• Location(s) : 

  • • Washington, D.C.

    • West Palm Beach, Florida

    • New York City

• Date :   September 18, 2001 – October 12, 2001

• Target :   U.S. senators, media figures

• Attack type :   Bioterrorism

• Weapons :   Military grade anthrax bacteria

• Deaths :   5

• Injured :   17

• Victims :

  • • Sen. Tom Daschle,

    • Sen. Patrick Leahy,

    • Bob Stevens (killed),

    • Thomas Morris Jr., Joseph Curseen, Kathy Nguyen, Ottilie Lundgren (all killed)

• Motive :    According to the FBI: saving the anthrax vaccine program.

  • • "The anthrax vaccine program to which [Dr. Ivins] had devoted his entire career of more than 20 years was failing. [...] Following the anthrax attacks, however, his program was suddenly rejuvenated"[1] [and] "a possible motive was his concern about the end of the vaccination program[...], and one theory is that by launching these attacks, he creates a situation, a scenario, where people all of a sudden realize the need to have this vaccine."[2]

• Accused :   [Dr. Bruce Edward Ivins (born 1946)]   /   [Steven Jay Hatfill (born 1953)] (exonerated)  /   Al-Qaeda

The 2001 anthrax attacks, also known as Amerithrax (a portmanteau of "America" and "anthrax") from its FBI case name,[3] occurred in the United States over the course of several weeks beginning on September 18, 2001, one week after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to several news media offices and to Democratic Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, killing five people and infecting 17 others. According to the FBI, the ensuing investigation became "one of the largest and most complex in the history of law enforcement".[4]

A major focus in the early years of the investigation was bioweapons expert [Steven Jay Hatfill (born 1953)], who was eventually exonerated. [Dr. Bruce Edward Ivins (born 1946)], a scientist at the government's biodefense labs at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland, became a focus around April 4, 2005. On April 11, 2007, Ivins was put under periodic surveillance and an FBI document stated that he was "an extremely sensitive suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks".[5] On July 29, 2008, Ivins died by suicide with an overdose of acetaminophen.[6]

Federal prosecutors declared Ivins the sole culprit on August 6, 2008, based on DNA evidence leading to an anthrax vial in his lab.[7] Two days later, Senator Chuck Grassley and Representative Rush D. Holt, Jr. called for hearings into the Department of Justice and FBI's handling of the investigation.[8][9] The FBI formally closed its investigation on February 19, 2010.[10]

In 2008, the FBI requested a review of the scientific methods used in their investigation from the National Academy of Sciences, which released their findings in the 2011 report Review of the Scientific Approaches Used During the FBI's Investigation of the 2001 Anthrax Letters.[11] The report cast doubt on the government's conclusion that Ivins was the perpetrator, finding that the type of anthrax used in the letters was correctly identified as the Ames strain of the bacterium, but that there was insufficient scientific evidence for the FBI's assertion that it originated from Ivins's laboratory. The FBI responded by pointing out that the review panel asserted that it would not be possible to reach a definite conclusion based on science alone, and said that a combination of factors led the FBI to conclude that Ivins had been the perpetrator.[12] Some information is still sealed concerning the case and Ivins's mental problems.[13][14][15] The government settled lawsuits that were filed by the widow of the first anthrax victim Bob Stevens for $2.5 million with no admission of liability. The settlement was reached solely for the purpose of "avoiding the expenses and risks of further litigations", according to a statement in the agreement.[16]

[...]

Context

The attacks followed a week after the September 11 attacks, which had caused the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City, damage to The Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and the crash of an airliner in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The anthrax attacks came in two waves. The first set of anthrax letters had a Trenton, New Jersey, postmark dated September 18, 2001. Five letters are believed to have been mailed at this time to ABC News, CBS News, NBC News and the New York Post, all located in New York City, and to the National Enquirer at American Media, Inc. (AMI), in Boca Raton, Florida.[17] Robert Stevens, who worked at the Sun tabloid, also published by AMI, died on October 5, 2001, four days after entering a Florida hospital with an undiagnosed illness that caused him to vomit and be short of breath.[18][19] Only the New York Post and NBC News letters were found;[20] the existence of the other three letters is inferred because individuals at ABC, CBS and AMI became infected with anthrax. Scientists examining the anthrax from the New York Post letter said it appeared as a clumped coarse brown granular material looking like dog food.[21]

Two more anthrax letters, bearing the same Trenton postmark, were dated October 9, three weeks after the first mailing. The letters were addressed to two Democratic Senators, Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Patrick Leahy of Vermont. At the time, Daschle was the Senate Majority leader and Leahy was head of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Daschle letter was opened by an aide, Grant Leslie, on October 15, and the government mail service was shut down. The unopened Leahy letter was discovered in an impounded mailbag on November 16. The Leahy letter had been misdirected to the State Department mail annex in Sterling, Virginia, because a ZIP code was misread; a postal worker there, David Hose, contracted inhalational anthrax.

More potent than the first anthrax letters, the material in the Senate letters was a highly refined dry powder consisting of about one gram of nearly pure spores. A series of conflicting news reports appeared, some claiming the powders had been "weaponized" with silica. Bioweapons experts who later viewed images of the attack anthrax saw no indication of "weaponization".[22] Tests by Sandia National Laboratories in early 2002 confirmed that the attack powders were not weaponized.[23][24]

At least 22 people developed anthrax infections, 11 of whom contracted the especially life-threatening inhalational variety. Five died of inhalational anthrax: Stevens; two employees of the Brentwood mail facility in Washington, D.C. (Thomas Morris Jr. and Joseph Curseen),[25] and two whose source of exposure to the bacteria is still unknown: Kathy Nguyen, a Vietnamese immigrant resident in the New York City borough of the Bronx who worked in the city,[26] and the last known victim Ottilie Lundgren, a 94-year-old widow of a prominent judge from Oxford, Connecticut.[27]

Because it took so long to identify a culprit, the 2001 anthrax attacks have been compared to the Unabomber attacks which took place from 1978 to 1995.[28]

The letters

Authorities believe that the anthrax letters were mailed from Princeton, New Jersey.[29] Investigators found anthrax spores in a city street mailbox located at 10 Nassau Street near the Princeton University campus. About 600 mailboxes were tested for anthrax which could have been used to mail the letters, and the Nassau Street box was the only one to test positive.

The Tom Brokaw (NBC) note

The New York Post and NBC News letters contained the following note:

• 09-11-01
• THIS IS NEXT
• TAKE PENACILIN [sic] NOW
• DEATH TO AMERICA
• DEATH TO ISRAEL
• ALLAH IS GREAT

The second anthrax note

The second note was addressed to Senators Daschle and Leahy and 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.

All the letters were copies made by a copy machine, and the originals were never found. Each letter was trimmed to a slightly different size. The senate letter uses punctuation, while the media letter does not. The handwriting on the media letter and envelopes is roughly twice the size of the handwriting on the senate letter and envelopes. The envelopes addressed to Senators Daschle and Leahy had a fictitious return address:

• 4th Grade
• Greendale School
• Franklin Park NJ 08852

Franklin Park, New Jersey, exists, but the ZIP code 08852 is for nearby Monmouth Junction, New Jersey. There is no Greendale School in Franklin Park or Monmouth Junction, New Jersey, though there is a Greenbrook Elementary School in adjacent South Brunswick Township, New Jersey.

False leads

The Amerithrax investigation involved many leads which took time to evaluate and resolve. Among them were numerous letters which initially appeared to be related to the anthrax attacks but were never directly linked.

For example, before the New York letters were found, hoax letters mailed from St. Petersburg, Florida, were thought to be the anthrax letters or related to them.[30][31] A letter received at the Microsoft offices in Reno, Nevada, after the discovery of the Daschle letters gave a false positive in a test for anthrax.[32] Later, because the letter had been sent from Malaysia, Marilyn Thompson of The Washington Post connected the letter to Steven Hatfill, whose girlfriend was from Malaysia.[33] The letter merely contained a check and some pornography, and was neither a threat nor a hoax.[34]

A copycat hoax letter containing harmless white powder was opened by reporter Judith Miller in The New York Times newsroom.[35][36]

Also unconnected to the anthrax attacks was a large envelope received at American Media, Inc., in Boca Raton, Florida (which was among the victims of the attacks) in September 2001. It was addressed "Please forward to Jennifer Lopez c/o The Sun", containing a metal cigar tube with a cheap cigar inside, an empty can of chewing tobacco, a small detergent carton, pink powder, a Star of David pendant, and "a handwritten letter to Jennifer Lopez. The writer said how much he loved her and asked her to marry him."[37] Another letter, which mimicked the original anthrax letter to Senator Daschle, was mailed to Daschle from London in November 2001, at a time when Hatfill was in England, not far from London.[38][39][40] Shortly before the discovery of the anthrax letters, someone sent a letter to authorities stating, "Dr. Assaad is a potential biological terrorist."[41] No connection to the anthrax letters was ever found.[42]

During the first years of the FBI's investigation, Don Foster, a professor of English at Vassar College, attempted to connect the anthrax letters and various hoax letters from the same period to Steven Hatfill.[38] Foster's beliefs were published in Vanity Fair and Readers' Digest. Hatfill sued and was later exonerated. The lawsuit was settled out of court.[43]

Anthrax material

The letters sent to the media contained a coarse brown material, while the letters sent to the two U.S. Senators contained a fine powder.[44][45] The brown granular anthrax mostly caused skin infections, cutaneous anthrax (9 out of 12 cases), although Kathy Nguyen's case of inhalation anthrax occurred at the same time and in the same general area as two cutaneous cases and several other exposures. The AMI letter which caused inhalation cases in Florida appears to have been mailed at the same time as the other media letters. The fine powder anthrax sent to the senators mostly caused the more dangerous form of infection known as inhalational anthrax (8 out of 10 cases). Postal worker Patrick O'Donnell and accountant Linda Burch contracted cutaneous anthrax from the Senate letters.

All of the material was derived from the same bacterial strain known as the Ames strain.[46] The Ames strain was a common strain isolated from a cow in Texas in 1981. The name "Ames" refers to the town of Ames, Iowa, but was mistakenly attached to this isolate in 1981 because of a mixup about the mailing label on a package.[47][48] First researched at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), Fort Detrick, Maryland, the Ames strain was then distributed to sixteen bio-research labs within the U.S. and three other locations (Canada, Sweden and the United Kingdom).[49]

DNA sequencing of the anthrax taken from Robert Stevens (the first victim) was conducted at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) beginning in December 2001. Sequencing was finished within a month and the analysis was published in the journal Science in early 2002.[50]

Radiocarbon dating conducted by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in June 2002 established that the anthrax was cultured no more than two years before the mailings.[51]

Mutations

Early in 2002, it was noted that there were variants or mutations in the anthrax cultures that were grown from powder found in the letters. Scientists at TIGR sequenced the complete genomes from many of these isolates during the period from 2002 to 2004. This sequencing identified three relatively large changes in some of the isolates, each comprising a region of DNA that had been duplicated or triplicated. The size of these regions ranged from 823 bp to 2607 bp, and all occurred near the same genes. Details of these mutations were published in 2011 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.[52] These changes became the basis of PCR assays used to test other samples to find any that contained the same mutations. The assays were validated over the many years of the investigation, and the repository of Ames samples was also being built. From roughly 2003 to 2006 the repository and the screening of the 1,070 Ames samples in that repository were completed.[53]

Based on the testing, the FBI concluded that flask RMR-1029 was the parent material of the anthrax spore powder. Ivins had sole control over that flask.[13]:28–29

Controversy over coatings and additives

On October 24, 2001, USAMRIID scientist [Dr. Peter B. Jahrling (born 1946)] was summoned to the White House after he reported signs that silicon had been added to anthrax recovered from the letter addressed to Daschle. Silicon would make the anthrax more capable of penetrating the lungs. Seven years later, Jahrling told the Los Angeles Times on September 17, 2008, "I believe I made an honest mistake", adding that he had been "overly impressed" by what he thought he saw under the microscope.[54]

Richard Preston's book[55] provides details of conversations and events at USAMRIID during the period from October 16, 2001, to October 25, 2001. Key scientists described to Preston what they were thinking during that period. When the Daschle spores first arrived at USAMRIID, the key concern was that smallpox viruses might be mixed with the spores. "Jahrling met [John] Ezzell in a hallway and said, in a loud voice, 'Goddamn it, John, we need to know if the powder is laced with smallpox.'" Thus, the initial search was for signs of smallpox viruses. On October 16, USAMRIID scientists began by examining spores that had been "in a milky white liquid" from "a field test done by the FBI's Hazardous Materials Response Unit". Liquid chemicals were then used to deactivate the spores. When scientists turned up the power on the electron beam of the Transmission Electron Microscope (TEM), "The spores began to ooze." According to Preston,

"Whoa," Jahrling muttered, hunched over the eyepieces. Something was boiling off the spores. "This is clearly bad stuff," he said. This was not your mother's anthrax. The spores had something in them, an additive, perhaps. Could this material have come from a national bioweapons program? From Iraq? Did al-Qaeda have anthrax capability that was this good?

On October 25, 2001, the day after senior officials at the White House were informed that "additives" had been found in the anthrax, USAMRIID scientist [Dr. Thomas William Geisbert (born 1962)] took a different, irradiated sample of the Daschle anthrax to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) to "find out if the powder contained any metals or elements". AFIP's energy dispersive X-ray spectrometer reportedly indicated "that there were two extra elements in the spores: silicon and oxygen. Silicon dioxide is glass. The anthrax terrorist or terrorists had put powdered glass, or silica, into the anthrax. The silica was powdered so finely that under Geisbert's electron microscope it had looked like fried-egg gunk dripping off the spores."

The "goop" Peter Jahrling had seen oozing from the spores was not seen when AFIP examined different spores killed with radiation.

The controversy began the day after the White House meeting. The New York Times reported, "Contradicting Some U.S. Officials, 3 Scientists Call Anthrax Powder High-Grade – Two Experts say the anthrax was altered to produce a more deadly weapon",[56] and The Washington Post reported, "Additive Made Spores Deadlier".[57] Countless news stories discussed the "additives" for the next eight years, continuing into 2010.[58][59]

Later, the FBI claimed a "lone individual" could have created the anthrax spores for as little as $2,500, using readily available laboratory equipment.[60]

A number of press reports appeared suggesting the Senate anthrax had coatings and additives.[61][62] Newsweek reported the anthrax sent to Senator Leahy had been coated with a chemical compound previously unknown to bioweapons experts.[63] On October 28, 2002, The Washington Post reported, "FBI's Theory on Anthrax is Doubted"[64] suggesting that the senate spores were coated with fumed silica. Two bioweapons experts that were utilized as consultants by the FBI, Kenneth Alibek and Matthew Meselson, were shown electron micrographs of the anthrax from the Daschle letter. In a November 5, 2002 letter to the editors of The Washington Post, they stated that they saw no evidence the anthrax spores had been coated with fumed silica.[22]

A November 28, 2003, article in Science magazine suggests that the senate anthrax "was a diabolical advance in biological weapons technology".[65] The article describes "a technique used to anchor silica nanoparticles to the surface of spores" using "polymerized glass".[65] According to Stuart Jacobsen, "polymerized glass" is "a silane or siloxane compound that's been dissolved in an alcohol-based solvent like ethanol". It leaves a thin glassy coating that helps bind the silica to particle surfaces.[66]

An August 2006 article in Applied and Environmental Microbiology, written by Douglas Beecher of the FBI labs in Quantico, Virginia, states "Individuals familiar with the compositions of the powders in the letters have indicated that they were comprised simply of spores purified to different extents."[67] The article also specifically criticizes "a widely circulated misconception" "that the spores were produced using additives and sophisticated engineering supposedly akin to military weapon production".[67] The harm done by this misconception is described this way: "This idea is usually the basis for implying that the powders were inordinately dangerous compared to spores alone. The persistent credence given to this impression fosters erroneous preconceptions, which may misguide research and preparedness efforts and generally detract from the magnitude of hazards posed by simple spore preparations."[67] Critics of the article complained that it did not provide supporting references.[68][69]

False report of bentonite

In late October 2001, ABC chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross linked the anthrax sample to Saddam Hussein because of its purportedly containing the unusual additive bentonite. On October 26, Ross said, "sources tell ABCNEWS the anthrax in the tainted letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle was laced with bentonite. The potent additive is known to have been used by only one country in producing biochemical weapons—Iraq. ... [I]t is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program ... The discovery of bentonite came in an urgent series of tests conducted at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and elsewhere." On October 28, Ross said that "despite continued White House denials, four well-placed and separate sources have told ABC News that initial tests on the anthrax by the U.S. Army at Fort Detrick, Maryland, have detected trace amounts of the chemical additives bentonite and silica",[70] a charge that was repeated several times on October 28 and 29.[71]

On October 29, 2001, White House spokesman Scott Stanzel "disputed reports that the anthrax sent to the Senate contained bentonite, an additive that ha[d] been used in Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program". Stanzel said, "Based on the test results we have, no bentonite has been found".[72] The same day, Major General John Parker at a White House briefing stated, "We do know that we found silica in the samples. Now, we don't know what that motive would be, or why it would be there, or anything. But there is silica in the samples. And that led us to be absolutely sure that there was no aluminum in the sample, because the combination of a silicate, plus aluminum, is sort of the major ingredients of bentonite."[73] Just over a week later, Homeland Security Advisor Tom Ridge in a White House press conference on November 7, 2001, stated, "The ingredient that we talked about before was silicon."[74] Neither Ross at ABC nor anyone else publicly pursued any further claims about bentonite, despite Ross's original claim that "four well-placed and separate sources" had confirmed its detection.

Dispute over silicon content

Some of the anthrax spores (65–75%) in the anthrax attack letters contained silicon inside their spore coats. Silicon was even reportedly found inside the natural spore coat of a spore that was still inside the "mother germ", which was asserted to confirm that the element was not added after the spores were formed and purified, i.e., the spores were not "weaponized".[23][24]

In 2010, a Japanese study reported, "silicon (Si) is considered to be a "quasiessential" element for most living organisms. However, silicate uptake in bacteria and its physiological functions have remained obscure." The study showed that spores from some species can contain as much as 6.3% dry weight of silicates.[75] "For more than 20 years, significant levels of silicon had been reported in spores of at least some Bacillus species, including those of Bacillus cereus, a close relative of B. anthracis." According to spore expert Peter Setlow, "Since silicate accumulation in other organisms can impart structural rigidity, perhaps silicate plays such a role for spores as well."[76]

The FBI lab concluded that 1.4% of the powder in the Leahy letter was silicon. Stuart Jacobson, a small-particle chemistry expert stated that:

• This is a shockingly high proportion [of silicon]. It is a number one would expect from the deliberate weaponization of anthrax, but not from any conceivable accidental contamination.[77]

Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Labs conducted experiments in an attempt to determine if the amount of silicon in the growth medium was the controlling factor which caused silicon to accumulate inside a spore's natural coat. The Livermore scientists tried 56 different experiments, adding increasingly high amounts of silicon to the media. All of their results were far below the 1.4% level of the attack anthrax, some as low as .001%. The conclusion was that something other than the level of silicon controlled how much silicon was absorbed by the spores.[77][78]

Richard O. Spertzel, a microbiologist who led the United Nations' biological weapons inspections of Iraq, wrote that the anthrax used could not have come from the lab where Ivins worked.[79] Spertzel said he remained skeptical of the Bureau's argument despite the new evidence presented on August 18, 2008, in an unusual FBI briefing for reporters. He questioned the FBI's claim that the powder was less than military grade, in part because of the presence of high levels of silica. The FBI had been unable to reproduce the attack spores with the high levels of silica. The FBI attributed the presence of high silica levels to "natural variability".[80] This conclusion of the FBI contradicted its statements at an earlier point in the investigation, when the FBI had stated, based on the silicon content, that the anthrax was "weaponized", a step that made the powder more airy and required special scientific know-how.[81]

"If there is that much silicon, it had to have been added," stated Jeffrey Adamovicz, who supervised Ivins's work at Fort Detrick.[77] Adamovicz explained that the silicon in the anthrax attack could have been added via a large fermentor, which Battelle and some other facilities use" but "we did not use a fermentor to grow anthrax at USAMRIID ... [and] We did not have the capability to add silicon compounds to anthrax spores." Ivins had neither the skills nor the means to attach silicon to anthrax spores. Richard Spertzel explained that the Fort Detrick facility did not handle anthrax in powdered form. "I don't think there's anyone there who would have the foggiest idea how to do it."[77]

Investigation

A reward for information totalling $2.5 million is being offered by the FBI, U.S. Postal Service and ADVO, Inc.

Authorities traveled to six continents, interviewed over 9,000 people, conducted 67 searches and issued over 6,000 subpoenas. "Hundreds of FBI personnel worked the case at the outset, struggling to discern whether the Sept. 11 al-Qaeda attacks and the anthrax murders were connected before eventually concluding that they were not."[82] In September 2006, there were still 17 FBI agents and 10 postal inspectors assigned to the case, including FBI Special Agent C. Frank Figliuzzi who was the on-scene commander of the evidence recovery efforts.[citation needed]

Anthrax archive destroyed

The FBI and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) both gave permission for Iowa State University to destroy the Iowa anthrax archive and the archive was destroyed on October 10 and 11, 2001.[83]

The FBI and CDC investigation was hampered by the destruction of a large collection of anthrax spores collected over more than seven decades and kept in more than 100 vials at Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa. Many scientists claim that the quick destruction of the anthrax spores collection in Iowa eliminated crucial evidence useful for the investigation. A precise match between the strain of anthrax used in the attacks and a strain in the collection would have offered hints as to when bacteria had been isolated and, perhaps, as to how widely it had been distributed to researchers. Such genetic clues could have given investigators the evidence necessary to identify the perpetrators.[83]

Al-Qaeda and Iraq blamed for attacks

Immediately after the anthrax attacks, White House officials pressured FBI Director Robert Mueller to publicly blame them on al-Qaeda following the September 11 attacks.[84] During the president's morning intelligence briefings, Mueller was "beaten up" for not producing proof that the killer spores were the handiwork of Osama Bin Laden, according to a former aide. "They really wanted to blame somebody in the Middle East," the retired senior FBI official stated. The FBI knew early on that the anthrax used was of a consistency requiring sophisticated equipment and was unlikely to have been produced in "some cave". At the same time, President Bush and Vice President Cheney in public statements speculated about the possibility of a link between the anthrax attacks and Al Qaeda.[85] The Guardian reported in early October that American scientists had implicated Iraq as the source of the anthrax,[86] and the next day The Wall Street Journal editorialized that Al Qaeda perpetrated the mailings, with Iraq the source of the anthrax.[87] A few days later, John McCain suggested on the Late Show with David Letterman that the anthrax may have come from Iraq,[88] and the next week ABC News did a series of reports stating that three or four (depending on the report) sources had identified bentonite as an ingredient in the anthrax preparations, implicating Iraq.[70][71][89]

Statements by the White House[72] and public officials[73] quickly proved that there was no bentonite in the attack anthrax. "No tests ever found or even suggested the presence of bentonite. The claim was just concocted from the start. It just never happened."[90] Nonetheless, a few conservative journalists repeated ABC's bentonite report for several years,[91] even after the invasion of Iraq proved there was no involvement.

"Person of interest"

[Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg (born 1930)], a molecular biologist at the State University of New York at Purchase and chairwoman of a biological weapons panel at the Federation of American Scientists, and others began claiming that the attack might be the work of a "rogue CIA agent" in October 2001, as soon as it became known that the Ames strain of anthrax had been used in the attacks, and she told the FBI the name of the "most likely" person.[92] On November 21, 2001, she made similar statements to the Biological and Toxic Weapons convention in Geneva.[93] In December 2001, she published "A Compilation of Evidence and Comments on the Source of the Mailed Anthrax" via the web site of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) claiming that the attacks were "perpetrated with the unwitting assistance of a sophisticated government program".[94] She discussed the case with reporters from The New York Times.[95] On January 4, 2002, Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times published a column titled "Profile of a Killer"[96] stating "I think I know who sent out the anthrax last fall." For months, Rosenberg gave speeches and stated her beliefs to many reporters from around the world. She posted "Analysis of the Anthrax Attacks" to the FAS web site on January 17, 2002. On February 5, 2002, she published "Is the FBI Dragging Its Feet?"[97] In response, the FBI stated, "There is no prime suspect in this case at this time".[98] The Washington Post reported, "FBI officials over the last week have flatly discounted Dr. Rosenberg's claims".[99] On June 13, 2002, Rosenberg posted "The Anthrax Case: What the FBI Knows" to the FAS site.[100] On June 18, 2002, she presented her theories to senate staffers working for Senators Daschle and Leahy.[101] On June 25, the FBI publicly searched Hatfill's apartment, and he became a household name. "The FBI also pointed out that Hatfill had agreed to the search and is not considered a suspect."[102] American Prospect and Salon.com reported, "Hatfill is not a suspect in the anthrax case, the FBI says."[103] On August 3, 2002, Rosenberg told the media that the FBI asked her if "a team of government scientists could be trying to frame Steven J. Hatfill".[104] In August 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft labeled Steven Hatfill a "person of interest" in a press conference, though no charges were brought against him. Hatfill is a virologist, and he vehemently denied that he had anything to do with the anthrax mailings and sued the FBI, the Justice Department, Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, and others for violating his constitutional rights and for violating the Privacy Act. On June 27, 2008, the Department of Justice announced that it would settle Hatfill's case for $5.8 million.[105]

Hatfill also sued The New York Times and its columnist Nicholas D. Kristof, as well as Donald Foster, Vanity Fair, Reader's Digest, and Vassar College for defamation. The case against The New York Times was initially dismissed,[106] but it was reinstated on appeal. The dismissal was upheld by the appeals court on July 14, 2008, on the basis that Hatfill was a public figure and malice had not been proven.[107] The Supreme Court rejected an appeal on December 15, 2008.[108] Hatfill's lawsuits against Vanity Fair and Reader's Digest were settled out of court in February 2007, but no details were made public. The statement released by Hatfill's lawyers[43] said, "Dr. Hatfill's lawsuit has now been resolved to the mutual satisfaction of all the parties".

Bruce Edwards Ivins

Bruce E. Ivins had worked for 18 years at the government's bio defense labs at Fort Detrick and was a top biodefense researcher. The Associated Press reported on August 1, 2008 that he had apparently committed suicide at the age of 62. It was widely reported that the FBI was about to press charges against him, but the evidence was largely circumstantial and the grand jury in Washington reported that it was not ready to issue an indictment.[109] Rush D. Holt Jr. represented the district where the anthrax letters were mailed, and he said that circumstantial evidence was not enough and asked FBI director Robert S. Mueller to appear before Congress to provide an account of the investigation.[110] Ivins's death left two unanswered questions. Scientists familiar with germ warfare said that there was no evidence that he had the skills to turn anthrax into an inhalable powder. Alan Zelicoff aided the FBI investigation, and he stated: "I don't think a vaccine specialist could do it…. This is aerosol physics, not biology".[111]

W. Russell Byrne worked in the bacteriology division of the Fort Detrick research facility. He said that Ivins was "hounded" by FBI agents who raided his home twice, and he was hospitalized for depression during that time. According to Byrne and local police, Ivins was removed from his workplace out of fears that he might harm himself or others. "I think he was just psychologically exhausted by the whole process," Byrne said. "There are people who you just know are ticking bombs. He was not one of them."[112]

On August 6, 2008, federal prosecutors declared Ivins the sole perpetrator of the crime when US Attorney Jeffrey A. Taylor laid out the case to the public. "The genetically unique parent material of the anthrax spores... was created and solely maintained by Dr. Ivins." But other experts disagreed, including biological warfare and anthrax expert Meryl Nass, who stated: "Let me reiterate: no matter how good the microbial forensics may be, they can only, at best, link the anthrax to a particular strain and lab. They cannot link it to any individual." At least 10 scientists had regular access to the laboratory and its anthrax stock, and possibly quite a few more, counting visitors from other institutions and workers at laboratories in Ohio and New Mexico that had received anthrax samples from the flask.[113] The FBI later claimed to have identified 419 people at Fort Detrick and other locations who had access to the lab where flask RMR-1029 was stored, or who had received samples from flask RMR-1029.[114]

Mental health issues

Ivins told a mental health counselor more than a year before the anthrax attacks that he was interested in a young woman who lived out of town and that he had "mixed poison" which he took with him when he went to watch her play in a soccer match. "If she lost, he was going to poison her," said the counselor, who treated Ivins at a Frederick clinic four or five times in mid-2000. She said that Ivins emphasized that he was a skillful scientist who "knew how to do things without people finding out". The counselor was so alarmed by his emotionless description of a specific, homicidal plan that she immediately alerted the head of her clinic and a psychiatrist who had treated Ivins, as well as the Frederick Police Department. She said that the police told her that nothing could be done because she did not have the woman's address or last name.[115]

In 2008, Ivins told a different therapist that he planned to kill his co-workers and "go out in a blaze of glory". That therapist stated in an application for a restraining order that Ivins had a "history dating to his graduate days of homicidal threats, actions, plans, threats and actions towards therapists". Dr. David Irwin, his psychiatrist, called him "homicidal, sociopathic with clear intentions."[116]

Evidence of consciousness of guilt

According to the report on the Amerithrax investigation published by the Department of Justice, Ivins engaged in actions and made statements that indicated a consciousness of guilt. He took environmental samples in his laboratory without authorization and decontaminated areas in which he had worked without reporting his activities. He also threw away a book about secret codes, which described methods similar to those used in the anthrax letters. Ivins threatened other scientists, made equivocal statements about his possible involvement in a conversation with an acquaintance, and put together outlandish theories in an effort to shift the blame for the anthrax mailings to people close to him.[13]:9

The FBI said that Ivins's justifications for his actions after the environmental sampling, as well as his explanations for a subsequent sampling, contradicted his explanation for the motives for the sampling.[117]

According to the Department of Justice, flask RMR-1029, which was created and controlled by Ivins, was used to create "the murder weapon".[49][118][119][120]

In 2002, researchers did not believe it was possible to distinguish between anthrax variants.[121] In January 2002, Ivins suggested that DNA sequencing should show differences in the genetics of anthrax mutations which would allow the source to be identified. Despite researchers advising the FBI that this may not have been possible, Ivins tutored agents on how to recognize them. Considered cutting edge at the time, this technique is now commonplace.[121] In February 2002, Ivins volunteered to provide samples from several variants of the Ames strain in order to compare their morphs. He submitted two test tube "slants" each from four samples of the Ames strain in his collection. Two of the slants were from flask RMR-1029. Although the slants from flask RMR-1029 were later reported to be a positive match, all eight slants were reportedly in the wrong type of test tube and would therefore not be usable as evidence in court. On March 29, 2002, Ivins's boss instructed Ivins and others in suites B3 and B4 on how to properly prepare slants for the FBI Repository. The subpoena also included instructions on the proper way to prepare slants. When Ivins was told that his February samples did not meet FBIR requirements, he prepared eight new slants. The two new slants prepared from flask RMR-1029 submitted in April by Ivins did not contain the mutations that were later determined to be in flask RMR-1029.[122][123]

It was reported that in April 2004, Henry Heine found a test tube in the lab containing anthrax and contacted Ivins.[121] In an email sent in reply, Ivins reportedly told him it was probably RMR-1029 and for Heine to forward a sample to the FBI.[121] Doubts regarding the reliability of the FBI tests were later raised when the FBI tested Heine's sample and a further one from Heine's test tube: one tested negative and one positive.[121]

A DOJ summary report of February 19, 2010, said that "the evidence suggested that Dr. Ivins obstructed the investigation either by providing a submission which was not in compliance with the subpoena, or worse, that he deliberately submitted a false sample."[13]:79 Records released under the Freedom of Information Act in 2011 show that Ivins provided four sets of samples from 2002 to 2004, twice the number the FBI reported. Three of the four sets tested positive for the morphs.[121]

The FBI said that "At a group therapy session on July 9, 2008, Dr. Ivins was particularly upset. He revealed to the counselor and psychologist leading the group, and other members of the group, that he was a suspect in the anthrax investigation and that he was angry at the investigators, the government, and the system in general. He said he was not going to face the death penalty, but instead had a plan to 'take out' co-workers and other individuals who had wronged him. He noted that it was possible, with a plan, to commit murder and not make a mess. He stated that he had a bullet-proof vest, and a list of co-workers who had wronged him, and said that he was going to obtain a Glock firearm from his son within the next day, because federal agents were watching him and he could not obtain a weapon on his own. He added that he was going to 'go out in a blaze of glory.'"[13]:50

While in a mental hospital, Ivins made menacing phone calls[124] to his social worker Jean Duley on July 11 and 12.

Alleged hidden texts

In the letters sent to the media, the characters 'A' and 'T' were sometimes bolded or highlighted by tracing over, according to the FBI suggesting that the letters contained a hidden code.[13]:58[125][126][127][128][129]

Some believe the letters to the New York Post[130] and Tom Brokaw[131] contained a "hidden message" in such highlighted characters. Below is the media text with the highlighted As and Ts:

• 09-11-01
• THIS IS NEXT
• TAKE PENACILIN [sic] NOW
• DEATH TO AMERICA
• DEATH TO ISRAEL
• ALLAH IS GREAT

According to the FBI, Summary Report issued on February 19, 2010, following the search of Ivins's home, cars, and office on November 1, 2007, investigators began examining his trash.[13]:64 A week later, just after 1:00 a.m. on the morning of November 8, the FBI stated that Ivins was observed throwing away "a copy of a book entitled Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, published by Douglas Hofstadter in 1979" and "a 1992 issue of American Scientist Journal which contained an article entitled 'The Linguistics of DNA,' and discussed, among other things, codons and hidden messages".[13]:61

The book Gödel, Escher, Bach contains a lengthy description of the encoding/decoding procedures, including an illustration of hiding a message within a message by bolding certain characters.[132] According to the FBI Summary Report, "[w]hen they lifted out just the bolded letters, investigators got TTT AAT TAT – an apparent hidden message". The 3-letter groups are codons, "meaning that each sequence of three nucleic acids will code for a specific amino acid".[13]:59

• TTT = Phenylalanine (single-letter designator F)

• AAT = Asparagine (single-letter designator N)

• TAT = Tyrosine (single-letter designator Y)

The FBI Summary Report proceeds to say: "From this analysis, two possible hidden meanings emerged: (1) 'FNY' – a verbal assault on New York, and (2) PAT – the nickname of [Dr. Ivins's] Former Colleague #2." Ivins was known to have a dislike for New York City, and four of the media letters had been sent to New York.[13]:60 The report states that it "was obviously impossible for the Task Force to determine with certainty that either of these two translations was correct", however, "the key point to the investigative analysis is that there is a hidden message, not so much what that message is".[13]:60 According to the FBI, Ivins showed a fascination with codes and also had an interest in secrets and hidden messages,[13]:60 ff and was familiar with biochemical codons.[13]:59 ff

Ivins's "non-denial" denials

Experts have suggested that the anthrax mailings included a number of indications that the mailer was trying to avoid harming anyone with his warning letters.[38][94]

Examples:

1. None of the intended recipients of the letters were infected.

2. The seams on the backs of the envelopes were taped over as if to make certain the powders could not escape through open seams.[133]

3. The letters were folded with the "pharmaceutical fold", which was used for centuries to safely contain and transport doses of powdered medicines (and currently to safely hold trace evidence).[citation needed]

4. The media letters provided "medical advice": "TAKE PENACILIN [sic] NOW."

5. The Senate letters informed the recipient that the powder was anthrax: "WE HAVE THIS ANTHRAX."

6. At the time of the mailings, it was generally believed that such powders could not escape from a sealed envelope except through the two open corners where a letter opener is inserted, which had been taped shut.[134]

In June 2008, Ivins was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital. The FBI stated that during a June 5 group therapy session there, Ivins had a conversation with an unnamed witness, during which he made a series of statements about the anthrax mailings that the FBI said could best be characterized as "non-denial denials".[13]:70–71 When asked about the anthrax attacks and whether he could have had anything to do with them, the FBI said that Ivins admitted he suffered from loss of memory, stating that he would wake up dressed and wonder if he had gone out during the night. Some of his responses allegedly included the following selected quotes:

• "I can tell you I don't have it in my heart to kill anybody."

• "I do not have any recollection of ever have doing anything like that. As a matter of fact, I don't have no clue how to, how to make a bio-weapon and I don't want to know."

• "I can tell you, I am not a killer at heart."

• "If I found out I was involved in some way, and, and ..."

• "I don't think of myself as a vicious, a, a nasty evil person."

• "I don't like to hurt people, accidentally, in, in any way. And [several scientists at USAMRIID] wouldn't do that. And I, in my right mind wouldn't do it [laughs] ... But it's still, but I still feel responsibility because [the RMR-1029 flask containing the anthrax spores] wasn't locked up at the time ..."

In an interview with a confidential human resource[clarification needed] (CHR) which took place on January 8, 2008, the FBI said that the CHR told FBI agents that since Ivins's last interview with the FBI (on November 1, 2007), Ivins had "on occasion spontaneously declared at work, 'I could never intentionally kill or hurt someone'".[135]

Doubts about FBI conclusions

After the FBI announced that Ivins acted alone, many people with a broad range of political views, some of whom were colleagues of Ivins, expressed doubts.[136] Reasons cited for these doubts include that Ivins was only one of 100 people who could have worked with the vial used in the attacks and that the FBI couldn't place him near the New Jersey mailbox from which the anthrax was mailed.[136][137] The FBI's own genetic consultant, [Dr. Claire Marie Fraser (born 1955)], stated that the failure to find any anthrax spores in Ivins's house, vehicle or on any of his belongings seriously undermined the case.[123] Noting unanswered questions about the FBI's scientific tests and lack of peer review, Jeffrey Adamovicz, one of Ivins's supervisors in USAMRIID's bacteriology division, stated, "I'd say the vast majority of people [at Fort Detrick] think he had nothing to do with it."[138] More than 200 colleagues attended his memorial service following his death.[139]

Alternative theories proposed include FBI incompetence, that Syria or Iraq directed the attacks, or that similar to some 9/11 conspiracy theories the US government knew in advance that the attacks would occur.[136] Senator Patrick Leahy who is Senate Judiciary Committee chairman and who had received an anthrax-tainted letter, said the FBI has not produced convincing evidence in the case.[citation needed] The Washington Post called for an independent investigation in the case saying that reporters and scientists were poking holes in the case.[140] Had both attacks on the senators succeeded in killing their targets, the result would have been a Republican majority in the Senate, in the immediate future because of the loss of two Democrats, and in the long term as the governors of the targets' states would have been likely to name Republican replacements. This suggests that right-wing extremists had an incentive to carry out the attacks[speculation?].

On September 17, 2008, Senator Patrick Leahy told FBI Director Robert Mueller during testimony before the Judiciary Committee which Leahy chairs, that he did not believe Army scientist Bruce Ivins acted alone in the 2001 anthrax attacks, stating:

I believe there are others involved, either as accessories before or accessories after the fact. I believe that there are others out there. I believe there are others who could be charged with murder.[141]

Tom Daschle, the other Democratic senator targeted, believes Ivins was the sole culprit.[142]

Although the FBI matched the genetic origin of the attack spores to the spores in Ivins's flask RMR-1029, the spores within that flask did not have the same silicon chemical "fingerprint" as the spores in the attack letters. The implication is that spores taken out of flask RMR-1029 had been used to grow new spores for the mailings.[143]

On April 22, 2010, the U.S. National Research Council, the operating arm of the National Academy of Sciences, convened a review committee that heard testimony from Henry Heine, a microbiologist who was formerly employed at the Army's biodefense laboratory in Maryland where Ivins had worked. Heine told the panel that it was impossible that the deadly spores had been produced undetected in Ivins's laboratory, as maintained by the FBI. He testified that at least a year of intensive work would have been required using the equipment at the army lab to produce the quantity of spores contained in the letters and that such an intensive effort could not have escaped the attention of colleagues. Heine also told the panel that lab technicians who worked closely with Ivins have told him they saw no such work. He stated further that biological containment measures where Ivins worked were inadequate to prevent Anthrax spores from floating out of the laboratory into animal cages and offices. "You'd have had dead animals or dead people," Heine said.[144] According to Science Magazine,[145] "Heine caveated his remarks by saying that he himself had no experience making anthrax stocks." Science magazine provides additional comments by Adam Driks of Loyola who stated that the amount of anthrax in the letters could be made in "a number of days". Emails by Ivins state, "We can presently make 1 X 10^12 [one trillion] spores per week."[146] And The New York Times reported on May 7, 2002, that the Leahy letter contained .871 grams of anthrax powder [equivalent to 871 billion spores][147]

In a technical article to be published in the Journal of Bioterrorism & Biodefense in 2011, three scientists argued that the preparation of the spores did require a high level of sophistication, contrary to the position taken by federal authorities that the material would have been unsophisticated. The paper is largely based on the high level of tin detected in tests of the mailed anthrax, and the tin may have been used to encapsulate the spores, which required processing not possible in laboratories to which Ivins had access. According to the scientific article, this raises the possibility that Ivins was not the perpetrator or did not act alone. Earlier in the investigation, the FBI had named tin as a substance "of interest" but the final report makes no mention of it and fails to address the high tin content. The chairwoman of the National Academy of Science panel that reviewed the FBI's scientific work and the director of a separate review by the Government Accountability Office said that the issues raised by the paper should be addressed. Other scientists, such as Johnathan L. Kiel, a retired Air Force scientist who worked on anthrax for many years, did not agree with the authors' assessments — saying that the tin might be a random contaminant rather than a clue to complex processing.[148] Kiel said that tin might simply be picked up by the spores as a result of the use of metal lab containers, although he had not tested that idea.[148]

In 2011, the chief of the Bacteriology Division at the Army laboratory, Patricia Worsham, said it lacked the facilities in 2001 to make the kind of spores in the letters. In 2011, the government conceded that the equipment required was not available in the lab, calling into question a key pillar of the FBI's case, that Ivins had produced the anthrax in his lab. According to Worsham, the lab's equipment for drying spores, a machine the size of a refrigerator, was not in containment so that it would be expected that non-immunized personnel in that area would have become ill. Colleagues of Ivins at the lab have asserted that he couldn't have grown the quantity of anthrax used in the letters without their noticing it.[149]

A spokesman for the Justice Department said that the investigators continue to believe that Ivins acted alone.[148]

Evidence of 9/11 link to anthrax

Experts at the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies (CCBS) concluded that one of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers, Ahmed al-Haznawi, had likely been exposed to anthrax. Al-Haznawi and another man arrived in the emergency room of a Fort Lauderdale, Florida, hospital presenting an ugly, dark lesion on his leg that he said he developed after bumping into a suitcase two months earlier. Dr. Christos Tsonas thought the injury was curious, cleaned it and prescribed an antibiotic. After September 11, federal investigators found the medicine prescribed by Tsonas among the possessions of al-Haznawi.[150]

Tsonas came to believe that al-Haznawi's lesion "was consistent with cutaneous anthrax", a disease that causes skin lesions. The experts at the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies interviewed Tsonas and prepared a memorandum that was circulated among top government officials. The memorandum said that the diagnosis of cutaneous anthrax was "the most probable and coherent interpretation of the data available" and that "such a conclusion of course raises the possibility that the hijackers were handling anthrax and were the perpetrators of the anthrax letter attacks".

Several 9/11 hijackers, including al-Haznawi, lived in Boca Raton, Florida, near American Media, Inc., the workplace of the first victim of the anthrax attacks. They also attended flight school there. Some of the hijackers rented apartments from a real estate agent who was the wife of an editor of the Sun, a publication of American Media. Further, a pharmacist in Delray Beach, Florida, stated he had told the FBI that two of the 9/11 hijackers, Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, entered the pharmacy seeking medicine to treat irritations on Atta's hands.[150]

If the 9/11 hijackers were involved in the anthrax attacks, they would have needed an accomplice to mail the tainted letters since the four recovered anthrax letters were postmarked on September 18 and October 9.[150]

Congressional oversight

Congressman Rush Holt, whose district in New Jersey includes a mailbox from which anthrax letters are believed to have been mailed, called for an investigation of the anthrax attacks by Congress or by an independent commission he proposed in a bill entitled the Anthrax Attacks Investigation Act (H.R. 1248)[151] Other members of Congress have also called for an independent investigation.[152]

An official of the U.S. administration said in March 2010 that President Barack Obama probably would veto legislation authorizing the next budget for U.S. intelligence agencies if it called for a new investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks, as such an investigation "would undermine public confidence" in an FBI probe.[153] In a letter to congressional leaders, Peter Orszag, the director of the Office of Management and Budget at the time, wrote that an investigation would be "duplicative", and expressed concern about the appearance and precedent involved when Congress commissions an agency Inspector General to replicate a criminal investigation, but did not list the anthrax investigation as an issue that was serious enough to advise the President to veto the entire bill.[154]

National Academy of Sciences review

In what appears to have been a response to lingering skepticism, on September 16, 2008, the FBI asked the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to conduct an independent review of the scientific evidence that led the agency to implicate U.S. Army researcher Bruce Ivins in the anthrax letter attacks of 2001.[11] However, despite taking this action, Director Mueller said that the scientific methods applied in the investigation had already been vetted by the research community through the involvement of several dozen nonagency scientists.[11]

The NAS review officially got underway on April 24, 2009.[155] While the scope of the project included the consideration of facts and data surrounding the investigation of the 2001 Bacillus anthracis mailings, as well as a review of the principles and methods used by the FBI, the NAS committee was not given the task to "undertake an assessment of the probative value of the scientific evidence in any specific component of the investigation, prosecution, or civil litigation", nor to offer any view on the guilt or innocence of any of the involved people.[156]

In mid-2009, the NAS committee held public sessions, in which presentations were made by scientists, including scientists from the FBI laboratories.[157][158][159][160] In September 2009, scientists, including Paul Keim of Northern Arizona University, Joseph Michael of Sandia National Laboratory and Peter Weber of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, presented their findings.[161][162] In one of the presentations, scientists reported that they did not find any silica particles on the outside of the spores (i.e., there was no "weaponization"[citation needed]), and that only some of the spores in the anthrax letters contained silicon inside their spore coats. One of the spores was still inside the "mother germ", yet it already had silicon inside its spore coat.[23][163]

In October 2010, the FBI submitted materials to NAS that it had not previously provided. Included in the new materials were results of analyses performed on environmental samples collected from an overseas site. Those analyses yielded evidence of the Ames strain in some samples. NAS recommended a review of those investigations.[164]

The NAS committee released its report on February 15, 2011, concluding that it was "impossible to reach any definitive conclusion about the origins of the anthrax in the letters, based solely on the available scientific evidence".[165] The report also challenged the FBI and U.S. Justice Department's conclusion that a single-spore batch of anthrax maintained by Ivins at his laboratory at Fort Detrick in Maryland was the parent material for the spores in the anthrax letters.[164][166][167]

Aftermath

Contamination and cleanup

Dozens of buildings were contaminated with anthrax as a result of the mailings. The companies in charge of the clean up and decontaminating of buildings in New York City, including ABC Headquarters and a midtown Manhattan building that was part of the Rockefeller Center and was home to the New York Post and Fox News, were Bio Recovery Corporation of Woodside, New York and Bio-Recovery Services of America, based in Ohio.[168] Bio Recovery provided the labor and equipment, such as HEPA filtered negative pressure air scrubbers, HEPA vacuums, respirators, cyclone foggers, and decontamination foam licensed by the Sandia National Laboratories. Ninety-three bags of anthrax-contaminated mail were removed from the New York Post alone.[169]

The decontamination of the Brentwood postal facility took 26 months and cost $130 million. The Hamilton, New Jersey postal facility[170] remained closed until March 2005; its cleanup cost $65 million.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency led the collaborative effort to clean up the Hart Senate Office Building, where Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle's office was located, as well as the Ford Office Building and several other locations around the capitol.[171] It used $27 million of its funds for its Superfund program on the Capitol Hill anthrax cleanup.[172] One FBI document said the total damage exceeded $1 billion.[173]

Political effects

The anthrax attacks, as well as the September 11, 2001, attacks, spurred significant increases in U.S. government funding for biological warfare research and preparedness. For example, biowarfare-related funding at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) increased by $1.5 billion in 2003. In 2004, Congress passed the Project Bioshield Act, which provides $5.6 billion over ten years for the purchase of new vaccines and drugs.[174] These vaccines included the monoclonal antibody Raxibacumab, which treats anthrax as well as an Anthrax Vaccine Adsorbed, both of which are stockpiled by the US government.[175]

A theory that Iraq was behind the attacks, based upon purported evidence that the powder was weaponized and some reports of alleged meetings between 9/11 conspirators and Iraqi officials, may have contributed to the hysteria which ultimately enabled the 2003 Invasion of Iraq.[176]

Cipro manufacturer Bayer pharmaceuticals agreed to provide the United States with 100,000 doses of (Ciprofloxacin) for $.95 per dose, a cut in the price from $1.74.[177] The Canadian government had previously overridden the Bayer patent,[178] and the US was threatening the same measure if Bayer did not agree to negotiate the price.[179] Shortly afterward, it was recommended that doxycycline was a more appropriate drug to treat anthrax exposure.[177] A widened use of the broad-spectrum antibiotic Ciprofloxacin had also raised serious concerns amongst scientists about the creation and increased spread of drug-resistant bacteria strains.[177] Numerous corporations offered to supply drugs for free, contingent on the Food and Drug Administration approving their products for anthrax treatment. They included Bristol Myers Squibb (Gatifloxacin), Johnson and Johnson (Levofloxacin) and GlaxoSmithKline (two drugs). Eli Lilly and Pfizer also offered to provide drugs at cost.[177]

The attack led to the widespread confiscation and curtailment of US Mail, especially to US media companies: "checks, bills, letters, and packages simply stopped arriving. For many people and businesses that had resisted the cultural shift to e-mail, this was the moment that pushed them online."[180]

After the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent anthrax mailings, lawmakers were pressed for legislation to combat further terrorist acts. Under heavy pressure from then Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, a bipartisan compromise in the House Judiciary Committee allowed legislation for the Patriot Act to move forward for full consideration later that month.[181][182]

Health

Years after the attack, several anthrax victims reported lingering health problems including fatigue, shortness of breath and memory loss.[183]

A 2004 study proposed that the total number of people harmed by the anthrax attacks of 2001 should be raised to 68.[184]

A postal inspector, William Paliscak, became severely ill and disabled after removing an anthrax-contaminated air filter from the Brentwood mail facility on October 19, 2001. Although his doctors, Tyler Cymet and Gary Kerkvliet, believe that the illness was caused by anthrax exposure, blood tests did not find anthrax bacteria or antibodies, and therefore the CDC does not recognize it as a case of inhalational anthrax.[185]

[...]

See also

• Law portal
• United States portal

• 1984 Rajneeshee bioterror attack – first widely recognized instance of bioterror in the United States
• 2003 ricin letters
• April 2013 ricin letters
• Austin serial bombings
• Anthrax War, 2009 documentary
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
• Domestic terrorism in the United States
• Health crisis
• United States Postal Service Irradiated mail
• List of journalists killed in the United States
• List of unsolved murders
• October 2018 United States mail bombing attempts
• Statement on Chemical and Biological Defense Policies and Programs

Two days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a friend called me up in panic. His cousin had supposedly heard from a high-ranking F.B.I. source that another, even more catastrophic attack on New York was imminent. ''Nuclear?'' I asked. ''Or biological,'' he said knowingly. The only way I could get him off the phone was to promise to check the rumor out, which I sheepishly proceeded to do. Two responses from people with high classifications were basically the same: ''I haven't heard anything, and I wouldn't do anything silly -- but after Tuesday, who knows?''

''Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War,'' by three veteran reporters for The New York Times -- Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William Broad -- offers reasons the tip could not be laughed off. It tells the story of biological weapons and the fight against them, using biography and historical narrative to make the issues clear and accessible. The tone is somewhat alarmist, but because of the care with which the authors have assembled their case, not to mention our new sense of what is possible, even skeptical readers may have trouble sleeping easily after they finish it.

Biological weapons are easier to make than nuclear weapons and deadlier than chemical ones. The worst-case scenarios involve the dissemination of genetically engineered ''superbugs'' that are lethal, contagious and untreatable. As the authors point out, an attack could happen almost invisibly: ''There would be no 'scene' at which experts could converge. In germ terrorism, the 'first responders' would be doctors and nurses, and the first signs of attack would be the arrival of sick people at an emergency room.'' Anyone who had come into contact with the sick over the incubation period of the virus could unwittingly pass on the contagion. What could the danger be? The influenza epidemic of 1918-19 killed 20 million people, far more than died during World War I.

The book opens with a description of the ''first large-scale use of germs by terrorists on American soil,'' the spreading of salmonella in Oregon salad bars by followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh in 1984. The most chilling aspect of this incident, in which 751 people were poisoned, is how much it resembles the better-known nerve-gas attack in a Tokyo subway by the Aum Shinrikyo cult a decade later. Both were carried out by followers of bizarre gurus who presided over large, rich organizations; both were preceded by smaller operations designed to test methods and weaponry; and yet both took authorities by complete surprise.

Only years later, in fact, did the full details surrounding the Oregon incident become known. Investigators at first attributed the outbreak to improper food handling, the authors explain, because they were drawn to the most probable cause of the illness: '' 'If it looks like a horse, don't think about zebras,' they are taught. For American scientists in 1984, bioterrorism was, in effect, a zebra.''

Among those called in to investigate the Rajneesh episode was Bill Patrick, a pillar of America's own biological weapons program. The authors use Patrick's story, along with those of the biologists Joshua Lederberg and Matthew Meselson, to sketch the contours of that program from its origins during World War II, through the renunciation of offensive biological warfare by the Nixon administration, to the focus on defense during the last decades of the cold war. The tale is full of interesting tidbits -- who knew that the only United States biological attack was against Hjalmar Schacht, the head of the Reichsbank under Hitler? -- but describes what was at most a minor sideshow of the larger superpower confrontation.

In the 1990's, however, biological weapons moved closer to center stage. One reason was Saddam Hussein, who not only vigorously pursued all weapons of mass destruction but refused to give them up even after his defeat in the Persian Gulf war. Revelations about the extent of the Iraqi biological weapons program demonstrated just how easy it was to evade international restrictions and forced officials to consider how ill-prepared American forces were to cope with such weapons. The first days of the gulf war saw some anxious moments, as when ''a half dozen British soldiers stationed near the front lines reported flulike symptoms.'' But sometimes a horse is just a horse: instead of anthrax, it turned out to be the flu.

Another reason for concern was Moscow. Investigations in the early 1990's proved conclusively that a 1979 outbreak of anthrax in the Soviet city of Sverdlovsk, now Yekaterinburg, had been caused by a military accident; a top Russian weapons scientist, Kanatjan Alibekov, defected in 1992 with priceless information; and visits by Americans to former Soviet installations revealed an illegal offensive biological weapons program of staggering extent. A gram of anthrax spores can kill dozens of people; at its peak, the Soviet program could produce 4,500 metric tons a year -- along with smallpox, the Marburg virus and ''a genetically improved version of the Black Death.''

Most of this material is familiar, thanks to ''Biohazard'' (1999), by the Russian defector -- now known as Ken Alibek -- and the authors' earlier reportage for The Times, but it shocks nonetheless. The reader tours decaying laboratories where some of the most vicious killers in history were enhanced and weaponized. ''In one bungalow . . . hundreds of small cages were stacked together; in another room stood a human-sized cage -- for large 'nonhuman primates,' man-sized monkeys. . . . The animals were long gone, but a stench familiar to veterans of the world of germ warfare clung to the ruins -- a blend of bleach, dust, animal waste and death.''

If Iraq and Russia showed the danger of national weapons programs, other events in the 1990's, from the bombing of the World Trade Center and the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building to Aum Shinrikyo's attack in the Tokyo subway, brought home the threat from smaller groups. Within a few years, American officials from President Clinton on down were consumed with how to protect our armed forces and public from biological attack.

Yet despite much effort and billions of dollars thrown at the problem, neither the military nor the citizenry is remotely ready to handle a serious crisis. The military's anthrax vaccination program appears to have been something of a boondoggle, and simulations show that the use of biological weapons against American cities would cause utter chaos. Even New York, whose Office of Emergency Management has set the standard for how to prepare, would be overwhelmed should any of the truly horrific scenarios actually take place.

So how should one handle such a serious but unlikely contingency? Some simply dismiss it. The authors quote one military officer as saying about biological warfare: ''There's an in box, an out box and a too-hard-to-do box. . . . We saw it as a threat, but we didn't want to deal with it, to put together a war plan. It was too difficult.'' This is psychologically understandable; after all, the United States never really had an answer for what to do about nuclear weapons if deterrence failed, yet it managed to get through the cold war anyway. We may get lucky again, and a combination of prevention, deterrence and intelligence -- together with the inherent difficulty of successfully weaponizing diseases -- could allow us to live through several more decades unscathed. But it would be wise to think of this as an insurance question, and to take steps to lower the odds and reduce the consequences should the unthinkable ever occur.

The most obviously beneficial move would be to upgrade dramatically the nation's public health and epidemiological surveillance systems, which constitute one of the few tools available for dealing with a biological attack (a step that would have much wider benefits as well). Another sensible measure would be increasing our cooperative threat reduction programs with Russia to keep tabs on the materiel and personnel of the former Soviet arsenal. With little pork and few headlines involved, however, these remedies are likely to attract more rhetoric than action.

They shouldn't. We know now that there are people who want us dead, that there are ways to kill us in large numbers and that there is little we can do to stop them. The authors cite the C.I.A. as warning that Osama bin Laden has been ''training his operatives to use chemical and biological toxins,'' and at least one of the hijackers identified in the Sept. 11 attack was reportedly checking out crop-dusters in Florida earlier this year. A few weeks ago, experts knew that terrorists preferred the familiar to the exotic, and thought bombs posed the greatest threat. That was then; this is now.

In late September, in the days before a series of anthrax-tainted letters made bioterrorism a reality in the United States, President Bush decided that the federal government should acquire enough vaccine to protect every American against an even more menacing biological threat: smallpox.

Although smallpox was eradicated as a disease in the 1970's, American intelligence had suspected for years that Iraq and North Korea, and possibly other rogue nations, had maintained clandestine stocks of the deadly smallpox virus.

But officials say it was the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and not any new information, that prompted the president's decision to greatly expand the nation's smallpox vaccine stockpile.

The decision, which was not publicly announced, gained urgency when letters containing potentially lethal anthrax powder began arriving at news organizations and on Capitol Hill. The anthrax scares produced widespread fears that the nation would run short of the antibiotic Cipro. So senior administration officials quietly sped up their timetable for acquiring the smallpox vaccine.

Last Wednesday, Tommy G. Thompson, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, announced the plan, which calls for stockpiling the vaccine so that it can be used in the event of an outbreak of smallpox, a highly contagious disease for which there is no treatment, and that kills one-third of all people infected with it.

''I think the American people will feel much more comfortable knowing they have their name on a vaccine shot in our inventory,'' Mr. Thompson said in an interview. ''It's the security of knowing you have enough for every American.''

The decision to buy 300 million doses will vastly accelerate an existing vaccine program that, in the view of many scientists and federal officials, was hampered by bureaucratic inefficiency and was moving much too slowly. It also illustrates just how concerned officials have become about the nation's preparedness for a bioterrorism attack.

Despite Mr. Thompson's public pronouncements on Sept. 30 that the government ''can handle any contingency right now,'' interviews with nearly a dozen administration officials, scientists and bioterrorism experts make clear that in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, both the health secretary and the White House privately were acutely aware of the nation's vulnerabilities.

Even so, it was not until Oct. 4 -- just hours before Mr. Thompson announced to the nation that a Florida man had become sick with pulmonary anthrax -- that he secured Mr. Bush's commitment to pay for his entire $1.6 billion bioterrorism preparedness package.

''It was the double whammy of the World Trade Center and the anthrax attack that made everybody realize that these are real problems that need to be dealt with,'' said Peter B. Jahrling, an Army scientist who is one of the nation's leading smallpox researchers. ''In all my years of government service, I have never seen anything move this fast.''

Mankind's triumph over smallpox is considered public health's greatest accomplishment. After the World Health Organization officially declared in 1980 that the disease had been eradicated, countries were supposed to destroy their stocks of the smallpox virus and transfer any samples of it two repositories, one in Russia and the other in the United States, at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

By the early 1990's, the United States had about 15 million doses of aging smallpox vaccine that had been made by Wyeth Laboratories. It was too little to protect civilians and military forces, but few civilian scientists believed that the disease would ever re-emerge.

The military, however, thought otherwise. In 1989, Vladimir Pasechnik, a top Soviet biologist, defected to Britain. In briefings later shared with American military intelligence analysts, he described the Soviet Union's empire of thousands of scientists and dozens of secret cities and facilities devoted to turning germs and viruses, including smallpox, into weapons. And he said Moscow was trying to modify smallpox into an even more efficient killer.

These accusations, bolstered by the 1992 defection to the United States of Ken Alibek, the No. 2 scientist in the secret Soviet program, led American scientists at the Army's biological defense laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md., to press for the development of a more modern vaccine.

In 1997, the Pentagon awarded a contract to DynPort, an American-British company, to do just that.

The next year, a special panel of experts urged President Bill Clinton to start a vaccine program for civilians. Because vaccination was stopped in 1972, and immunization against smallpox lasts only 15 to 20 years, Americans are especially vulnerable, experts say.

At the Department of Health and Human Services, [Dr. Margaret Ann "Peggy" Hamburg (born 1955)] oversaw the smallpox effort. Administration officials worried that they would not get support for the plan in Congress. ''A lot of people thought this was a crazy idea, to make new vaccine when the disease didn't exist,'' Dr. Hamburg said.

At the White House, Richard A. Clarke, President Clinton's counterterrorism coordinator, wanted the Pentagon and the health agency to join forces. But the Pentagon refused to share the seed strain for its program with the civilian program.

In an interview last summer, a spokesman for the office charged with making the vaccine, the Joint Vaccine Acquisition Program, said there were legal impediments to cooperating with a civilian contractor. Among other factors, he said, product liability was a concern.

''These were two diametrically opposite bureaucracies that had no history of dealing with one another,'' said Mr. Clarke, who now leads Mr. Bush's office to protect the nation against Internet threats.

The result was two separate smallpox vaccination programs. The military contract with DynPort called for 300,000 doses at a cost of $22 million, or initially about $70 a dose, to be delivered around 2005 or 2006. The civilian contract, which was awarded to OraVax, a Massachusetts-based company that has since been acquired by Acambis, a British concern, called for 40 million doses to be delivered by 2005, at a cost of $343 million, at about the same time as the military vaccine.

One senior administration official called the situation ''an utter mess.''

Even before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Bush administration was determined to straighten the problem out. In June, a team of bioterrorism experts, led by the Johns Hopkins University Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies, conducted an exercise code-named Dark Winter that simulated an outbreak of smallpox in the United States. As the imaginary epidemic spread, growing grimmer and grimmer, the government quickly ran out of vaccine.

• [Note - Primary author and producer of the Dark Winter exercise was  Dr. Tara Jeanne O'Toole (born 1951) ]

''After Dark Winter, there was a whole spate of briefings, so that a whole lot of people suddenly began to realize just how serious an epidemic of this sort could be,'' said Dr. Donald A. Henderson, who directs the center at Johns Hopkins and led the global effort to eradicate smallpox.

On Sept. 16, Mr. Thompson brought Dr. Henderson into his inner circle of advisers. The men met for the first time that day.

''This was a man deeply troubled and very worried,'' Dr. Henderson recalled. Mr. Thompson acknowledged as much. ''Where will they hit us if they're going to hit us again?'' he remembered thinking.

By this time, Mr. Thompson was already pressing the White House to improve the nation's bioterrorism defenses. He found allies there among several officials who were steeped in biodefense.

I. Lewis Libby, a top Pentagon lawyer in the first Bush administration who is now Vice President [Richard Bruce Cheney (born 1941)]'s chief of staff and national security adviser, arranged for his boss to see a video of the Dark Winter exercise on Sept. 20. Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, who directs a National Security Council program to defend against weapons of mass destruction, was also supportive.

Officials said the vice president was so alarmed by the exercise that he raised the smallpox vaccine issue at a National Security Council meeting later that day. ''The vice president was pushing it, and the president was going along with it,'' a senior administration official said.

Within Mr. Thompson's circle of advisers, however, there was serious debate about whether 300 million doses were actually needed. Dr. Henderson's group at Johns Hopkins had estimated that only 100 million to 135 million doses would be needed to curtail an outbreak, and people familiar with the discussion say Dr. Henderson argued that money might be better spent on improving the public health infrastructure.

Others argued that the government needed a dose for every American, if only to avert panic. Among them was Michael T. Osterholm, a public health expert who is also advising Mr. Thompson. He declined to talk about the deliberations, but said, ''There is a certain psychological benefit to knowing that, in this country, there is a dose of vaccine for everybody if we need it.''

The secretary agreed and, sometime after Sept. 20, secured verbal approval from the president for the program. On Oct. 3, Mr. Thompson announced that his agency had arranged for Acambis to speed up its work and deliver the doses by the end of next summer.

The next day, anthrax hit America.

As the news was breaking in Florida that a man there was sick with pulmonary anthrax, a disease not seen in this country for a quarter-century, Mr. Thompson was at the White House, briefing the president and vice president on his bioterrorism plans.

Officials say that briefing was a pivotal moment. The president committed the $1.6 billion for the broad antibioterrorism package. When it was over, Mr. Thompson briefed the press about the anthrax infection. Over the next several days, it became clear that the case was a deliberate attempt at anthrax poisoning.

''When the anthrax hit, it was like, whoof!'' Dr. Henderson said. ''Sort of like a blow in the stomach.'' The next Monday, Oct. 8, [Dr Anthony Stephen Fauci (born 1940)], director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, received an order from Mr. Thompson's chief deputy, Claude Allen. His mission, Dr. Fauci said, was ''to determine the scientific and technical feasibility of rapidly expanding the production of smallpox vaccine.''

That Friday, a collection of the nation's top scientists and public health officials gathered in Dr. Fauci's office on the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. They included representatives from the Food and Drug Administration, the disease control centers and Dr. Fauci's institute, as well as Dr. Jahrling, the Army scientist.

''It was a high state of adrenaline,'' Dr. Fauci recalled. He remembered telling the assembled scientists: ''We have been given a task. We are going to get it done, and we are going to get it done on time. Failure is not an option.'' One concern, he and others said, was that the administration was taking a risk by relying on just one company, Acambis, to make the smallpox vaccine. So by this time, officials from Mr. Thompson's office were already meeting with other vaccine manufacturers, including Merck and Baxter International, which has a 20 percent stake in Acambis, to determine whether they would help in the effort.

''I think you want to diversify the risk,'' Dr. Jahrling said. ''In a world where planes hit trade centers and the whole thing comes crashing down, I think you probably want to make this stuff in more than one place.'' And while Dr. Fauci's institute was already running tests to see if the existing stockpile of 15 million doses could be safely diluted to create 75 million, everyone at the meeting agreed that was not good enough. By the time it was over, they had agreed to get a draft proposal for buying 300 million doses to Mr. Thompson by Oct. 17.

''We were on a very fast track,'' Dr. Fauci said.

So fast, in fact, that Mr. Thompson did not even wait for the draft to announce his plans. He did not need to, he said. The decision had already been made.

Patients worried about bioterrorism are calling doctors like David Busch asking, "When can I get my smallpox vaccine?" But Dr. Busch, chief of infectious diseases at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, tells patients that even when supplies of the scarce vaccine are expanded, he plans to do immunization "as needed, not as desired."

Amid the current shortage of smallpox vaccine and concern about its side effects, there is no plan now to undertake general vaccination of Americans.

Instead, the consensus of health officials is that vaccine stocks should be reserved for face-to-face contacts of patients in an actual smallpox outbreak. This technique, called "ring vaccination," was used to eradicate smallpox in developing countries. "It's critical that people around smallpox cases have first priority," says [Thomas Vincent Inglesby, Jr. (born 1957)] of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense in Baltimore. "They're the ones who are going to get the disease and spread the disease."

As for the danger of side effects, the vaccine is no more dangerous than it was decades ago. But doctors caution that Americans may be at more risk today than when the vaccine was phased out a quarter century ago, because of an aging population and growth of conditions that weaken the immune system: HIV disease, hepatitis C, organ transplants, and cancer chemotherapy.

The U.S. now has about 15 million doses on hand. Current tests will determine whether it is safe and effective to dilute those doses and expand supplies by five- to 10-fold. In an unpublished pilot study, smallpox researcher Sharon Frey of St. Louis University told The Wall Street Journal that even when the vaccine was diluted to 1/10 strength, 70% of recipients developed a strong immune response. About 95% of people receiving the full-strength vaccine develop a protective immune response.

Next year, more doses are expected to roll off the assembly line. Britain's Acambis PLC plans to deliver 54 million doses of vaccine, and U.S. companies are in talks to supply an additional 250 million doses.

Even when expanded supply is available, doctors plan to use them with caution. Made from live vaccinia virus that is kin to cowpox, the vaccine usually produces a bump at the injection site. But in people with weakened immunity, it carries a risk of full-blown vaccinia pox. In very young children, there also is a risk of encephalitis with brain damage, or even death. Historically, fatal reactions have occurred at the rate of one to two per million vaccinated.

The treatment for vaccine side effects, an antibody solution called vaccinia immune globulin, also is in very short supply. To supplement this, the National Institutes of Health soon will test the drug cidofovir, made by [Gilead Sciences] of Foster City, Calif.

Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Md., says crafting a national smallpox-vaccine strategy is a difficult balancing act. "The decision is something that should not be taken lightly," he says. "If you decide to vaccinate the entire population, there will be a certain number of children who will die, or have neurological complications."

A 1947 incident in New York City offers a sobering cautionary tale. An infected business traveler from Mexico City touched off an outbreak involving 12 cases and two deaths. In the ensuing emergency, 6.3 million New Yorkers were immunized, causing six deaths from vaccine reactions, triple the disease toll, says author Jonathan Tucker in his book "Scourge."

Some like  [Thomas Vincent Inglesby, Jr. (born 1957)] say ring vaccination, fine for a moderate outbreak, might have to be expanded in the event of a massive epidemic. Los Angeles County Health Officer Jonathan Fielding proposes making an exception in this wait-and-see approach for essential medical personnel: emergency-room doctors and nurses, intensive-care staff, and "foot soldiers in a mass-immunization campaign."

Over six months ago, a terrorist sent anthrax-laden letters, killing five Americans while targeting prominent leaders, including Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. Today, federal investigators remain clueless as to who did it.

Maybe this is why Mr. Law-and-Order, Attorney General John Ashcroft, is so secretive. This week, the New York Daily News revealed, the Justice Department insisted that Congress's General Accounting Office return a list of whom Mr. Ashcroft has detained since Sept. 11. This highly partisan Attorney General has no interest in accountability.

A number of outside experts -- prominent scientists, terrorism specialists, former Justice Department officials, and a handful of lawmakers -- privately are highly critical of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's probe of who sent the anthrax letters to Sens. Daschle and Leahy and major news organizations, including NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw.

Attorney General Ashcroft has left Mr. Leahy and Mr. Daschle largely in the dark. The Vermont Democrat learned in the New York Times Tuesday that investigators now believe the anthrax sent to him was even more sophisticated and lethal than first suspected. (The FBI's dubious excuse was there are inaccuracies in the article.) And Sen. Daschle received almost no information until he requested a briefing a month ago.

The anthrax investigation has been massive, but critics charge it lacks sufficient expertise and direction. "The Bureau is never good at acknowledging a deficit, and outside experts are alien to their culture," says a former top law enforcement official. The FBI says it has a dozen scenarios on the perpetrators, including several international links, but since last fall its basic assumption has been a singleton domestic scientist, a deranged bioterrorist.

That may be, but in doggedly adhering to that assumption, the investigation too easily brushes aside powerful countersigns. Consider:

* The most serious contemporary biological attack in America began only days after Sept. 11; the domestic sociopath scenario assumes these two acts are unrelated.

* One of the Sept. 11 hijackers, Ahmed al-Haznawi, was treated by a Florida doctor for a severe lesion on his leg in late June. (He claimed he'd bumped into a suitcase.) The treating physician now is convinced he had cutaneous anthrax: two leading Johns Hopkins biodefense experts, Tara O'Toole and Thomas Inglesby, after reviewing the records, say "the most probable and coherent" diagnosis is anthrax. The FBI rejects this because if a Sept. 11 hijacker contracted anthrax last summer, it inextricably links the two issues.

* A crazed scientist plausibly could have sent letters to top Capitol Hill Democrats and leading members of the media, perhaps even ideologically motivated. But the first letter and first victim was at American Media, publisher of the National Enquirer, located not in New York or Washington but in Boca Raton, Fla. That's near where some of the Sept. 11 hijackers were living. The counter theory is that American Media may have been an initial trial run: "This most likely was an experiment to see if some of the stuff was high quality and potentially lethal anthrax," theorizes one non-government terrorism expert who has researched the case extensively.

The anthrax letters stopped in October, which raises questions about a domestic perpetrator who presumably has the capacity to keep producing more stuff. But it is more consistent with a foreign source, where either the supply coming in or the contacts were cut off.

The foreign-source scenario raises huge questions, too. Conceivably al Qaeda -- which documents published in this newspaper months ago clearly demonstrate was seeking biological and chemical weapons -- produced anthrax on its own; experts say that's unlikely.

Those familiar with the territory say it could have come from Iran -- also unlikely, they believe -- or rogue Russian scientists. The most likely source, however, some of these experts believe, would be Iraq, which almost certainly has the capacity and the motive.

But the Iraq theory has its own problems. Bush administration hawks who want to topple Saddam know it's much more palatable if they can link the Iraqis to Sept. 11 or the anthrax attacks. They have been willing to peddle stories that now appear false, such as an alleged meeting between hijacker Muhammad Atta and a top Iraqi intelligence official in Prague last year; recently Newsweek magazine reported convincingly that story almost surely was a hoax. If there's anything damning here on Iraq's involvement with the anthrax threat, it would have been leaked. Moreover, even some Washington hard-liners, as well as top officials in the Israeli government, reject any bin Laden/Saddam ties, despite reports of some contact after the 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Africa.

The FBI is making a major effort, having conducted over 5,000 interviews, served over 1,300 subpoenas and made inquiries at 650 scientific labs around the U.S. A $2.5 million reward has been offered, outside experts assembled, and experimental facilities built to test theories.

But, FBI watchers say, the bureau does a poor job of turning information into intelligence. The bureaucracy last year ignored several pre-Sept. 11 warnings, including a memo from a Phoenix agent last summer about an alarming pattern of Arab men with possible ties to terrorism attending flight schools. This follows on the heels of numerous earlier screwups, ranging from espionage to flawed FBI labs.

On anthrax, imagine the outcry if the shoe were on the other foot, Democrats were in charge of the Justice Department and had made virtually no progress in investigating who was trying to kill prominent Republicans or conservatives. John Ashcroft would have led the charge. It's time to demand the same accountability from the current attorney general.

It was a tense, unsettling time. A mere week after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, anthrax-laced letters began coursing through the mails on their way to several news organs and two U.S. senators, delivering death to five and mayhem to a nation.

This first major act of bioterrorism on U.S. soil triggered one of the largest, most complex, and costliest investigations ever undertaken by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and still the person who mailed the letters remains at large.

This September, Joseph Persichini Jr., acting assistant director of the FBI's Washington field office, acknowledged the major, if unheralded, role science is playing in the probe. Yet the FBI has said little about what science has revealed, citing the criminal nature of the case as its reason. What scientific tidbits the public has been fed come from media reports, and most of these have been incorrect or incomplete.

Since finding an unopened anthrax letter addressed to Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) in late 2001 and the letter's dramatic handover to scientists at Fort Detrick in Maryland, the FBI has clamped down on information on the probe. The embargo has been so tight that a former top military scientist who now works for a government contractor tells C&EN that he was consulted before the Leahy letter, but afterward, he could get no updates on progress being made even from friends in the FBI.

Though massive resources have been devoted to solving the case, many FBI critics attribute FBI's silence to the fact that the probe initially was misdirected and is now stalled.

Inexplicably, that silence was broken this August. Then, Douglas J. Beecher, a microbiologist in the FBI's hazardous materials response unit, published a paper in Applied & Environmental Microbiology , a well-respected but not well-known journal. It took the media a month to publish accounts of Beecher's article, which they generally interpreted as indicating that the FBI initially had misunderstood the nature of the anthrax used in the attacks.

After reading those news accounts, Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.), a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, wrote the FBI, requesting that it brief the committee on the status of the investigation. Assistant FBI Director Eleni P. Kalisch summarily rejected Holt's request.

Kalisch said that briefing the intelligence committee on a criminal investigation would be inappropriate. She also said the FBI and the Justice Department had decided long ago to stop briefing members of Congress after sensitive, classified information found its way into media accounts citing congressional sources. A Holt spokesman told C&EN the intelligence committee received "three limited briefings in 2002 and 2003, and no committee member has ever been implicated in leaks."

Angered by the FBI's refusal to brief Congress, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), in late October, blasted the FBI's investigation for its "dead-ends" and "lack of progress." In a letter to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, Grassley listed a litany of questions he wanted the department and the FBI to answer. He is still awaiting answers.

Beecher's peer-reviewed paper set off heated discussions not only in Congress but also in the arms control community and among government and academic scientists. The seven-page article chronicles the methodology the FBI used to uncover the Leahy letter, which, because it was unopened, contained the most unadulterated powder recovered from any letter.

What sparked debate was one paragraph in the discussion section that a military analyst, who asked not to be named because he still works with the FBI, says "clearly had nothing to do with the content of the article."

The first anthrax-laced letter destined for the Senate reached the office of former Sen. Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) and was opened by one of his aides on Oct. 15, 2001. That simple act unleashed a fluffy light tan powder that wafted through the office and traveled the air ducts to contaminate the entire Hart Senate Office Building. Offices in the Hart building were evacuated, and eventually, other Senate and House offices were shuttered as well. The work of Congress came nearly to a standstill.

Five years later—after the FBI had conducted more than 9,100 interviews and 67 searches and had issued 6,000 grand-jury subpoenas—the case remains unsolved. FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III expects the case will eventually be solved. But the FBI's critics agree with Daschle, who contends that "the investigation's trail has gone cold."

In an Oct. 16 Washington Post OpEd, Daschle alludes to the Beecher article and writes that questions still "remain in the scientific community about the composition of the anthrax and the level of technological expertise required to manufacture it."

Given how easily the powder in the Daschle letter aerosolized, government officials, military scientists, and academic anthrax experts were quoted in the media as claiming the anthrax spores in the letter had to have been "weaponized." That is, the spores had to have been specially treated or processed—milled and coated with an additive such as silica—to make them float in the air. But in his article, Beecher, almost as an aside, dismisses this possibility.

In the paragraph that set the scientific and arms control communities abuzz, Beecher writes: A "widely circulated misconception is that the spores were produced using additives and sophisticated engineering supposedly akin to military weapon production."

This is the FBI's first public statement on the investigation since it began analyzing the material in the Leahy letter and the first time the bureau has described the anthrax powder. Beecher, however, provides no citation for the statement or any information in the article to back it up, and FBI spokeswomen have declined requests to interview him.

"The statement should have had a reference," says L. Nicholas Ornston, editor-in-chief of the microbiology journal. "An unsupported sentence being cited as fact is uncomfortable to me. Any statement in a scientific article should be supported by a reference or by documentation," he says.

Early news reports, replete with unnamed sources, implied that the universe of potential suspects was fairly narrow. The perpetrator of the attacks, the reports said, was likely to have special technical skills and likely had access to highly contained defense labs such as those operated by the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Maryland and the Army's Dugway Proving Ground in Utah.

Because the anthrax powders proved to be so deadly, the thinking was that the perpetrator had to have used equipment, additives, and procedures that the Army had used to weaponize biological agents in its offensive bioweapons program before President Richard Nixon shut it down in 1969.

Several former government officials and scientists, who asked for anonymity, say the early media accounts that Beecher says mischaracterized the anthrax powders can be traced to the government's struggle to deal quickly with an unsettling and unfamiliar threat.

At an Oct. 29, 2001, White House press briefing, Maj. Gen. John S. Parker, then-commanding general of the Army's Medical Research & Materiel Command at Fort Detrick, said silica had been found in the Daschle letter. Tom Ridge, then-director of the White House Office of Homeland Security, at a briefing a few days earlier said a binding agent had been used to make the anthrax powders.

As one of the former government officials tells C&EN, "Those judgments were premature and frankly wrong." At the height of the attacks, top government officials with no scientific background received briefings from people who also were not scientists, and "the nuances got lost," he explains.

Sometimes scientists misspoke as well, as was the case with the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. AFIP studied the anthrax powder from the Daschle letter using energy dispersive X-ray spectrometry, and a top AFIP scientist, Florabell G. Mullick, reported the presence of silica in an AFIP newsletter. Yet, the spectrum AFIP released shows a peak for the element silicon, not silicon dioxide (silica).

Harvard University molecular biologist Matthew S. Meselson, who has consulted for the FBI on the anthrax probe, dismisses these early statements as misunderstandings or misinterpretations of the scientific studies conducted on the Daschle powder. "I don't know of anybody with spore expertise who actually worked on the stuff who said the spores were coated," he says. The FBI has never publicly claimed the spores were coated with silica and, in fact, told members of Congress at classified briefings that the spores were not coated, he says.

Meselson alerted the FBI to a 1980 microbiology paper that reports finding silicon in the spore coat of Bacillus cereus, a cousin to Bacillus anthracis, the bacterium that causes anthrax. The silicon AFIP detected might be a natural element of the anthrax spore coat.

Although the FBI has released no information on studies probing for the presence of silicon in the coat of anthrax spores, and no studies have been published, Peter Setlow suspects that such studies have been done. About two years ago, Setlow, a molecular biologist at the University of Connecticut Health Center, was invited to an FBI-organized meeting of spore specialists.

The explanation for mischaracterizing the attack material is really quite simple, one of the former government officials says. When the attacks occurred, "there was no systematic methodology in place to evaluate a biological powder forensically." Initially, he says, the studies were "done on the fly." And quite frankly, he says, "a lot of people didn't know what they were looking for.

"The pace of the forensic investigation ground to a halt," this official says, "because there was not a lot of available expertise in the scientific toolbox."

Much of the material from the Daschle letter was consumed by destructive tests that produced little useful information, the official says. The government was understandably reluctant to proceed with tests on the Leahy powder until a validated testing protocol was developed, he explains.

So in December 2001, the FBI met with experts selected by the National Academies for advice on how to deal with the Leahy letter, a participant at that meeting says. Six NAS-vetted scientists attended that one-day meeting at the FBI's Washington field office and produced a flow chart, a scientific playbook on how to analyze the powder to garner the most information. Whether that flow chart was ever used is unknown.

The December meeting was among the first of eight the FBI would eventually convene with scientists "to develop a comprehensive analytical scheme for evaluating and analyzing the anthrax evidence," the FBI's Persichini says. In fact, the "FBI has held two outreach sessions in the past 18 months, and Beecher was present at the first one," says Milton Leitenberg, an arms controls expert at the University of Maryland.

Also in his paper, Beecher writes: "Individuals familiar with the compositions of the powders in the letters have indicated that they were comprised simply of spores purified to different extents." His citation for this statement is a 2003 article that investigative journalist Gary Matsumoto published in the news section of Science (302, 1492).

Meselson, who reviewed Beecher's article for the FBI, was asked to assess scanning electron micrographs of the anthrax powder. Early in 2002, he spent half a day at the FBI's Washington field office and looked at "a large heap of electron micrographs" of the powder from the Daschle letter.

"I saw no evidence of anything except spores, no evidence of silica nanoparticles," Meselson says. "If silica was present, I would have seen it, but nothing could have been purer than what I saw," he insists. Though purified, the preparation "had not been milled," he adds.

A government official who asked not to be named says the FBI knew early on that the Daschle and Leahy powders had a high concentration of spores. "But knowing the specific attributes of the spores took a longer time," he explains.

A former top military scientist speaking on background because his current employer has government contracts, tells C&EN that he, too, "saw scanning electron micrographs" of the powder from the Daschle letter. "I saw only spores and almost no rubbish from the culture media." If the spores had been coated with silica, they would have looked like doughnuts with large sugar particles on them, he says. Instead, "the Daschle spores were clean doughnut holes with no sugars."

He also says, "I had never seen a preparation that pure—1012 spores per gram—with no rubbish." Curious about the purity of the spores, he contacted William C. Patrick III, who had made bioweapons for the Army when the U.S. had an offensive program. He says Patrick told him it was possible to get rid of nonspore material by repeatedly washing the spores with water and spinning off the culture debris into the supernatant.

This former military scientist never saw the material from the Leahy letter and "heard nothing from the FBI regarding the Leahy letter." So, even though he saw pure spores in the electron micrographs of the Daschle powder he was shown, "It was never clear to me whether the spores were coated or not, because I heard it both ways."

Media reports had described the material released when the Daschle letter was opened as looking like a cloud of smoke. "I had always thought the spores had to be treated to get them to fluff up as they did," he says.

Meselson, however, has another theory. He believes that "if the spores are pure enough, they will be suspended into air, they will fly." He builds his theory on the scientific scaffold of triboelectricity, which, he notes, "aerosol physicists haven't considered."

Triboelectricity occurs, for example, when combing your hair on a dry winter's day causes sparks to fly as electrons move from hair to bind more tightly to the comb. In Meselson's theory, all the purified spores carry the same electrical charge so they will fly apart. And, he says, "you don't need much to fly into the air" to cause harm.

Both Meselson and the former military scientist agree that making the purified preparations didn't require an expensive laboratory setup. As the military scientist says, "A simple facility" is really all that's needed. "I have concluded that maybe the hardest part is doing it safely so you don't hurt yourself. Some experience is needed, but it's probably more an art than a science," he says.

Arms control expert Jonathan B. Tucker, a Bosch Public Policy Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, says, "The use of the Ames strain, the purity of the spores, and the extreme volatility of the material suggests that it was made by an individual with a high degree of technical sophistication."

Other experts say Beecher's now famous paragraph broadens the scope of potential suspects to include individuals or small groups lacking the resources of large national programs. Rutgers University microbiologist Richard H. Ebright, however, doesn't believe that it does.

As Ebright points out, the anthrax mailer had to have the "requisite microbiological and powder preparation skills." But equally important, the perpetrator "had to have access to the attack strain," which in all the letters was Ames.

Ebright admits that the pool of persons with the required skills is large and many times "larger than the pool of persons with access to the [Ames] strain." Prior to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Ames strain "was narrowly distributed," probably to "no more than a dozen, certainly no more than 20 laboratories" worldwide, he says. Labs possessing the strain were part of U.S. and allied biodefense and intelligence programs, and the perpetrator "must have obtained the attack strain" from one of these labs, he argues.

On Oct. 5, NBC Nightly News reported: "Investigators tell NBC News that the water used to make [the anthrax spores] came from a northeastern U.S., not a foreign, source." Ebright says, "This information, if correct, would appear to narrow the field" of labs possessing seed cultures of the Ames strain prior to Sept. 11, 2001.

As Ebright explains, "The intersection between institutions in possession of the Ames strain prior to Sept. 11, 2001, and institutions in the northeastern U.S. would appear" to narrow the likely source of the Ames strain to "two or three institutions: USAMRIID; the University of Scranton; and, if one interprets 'northeastern' broadly, Battelle Memorial Institute" in Columbus, Ohio. Battelle does classified research for the Department of Defense. A University of Scranton scientist was using "nucleic acid sequences to develop taxonomies of bioweapons agents, a subject of interest to the Department of Defense," Ebright says.

"If the NBC report on the identification of the water source is correct, it reflects further development of the analytical approach" reported in articles published in 2003 on the use of stable isotope analysis for microbe forensics, Ebright says. Those methods applied to O and H can provide information about the water used for the culture media, Ebright says.

In mid-to-late 2003, the FBI contracted out some 20-odd studies of the culture media using isotopic analyses to trace to a specific geographic area the water and nutrients used to grow the anthrax. Yet, early in 2002, DNA sequencing of the anthrax taken from the first anthrax victim conducted at the Institute for Genomic Research and other genetic analyses pointed to USAMRIID as the origin of the Ames strain.

The DNA sequencing work was published in Science in 2002 and reported by the media. Also noted in media accounts was the radiocarbon dating analyses by Lawrence Livermore National Lab in June 2002 that found the Ames attack strain was cultured no more than two years before the mailings.

In November 2002, FBI Director Mueller announced that efforts were being made to "reverse engineer" the mailed anthrax. News accounts in spring 2003 reported that the work was being conducted by the Army's biodefense center at Dugway Proving Ground.

These news reports, naming no sources, claimed that Dugway had successfully reproduced the anthrax powder used in the attacks. Dugway, according to the media, concluded that the attack material was made with simple methods and inexpensive equipment and that the spores were not coated with an additive such as silica.

Daniel Martin, a microbiologist in Dugway's Life Sciences Division, tells C&EN that Dugway was asked "to produce materials to see how they compared with the materials the FBI had in its possession." But, Martin says, Dugway did not reverse or back engineer the attack powder. "Back engineering implies that you know exactly what the material is and can replicate the material exactly, step by step." That isn't what Dugway did, he says.

Instead, Martin says, Dugway used the Leahy powder as the culture starter to "produce several different preparations using different media, and different ways of drying and milling the preparation" that the FBI could use for comparison purposes. Dugway, he says, never analyzed the Leahy powder and did no comparative analyses between the preparations made and the Leahy powder.

Indeed, by fall 2003, Michael A. Mason, then-assistant director of FBI's Washington field office, is quoted as saying that the FBI had not been able to re-create the process used to make the anthrax attack material. Still, he said, the FBI had learned enough to believe that the perpetrator had special expertise.

Leitenberg says a well-connected former military scientist told him that Dugway was only able to produce preparations containing "one-fifth the number of spores found in the Leahy powder." This same military source also told Leitenberg that Battelle Memorial Institute was also asked to back engineer the Leahy powder.

Back in 2003, Mason was not certain whether the anthrax case would ever be solved. Even if there was no "successful resolution," Mason said the investigation was "remarkable" because of the scientific and analytical skills employed.

So why, three years after Mason's public remarks and a pretty effective gag order, has the FBI chosen to speak out through Beecher's article? It's possible that the FBI is confident enough in the science "to set the record straight or to deflect ongoing or anticipated criticism," one former government official speculates.

It is also possible that Beecher's famous paragraph may be setting the groundwork for the FBI's defense in the suit brought against it by Steven J. Hatfill, whom former attorney general John D. Ashcroft called "a person of interest," the former official says.

A former FBI laboratory official says the FBI may have realized that the scientific evidence is pointing to a different conclusion than initial speculation that the perpetrator had to be associated with a national program. If so, "then it is very valuable for a number of reasons to have the evidence published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, which gives it a measure of acceptance and credibility," he says.

To underscore his statement, the FBI lab official points to "the Daubert standard for scientific evidence and associated case law." This standard is a legal precedent by which federal trial judges rule on the admissibility of evidence based on its relevance and reliability (C&EN, Feb. 27, page 36).

Despite Mason's uncertainty three years ago, the FBI now seems confident that the case eventually will be solved. Writing in the Washington Post on Oct. 6, former State Department intelligence analyst Kenneth J. Dillon says there are two possible reasons for that confidence. One is that the FBI actually knows but lacks some confirmatory evidence to nail the perpetrator. The other, he writes, is embarrassment because "the evidence [the FBI might have] points to the clandestine biowarfare program of a close ally as the anthrax source."

If NBC reported the science correctly and the water used to make the anthrax did come from a northeastern U.S. source, Dillon's second supposition falls apart.

Leitenberg says that "scientists in the biodefense programs of several nations allied to the U.S. have frequently expressed the suspicion that the U.S. government is embarrassed to identify segments or individuals of the U.S. biodefense community as responsible for the 2001 anthrax events."

The FBI is not talking about the perpetrator and is saying very little publicly about the science it has called upon in trying to solve the five-year-old case. What the public has been told points to a U.S. biodefense facility as the source of the attack strain of anthrax spores that were not specially treated or engineered but were very pure—and very deadly.