Anthrax scientists under microscope (Hatfill or al-Haznawi

Herald Correspondent Caroline Overington reports from Washington on a key strand of America's anthrax investigation.

It is not easy to kill people with anthrax. Not, at least, without killing yourself in the process. The stuff is so lethal that the FBI thinks only 20 people in the United States would know how to handle it.

Martin Hugh-Jones is one of those people. As a professor of veterinary medicine at Louisiana State University, he is an expert on the disease and, ever since somebody sent it through the mail last October and killed five people, he has been wondering how it was done.

"Let's speak hypothetically. It's 6am on a cool day, with no wind. You could go into your garden and, provided there was only a slight breeze, running from left to right, but not from behind, because that would create turbulence, I think you could open the jar.

"Once you'd done that I think you could stick one of those wooden spatulas you get in coffee shops into the jar, scoop some out and tip it off, into an envelope. Then you'd have to seal the envelope, using a wet cotton ball; you wouldn't want to put your face near the envelope. Some of it would get airborne, for sure, but provided you hosed everything down, provided you really knew what you were doing, I think you'd be OK."

"Handling anthrax is very difficult," Professor Hugh-Jones said. "And whoever killed those people had access to good quality, fine anthrax in powder form, and there would be only six to a dozen people in the United States with access to that."

Professor Hugh-Jones says he is not one of them. He nevertheless suspects the FBI is keeping an eye on him while it continues a year-long investigation into the letters laced with anthrax. "They record my calls," he said, and he is also sure that the FBI is reading his email. "I don't mind. They don't think I did it. They are just interested in what I think."

"Well, basically, I agree with the FBI. I think it must be somebody with scientific knowledge."

And would one of those people be his colleague, Steven Hatfill? Professor Hugh-Jones will not say.

"I have never met the man. If you have questions about that, you will have to ask him."

That, unfortunately, is impossible. Dr Hatfill does not speak to journalists. Not any more, anyway. He used to talk about anthrax all the time, but that was before he became a "person of interest" in the FBI's investigation into the letters that were sent to reporters and politicians in the tense months after the September 11 terrorist attacks. The dust escaped from the envelopes, infecting 18 people. Five of them, including two postal workers, died.

The FBI's investigation into the case, and into Dr Hatfill, appeared until recently to have stalled. Then, in a flurry of activity that coincided with the looming first anniversary of the first death, the bureau suddenly took bloodhounds into his flat to try to find evidence to link him to the crime.

The bureau's interest in Dr Hatfill was prompted early in the case, by his interesting resume, which shows he was born in St Louis but that he got his medical degree at a university in Zimbabwe, then called Rhodesia, in the 1970s. Dr Hatfill claims to have fought black rebels during the civil war there. (Curiously, the world's largest outbreak of human anthrax occurred from 1978 to 1980 in rural Southern Rhodesia, where 10,738 cases were recorded and 182 people died. There is evidence that this outbreak was the result of covert action by Rhodesian security forces.)

Dr Hatfill also has access to anthrax, and is vaccinated against it. About two years ago he took a job at the US Army's Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, or USAMRIID. The lab does research on deadly biological agents, and grows them to make vaccines. After leaving USAMRIID, he went to work for Science Applications International, and while he was there he commissioned a report about what would happen if anthrax was sent through the mail.

The FBI has also noted that when Dr Hatfill was studying in Zimbabwe he lived in Greendale, which is a suburb of Harare. The return address on the anthrax letters was "Greendale School, New Jersey", which does not exist. The FBI has also suggested that he is loose with the truth. (Dr Hatfill has reportedly told colleagues that he once flew fighter jets for the US military, but his record shows he never progressed above the rank of private).

Dr Hatfill denies he is the anthrax terrorist. He has taken a lie detector test and agreed to let the FBI search his home and car.

In one of his last public comments, which he left on a newspaper editor's answering machine, Dr Hatfill expressed dismay that, after a lifetime "of working until 3am to combat this weapon of mass destruction ... sir, my career is over at this time".

Dr Hatfill's supporters are similarly dismayed, not least because they think the FBI's focus on him distracts them from the theory that the outbreak was linked to the September 11 terrorist attacks. There is some evidence for this, too. In March last year, just six months before those attacks, one of the hijackers, Ahmed al-Haznawi, was treated at a Florida hospital for a severe black lesion on his leg. He told nurses he had bumped into a suitcase, and was treated with antibiotics.

However, the doctor who treated him is now convinced that al-Haznawi had anthrax. In the tense weeks after September 11 the doctor asked an anthrax expert, Dr Tara O'Toole, director of the Centre for Civilian Biodefence at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, to look at al-Haznawi's file. She did, then passed it on to a colleague, who is also a germ expert. Both concluded that the "most probable and coherent" diagnosis was anthrax.

If that could be proven, then the outbreak would almost certainly be linked to events on that day. But it cannot be proven: al-Haznawi died on one of the hijacked aircraft.

For his part, Professor Hugh-Jones does not buy the "international terrorism theory. I think it was domestic."

Dr Hatfill is right in thinking that his career is probably over. He lost his last job, at Science Applications International, after he failed a lie detector test unrelated to this case. Shortly after, the publicity about his possible involvement reached a peak, and he found himself unemployed for almost a year. Then, on July 1, he was finally hired for a new, $US150,000-a-year job as associate director at, of all places, Louisiana State University's National Centre for Biomedical Research and Training. The centre gets $US11 million

($20 million) a year to teach FBI agents and other law enforcement officials to deal with things like, say, an anthrax outbreak.

But how could a "person of interest" in the anthrax case get a job funded by the Justice Department to teach FBI agents about anthrax?

A university spokesman said he could not really explain it, but he denied reports that Dr Hatfill had FBI agents in his class, even though most of those reports quoted the head of the centre saying exactly that.

"Dr Hatfill conducted one really short course before being put on leave with pay, and now we're checking out various things about him and then we'll decide what to do," the spokesman said.

The university had known Dr Hatfill was a person of interest to the case when they employed him, "but that's not unusual. His background is in anthrax, that's his area of expertise, and they are interviewing a number of people in that situation, so that wouldn't unduly concern us."

So why put him on leave? "I can't really say much, except we're reviewing a number of issues."

would help if you talked in declarative statements rather than cryptic innuendo, but I think I understand you now.

Well, if you had been paying attention while I've layed it out for you slowcoaches over the last ten months, you wouldn't have had this problem.

I also believe they provided the weaponized anthrax to certain organizations, hoping it would find its way to Israel or the US, but again was not involved directly in the planning or execution.

Not credible. Saddam is in a fixed position. Saddam is using the anthrax to deter us from attacking him, not to ensure that we do. So far, it's worked pretty well, and I think he will at least come out of this alive, unlike his expendable buddy, bin Laden.

I agree with you that the anthrax attack was a follow-up to 9/11. It showed up so soon after that day that it had to have been pre-planned. What bothers me about Hatfill is in the contents of the novel he started writing before 9/11. I'd be interested to know how you would explain away the scenario he creates in his novel with the almost identical manner in which the real anthrax attacks were carried out. Here's an excerpt from the report describing the content of his book:

Glasberg revealed today that Hatfill has been working on a novel. Part of the manuscript has been obtained by ABCNEWS affiliate WJLA-TV in Washington. "This novel written by Steven Hatfill envisions a biological attack on Congress," said Rebecca Cooper, a reporter for WJLA. "It's an attack so deadly that not only do members of Congress and congressional aides become ill, but hundreds of Washington residents become ill and many die as a result."

Uh, I should have said Cooper's description. Rebecca West is someone quite different.

Which brings up an interesting point, since we're talking about coincidences. Rebecca Cooper is an off-air ABC News reporter. ABC News was the source for the bogus Greendale School talking point, which was repeated ad nauseum in the flurry of articles accompanying the first photo-op search of Hatfill's apartment. ABC News was also the conduit for the bogus rumor, sourced to the FBI, that they were hot on the tail of a former "top Batelle scientist" who had made anthrax threats in the week following 9/11 (U.S. Scientist Questioned - ABC News, December 20, 2001). It soon emerged that the "top scientist" was a drunken ex-lab tech working in a bowling ally in Milwaulkee, and the FBI was forced to publicly exonerate him when his name came out shortly afterwards. Coincidence?

But wait: there's more. Rebecca Cooper is also the off-air reporter who was (temporarily) Gary Condit's alibi for the murder of Chandra Levy, and was publicly linked to Condit romantically by the tabloids. (Try http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&q=Rebecca+Cooper+Gary+Condit+Affair ).

Funnily enough, there is another Gary Condit connection here. The FBI investigator identified in the Hatfill stories, Bob Roth, was also the case officer for the investigation into the disappearance of Joyce Chiang. Chiang, if you recall, was the attractive young immigration attornee who interned with Gary Condit's close friend and co-sponsor of immigration legislation, Howard Berman (D-CA). In 1999, she disappeared from the Dupont Circle Starbucks near Gary's condo, where she was last seen deep in conversation with a never-identified blonde woman. Her skeletonized remains were recovered from the Anacosta River several months later. Berman went out of his way to set up a reward and bring in the FBI -- presumably Special Agent Roth. The investigation was widely seen as ill-conceived. For example, much time was spent pursuing the theory that Chiang had been kidnapped off the streets of Adams Morgan by Chinese white slavers. Apparently, the basis for pursuing this bizarre notion was the fact that Chiang was an Asian American. Needless to say, the investigation imploded into a black hole and Chiang's killer has never been identified.

Hmm, yes, indeed, how many of us would want our lives and careers picked apart with a search engine?

Uh, maybe he wrote it after October of last year?

Maybe he did. Do you know exactly when he wrote it? I'm trying to find more info on that. If it was written before the anthrax attacks on Congress, and if Cooper's description of the scenario in his novel wasn't doctored up as you believe, would you consider him suspicious? Couldn't he have crossed paths with some swarthy characters when he was in Africa? I'm not saying he's guilty or innocent - I just wouldn't rule him out just yet based on what we know about him. And it wasn't just ABC news. There were reports out of the South African newspapers confirming that he did indeed fabricate his credentials. If he is working with the feds and this all is just a staged charade, why would the feds bring this negative publicity upon themselves now if they're planning to go public with hard evidence in the next few weeks? They've stalled the investigation this long.

Do you know exactly when he wrote it?

No, I don't. Hatfill copyrighted an unpublished novel about four years ago, called "Emergence." From the sound of it, the current book must be a work-in-progress, since it was on his hard drive.

Ask yourself some common sense questions.

If Steve Hatfill murdered five people, at least one in a death penalty state, how likely is it he would really write a novel to explain how he did it?

If Steve Hatfill, single guy, soldier of fortune, murdered five people in perhaps the most forensically distinctive killings in history, and had been publicly identified as a key suspect last year, and had freely travelled abroad during that period on business, would he still be here?

If the FBI really believed Steve Hatfill was the anthrax killer and had a secret anthrax lab, why did they search his Ocala storage locker in t-shirts and shorts?

If they really believed that Steve Hatfill had a secret lab for making the most sophisticated weaponized anthrax ever seen and a possibly unknown number of accessories in the military biodefense program, would the FBI really have left him on the loose for almost a year, and would they have let him travel overseas, or, if they were hoping to lure him into giving himself and his lab and his collaborators away, would they do it by staging a photo op search of his house, complete with TV news helicopters?

If the government seriously thought Steve Hatfill had killed five people and caused several billion dollars of economic loss last year, would they really have hired him back from the private sector to a $150K/yr job as a biowarfare preparedness trainer last month?

Is it really likely that Steve Hatfill had the means and motivation to stage an anthrax attack on the offices of the 9-11 terrorists' landlord within at most a few days of the hijackers' Delray Beach location being disclosed by Attornee General John Ashcroft?

Is there any reason to discount the conclusion of the staff of AMI and Bob Steven's treating physician (as reported in the New England Journal of Medicine) that the source of the AMI anthrax was a suspicious package which was received, but not opened, about one week *before* 9/11?

Is there any substantive reason to discount the post facto diagnosis of cutaneous anthrax in one of the 9/11 hijackers made by a Florida emergency room physician, and confirmed by Johns Hopkins scientists?

Does it seem likely to you that if the government were facing a hugely embarassing bioterrorism scandal emanating from within the "military-industrial complex," that it would choose exactly the time when we are trying to build up support for an attack on Iraq to foreground that embarassment into public consciousness, as opposed to burying the scandal, or dispatching it last year so it would be "old news" by now? Or does it seem more likely to you that the coincidence of this crisis in the domestic suspect theory of the anthrax with the new focus on Iraq has been engineered for a reason which will shortly become apparent?

Did the man you saw on television yesterday calling for his accusers to put up or shut up look either homicidal, suicidal, or in any other way mentally abnormal?

There were reports out of the South African newspapers confirming that he did indeed fabricate his credentials.

It sounds like Hatfill exaggerated some credentials on his resume. He may well be a bit of a self-promoter. I've known many, many people like that, in academia, in business, in science and in government. Incidentally, many of them are very good at what they do, but it doesn't stop them guilding the lilly. It also doesn't justify spinning elaborate X-Files theories about them being serial-killers without even circumstantial evidence. After all, it's not as if his resume includes hijacking an airliner and flying into a skyscraper, like certain other "persons of interest" I could mention.

If he is working with the feds and this all is just a staged charade, why would the feds bring this negative publicity upon themselves now if they're planning to go public with hard evidence in the next few weeks?

That's a reasonable question and here's how I would analyze it. In the first place, the people who are actually carrying out the investigation probably don't understand the big picture, or are smart enough, career-wise and pension-wise, to understand that they are not supposed to think about the big picture. I assume that the people who are actually carrying out the investigation are not independent thinkers. Bob Roth isn't Frank Serpico. He's no Harry Callaghan. More than likely, he's a bureaucratic time-server who takes direction well.

Bush says to Mueller: stall. Mueller says to his Number 2: Find somebody we can put on this domestic angle thing, and make sure he's loyal and not too bright. Number 2 says to Bob Roth -- here, check out these scientists, and here's a book on microbiology -- have at it! Welcome to the real world of bureaucratic gamesmanship.

Maybe Roth got a little gung-ho. Maybe Hatfill's "anguish" is, shall we say, a little bit played up, because he's smart enough to understand what's likely going on. They're both cogs in a bureaucratic machine, but they are probably acting semi-autonomously. If things get out of whack, Bush will inject a little steering input from above, but he isn't going to micro-manage it.

This is really guesswork, BTW. I'm not privy to the inner goings on of the FBI. It could be that the FBI is simply completely incompetent and corrupt. There's plenty of evidence that that is true of at least parts of the FBI. My problem with the simplest version of that theory is that I cannot believe Bush would leave a matter of such grave importance in the hands of knaves & buffoons. He might leverage the knaves & buffoons for his larger ends... but that brings us back pretty close to the model I just outlined.

But there is a second issue here, which dovetails with this analysis quite well. The "rogue scientist" theory promulgated by leftwing activist Barbara Hatch Rosenberg has been, IMO, exploited by the Bush administration for its own ends, to wit, buying time in a game of chicken with Saddam Hussein. The Hatfill theory has become gospel among segments of the Left, and many hold to a version of the theory where Hatfill is not just a loose cannon, but is actually in cahoots with the CIA and/or Bush for their own nefarious ends (think "oil bidness"). Not all of those true believers are on the far-out fringes. The notion that Hatfill was carrying out the bidding of his CIA handlers was actually floated by Nicholas Kristoff in the editorial pages of the New York Times. If you do a web search on Hatfill's name, you'll see that the Hatfilll conspiracy is already well-entrenched in the European media. Thus, there is now a premium on "roughing up" Hatfill publicly before exonerating him, otherwise it might all look a little too cozy. But the "roughing up" he has received is, in the big picture, nothing. He will come out of this very well, with book deals, TV gigs, the works, if he wants it. So I wouldn't take it too seriously.

You have indeed posed some thought-provoking, common sense questions. I especially can't answer your first question and if the feds are hoping to build a case against him based on the manuscript of his novel, I hope they can answer it.

I’m not viewing him in the same context as Rosenberg, the media, et al are. They are trying to paint him as a lone, right wing, domestic nut case. Many here see him as the “Jewel” fall guy. I’m just looking at his background and his whereabouts more than anything else. He trained, worked and lived in Africa for a substantial portion of his life and didn’t return to the U.S. until 1995. Al Qaeda and other islamic radical Egyptian groups (with which Atta was tied) are known to have had a strong operational presence in Africa. I don't think it's unreasonable to surmise that he could have been sought out by them because of his expertise. There are theories that there was a McVeigh-Oklahoma City-Iraq connection. Why couldn’t the same line of thinking apply here? More than anything, I'm trying to figure out how the Ft. Detrick strain ended up in enemy hands.

Have you looked at Dr. Phillip Zack?

Not really. Science magazine did a profile of USAMRIID a few weeks ago which mentioned some of the related incidents, like the Camel Club thing, and it sounded like a big nothing. You can also tell it's a big nothing because of the ridiculousness of some of the innuendos, like that story about someone rolling back the meter on an electron microscope they were supposedly using to look at anthrax (LOL!). Greendale School revisited, in other words.

So, it's the same kind of deal as with Hatfill, where agenda-driven people construct their own fantasies out of a few half-baked rumors, and like the Hatfill thing, it will whither in the light of day. It differs from the Hatfill thing in that some relatively high profile people were willing to point a finger at Hatfill (Rosenberg, Kristof), whereas nobody with any kind of inside contacts or any real scientific or journalistic reputation to maintain has gone on record against Zack.

Once the Hatfill thing plays out, the air will be completely out of the "rogue government scientist" balloon. Nobody's going to revive that Frankenstein monster after it's dead. Everything is going exactly according to plan.

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