2002-05-21 - Why is the FBI Anthrax Investigation Stalled?


The Guardian (UK). Tuesday May 21, 2002

Riddle of the spores

Why has the FBI investigation into the anthrax attacks stalled? The
evidence points one way

George Monbiot

The more a government emphasises its commitment to defence, the less
it seems to care about the survival of its people. Perhaps it is
because its attention may be focused on more distant prospects: the
establishment and maintenance of empire, for example, or the dynastic
succession of its leaders. Whatever the explanation for the neglect of
their security may be, the people of America have discovered that
casual is the precursor of casualty.

But while we should be asking what George Bush and his cabinet knew
and failed to respond to before September 11, we should also be
exploring another, related, question: what do they know now and yet
still refuse to act upon? Another way of asking the question is this:
whatever happened to the anthrax investigation?

After five letters containing anthrax spores had been posted, in the
autumn, to addresses in the United States, the Federal Bureau of
Investigation promised that it would examine "every bit of information
[and] every bit of evidence". But now the investigation appears to
have stalled. Microbiologists in the US are beginning to wonder aloud
whether the FBI's problem is not that it knows too little, but that it
knows too much.

Reducing the number of suspects would not, one might have imagined,
have been too much to ask of the biggest domestic detective agency on
earth. While some of the anthrax the terrorist sent was spoiled during
delivery, one sample appears to have come through intact. The letter
received by Senator Tom Daschle contained one trillion anthrax spores
per gram: a concentration which only a very few US government
scientists, using a secret and strictly controlled technique, know how
to achieve. It must, moreover, have been developed in a professional
laboratory, containing rare and sophisticated "weaponisation"
equipment. There is only a tiny number of facilities - all of them in
the US - in which it could have been produced.

The anthrax the terrorist sent belongs to the "Ames" strain of the
bacterium, which was extracted from an infected cow in Texas in 1981.
In December, the Washington Post reported that genetic tests showed
that the variety used by the terrorist was a sub-strain cultivated by
scientists at the US army's medical research institute for infectious
diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland. That finding was
publicly confirmed two weeks ago, when the test results were published
in the journal Science. New Scientist magazine notes that the anthrax
the terrorist used appears to have emerged from Fort Detrick only
recently, as the researchers found that samples which have been
separated from each other for three years acquire "substantial genetic
differences".

The Ames strain was distributed by USAMRIID to around 20 other
laboratories in the US. Of these, according to research conducted by
Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, who runs the Federation of American
Scientists' biological weapons monitoring programme, only four possess
the equipment and expertise required for the weaponisation of the
anthrax sent to Senator Daschle. Three of them are US military
laboratories, the fourth is a government contractor. While security in
all these places has been lax, the terrorist could not have stolen all
the anthrax (around 10 grams) which found its way into the postal
system. He must have used the equipment to manufacture it.

Barbara Hatch Rosenberg has produced a profile of the likely
perpetrator. He is an American working within the US biodefense
industry, with a doctoral degree in the relevant branch of
microbiology. He is skilled and experienced at handling the weapon
without contaminating his surroundings. He has full security clearance
and access to classified information. He is among the tiny number of
Americans who had received anthrax vaccinations before September 2001.
Only a handful of people fit this description. Rosenberg has told the
internet magazine Salon.com that three senior scientists have
identified the same man - a former USAMRIID scientist - as the likely
suspect. She, and they, have told the FBI, but it seems that all the
bureau has done in response is to denounce her.

Instead, it has launched the kind of "investigation" which might have
been appropriate for the unwitnessed hit and run killing of a person
with no known enemies. Rather than homing in on the likely suspects,
in other words, it appears to have cast a net full of holes over the
entire population.

In January, three months after the first anthrax attack and at least a
month after it knew that the sub-strain used by the attacker came from
Fort Detrick, the FBI announced a reward of $2.5m for information
leading to his capture. It circulated 500,000 fliers, and sent letters
to all 40,000 members of the American Society for Microbiology, asking
them whether they knew someone who might have done it.

Yet, while it trawled the empty waters, the bureau failed to cast its
hook into the only ponds in which the perpetrator could have been
lurking. In February, the Wall Street Journal revealed that the FBI
had yet to subpoena the personnel records of the labs which had been
working with the Ames strain. Four months after the investigation
began, in other words, it had not bothered to find out who had been
working in the places from which the anthrax must have come. It was
not until March, after Barbara Hatch Rosenberg had released her
findings, that the bureau started asking laboratories for samples of
their anthrax and the records relating to them.

To date, it appears to have analysed only those specimens which
already happened to be in the hands of its researchers or which had
been offered, without compulsion, by laboratories. A fortnight ago,
the New York Times reported that "government experts investigating the
anthrax strikes are still at sea". The FBI claimed that the problem
"is a lack of advisers skilled in the subtleties of germ weapons".

Last week, I phoned the FBI. Why, I asked, when the evidence was so
abundant, did the trail appear to have gone cold? "The investigation
is continuing," the spokesman replied. "Has it gone cold because it
has led you to a government office?" I asked. He put down the phone.

Had he stayed on the line, I would have asked him about a few other
offences the FBI might wish to consider. The army's development of
weaponised anthrax, for example, directly contravenes both the
biological weapons convention and domestic law. So does its plan to
test live microbes in "aerosol chambers" at the Edgewood Chemical
Biological Center, also in Maryland. So does its development of a
genetically modified fungus for attacking coca crops in Colombia, and
GM bacteria for destroying materials belonging to enemy forces. These,
as the research group Project Sunshine has discovered, appear to be
just a tiny sample of the illegal offensive biological research
programmes which the US government has secretly funded. Several
prominent scientists have suggested that the FBI's investigation is
being pursued with less than the rigour we might have expected because
the federal authorities have something to hide.

The FBI has dismissed them as conspiracy theorists. But there is
surely a point after which incompetence becomes an insufficient
explanation for failure.