Posted on 11/07/2003 6:47:11 AM PST by dead
America's two-year investigation of deadly anthrax attacks has come up empty-handed. If the chief suspect didn't do it, who did? Marian Wilkinson investigates.
When the US Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) first embarked on a secret project to train a team that could lead the hunt for deadly biological and chemical weapons in enemy territory, it turned to a little-known private company with excellent connections to the Pentagon. That company, Science Applications International Corporation, offered up one of its best experts to fill the contract, Steven J. Hatfill, an ingenious doctor with impressive credentials in the field of bio-terrorism.
As the senior DIA officer in charge of the project, Esteban Rodriguez, put it, Hatfill was "this ultimate biological weapons expert".
For more than two years, Hatfill worked under contract for the front-line US defence agencies on bio-terrorism, including the DIA, the US Special Forces and the Defence Threat Reduction Agency, a defence official told the Herald. Hatfill would continue to work on the Pentagon projects until May 2002, months after the FBI's Washington office began questioning him over the biggest bio-terrorist crime in US history, the mailing of a series of letters laced with a deadly strain of the anthrax virus.
The anthrax letters were sent through the postal service to two senators and some of the country's top news media in the weeks after September 11. The attack left five people dead and 22 ill but no one has been charged.
Today, Hatfill, stripped of his security clearances, is unemployed. His scientific reputation is in tatters. FBI agents on what's called the Amerithrax investigation tailed him around the clock for more than a year. Bloodhounds searched his home, his phones were tapped, his emails read and his friends interrogated. A former colleague turned out to be an FBI informant.
But Hatfill, described as "a person of interest" in the anthrax investigation by the US Attorney-General, John Ashcroft, over a year ago, has not been charged. Indeed, the FBI investigation has deeply split the small, elite world of bio-terrorism experts in the US. In the Pentagon, some defence officials are still accusing the FBI of having "a mindset" against him. One defence official said: "The guys around here say certainly he has the knowledge and expertise to do it but he is the last guy who would."
Martin Hugh-Jones, one of the US's top anthrax researchers, at Louisiana State University where Hatfill briefly worked, has said "Hatfill is just a jerk and an idiot and is paying for it". He said he was "willing to bet" he didn't do it.
The scientist who helped steer the FBI towards Hatfill, Dr Barbara Hatch Rosenberg of the Federation of American Scientists, says she has no regrets. "I know I've gotten a lot of flak. I don't care about that," she said, stressing that she never named Hatfill as a suspect. "My whole point was to make certain they were investigating some evidence that I learnt about from people with more knowledge than I in the case but who couldn't talk."
A new FBI agent in the Washington office, Michael Mason, took over supervision of the investigation in August. In one of his first public statements he distanced the FBI from the naming of Hatfill, saying, "Whether or not we bring the person or persons that are guilty to justice, this has been a remarkable investigation."
Mason's comments masked splits in the FBI over the course of the two-year investigation that has interviewed more than 6000 people and involved hundreds of agents. The second anniversary of the attacks last month was marked by the release of three inconclusive books on the case and several lawsuits, including one lodged by Hatfill for unspecified damages against FBI agents and against Ashcroft.
The FBI, through a spokesman, says the Amerithrax investigation is still "very active" and at least one witness said new documents have recently been subpoenaed. There is no evidence that the FBI has dropped its interest in Hatfill.
BUT behind the raging debate about whether Hatfill is guilty are very murky and disturbing questions for the US defence establishment. Was the perpetrator of the biggest bio-terror attack on US soil one of its own who strayed, as one scientist put, "off the reservation"? And was the motive criminal, personal or an attempt to shock the Government into pouring money and resources into bio-terrorism defence?
Suspicion that the killer was a defence scientist began when tests revealed the anthrax genetically matched the "Ames" strain of the virus. That strain was used in research at two US defence establishments, the Army's Dugway Proving Ground in Utah and its Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in Maryland, where Hatfill had worked. But the Ames strain, discovered in 1981, had also been sent around the country and the world for research purposes, so this hardly narrowed the field of suspects.
What intrigued investigators was how the anthrax had been refined. The most deadly letters were sent to Daschle, a Democrat senator, then the majority leader, and Pat Leahy, the head of the judicial committee that oversees the Department of Justice and the FBI.
The anthrax in these was extraordinarily highly processed or "weaponised", as one scientist said. It made the anthrax powder so light that the tiniest amount could become airborne when disturbed and infect the victims' lungs, bypassing their natural defences. When a minute amount leaked from the letters as they went through the mail in Washington DC it killed postal workers, even though they never opened the letters.
Dr Dick Spertzel, who worked for years at the US Army's lab at Fort Detrick, says the anthrax sent to the senators came from a sophisticated laboratory.
"This is not something that a person could casually make," Spertzel told the Herald. "And I contend that you can't do this in a clandestine fashion so it had to be made in a country that was complicit in its production - and that narrows the field."
But Spertzel, who has worked with Hatfill, is one of the few experts who does not believe the perpetrator was a US scientist. A former UN weapons inspector who is still convinced Saddam Hussein kept an active bio-weapons program, he is convinced Iraq is the most likely anthrax source. And the failure of the WMD search in that country has not dissuaded him.
"The FBI spent a year and a half trying to duplicate the product and failed by their own admission," said Spertzel. "It think I know what's being done in America and there is nothing resembling this."
Dr Martin Hugh-Jones, while deferring to Spertzel's military expertise, disagrees. "The betting is still that it's domestic and I have no reason to doubt that. My working model is that somebody came across some weaponised material being used in a trial and appropriated a small amount of it." Who was it? "I have my suspicions and I start with some of my best friends."
How Hatfill became a key target of the FBI investigation is intriguing. When he left the US Army's lab at Fort Detrick he was hired by the defence contractor SAIC. One close associate was a retired military scientist, Dr Bill Patrick. Now in his 70s, Patrick is one of the fathers of the US bio-terrorism program and runs a consulting company called Bio Threats Assessments.
When SAIC assigned Hatfill to work on his first important contract in 1999, he hired Patrick to write a paper on how to respond to bio-terrorist attack. One scenario Patrick scoped out was the effect of two grams of anthrax being sent through the mail.
By early 2001, Hatfill was working at SAIC on a secret project for the Defence Intelligence Agency. His job was to train teams to go in and secure possible weapons sites, take samples and test for deadly toxins.
About the same time, Patrick gave a series of lectures to meetings of defence scientists on the threat of biological warfare. For impact, he would take glass bottles of simulated weaponised anthrax to the talks.
Patrick told a conference in February 2001 such a powder "must produce very small particles, on the order of 1 to 3 microns. Particles this small can avoid your respiratory tract's defence mechanism, get down in your lung sacs and cause a deep-seated infection. Such a powder ... is difficult to prepare but once a terrorist has it, dissemination is easy."
Bio-terrorism was the hot new issue and by August 2001, Hatfill, partly through his association with Patrick, found his status as an expert soaring. He was in demand by the Pentagon. But he was also making enemies. That month, a colleague at SAIC began reporting back to the company on what he claimed were Hatfill's dark secrets.
Hatfill refuses to talk to reporters but a close friend said he probably deliberately misled the informant. "Steve would feed him a line of s---, not realising the guy was feeding it all to the FBI and the CIA."
If true, this proved to be a huge mistake. SAIC was a critical defence contractor. The informant's report was passed to the Government and Hatfill was called in for a polygraph. His security clearance, vital for his work, was suspended.
A month later, the US was thrown into turmoil by the September 11 attacks. On September 18 the first of the anthrax letters was posted from Trenton, New Jersey. On October 10 the most deadly letter, with the weaponised anthrax, was sent to Daschle's office. The letters carried the slogan "Death to America - death to Israel", casting suspicion on either al-Qaeda or Iraq. But within weeks those suspicions turned inward, especially as one of the letters carried the warning "Take penacilin now".
Once the search went domestic, Hatfill's clash over his security clearance put him under scrutiny. By last year he was under intense investigation. Other defence scientists were also questioned and given polygraphs. Patrick, especially, was offended that anyone would doubt his integrity.
In the end, no evidence appears to have linked either with the crime. Indeed, says Hatfill's lawsuit, the evidence shows he was working overtime at SAIC when the letters were posted hundreds of kilometres away. What the FBI discovered was that Hatfill had lied about his PhD and embellished his past military service. But while suspicious, it was not a hanging offence. His friends are still declaring him innocent.
Daschle hopes the FBI will solve the case but recently expressed his doubts. "They tell me they have good leads, they're making progress and they are confident they will solve the case." But he, too, has noted that two years on, the FBI has not yet made an arrest.
Toxic trail
September 11, 2001: Terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.
September 18: An anthrax-filled letter is sent to NBC News in New York. Other letters are sent to the news media over the next two weeks.
October 5: Bob Stevens, a photo editor with American Media, is the first victim to die.
October 15: A letter with more lethal anthrax is opened in Senator Tom Daschle's office.
November 9: The FBI posts its profile of the suspect as a domestic loner.
March 4, 2002: Hatfill is forced to leave his job with a defence contractor when his security clearance is finally revoked. He is now under scrutiny by the FBI.
August: Hatfill is described as a "person of interest" in the anthrax investigation by US Attorney-General John Ashcroft.
August 11: Hatfill calls a public press conference to declare his innocence.
August 26: Hatfill, unemployed, sues FBI and Ashcroft.
Don't think this is right. He is a PhD, and I think I even remember that his degree was, maybe, not completed? Don't know that for sure, but the statement makes him sound like a medical doctor which he certainly is not. Odd.
Given the myriad of ways in which single-piece rate First-Class Mail can be delayed, misrouted and "lost" until it finally reaches the 010 operation, there is no evidence to demonstrate that they were not all mailed September 7, 2001 at 6 PM (or thereabouts) after the last prayer of the day down at the local mosque used by the terrorist team in Boca Raton, FL.
Some of her "friends" are in the FBI and they suspect each other. Then there's an extreme leftwing gang in the top levels of USPS management who also suspect some of their ideological soulmates, if not personal associates from the '60s, did it and they have made no serious demand that the FBI investigate the full spectrum of possibilities in this case.
The trail grows cold while the FBI continues to fiddle with Hatfill.
They talked to Rosenberg, who talked and Rosenberg has no legal standing to withhold their names. This makes it sound as if the FBI went chasing after hearsay, without checking the sources.
That is absolute nonsense. The first letters were mailed in the Trenton-Princeton vicinity sometime between early afternoon on the 17th of September and the first pickup on the 18th. There's no way they could have been mailed in Florida and have been postmarked in Trenton.
The second mailing is less precise. They were mailed in the Trenton-Princeton area sometime after the last pickup on Saturday October 6th and the first pickup on October 9th.
Postmarking letters is and always has been done in a very precise way because of all the mail which depends upon an accurate postmark.
When mail gets lost, it gets lost after it is postmarked.
Ed
You stepped in it, Ed.
There are people on here -- one in particular -- who know a helluva lot more than you about the circulation pattern of U.S. mail. Or me, for that matter.
Yep.
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