2003-07-03 -- Steven Hatfill, Prime Suspect in 2001 Postal Anthrax Attac,,
Was a Bioweapons Developer for US and South African Governments


Steven Hatfill, the FBI's prime suspect in 2001 US postal anthrax
attacks though never charged, also helped build mobile bioweapons lab
for the US. Following the news story is a background piece on Hatfill
that completes the picture.


Sidney Morning Herald, July 3 2003


The man described by US Attorney-General, John Ashcroft, as a "person
of interest" in an inquiry into the anthrax postal attacks in 2001
trained US Special Forces in biological warfare before the Iraq war,
The New York Times reported yesterday.

Steven Hatfill helped set up a mobile bioweapons laboratory that was
used to teach troops what to look for in Iraq, the newspaper said,
citing unnamed government officials and experts.

At the heart of the project was a covert plan to build a mobile germ
plant, real in all its parts but never actually "plugged in" to make
weapons, it was claimed. To design the unit, the Government turned to
Dr Hatfill, then a rising star in the world of biological defence.

According to the report, the officials now say a major reason Dr
Hatfill came under suspicion following the anthrax attacks, which left
five people dead, was his work on the mobile unit. In any case,
investigators found no evidence suggesting that the plant ever made
anthrax, the paper said.

Even after the FBI began investigating Dr Hatfill, the Pentagon
continued to draw on his expertise.


This is the NY Times article referred to:


New York Times, July 2, 2003

Subject of Anthrax Inquiry Tied to Anti-Germ Training

This article was reported and written by William J. Broad, David
Johnston and Judith Miller.

Three years ago, the United States began a secret project to train
Special Operations units to detect and disarm mobile germ factories of
the sort that Iraq and some other countries were suspected of
building, according to administration officials and experts in germ
weaponry.

The heart of the effort, these officials said, was a covert plan to
construct a mobile germ plant, real in all its parts but never
actually "plugged in" to make weapons. In the months before the war
against Iraq, American commandos trained on this factory.

The tale of the mobile unit provides a glimpse into one of the most
secretive of military and intelligence worlds, that of germ warfare
defense. But here, two stories intersect. The first involves this
previously unknown aspect of the Iraq war. The second involves the
investigation into who sent letters containing anthrax that killed
five people in the United States in late 2001.

Officials familiar with the secret project say that to design an
American version of a mobile germ unit, the government turned to Dr.
Steven J. Hatfill, then a rising star in the world of biological
defense but more recently publicly identified by the Justice
Department as "a person of interest" in the anthrax investigation.

It was unclear why investigators focused on Dr. Hatfill. Officials now
say a major reason he came under suspicion was his work on the mobile
unit.

Dr. Hatfill has been subjected to greater scrutiny than anyone else in
the anthrax investigation, but the government has brought no charges.
He has repeatedly denied any role in the attacks and has said he knows
nothing about anthrax production.

Dr. Hatfill, people close to him say, is proud of his work on the
mobile unit and says it demonstrates his desire to assist the
government in biodefense, even though investigators tried to use his
work against him. In any case, investigators found no evidence
suggesting that the plant ever made anthrax, his friends, government
experts and investigators all agree.

The secret trainer is similar to the mobile units that the Bush
administration has accused Iraq of building to produce biological
weapons. Neither its existence nor Dr. Hatfill's work on it has
previously been disclosed publicly. Pat Clawson, Dr. Hatfill's
spokesman and friend, said Dr. Hatfill would not comment on any secret
project or any role that he might have played. Mr. Clawson also
declined comment.

Dr. Hatfill helped develop the mobile plant while working for Science
Applications International Corporation, a leading contractor for the
Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency, the officials and the
experts said.

They said the unit was set up last fall at Fort Bragg, N.C., to help
Delta Force, the Army's elite Special Operations unit, learn what to
look for in Iraq and how to react if it found dangerous mobile gear.

Several people familiar with the Delta Force trailer, including senior
counterterrorism officials, said it was intended solely for training.
They emphasized that its components were not connected and that it
could not have made lethal germs.

Even after the F.B.I. began investigating Dr. Hatfill, the Pentagon
continued to draw on his expertise. But tensions arose between the
Justice Department and the Defense Department over their access to the
mobile unit, the weapons experts said.

The trainer's equipment includes a fermenter, a centrifuge and a mill
for grinding clumps of anthrax into the best size for penetrating
human lungs, these experts said.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, suspecting that components from
the Delta trainer might have been used to make the anthrax mailed in
late 2001, examined the unit, officials and experts said. But
investigators found no spores or other evidence linking it to the
crime, they said.

The mobile unit is part of the government's secretive effort to
develop germ defenses.

Critics say such biodefense projects often test the limits of the 1975
global ban on germ weapons, which the United States championed.

But the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the anthrax letters
only weeks later prompted the Bush administration to greatly expand
the number of such clandestine projects.

Elisa D. Harris, a Clinton administration arms control official now at
the University of Maryland, said developing a mobile germ trainer
would not violate the treaty. But she questioned the wisdom of it.

"It will raise concerns in other capitals," Dr. Harris said, "in part
because the United States has fought tooth and nail to prevent the
international community from strengthening the germ treaty."

Senior Pentagon officials declined to discuss the mobile unit. An
administration official said the Pentagon had reviewed the unit to
ensure legal compliance with the germ treaty.

The American mobile unit was not a first. About 50 years ago, when the
United States made germ weapons, scientists drew up plans for mobile
units that could produce enough anthrax to kill almost everyone in a
large city, said William C. Patrick III, a former head of product
development at Fort Detrick, Md., then the military's center for
developing germ weapons. The goal, Mr. Patrick said in an interview,
was to create a reserve in case an enemy destroyed the nation's germ
factories, in Arkansas and Maryland at the time.

Over the decades, other countries, including Iraq, have also sought
such mobile gear.

After Iraq lost the 1991 Persian Gulf War and agreed to destroy its
unconventional arms, Iraqi officials told United Nations inspectors
that Baghdad had once considered making mobile germ plants. A United
Nations official said that inspectors "kept that in the back of their
minds" while looking for evidence of mobile germ plants. They found
none.

In the fall of 1997, Dr. Hatfill, a medical doctor, entered the world
of germ defense by taking a job at Fort Detrick, where he studied
protections against deadly viruses like Ebola. In late 1998, he began
working at Science Applications, a company based in San Diego that has
offices in the Virginia suburbs of Washington. Among other things, it
helps the government develop defenses against germ weapons.

At Science Applications in Virginia, because of an increase in anthrax
hoaxes, Dr. Hatfill helped commission a paper from Mr. Patrick to
assess the risks of spores sent through the mail. The February 1999
paper compared the probable physical characteristics of anthrax that
could be produced by amateurs with the known traits of American
weapon-grade anthrax; it said nothing about anthrax production.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and other senior American officials
have said that in late 1999 a defecting Iraqi chemical engineer told
American officials he had supervised operations at a mobile germ unit,
and that Baghdad was making a fleet of them.

By 2000, the United States appears to have concluded that the rumored
Iraqi mobile plants were probably real.

At his job, Dr. Hatfill took on the mobile trainer project with
enthusiasm, colleagues recalled. At times, one said, he asserted that
he was its instigator.

Military officials said that the effort was financed by the Defense
Threat Reduction Agency, an arm of the Pentagon that works to counter
biological, radiological and chemical weapons.

Experts said that Science Applications assigned the project to Dr.
Hatfill and Dr. Joseph F. Soukup, a vice president for biomedical
science, who helped commission the 1999 anthrax report.

Science Applications declined to discuss the project or Dr. Hatfill's
involvement. "It's highly classified," Ron Zollars, a company
spokesman, said. Dr. Soukup did not return phone calls.

To learn about mobile production, Dr. Hatfill again called on Mr.
Patrick and his encyclopedic knowledge, said experts familiar with
their work. Mr. Patrick, who also declined to comment, described the
old American plans in detail, these experts said.

The collaboration, experts said, produced a novel design that
demonstrated a number of ways to multiply viruses and bacteria,
including the use of fermentation, chicken eggs and tissue culture. It
was not meant to replicate Iraqi or American designs but instead to
illustrate a range of mobile biological threats.

In 2000, Dr. Hatfill began gathering parts for the mobile unit, an
expert said. Another quoted Dr. Hatfill as saying he had bought parts
for the Delta trailer long before its construction and stored them in
a warehouse.

"It's all the ordering of equipment that in hindsight looks
suspicious," said a third expert, who is familiar with the secret
federal projects that Dr. Hatfill worked on.

The trainer's construction began in September 2001, one expert said.
Dr. Hatfill supervised it at A.F.W. Fabrication, a metalworking plant
on the outskirts of Frederick, Md. The shop was a mile from Dr.
Hatfill's apartment outside Fort Detrick's main gate.

Although Dr. Hatfill seemed fully engaged in biodefense work, his
world began unraveling. That summer, the C.I.A. had rejected his
application for a high-level intelligence clearance after he failed a
polygraph test, associates and officials said. Then, in September
2001, the anthrax attacks began and Dr. Hatfill soon found himself
under scrutiny.

Science Applications fired him in March 2002. The secret Delta
trailer, a person close to Dr. Hatfill said, was then half built.

Mr. Zollars of Science Applications said Dr. Hatfill did no further
work for the company and received no further pay. Experts familiar
with Dr. Hatfill said he continued to work on the germ trainer. "He
was doing it on his own, using his own money," one recalled.

Later, as the Delta trailer was being hauled to Fort Bragg, F.B.I.
agents and experts pulled it over and thoroughly checked it for
anthrax and other deadly germs.

"The F.B.I. wanted to confiscate it," one expert recalled.

After tense discussions, the Pentagon kept the Delta trailer, which
was set up at Fort Bragg last fall in preparation for the war with
Iraq. Experts said many troops used it in training sessions run at
times by Dr. Hatfill and at other times by Mr. Patrick.

"This is a sensitive thing," Col. Bill Darley, spokesman for the
United States Special Operations Command in Tampa, Fla., said of the
mobile unit in an interview. He declined to disclose details, other
than to say it was used exclusively for training.

"We are not growing anthrax or botulinum toxin," Colonel Darley said.
"None of this equipment is functional. It looks like - it is - the
real stuff, but it's nonfunctional."

Friends said Dr. Hatfill was deeply committed to following through on
the project because it was for the Special Forces, in which he had
tried to serve while in the Army at Fort Bragg. "I had given my word,"
one friend quoted him as saying. "I wasn't about to break it."


This background on Steven Hatfill is from mid January 2003 Challenge
newsspaper:


ANTHRAX, APARTHEID, AND THE FBI

The FBI is hunting for evidence linking bio-warfare researcher Steven
Hatfill to the anthrax attacks that followed 9\11. According to
Attorney General Ashcroft, Hatfill is a "person of interest," not an
official suspect.  Whether or not he killed the five people who were
exposed to mailed anthrax spores, he is definitely not "innocent."
The investigation has uncovered his ties to the fascist Rhodesian and
South African white supremacist regimes.

Soon after the 2001 anthrax attacks, Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, chair of
the Federation of American Scientists Working Group on Biological
Weapons, accused the FBI of "dragging its feet" in investigating
obvious leads to defense research.  She described how Hatfill had
access to anthrax and the motive to use it.  By early December 2001,
genetic fingerprinting raised the possibility that the anthrax spores
came from one of a handful of US labs engaged in bio-weapons research,
but the FBI didn't demand bacteria samples from the labs until March.
All anthrax samples were the "Ames" strain, developed by the US Army
Medical Research Institute for Infectious Disease (USAM-RIID) at Ft.
Detrick, MD, Hatfill's former employer.  The spores were
"weaponized" - powdered to maximize their spread - by a secret process
invented by Army scientists and requiring sophisticated equipment.

Hatfill joined the Army's Institute for Military Assistance in the
1970s.  He moved to Ian Smith's fascist Rhodesia (today's Zimbabwe),
where he obtained an MD from 1975-'78, while still in the US military.
Hatfill served as a mercenary with Rhodesia's Special Air Squadron and
the Selous Scouts, elite paramilitary forces engaged in
"counter-insurgency" warfare against black guerrillas.  Racist and
anti-communist "dirty wars" backed by South Africa and the CIA killed
1.5 million people in the countries bordering South Africa, including
Zimbabwe.  The Selous Scouts carried out human experiments with
chemical and biological agents.  A now declassified US Defense
Intelligence Agency report comments, ". a member of the Selous Scouts
admitted in 1978 that they had tried both chemical and biological
warfare techniques to kill terrorists."

At the peak of Zimbabwe's civil war (1978-1980), the world's biggest
anthrax epidemic swept the "Tribal Trust Lands" (black "homelands"),
affecting 10,738 black farmers and their cattle; 182 died.  The region
remains contaminated today.  According to a former Rhodesian military
officer, "the use of anthrax spoor to kill off the cattle of
tribesman . was carried out in conjunction with psychological
suggestions . that their cattle were sick and dying because of disease
introduced into Zimbabwe from Mozambique by the infiltrating
guerillas."

According to Zimbabwe's Daily Mirror, Hatfill owed his medical school
admission to Dr. Robert Symington, father of Rhodesia's bio-weapons
program.  In 1984, Hatfill moved to apartheid South Africa, where he
joined the medical branch of the notorious South Africa Defense Force.
Medical units of the SADF were linked to "Project Coast."  Under
Wouter Basson (aka "Dr. Death"), "Project Coast" was a massive
bio-weapons operation, experimenting with plague, cholera and anthrax
to assassinate African nationalists.  The British New Statesman asks,
"were (Hatfill) to be publicly charged, might he have very damaging
information to impart about US assistance to the Rhodesian and South
African regimes . about offensive biological warfare programs, even
though the military insists it does defensive research only?  Might he
not be a veritable landmine of dangerous, damaging and embarrassing
information?"

Returning to the US in the mid-90s, Hatfill worked at USAMRIID on
Ebola and Marburg, two of the world's deadliest viruses.  In 1999 he
joined SAIC, a defensive contractor whose major client is the CIA.
Hatfill never officially worked with anthrax but his USAMRIID mentor
was Bill Patrick, the Army Scientists who weaponized anthrax.  Under a
CIA commission to the SAIC, Patrick wrote a report on possible
scenarios following an anthrax attack through the mail.

If Hatfill is the killer, his motives are murky.  But it's clear that
the main beneficiary is the bio-defense industry, which is reaping a
bonanza in the wake of the anthrax scare.  According to David Franz,
former Commander of USAMRIID, "I think a lot of good has come from it.
From a biological or medical standpoint, we've now five people who
have died, but we've put about $6 billion in our budget into defending
against bio-terrorism? (ABC News, 5-4-02)

This exposes US hypocrisy in justifying war with Iraq over "weapons of
mass destruction (WMD)." From Hiroshima to anthrax to depleted
uranium, US imperialism has been the major deplorer of WMD since World
War II.  The current build-up in bio-defense research, along with
plans for mass smallpox vaccination, goes beyond concern with an Iraqi
military response.  The rulers anticipate prolonged war in the
Mid-East, against many potential enemies.  Homeland (in)Security and
bio-defense is preparing us for fascism and a perpetual state of war.

Sources:

NT Times, Nicholas D. Kristof articles of 1-4-02, 7-2-02, 7-12-02,
7-19-02, 8-13-02, all these and much more is available from
http://www.fas.org/bwc/anthraxnews.htm


COUZIN J., Profile: Barbara Hatch Rosenberg. Unconventional detective
bears down on a killer. Science 2002;297:1264-5, available at
http://www.anthraxinvestigation.com/misc3.html


M. Nass, PSR Quarterly 1992, 2:198-209
http://www.anthraxvaccine.org/zimbabwe.html


Hartford Courant 3-24-02
http://www.fas.org/bwc/news/anthraxreport.htm


George Monbiot, Riddle of the Spores, Guardian (UK), 5-2-02
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,719242,00.html


Manold and Goldberg (1999) Plague Wars

The Mirror (Harare), 10-19-02

Military Proposes Illegal Bioweapons Research, Village Voice, 5-10-02,
http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0511-05.htm