work by William Shakespeare. The bus left without him. Today, the "academic detective" is a professor at prestigious Vassar College, and he is just as certain that he has made another irrefutable catch: the identity of the man who two years ago terrorised America with anthrax-dusted letters that killed five people and made 22 others sick. For legal reasons, he doesn't deliver that verdict in quite so many words, but Foster's account of his latest sleuthing in October's Vanity Fair leaves the casual reader in little doubt. His prime suspect is former US Army bio-warfare specialist Steven Hatfill, the man whom the FBI has been keeping under surveillance since another academic, microbiologist Barbara Rosenberg, conducted an unofficial investigation. Like Foster, but for entirely different reasons, she concluded that the letters were a wake-up call from a misguided patriot. As Ground Zero still smoked, she theorised that the culprit wanted to prod authorities into preparing for the next, inevitable terrorist offensive - biological warfare. Hatfill angrily denied the allegations before deciding to let his lawyers do the talking. Even his supporters admit, however, that he makes a compelling suspect. He had access to the weapons-grade Ames strain used in the attacks. He was studying in Rhodesia when an unexplained anthrax outbreak killed or made 11,000 people sick. And later, after Ian Smith's white government fell, he moved to South Africa, where he knew, and may have worked with, the apartheid regime's germ-warfare specialists. There were other circumstantial clues, too, including the anthrax letter's fictitious return address, "the Greendale School". Foster combed the internet to see if those words occurred anywhere in Hatfill's past. In the former Rhodesia, he found a suburb by that name a mile from his suspect's old address. "A person writing, say, a ransom note or death threat will always try to conceal his identity, but it's really not possible," Foster told the Weekend Herald in an earlier interview. "Certain traits - punctuation, idiosyncrasies of expression, hints of personal history - as markers, they're as good as fingerprints." And like a fingerprint analyst, Foster runs the loops and whorls of literary style through a computer that looks for similarities with a suspect's known works. The FBI, which had been ridiculed in the press for its inability to find the anthrax killer, was keen to tap Foster's mind, and while others had doubts about Foster's methods, the bureau's agents were true believers. Apart from the Shakespeare scoop, he had identified the New Yorker's Joe Klein as the anonymous author of the Clinton roman-a-clef Primary Colors, and helped nail Unabomber Ted Kaczynski by analysing the mad hermit's rants against technology and modern life. He helped Kenneth Starr's inquisitors to extract Monica Lewinsky's admission of enjoying sex and cigars in the Oval Office, and he applied the skills of a forensic linguist to the bizarre ransom note left in the Boulder home of murdered 6-year-old beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey. That last case was problematical at first, because Foster initially believed the letter couldn't possibly have been the work of any member of JonBenet's family. But eventually, after writing to assure John and Patsy Ramsey that "I would stake my reputation on your innocence", his thinking fell into step with the authorities, who still see the couple as the only suspects worth considering. The misspelled anthrax notes are full of clues, Foster explains. Why, for example, would a colleague of the September 11 terrorists warn recipients to seek immediate medical help, as all the letters did? And what of the misspellings and reversed characters? Elementary, proclaims Foster - clumsy attempts to conceal that English is the writer's native language. Hatfill's lawyer, Tom Connolly, is unimpressed, likening the official investigation to the FBI's leaks and smears against Richard Jewell, the security guard initially suspected of bombing the Atlanta Olympics. Months later, investigators admitted that the blast was the work of anti-abortion fanatic Eric Rudolph. Like Hatfill, Jewell passed a voluntary FBI lie detector test, only to see the results dismissed. The Vanity Fair article "is ripe with so many errors," Connolly says. "The real story," he adds, "is what a fraud Foster actually is." They're fighting words, especially given Foster's reputation as the father of forensic linguists and, indeed, its only practitioner. But Connolly isn't impressed, promising defamation lawsuits that he says will make Hatfill even richer than Jewell, who collected millions for his pain and suffering. But would a jury go against an expert of Foster's standing, the only person in 400 years to add an extra entry to the list of Shakespeare's known works? Quite possibly. Last year, Foster conceded what scores of his less media-savvy colleagues had been saying almost from the moment A Funeral Elegy was trumpeted on the front page of the New York Times. As Foster now admits, the find that transformed him from obscure academic to media darling wasn't Shakespeare's work, but the words of some unknown Elizabethan hack. That admission was a long time coming. Connolly hopes his client doesn't have to wait as long for a retraction. Seeking anthrax answers Palm Beach Post Editorial Saturday, September 27, 2003 With all the deserved attention that the 9/11 attacks receive, it's easy for people to forget the attacks that came in the wake of New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. Those attacks, however, also left victims, and this week some of them filed a lawsuit to get answers that are nearly two years late and counting. Robert Stevens, a photo editor at American Media Inc., then of Boca Raton, became the first of five people to die from exposure to anthrax. Not even a month had passed since the twin towers collapsed, and the method of his murder panicked South Floridians, who believed for a time that the airplane hijackers who moved through this area had left a poisonous, timed-release second wave of terrorism. Even as the FBI moved in to examine the AMI building in the northwest section of the city, Mr. Stevens' death became overshadowed by anthrax attacks on the U.S. Capitol and Washington-area post offices. A jittery public in this area got no help from federal agencies -- the first portions of Mr. Stevens' autopsy weren't released until two weeks ago -- and Tallahassee went along. Though Palm Beach County health officials had been handling the situation superbly and were trying to keep residents advised, Gov. Bush sent Department of Health Secretary John Agwunobi with orders to muzzle the locals and say nothing himself. In the lawsuit, the Stevens family alleges that the anthrax came from the laboratory at Fort Detrick in Maryland, where Army researchers study infectious diseases, and that Mr. Stevens thus died as a result of the government's negligence. It may be something of a legal reach, but it's a reach that the family is right to take. If relatives of the 9/11 victims are frustrated by not knowing whether the government could have prevented those attacks, they at least know who planned and carried out the murders. The Stevenses don't have even that much to fall back on. If the case gets to trial, attorney Richard Schuler doesn't have to show who sent the anthrax. But he has to prove that the Ames strain came from Fort Detrick. Though the lawsuit asks for $50 million, the action is as much about answers as it is about money. With Osama bin Laden, it's down to a manhunt. With the anthrax killer, it's still a detective story. If the lawsuit spurs the government to look harder and disclose more, the public can thank Robert Stevens' family. Widow's anthrax case stalled by security By Kathy Bushouse Staff Writer - The South Florida Sun-Sentinel Posted September 28 2003 National security issues have hindered Maureen Stevens' hunt for answers about her husband's death two years ago from inhalation anthrax. As Stevens moves ahead with a wrongful-death lawsuit that could embarrass the U.S. government and provide insight into the ongoing investigation of the fall 2001 bioterrorism attacks, it's certain those same national security arguments will take center stage. Stevens filed the case Wednesday in federal court in West Palm Beach. That will give her subpoena power, and experts say the federal government won't be able to withhold information simply by making unspecific claims of national security interests. Bruce Winick, a University of Miami law professor, said it will be up to a federal judge -- not government officials -- to decide whether turning over information related to the anthrax investigation creates a security risk. "The speculation about it will occur in a way where, if they assert that sort of a privilege, a federal district judge will rule on it," Winick said. "[The judge] won't just take the government's assertion at face value." That's what Richard Schuler, an attorney for Stevens, could be counting on. Since Stevens' husband, Bob, died Oct. 5, 2001, from inhalation anthrax and became the nation's first victim of a bioterrorist attack, information for the family has been lacking. Stevens, a tabloid photo editor for American Media Inc., died after coming into contact with an anthrax-laced envelope mailed to the company's Boca Raton office. Who did it, and where the anthrax came from, remains unknown. A U.S. attorney handling the anthrax case recently visited Maureen Stevens, but revealed little of what the government knows about who killed her husband. Thus the lawsuit, which claims that anthrax samples were known to be missing from an Army laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md., as early as 1992 and accuses the government of failing to adequately secure them. "The bottom line is that a lot of our [Freedom of Information Act] requests were not acknowledged or were not answered or responded to," Schuler said. "By filing the lawsuit, we have subpoena power." Schuler plans to use that power to get documents thus far unavailable to him, and to produce witnesses who could back his theory about government negligence ultimately leading to Bob Stevens' death. Among the potential witnesses on Schuler's list: Don Foster, an English professor at Vassar College, who wrote a scathing piece about the anthrax investigation in the October edition of Vanity Fair magazine. Dr. Steven Hatfill, a bioterrorism expert labeled a "person of interest" in the anthrax investigation. In August, Hatfill sued U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and other officials, seeking to clear his name in connection to the case. Dr. Ayaad Assaad, a former researcher at Fort Detrick, who has publicly alleged lax security at the facility and is involved in an age-discrimination suit after he lost his job there. Federal investigators made two trips to the contaminated AMI building in their search for clues, removing hundreds of letters and office machinery. Little else has ever been made public about the case. The investigation's seemingly slow pace could benefit Stevens. It might make a judge less willing to grant the government any kind of exceptions to handing over information, said William Banks, a professor at Syracuse University's College of Law. "What's the justification for the continuing secrecy if you're not going anywhere in the investigation?" Banks said. Still, a judge might grant a government request to withhold information concerning government facilities such as Fort Detrick, Banks said. The case might reach a point that the government chooses to settle the lawsuit rather than turn over sensitive information, Winick said. "I suppose if [the case] causes the government to reveal info it doesn't want to reveal ... the natural thing would be for the government to settle," he said. Schuler said the Stevens family hopes to get both information and monetary damages from the case. The family has been through an ordeal few can comprehend, he said. They watched from behind a window as Stevens lay in isolation at the hospital. Their backyard was dug up by investigators trying to determine whether the anthrax bacteria came from there. His clothes and personal items were hauled away as evidence. Months later, Maureen Stevens had to write to the government to get his shoes returned. They arrived in a big box with no note attached, Schuler said. "There were a lot of indignities," he said. "It's just been horrendous." Despite that, Schuler said they would love nothing more than to see progress in the federal investigation. "Hopefully, there will be an arrest. We're on their side," Schuler said. "We want them to find the person or persons who did this, and prosecute them. Anything we can do to help, we'll do." Kathy Bushouse can be reached at kbushouse@sun-sentinel.com or 561-243-6641. FBI fails to re-create anthrax production By Toni Locy, USA TODAY September 29, 2003 WASHINGTON — Two years after the nation's deadly anthrax attacks, the FBI still has not been able to re-create the process the killer used to produce the substance sent through the U.S. mail, a top FBI official said Monday. But Michael Mason, the new assistant director in charge of the FBI's Washington field office, said testing has helped investigators "narrow" some aspects of the investigation and convinced them that the culprit has special expertise. "We would not have that if reverse engineering had completely failed to provide us with any information or valuable leads," Mason said. The FBI had hoped that by now, "reverse engineering," working backward from the end result to determine how something was made, would have re-created the process used to produce the anthrax. In doing so, agents had hoped for clues to identify the killer. The investigation began after anthrax-laden letters were sent to media outlets and two U.S. senators in September and October 2001. Five people died and 17 others were sickened in the attacks. Thousands of people were placed on antibiotics. Scientists said Monday that it is unclear what Mason's revelation means. They say much depends on whether the FBI is attempting an identical re-creation. "It is so important that we sort through this," says Dave Franz, former commander of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md. "We don't want people to think they can do this to us anytime they want." The FBI is continuing efforts to re-create the anthrax. "If a couple of leads come out of it, it's worthwhile," an FBI official said Monday. Mason said he has made some "refinements" to the investigation but has not changed its direction. He said leaks to the media about the inquiry, particularly about scientist Steven Hatfill, have been damaging to the investigation. Last year, Attorney General John Ashcroft identified Hatfill, 48, a former researcher at the institute at Fort Detrick, as "a person of interest" in the investigation. Mason said he understood that when confronted by a reporter with Hatfill's name, Ashcroft used the term. But, Mason said, "there is absolutely zero value in coming forward with persons of interest up to the point we indict the person." TO: NEWS MEDIA CONTACTS DATE: MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 2003 RE: NEW LAWSUIT INVOLVING STEVEN HATFILL/ANTHRAX CASE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE =================================================================== (WASHINGTON, DC) – September 29, 2003 - A lawsuit has been filed in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia by broadcaster and investigative reporter PATRICK M. CLAWSON that seeks $5 million in damages from a major newspaper publisher and three journalists for libel, defamation, false light invasion of privacy, emotional distress and disparagement. Defendants in the action are: · ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH, LLC, publisher of the St. Louis (MO) Post-Dispatch; · PULITZER, INC., the parent company of the newspaper; · KAREN BRANCH-BRIOSO, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter in the Washington, DC office of the Post-Dispatch; · JON SAWYER, the Washington Bureau Chief of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch; and · ARNOLD J. ROBBINS, the Managing Editor of the Post-Dispatch. For the past year, Mr. Clawson has served as a pro bono media advisor and defense investigator for the attorneys of his friend, Dr. Steven Hatfill, a Washington, DC scientist who has been identified by the U.S. Justice Department as a "person of interest" in the investigation of the 2001 anthrax-by-mail attacks. Mr. Clawson is represented in the action by attorney William P. Farley of the law firm of McDonald & Karl, 900 17th St. N,W, Washington, DC 20006. The case, which was filed on September 26, 2003, is Civil Action #03-0007959. The Complaint alleges that on September 30, 2002, as part of its coverage of the Hatfill case, the Defendants published a newspaper report that recounted Mr. Clawson’s career in St. Louis, Missouri during the 1970s as a radio/TV investigative reporter and private investigator. The Complaint alleges that the Defendants falsely identified Clawson as a radio executive with " a history" of being an´"FBI informer." Mr. Clawson is not now and has never been an "FBI informer" and the Complaint alleges that Defendants’ statements were false, misleading, disparaging and defamatory and were published with malice and in reckless disregard of the truth. The Complaint further alleges that the Defendants did not interview law enforcement officials or review court records and had no evidence prior to publication to support their allegations that Clawson had a "history" of being "an FBI informer", then repeatedly refused to publish a correction or clarification after their post-publication investigation failed to produce evidence supporting the allegations. Clawson is a broadcaster, investigative reporter and licensed private investigator who resides in Berryville, VA, an outer suburb of the Washington, DC area. Clawson, a 30-year media veteran, specializes in coverage of organized crime, political corruption, terrorism, white-collar crime and activities of the media industry. He is a former on-air investigative reporter for Cable News Network, NBC Radio News, the Independent Television News Association and Independent Network News. He is the former Washington Bureau Chief of Radio & Records, a prominent broadcasting industry trade publication. Clawson recently was a radio talk show host and Director of Sales, Marketing & Strategy for Radio America, a Washington, DC-based national radio network. He is the recipient of several national journalism awards, including a National Emmy Citation for Community Service Broadcasting, the Janus Financial Journalism Prize, and investigative reporting awards from the Radio-Television News Directors Association and the Associated Press Broadcasters. -------------------- STATEMENT OF PATRICK M. CLAWSON "The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has smeared my reputation – and needlessly placed my life in jeopardy - by falsely, maliciously and recklessly publishing that I am a radio executive with "a history" of being an "FBI informer." "I’ve worked hard over 30 years to build a reputation in both legitimate society and the criminal underworld as an investigative journalist who can be trusted to protect his confidential sources and report the news without fear or favor. I plan to protect my reputation aggressively both in the courts and on the streets. " "I am an investigative reporter who has covered crime and corruption for decades and who often interviews and obtains information from criminals. I can’t think of anything more damaging to my professional reputation and personal safety than to be unjustly and recklessly branded as an "FBI informer." "Let me be very clear. I’m not some FBI flunky. I am not now, nor have I ever been, an "FBI informer." I don’t plan to be one, either. I have never betrayed the confidentiality of my sources, regardless of whether they were cops or criminals. I have always been a stand-up news guy who keeps his word to sources. If there’s a story to be reported, I tell it to the public on the air or in print. I don’t whisper it secretly in some dark back alley to a government gumshoe in exchange for favors or money." "In 1980, I complained very loudly and very openly to force government officials to stamp out corruption involving police officers and private investigators in St. Louis, Missouri. My actions were those of a civic-minded citizen whistleblower determined to stop an abuse of the public trust, not those of a "rat" or an "FBI informer" lurking in the shadows. In 1980, the Post-Dispatch reported that I was a "whistleblower" and never identified me as "an FBI informer" - because I was not. By the way, I rejected government offers of money and secrecy for my information – something that real FBI informers seek. I blew the whistle publicly because I was mad as hell about kinky cops who had sold their badges for bucks." "I paid a stiff price for doing my duty as a citizen whistleblower including an arrest on baseless charges that was aimed at discrediting me, a lengthy criminal grand jury investigation that eventually exonerated me of any wrongdoing, months of unemployment and financial ruin, and most tragically, the loss of a child when my spouse suffered a stress-induced miscarriage. "When I was a reporter in St. Louis back in the Seventies, I authored news stories criticizing bias, misconduct and ethics lapses at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that angered the paper’s reporters and editors. Now more, over a quarter-century later, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch is punishing me once again by smearing my good name and reputation." "As a journalist, I don’t believe in suing fellow journalists. I believe problems with news coverage should be worked out in a constructive and cooperative way with colleagues. That’s why I made repeated requests that the Defendants simply publish a clarification or correction to set the record straight and end the matter. My requests were repeatedly brushed off by the journalists in an arrogant and offensive manner, even after they acknowledged conducting no interviews and finding no evidence to substantiate their published identification of me as an "FBI informer." Their shameless conduct left me with no alternative but to protect my good name and reputation throughout litigation." "Over the past year, I’ve gone to the aid of a friend, Dr. Steven Hatfill, who has been wrongly identified as a "person of interest" by Attorney General John Ashcroft in the investigation of the 2001 anthrax-by-mail attacks. Despite the impression created by the Post-Dispatch report , I have never informed on Steve to the FBI. It’s ludicrous to think I would do that." "I have provided my services as a defense investigator and media adviser to Steve’s lawyers on a no-charge, pro-bono basis because I believe in the innocence of my friend. He’s a good man and his life has been ruined by a steady campaign of government leaks, rumors and innuendos spoon-fed to gullible reporters who too often think they’re part of the law enforcement establishment they’re supposed to be covering instead of acting as independent watchdogs of the public interest. " "If anyone has a problem with me helping a friend in a time of crisis, they should get over it. I’m unrepentant when it comes to standing up to protect freedom and justice in the face of government and media bullies. I want to see Steve Hatfill’s name cleared. " "Now, I’d like my own name to be cleared as well. The newspaper’s allegations are a bunch of bogus bunk and I am going to hold the reporters and editors of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch accountable." ---------------------------------------- 30 ----------------------------------------- October 2, 2003 Biological warfare team reunites again at Detrick by Karen Fleming-Michael Standard Staff Writer Catching up over sodas and beer in the pre-autumn sun Sept. 20, 235 people who worked in the biological warfare program at Detrick from 1943 to 1969 reunited after a two-year break to talk about the good old days. Amid the steady chatter and laughter at the post's Nallin Farm Pond, some helped their former co-workers navigate the lines of picnic tables with rolling walkers or motorized carts, while others leaned in closer to hear co-workers' voices with ears that aren't as keen as they once were. "We're just a close-knit group," said Richard Delauter, who worked as a technician for the program and went to work for a local radio station when his job at Detrick ended. "There's nothing any of us wouldn't do for another one." "Like a family" is sentiment many in the group used during the afternoon to describe the relationship that's lasted for more than three decades. Why were they so close? "We had one mission, and everyone was one big family, from the scientist at the top to the plumber and the janitor at the bottom," said Janet Michael, one of the event organizers. In fact, she and about 15 to 20 women who worked in administration hold monthly mini-reunions to keep in touch. Calling themselves the "Has Beens," the women meet for lunch at a local restaurant to dine, "chat and act silly and have a good time," said Doris Egge, a regular attendee. Holding the reunions every other year causes sleepless nights for its planners, especially the last two. The 2001 reunion was threatened by the heightened security on post after Sept. 11, and Hurricane Isabel did her best to thwart this year's get together. Still, people came from as far as California, Oregon, Wisconsin and North Carolina to attend. The group's highly classified work during that era was developing defensive mechanisms for biological attacks and developing weapons the United States could use in response to a biological attack. In 1969, Fort Detrick's mission changed from a retaliatory biological warfare capability to medical defense to neutralize the threat. Many of the scientists who worked in the biological weapons program have been in demand since the fall 2001 anthrax mail attacks. Bill Mahlandt, who worked at Detrick for 43 years, said though some of the stories he heard about the mail attacks didn't sound "quite right," he declined talking to reporters all the same. "I told them 'I don't really know who you are but you're asking me stuff that was classified, and I don't know if I can talk to you,'" he said. The anthrax-loaded letters were a "wake-up call" for Congress, said Louis LaMotte Jr., who went to work for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention when he left Detrick. "The public health service in the United States has really gotten some new life because all of a sudden they (Congress) realize the public health service has never been funded, and (now) CDC is getting money and assistance to develop programs." Former Fort Detrick Commanding General retired Maj. Gen. John Parker, who attended the reunion, told the crowd the nation needs their help to support the knowledge-based programs that came about after the mail attacks. "More important than the gathering is making sure that we can reach out to you and talk to you about what you did and what you know and how that contributes to the future defense and security of the United States," Parker said. Though the biological warfare program ended more than a quarter of a century ago, many attendees can't help but express their disappointment for when "Nixon canceled the program here." "From a national defense perspective, we needed the program," said LaMotte, who with his wife, Lila Jean, traveled with their cocker spaniel, Heather, from Atlanta for the event. "You need to have a program to know how to defend against it and what vaccines and drugs to develop. The Russians worked very ingeniously to develop antibiotic-resistant strains of biological warfare agents. We didn't. So we didn't know what we had to do to defend against that." Parker also encouraged the reunited group to take a last look at the building that housed a large fermenter, a key facility of the offensive biological weapons program, lamenting the historic edifice's destruction. The dismantling of Building 470 began this summer. Orley Bourland, who was once the plant manager for 470, said he had no qualms about the building, one of the program's most visible legacies, being taken down. "I didn't think it was anything that needed to be preserved," he said. "We got one 8-ball preserved, and that's enough." The number of attendees at this year's reunion was down by 55 as compared to the 2001 event, but Egge said the group doesn't dwell on that. "There are so many gone now who were at the last one. I'm just thankful for the ones that made it," she said. The next reunion is set for 2005, and Egge said she'll be there. "As long as they keep having them, I'll keep showing up," she said. Holding down the fort by Robert Schroeder Staff Writer - The Frederick Gazette Oct. 2, 2003 Col. John E. Ball is smiling patiently. As the "mayor" of Fort Detrick -- a title self-given by the installation's chief officer -- Ball knows what some Frederick residents think of the place. That it's frightening. That it produces strange, offensive weapons. That they wouldn't want to live, well, too close to it, because ... well, just because it's Fort Detrick. Ball takes it all in stride; he's heard it before. "People will ... generally fear what they don't understand or don't know," he says. "Things have changed in the last 40 years here at Fort Detrick." In April 1943, Camp Detrick was established as a biological warfare research facility. Its name was changed to Fort Detrick in 1956, when it became a permanent Army installation. But, ever since President Richard M. Nixon ended the United States' offensive biological warfare program in 1969, Detrick's mission has shifted to defense and research, working on cures to diseases U.S. soldiers might encounter on battlefields or in bunkers. In 1971, Nixon set up at Detrick the National Cancer Institute and in 1979, the Army Medical Intelligence and Information Agency moved to the installation. These days, Detrick and National Institutes of Health officials are mapping out plans for a major new biodefense facility. But as the sprawling military installation -- with 7,300 workers, Frederick County's largest employer -- celebrates its 60th anniversary, it appears that some Frederick residents still haven't gotten the memo that Detrick officials would like them to read: that their neighbor is not the creepy place they think it is. And that's just the image problem. Residents also gripe about traffic congestion along Rosemont Avenue and 7th Street, and water issues grab the spotlight from time to time. 'No secrets' It is the dangerous element of what the installation does that draws the most concern from average residents. To wit, the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) played a major role in testing the anthrax-laced letters sent to media offices in New York and congressional offices in Washington in 2001. USAMRIID possesses what Ball calls "research samples" of the deadly bacteria, along with others like SARS and Ebola. "We have no secrets at Fort Detrick," Ball says. Yet even Frederick Mayor Jennifer P. Dougherty (D), with whom Ball and his staff consult regularly, says that "you're always a little concerned" by what goes on at Detrick. But, Dougherty adds, it is "exciting" to host Detrick. She cited the research conducted on SARS, AIDS and cancer as "what the best and the brightest are supposed to do." Almost in the same sentence, though, the mayor acknowledges misgivings among residents here. "There's natural fear that they could use those powers for evil, not good," she says about Detrick's scientists. "It's always been shrouded in mystery," agrees county resident Stephanie Felton during a cigarette break from her job downtown. "I'm sure there's a lot we don't know about dear old Detrick," she says. Ball, a gregarious man with a can-do air about him, responds to comments like that by saying simply, "we're in the do-no-harm business." He points to a medical insignia on his camouflage jacket to underscore the statement. Harming to help But sometimes, to prevent harm, harm -- or the potential of it -- is inflicted on others. Beginning Friday and lasting through Sunday, a group of volunteers known as "whitecoats" will be holding an anniversary celebration of their own. These volunteers were all Seventh-day Adventists whose idea of serving their country was to breathe in such dangerous agents as Typhus Fever, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever and Yellow Fever during tests at Detrick. Being conscientious objectors, the Adventists opted for putting their health at risk so they could help others find cures. About 2,300 Adventists served as whitecoat volunteers from the program's inception in 1954 until its closure in 1973. None died, according to the Seventh-day Adventist Church, but many fell ill. Harold Butler of Myersville was one. "I was experimented on," the 57-year-old Butler, a dentist, says matter-of-factly. "I guess that's kind of unique. There aren't too many human guinea pigs in the world." Butler, a volunteer from 1969 to 1971, said he was experimented on twice; he was once given a yellow fever vaccine and another time subjected to a dietary experiment in which for two weeks he ate nothing but protein. Asked if he ever regretted volunteering for the experiments, Butler replies as if he'd never heard a stranger question. "No," he says. "I've never had any ill health problems or any regrets." Others, however, didn't volunteer for these kinds of tests. Bill Eisentrout, who worked at Detrick from 1953 to 1991, recalls tests done on prisoners serving life sentences in the mid-1950s. As a technician working with the installation's "Eight Ball" aerobiology chamber, Eisentrout controlled temperature and humidity for tests done on prisoners. "They'd breathe aerosol into their lungs," remembered Eisentrout, who now runs a golf services business in Middletown. "They were breathing anthrax and I just don't know what all," he said. Though such images are dated, these kinds of scenes persist in the community -- many people believe, for example, that the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks was leaked from Detrick. Last week, the widow of a photo editor sued the federal government, alleging that poor security at Detrick led to her husband's death. USAMRIID is the main custodian of the strain of anthrax found in envelopes sent to the victims of the attacks. "I still think that anthrax got out in some kind of way," Frederick resident Lloyd Diggs said recently. "In other words, someone wasn't watching what they should've." Open meetings As the public face of Fort Detrick, Ball says he is eager to interact with county residents and officials. "I'm a believer in getting information out," he says. He stresses that the installation does no classified work and seems to relish the opportunity to dispel the notion that the installation undertakes worrisome work. Aides mention a meeting next Wednesday at Whittier Elementary School regarding new construction, and another "community liaison" meeting is coming up on Oct. 16 at Detrick headquarters. The meetings -- implemented by Ball -- group elected officials, residents and business people "so we can keep them informed of a broad range of things going on at Fort Detrick," says spokeswoman Eileen C. Mitchell. "It allows us to answer their questions and receive their input." Ball also attends the monthly Council of Governments meetings and hobnobs with the county commissioners. And since he can't meet with city or county officials about everything all the time, he says he has able deputies to interface with Frederick's brass. Recently, for example, an installation-wide traffic study involved both Detrick and elected officials. Completed in July, the study identifies a number of options to improve access to the base, including the widening of Rosemont Avenue to provide a dedicated left-turn lane between the intersection of U.S. 15's northbound and southbound ramps. The study has been handed over to the city for consideration and will be discussed by city and Detrick representatives before any concrete plans are made. Detrick's Mitchell said it will also be shared with Frederick County officials. Traffic problems created by the base are of great importance to users of the roads surrounding the 1,200-acre post. And the installation's officials often come in for criticism from local residents and observers, as in a March 2003 commentary in The Gazette by former Frederick Mayor Paul Gordon, a Republican who served from 1990-94. "Detrick constantly remains an island whose future plans are most often unknown until it is too late to mesh them with local government's planning," Gordon wrote. The former mayor this week criticized Detrick for what he calls "lack of continuity," referring to the two-year terms of its garrison commanders. Many actually serve for three years but Gordon believes those term limits hamper smooth base/community relations. Gordon and others also are watching closely what Detrick does with its Area B, where crews have since 2001 cleaned up contaminated soil from a former dumping ground for drums, vials of bacteria and syringes. Detrick officials came under criticism from nearby residents when it was revealed that water contained extremely high levels of the cancer-causing chemicals TCE and PCE. Samples taken on Oct. 21, 1997, showed TCE at 5,000 ppb and PCE at 23,000 ppb in a spring-fed well of a home on Montevue Lane. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sets the drinking water standard for both chemicals at five parts per billion (ppb). The installation acted to provide homeowners with bottled water. In some cases, the fort sprung for new wells for affected residents. It is unknown if or how many residents in neighboring homes contracted cancer from the installation's water, since the Frederick County Health Department does not keep area-specific statistics. Lt. Col. Donald Archibald, the chief of safety, environment and integrated planning for Detrick's Army Garrison, says cleanup of Area B-11 should be finished in March, but that officials still must decide how exactly to approach groundwater cleanup for the wider Area B. "You don't know with 100 percent certainty ... that the contaminated water is a result of the area we're cleaning up," he said. Archibald said that a non-disease-causing strain of anthrax was found during the cleanup, but that otherwise, "we haven't seen any bacteria that are bacteria of concern." Necessary neighbors Whether or not perceptions about Detrick's activities are founded or false, the base appears poised to be a Frederick neighbor for a long time to come. Strong supporters of the installation, such as former U.S. Rep. Beverly Byron (D) of Frederick, who represented Maryland's 6th District from 1978 to 1993, say that Detrick plays a vital role in the community. "Many [Detrick] people have been active in schools, Scouts, athletics and teach at FCC," Byron says. They are "very well-educated -- many PhDs and research people." Byron, who fought to protect Detrick from a round of base closings in the mid-1990s, also says that technology companies located nearby benefit from Detrick's proximity and its scientists. And current officials, while recognizing public misgivings about the base, appear to have faith in the place and what it's doing. "I know they are not doing anything to risk the public health," Dougherty says. "Their families live here," also, the mayor says. And besides, Dougherty adds, "science has to be done somewhere." Author links anthrax attacks to hijackers By Larry Lipman, Palm Beach Post Washington Bureau Friday, October 3, 2003 WASHINGTON -- Two years after the first anthrax victim entered the hospital, the author of a new book examining the attacks suggests the FBI is making a mistake in focusing its efforts on a sole domestic perpetrator. The anthrax attacks began when Robert Stevens, a photo editor at the supermarket tabloid Sun, published by American Media Inc. in Boca Raton, entered the JFK Medical Center in Atlantis on Oct. 2, 2001 suffering from inhalation anthrax. Three days later he was dead. Eventually, 11 people were diagnosed with inhalation anthrax and six more with non-lethal cutaneous, or skin anthrax. The method of delivery was the U.S. postal system. Of the 11 who were infected, five died, five are still sick, and one -- Ernesto Blanco, who worked in the AMI building mailroom -- has returned to work. Leonard Cole, author of the book The Anthrax Letters: A Medical Detective Story, said at a news conference with four inhalation anthrax survivors that there were tantalizing links between the Sept. 11 hijackers and the anthrax attacks. Instead of pursuing those links, Cole said the FBI has used a profile for the anthrax perpetrator based on the Unabomber case, which resulted in the arrest of Theodore Kaczynski. Dr. Larry Bush, the JFK Medical Center physician who diagnosed Stevens as having anthrax, joined Cole and said there were serious questions that need to be answered. "Just to say this was a lone person, I think, is a little bit naive," Bush said. Among the elements -- all of which have previously been reported -- Cole said indicated a possible connection between the anthrax attacks and the hijackers were: • The June 2001 treatment of Ahmed Al Haznawi -- one of the hijackers of United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed into a Pennsylvania field -- by Dr. Christos Tsonas for a leg ulcer at Holy Cross Hospital in Fort Lauderdale. Tsonas later said the ulcer was probably cutaneous anthrax. • The fact that Gloria Irish, a real estate agent who is the wife of Sun editor-in-chief Mike Irish, rented Delray Beach apartments to two of the hijackers, Hamza Alghamdi and Marwan Al-Shehhi. Six of the hijackers lived near the AMI building. • The speculation by authorities, based on the trail of spores, that another letter was sent to the old National Enquirer building in Lantana. The National Enquirer, also published by AMI, moved into the AMI building in January 2001, but local phone books still listed the Lantana address. "None of this suggests with certainty that I know who the killers were, or who the killer was, or that it wasn't a domestic loner, but it seems to me that at the very least we... should have kept on the table the probability of a foreign connection," Cole said. Bush praised Dr. Jean Malecki, director of the Palm Beach County Health Department, for moving quickly to close the AMI building. Survivors told reporters how their lives have been "turned upside down," because they still suffer numerous symptoms, including short-term memory loss, low blood pressure and fatigue. With the exception of Blanco, none has returned to work. Blanco, 76, said "I feel fine," but Norma Wallace, a postal worker from Hamilton, N.J., said "it has been a traumatic experience." larryl@coxnews.com Chief weapons hunter: Tips to anthrax, Scud missiles in Iraq Posted 10/5/2003 5:48 PM USA Today WASHINGTON (AP) — Weapons hunters in Iraq are pursuing tips that point to the possible presence of anthrax and Scud missiles still hidden in the country, the chief searcher said Sunday. David Kay told Congress last week that his survey team had not found nuclear, biological or chemical weapons so far. But he argued against drawing conclusions, saying he expects to provide a full picture on Iraq's weapons programs in six months to nine months. While lacking physical evidence for the presence anthrax or Scuds, Kay said tips from Iraqis are motivating the search for them. Critics, including many in Congress, say Kay's findings do not support most of the Bush administration's prewar assertions that the United States faced an imminent, serious threat from Iraq's Saddam Hussein because of widespread and advanced Iraqi weapons programs. President Bush has said the U.S.-led war on Iraq was justified despite the failure to find weapons. Kay reported that searchers found a vial of live botulinum bacteria that had been stored since 1993 in an Iraqi scientist's refrigerator. The bacteria make botulinum toxin, which can be used as a biological weapon, but Kay has offered no evidence that the bacteria had been used in a weapons program. The live bacteria was among a collection of "reference strains" of biological organisms that could not be used to produce biological warfare agents. Kay said Sunday the same scientist told investigators that he was asked to hide another much larger cache of strains, but "after a couple of days he turned them back because he said they were too dangerous. He has small children in the house." Kay said the cache "contains anthrax and that's one reason we're actively interested in getting it." Kay, speaking on Fox News Sunday, did not say whether the anthrax was live or a strain used only for anthrax research. Before the war, Iraqis said they had destroyed their supply of anthrax. Inspectors haven't found any and Iraqis haven't been able to provide evidence to satisfy investigators that they did destroy it. Experts note that old supplies of anthrax would have degraded by now. While the Bush administration argued before taking the country to war that Iraq's arsenal posed an imminent threat, much of what Kay discovered is that Iraq had interest in such weapons and was researching some agents. Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., said Kay's report shows Saddam's clear intent to develop chemical and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them. He said, however, that the administration didn't tell the public the whole truth. "There is some evidence that the Bush administration exaggerated unnecessarily," he told "Fox News Sunday." Lieberman, a presidential candidate, said the exaggeration "did discredit what was otherwise a very just cause of fighting tyranny and terrorism." Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell have contended the vial of botulinum bacteria that Kay's team found is one strong piece of evidence of Saddam's weapons intent. Searches have been unsuccessful for the kind of long-range Scud missiles the Iraqis fired at Saudi Arabia and Israel in 1991. Many were destroyed during and after the Persian Gulf War, but the Bush administration had accused Iraq of continuing to hide Scuds. Kay said there are indications there may still be Scuds even though Iraq declared it got rid of them in the early 1990s. "We have Iraqis now telling us that they continued until 2001, early 2002, to be capable of mixing and preparing Scud missile fuel. Scud missile fuel is only useful in Scud missiles," he said. "Why would you continue to produce Scud missile fuel if you didn't have Scuds? We're looking for the Scuds." Kay's report to Congress said the information on fuel production came from Iraqi sources and has not been confirmed with documents or physical evidence. Weapons hunters still are looking for chemical weapons at scores of large ammunition storage sites throughout Iraq. Because of the size of the depots, searchers have examined only 10 of 130 sites so far, Kay said. "These are sites that contain — the best estimate is between 600,000 and 650,000 tons of arms," he said. "That's about one-third of the entire ammunition stockpile of the much larger U.S. military." The Iraqis stored chemical weapons, often unmarked, among conventional munitions, so "you really have to examine each one," Kay said. He said 26 sites are on a critical list to be examined quickly. GLASS HALF FULL The New York Post Opinion By Richard Spertzel October 6, 2003 -- Again we hear the cries of "no smoking gun." David Kay's report to Congress is decried variously as a full glass or an empty glass. It seem no one can accept that this is an interim report, and indeed the glass is half full. Kay says his group has found considerable evidence that Iraq had ongoing, prohibited biological and missile programs, although to date no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) have been found. He further reports of innumerable items and sites that should have been declared by Iraq to U.N. Monitoring and Verification Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) and probably earlier to U.N. Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM). Not declaring directly violated Security Council Resolution1441. Those of us experienced in dealing with Iraq over its weapons are not surprised that no "smoking gun" - e.g., munitions filled with chemical or biological agents - has been found. I've stated many times that if Iraq didn't use these weapons, they'd be difficult to find. Iraq didn't use them. Rolf Ekeus, former UNSCOM executive chairman, explained why in an oped earlier this summer: Iraq had told him and others in UNSCOM that it realized chemical and biological weapons could do little against a rapidly advancing enemy. Finding WMD-loaded munitions would require Iraqi individuals with knowledge of their storage sites to give that information to the Coalition forces. To date, this has not occurred. Yes, several scientists have talked to the press - but they've related less than what Iraq had already declared or acknowledged to UNSCOM. Many of the accounts seemed to be more akin to those of 1995 and early '96, rather than those of 1997 and '98. Indeed, Kay says the scientists have been reluctant to talk. Several reasons come to mind: They may have been unaware of the later admissions by Iraq, and afraid of revealing that which was not permitted. This also indicates that there is still a fear of retaliation for telling too much. The scientists may distrust both western reporters and Coalition personnel. I certainly saw this lack of trust in speaking with an Iraqi scientist this spring. And trust was not generated by the actions of some early "inspectors" from April through June, when the scientists were offered "less jail time" if they cooperated. The U.S. personnel were seemingly unaware that jail means one thing to us, but something far more horrific to Iraqis who lived under the Saddam regime. In considering how full the glass is, don't that it takes relatively little biological-agent material to create large-scale havoc, misery and death. Rather than casually dismissing any link between al Queda and Iraq, more effort should be exerted to fully establish that there was or was not a connection. Certainly, the official Czech position is still - despite all the leaks and innuendos to the contrary - that a meeting did take place in the Spring of 2001. We know from the anthrax letters that anthrax spores can survive the rigors of the mail service and produce evil results. These could be easily transported to and used in America. Nor are Anthrax spores the only biological agents that could be so used, or letters the only delivery means. Iraq supplying terrorists with biological material to be used in the United Sates has always been my concern with an ongoing Iraqi bioweapon program. It was most unlikely that Iraq would develop missiles that could threaten North America. Indeed, UNSCOM was told that Iraq saw biological weapons as a way to get its neighbors to "see things Iraq's way." But Iraq could extend its reach by supplying terrorists with suitable material. Yet to be accounted for is some significant WMD-production material that we know Iraq had. It is not apparent that current investigative units are even aware of these - i.e., a spray-dryer ideally suitable for making a powdered agent; 25 metric tons of Aerosil imported by Iraq in 2002, a product important to both the chemical and biological programs; and the missing 1,000-liter fermenters. These should have been among UNMOVIC's highest priorities, but the sites where they were located were not inspected. Where are these items now? The glass is now clearly half full. With time, which David Kay has requested, it may be fuller than many would like to see. Richard Spertzel was head of the biological-weapons section of Unscom from 1994-99.E-mail: RSpertzel@benadorassociates.com Anthrax Probe Should Trump the WMD Search James P. Pinkerton Newsday Columnist October 7, 2003 David Kay's report on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, or lack thereof, was obviously a disappointment to President George W. Bush. But some weapons of mass destruction have already been found, here at home, and they have killed Americans. Yet the Bush administration is much less interested in the search for those weapons and the unknown evildoer who used them - and for future weapons of the same lethal sort. Two years ago this month, even as America was still reeling from 9/11, the nation was further shaken by the letter-based anthrax attacks aimed at six different political and media targets. Those attacks - envelopes filled with bacterial spores - left five people dead and 17 sick. Now author Leonard Cole of Rutgers University has come forward with a new book, "The Anthrax Letters: A Medical Detective Story," which offers us a wealth of detail on the case - even as it reminds us how little we know. One man, Steven Hatfill, a former bioweapons researcher for the U.S. Army, was named as a "person of interest" by Attorney General John Ashcroft. Hatfill has denied any involvement, and has never been charged. Indeed, just last week the director of the FBI's Washington field office expressed regret that his superiors in the Justice Department had put Hatfill in the spotlight. Yet, even as G-men seemingly back away from Hatfill, author Cole is concerned that the U.S. government is still looking for an American Psycho who fits its profile of a germy loner. As Cole puts it: "By zeroing in on the single lone misfit theory, we missed the opportunity to explore links to other nations and other programs experts." The problem, Cole continues, is that the technology for developing anthrax and other biological weapons is relatively inexpensive, and the human expertise is equally easy to obtain. The former Soviet Union, for example, was active in bioweapons production. In the dozen years since its breakup, some ex-Soviet scientists have sold their grisly skills to new paymasters. And, of course, Iraq has been known to possess bioweapons. The one sure "find" uncovered by David Kay's Iraq Survey Group was a vial of botulinum bacteria. The Iraqi botulinum was nowhere near being "weaponized"; it would be absurd to justify the American invasion on that evidence alone. Moreover, with each passing day, it becomes more obvious that Iraq posed no imminent threat to the United States. But at the same time, Kay has found, he says, "equipment, technology, diagrams, documents" concerning potential Iraqi weapons programs. And so to the bottom line: It's not difficult to set up a clandestine bioweapons laboratory - and it's darn hard to find such a lab. If it took months for American inspectors to find the rudiments of such production in Iraq, where gumshoes have the run of the place - not a civil libertarian in sight - then it's easier to understand how, two years after the American anthrax attacks, the government doesn't have a single legit suspect. Meanwhile, there's the whole wide world of pranksters, hackers, extortionists, terrorists and rogue nations, all of whom have access to the United States, at least through the mail. In other words, a bioattack could come from just about anywhere. So what to do? Laura Segal, speaking for the Trust for America's Health, a Washington-based advocacy group, offers a plan for upgrading America's emergency-response system. For starters, she would double the budget of the Centers for Disease Control - the federal agency responsible for countering everything from AIDS to SARS to whatever new killer agent some evildoer can cook up in a lab - from its current $6.5 billion. To be sure, that's a lot of money. But it's less than the amount that Bush proposes to spend in Iraq every month, occupying and rebuilding a country that posed no urgent threat. In the meantime, as "The Anthrax Letters" makes plain, deadly potential threats aren't concentrated in any one country or axis of countries. Instead, the tools of terror are scattered around everywhere, at home as well as abroad. And so maybe we need a different approach to terrorism, not one that involves an offense against threats that have yet to be proven, but one that involves defense of the homeland - especially against threats that have already demonstrated their deadliness. October 10, 2003 Two years later, anthrax culprit still at large; cleanup continues By Mike Nartker, Global Security Newswire Two years ago this month, the first reports emerged that people in the eastern United States had become infected with the biological warfare agent anthrax. By the end of November, the 2001 anthrax attacks killed five people in Connecticut, Florida, New York and Washington, and sickened 13 others. Over the past year, the FBI has had little public success in tracking down those responsible for the anthrax attacks — to the point where a senior FBI official was reported late last month as suggesting that the case might be never be solved. While various U.S. agencies have launched the massive cleanup effort needed to decontaminate the various facilities that were tainted with anthrax, some of the victims still complain of lingering symptoms. Investigation Stalled Late last month, several newspapers reported on a set of surprising comments made by FBI Assistant Director Michael Mason, the newly appointed head of the bureau’s Washington field office. According to the Washington Post, Mason said he regretted that U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft had publicly identified former Army biologist Steven Hatfill as a “person of interest in the case.” Over the past two years, Hatfill has been the apparent public focus of the FBI investigation into the anthrax attacks. In early September, he filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department, claiming the department had violated his constitutional rights and damaged his reputation. Former U.N. inspector Richard Spertzel, who has followed the anthrax investigation, told Global Security Newswire that he hoped Hatfill succeeded in his lawsuit against Justice. “I sincerely hope Hatfill is able to collect big-time from his lawsuit. To have one’s life ruined on such flimsy reasons is criminal in nature,” Spertzel said. Mason was also reported late last month as having said that the FBI’s efforts to recreate the process used to produce the spores used in the attacks had been unsuccessful. Late last year, experts had praised the FBI’s decision to use this investigative tactic. While saying that the bureau had been unsuccessful in trying to recreate the process used to produce the anthrax spores, Mason also said that the effort had helped to narrow some aspects of the investigation, according to reports. “We would not have that if reverse engineering had completely failed to provide us with any information or valuable leads,” Mason was quoted by USA Today as saying. In addition this past year, another highly visible FBI investigative tactic also apparently resulted in failure, according to reports, when the bureau employed divers to search a forest pond near Frederick, Md. The discovery of pieces of laboratory equipment within the pond led the FBI this summer to drain it in hopes of finding further evidence. The three-week, $250,000 effort, however, only resulted in the discovery of discarded items unrelated to the attacks, according to reports. Assistant FBI Director Mason was also reported as having suggested that the anthrax investigation may never be solved — a view shared by some outside experts. “Most informed folk I have spoken with are of the same opinion that a break is not likely soon or maybe ever,” Martin Hugh-Jones of the Pathological Sciences Department at Louisiana State University’s School of Veterinary Medicine told Global Security Newswire. Moving On While the FBI has had little success in tracking down those responsible for the anthrax attacks, efforts over the past year to decontaminate the buildings contaminated with spores have had better results. In March, the U.S. Postal Service scored a success with the successful decontamination of the Brentwood Road mail-handling facility in Washington, D.C. after more than a year of work. A Postal Service spokesman told Global Security Newswire in June that the Brentwood facility was expected to reopen by the end of November. Efforts have also begun to decontaminate several other facilities affected by the attacks, including a U.S. State Department offsite mail facility in Sterling, Va., and a Postal Service mail-handling center in New Jersey. In addition, plans are being prepared to decontaminate the first site contaminated during the attacks — the former headquarters of American Media Inc in Boca Raton, Fla. That building has remained sealed since the discovery of the first two reported anthrax cases — AMI employees Bob Stevens, who died of the disease, and Ernesto Blanco, who came down with inhalational anthrax but recovered. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported in August that the firm Consultants in Disease and Injury Control had been awarded the contract to decontaminate the former AMI headquarters. Real estate developer David Rustine, who purchased the building for only $40,000, has reportedly promised to be the first to walk through the building unprotected once it had been decontaminated. In an effort to help prevent further biological attacks conducted by mail, the Postal Service in July began testing a new anthrax detection system at facilities in 15 cities. An agency spokesman told Global Security Newswire last month that the test had been a “resounding success” and now the Postal Service is scheduled to begin installing the system nationwide early next year. While progress has been made in efforts to decontaminate tainted facilities and to develop new techniques to prevent further attacks, many of the survivors of the attacks have been less successful in moving on, according to recent reports. In mid-September, the Baltimore Sun reported that a doctor at Baltimore Sinai’s hospital has been monitoring five of the survivors through telephone interviews conducted every three months since the attacks. According to the Sun, the study has found that all five survivors continue to report similar lingering symptoms, such as weakness and memory problems. In contrast to their experience, the 76-year-old Blanco, the first survivor of the attacks, has so far been the only one to return to work, according to the Associated Press. “I feel fine,” AP quoted Blanco as saying. Daschle Names Names Roll Call Inc. 10/15/2003 by Jennifer Yachnin Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D) has unveiled one of the most closely guarded facts about the 2001 anthrax attack on Capitol Hill, revealing the identity of the intern who unwittingly opened the chemically laced letter exactly two years ago today. Following the Oct. 15, 2001, incident, both the lawmaker and his staff made a concerted effort to shield the staffer's identity, indicating in news reports only that it was a female intern. But in his new book on the 107th Congress, set for release next month, Daschle names Grant Leslie as the intern who opened the fateful letter in the sixth-floor suite of the Hart Senate Office Building, and also reveals other previously undisclosed details about the terrifying experience. "She cut about an inch into the envelope and, much like talcum powder squeezed out of its container, a fine white power, accompanied by a cloud of white dust, spilled out," Daschle writes in "Like No Other Time," according to an advance copy of the tome. "Powder landed on her skirt and shoes, on the clothes of Bret Wincup, the intern standing next to her, and on the floor. "Grant realized immediately what this might be and sat frozen, trying to keep the envelope closed," Daschle continues. The Senator goes on to describe the arrival of Capitol Police officers, testing of the then-unknown substance, as well as the initial nasal swabs taken from the dozen staffers, including Leslie, who had been in the sixth-floor office when the letter was opened. "The doctor attending to Grant collected her nasal swab, and the police swabbed her clothes. The doctor advised her that she needed to prepare herself for the news that her nasal swab would be positive, even if others' weren't," Daschle writes. "He asked her if she wanted to go to the hospital. Shocked by the suggestion, she asked if he thought she needed to be hospitalized, and he responded, 'It's up to you.'" Leslie, who is now a research assistant in the Senator's office, declined the physician's offer, asserting, Daschle writes, it "could cause a big scene at the hospital." She elected to go home after washing and changing clothes. A Daschle spokeswoman declined a request to interview Leslie, stating the former intern would not speak publicly until after the Nov. 4 release of the book. In a stirring reminder of the gravity of the situation, Daschle also reveals that at one point Greg Martin, chief of infectious diseases at National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., reserved several beds at his facility. After viewing cultures grown from the staffers' nasal swabs, the doctor feared the worst. "Cultures are generally held for forty-eight to seventy-two hours, but the plates usually get checked for growth at the twenty-four- and forty-eight-hour marks. It had been less than twelve hours since the cultures were plated, but Greg checked them anyway," the Senator writes. "He was amazed to find the cream-colored colonies of rod-shaped Bacillus anthracis -- anthrax bacteria -- well on their way to completely covering about a dozen of the plates. Suddenly, it was a whole new ball game." Martin, Daschle writes, believed "there was a strong possibility that despite all medical interventions, some of my staff could develop inhalation anthrax." In addition to the anthrax attack, Daschle also addresses his relations with various lawmakers in the 279-page book. He recounts a December 2002 conversation with then-House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.) in which they acknowledged the possibility of facing off with one another for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. "For the first time, we were confronting the possibility that we could soon find ourselves adversaries -- a prospect neither of us would relish," Daschle writes. "Dick broke the silence. 'Whatever you decide,' he said, 'you will always be my friend.' "I looked back at him and replied, 'We've been through a lot together. You'll always be my friend, too.' "We gave each other a big hug. Then he turned without another word and left the room." Later in the book, Daschle describes his own elation over Maria Cantwell's (D) victory in the Washington Senate race back in 2000, which resulted in the historic 50-50 split in the chamber. He recounts that Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) was simply too shell-shocked to deal with the reality of an equally divided chamber. "[W]here my days had been driven by excitement and hope, Trent had been living in trepidation. Now, with the results final, he couldn't accept it," Daschle writes. "When I first managed to reach him after the Senate officially became fifty-fifty, Trent could hardly finish a sentence. He was in shock. It was simply too soon for him to accept the fact that his world -- his position as Senate majority leader -- had just been turned upside down. "It would turn out to be several weeks before Trent finally acknowledged what had occurred," Daschle writes. Similarly, Daschle addresses the Democrats' efforts, and eventual success, in recruiting a Republican to tip the balance of power in the chamber. "The reports I was getting by late March were that it looked as though something might happen with [Arizona Sen. John] McCain or [Rhode Island Sen. Lincoln] Chafee. There was very little going on with Jim Jeffords," Daschle notes, until the Vermont Senator met with Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and mentioned that he would consider becoming an Independent. "[T]hat was enough to push him to the center of our radar screen."