Fresh doubts raised on 2001 anthrax attacks
11.10.11
WASHINGTON | Months after the anthrax mailings that terrorized the nation in 2001, and long before he became the prime suspect, Army biologist Bruce Ivins sent his superiors an email offering to help trace the killer. </p><p>Ivins said he had several variants of Ames anthrax — the strain that the FBI believed was used in the attack — that could be tested to find the origins of the powder that had killed five people. </p><p> Seven years later, as federal investigators closed in to charge him for the same crimes he’d once offered to help solve, Ivins committed suicide in July 2008 at age 62.</p><p>Prosecutors voiced confidence that Ivins would have been found guilty, announcing that years of cutting-edge DNA analysis proved that his spores were “effectively the murder weapon.” </p><p> But to many of Ivins’ former colleagues at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md., his invitation to test anthrax in his own inventory is just one of the clues that points out the FBI could have suspected the wrong man. </p><p>What kind of murderer, they wonder, would ask the cops to test his own gun for ballistics? </p><p>Ten years after the attack, an in-depth examination of the case against Ivins by PBS’ “Frontline,” McClatchy Newspapers and ProPublica raises fresh doubts about the evidence and questions whether — despite a $100 million investigation — the real anthrax killer remains on the loose.</p><p>•Although prosecutors have said Ivins tried to hide his guilt by submitting a false sample of his anthrax that didn’t contain telltale genetic mutations found in the attack powder, records reveal publicly for the first time that Ivins made available at least three other samples for testing between 2002 and 2004.</p><p>Those samples did match the anthrax in the attack letters, a discovery that Ivins’ lawyer said debunks charges that he was covering his tracks. </p><p>•Prosecutors argued that Ivins was motivated by concern that the anthrax vaccine projects could be curtailed, that his “life’s work appeared destined for failure, absent an unexpected event.”</p><p>When told he might have to study other germs, Ivins replied: “I am an anthrax researcher. This is what I do.”</p><p>But Ivins’ former bosses say that he shouldn’t have had any worries about his future, because the Pentagon had approved a full year’s funding for his and others’ research on a new vaccine and was mapping out a five-year, $15 million plan. Said Gerard Andrews, then a supervisor: </p><p>“I believe the timeline has been distorted by the FBI.” </p><p>•As the FBI zeroed in on Ivins in March 2007, outside scientists called the Red Team urged investigators to deeper research the genetic mutations in the anthrax to ensure the results were unchallengeable.</p><p>FBI officials rebuffed them, saying it’s “an academic question with little probative value to the investigation.” </p><p>•After collecting swabs from Ivins’ home, vehicles and office and finding not a single spore from the attack powder, prosecutors simply attributed it to the training of a microbiologist used to handling dangerous germs.</p><p>But Claire Fraser-Liggett, a consultant who did some of the pioneering genetics work for the investigation, questioned how someone who perhaps had to work “haphazardly, quickly” could have avoided leaving behind tiny pieces of forensically traceable DNA. </p><p> “You think about all the efforts that had to go into decontaminating postal facilities, and the volatility of those spores and the fact that they were around for so long,” she said. “I think it represents a big hole, really gives me pause to think: How strong was this case against Dr. Ivins?” </p><p>The Justice Department formally closed the anthrax case last year. Much of the government’s case remains unchallenged, and prosecutors argue any inconsistencies and unanswered questions are trumped by a long chain of evidence that would have convinced a jury that Ivins prepared the lethal powder that was mailed to news media outlets and two U.S. senators. </p><p> “You can get into the weeds, and you can take little shots of each of these aspects of our vast, you know, mosaic of evidence against Dr. Ivins,” lead federal prosecutor Rachel Lieber said in an interview. But in a trial, she said, jurors would have pointed to the big picture. </p><p> “And, ladies and gentlemen, the big picture is, you have, you know, brick upon brick upon brick upon brick upon brick of a wall of evidence that demonstrates that Dr. Ivins was guilty of this offense.” </p><p><strong><span class="subhead">RMR-1029</span></strong></p><p>“RMR-1029 was conclusively identified as the parent material to the anthrax powder used in the mailings,” the Justice Department said in its summary. </p><p>Ten years ago, the FBI was ill-prepared to investigate America’s first anthrax attack. With no properly equipped lab of its own to handle the evidence, it turned to Fort Detrick. </p><p>Among those immediately enlisted to examine the attack powder: Bruce Ivins. On Oct. 17, 2001, he logged his observations:</p><p>“It is an extremely pure preparation, and an extremely high concentration. These are not ‘garage’ spores.”</p><p>Hardly, prosecutors theorize. Ivins withdrew anthrax from his flask — labeled RMR-1029 — and began to grow large quantities of the deadly germ at the army lab.</p><p> If so, his choice seems odd for a cunning killer. A veritable library of germs around him, Ivins took the spore culture that was expressly under his control.</p><p>While the powder-laced letters contained no fingerprints, hair or human DNA, they did offer solid microscopic clues: The lethal spores in the powder could be made to produce a small number of genetically distinct variants, known as morphs.</p><p>Ivins schooled federal agents in the intricacies of anthrax, explaining how the telltale morphs can arise from one generation to the next. </p><p> In April 2002, Ivins did something that investigators would highlight years later: He turned over samples from his flask of Ames anthrax that tested negative, showing no morphs.</p><p>But later, the FBI took their own samples from the flask and found four morphs that matched those in the powder. </p><p>Lieber, the prosecutor, thinks that Ivins manipulated his sample to cover his tracks.</p><p>“If you send something that is supposed to be from the murder weapon, but you send something that doesn’t match, that’s the ultimate act of deception. That’s why it’s so important,” she said. </p><p>Records recently released under the Freedom of Information Act, however, show that Ivins made available a total of four sets of samples from 2002 to 2004, double the number the FBI has disclosed.</p><p>And in subsequent FBI tests, three of the four sets ultimately tested positive for the morphs. </p><p>Paul Kemp, who was Ivins’ lawyer, called it “incredible” that he was never told. The fact that the FBI had multiple samples genetically matching anthrax in the letters, Kemp said, debunks the charge the biologist tried to confuse the investigators. </p><p><strong><span class="subhead">Another Hatfill?</span></strong></p><p>Before focusing on Ivins, the FBI spent years building a case against another former Army scientist. Steven Hatfill had commissioned a study on the effectiveness of a mailed anthrax attack and had taken ciprofloxacin, a powerful antibiotic, around the dates of the mailings. Attorney General John Ashcroft publicly called Hatfill a “person of interest.” </p><p>Eventually cleared, Hatfill won a $5.8 million settlement.</p><p>Ivins’ colleagues and some experts on the case wonder: Could the FBI have made the same blunder twice? </p><p>Ivins sat down for detailed interviews with prosecutors in early 2008 and volunteered a series of damaging admissions with his lawyer present.</p><p>Sometimes his answers were incoherent, FBI summaries show. He offered shifting explanations, acknowledged making long night drives while his wife slept and a penchant for mailing letters under pseudonyms from distant post offices.</p><p>With the FBI closing in, he fell into drinking and depression and made violent threats during group therapy sessions. A search of his home before he died turned up a cache of guns and ammunition. </p><p>And there was his obsession with Kappa Kappa Gamma. At the University of Cincinnati, where Ivins earned a doctoral degree in microbiology, prosecutors say, the socially awkward Ivins became deeply shaken when spurned by a girl belonging to the sorority. </p><p> For more than 30 years, his obsession with the sorority drove him to multiple, minor crimes against the group. In the case of one member, who also was a scientist, he turned stalker, vandalizing her car and swiping her lab book.</p><p>Two decades later, when she received an FBI appeal for scientists nationwide to help find the anthrax mailer, she instantly thought of Ivins and phoned the FBI. They didn’t home in on him for years. </p><p>When they did, the mailbox at 10 Nassau St. in Princeton, N.J., where poisoned letters were posted, loomed large. It was just steps from a sorority office and near the home of a former Fort Detrick researcher whom Ivins disliked. </p><p> “This mailbox wasn’t a random mailbox,” said Edward Montooth, a recently retired FBI agent who ran the inquiry. “There was significance to it for multiple reasons. And when we spoke to some of the behavioral science folks, they explained to us that everything is done for a reason with the perpetrator. And you may never understand it because you don’t think the same way.” </p><p>But Fraser-Liggett, the director of the University of Maryland’s Institute for Genome Sciences, said “I don’t know how it would have been possible to convict him. Should he have had access to a potential bio-weapon, given everything that’s come to light? I’d say, no. Was he just totally off the wall, from everything I’ve seen and read? I’d say, yes. </p><p> “But that doesn’t mean someone is a cold-blooded killer.” </p><p><strong><span class="subhead">Long nights</span></strong></p><p>Ivins could never explain why he spent so many late nights in the lab in the weeks before the letter attacks.</p><p>Like many of his colleagues at Fort Detrick, he dropped by the secured labs at odd hours to work alone. In the summer and fall of 2001, his night and weekend time in the hot suite spiked: 11 hours and 15 minutes in August, 31 hours and 28 minutes in September and 16 hours and 13 minutes in October. He’d averaged only a couple of hours in prior months.</p><p>Investigators haven’t said whether they think the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks prompted Ivins to start making the powder or to accelerate a plan already under way. On the weekend after 9/11, Ivins spent more than two hours each night in the lab on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. </p><p> The next afternoon — Monday, Sept. 17 — he took four hours of annual leave but was back at USAMRIID at 7 p.m.</p><p>Because of their Sept. 18 postmarks, the anthrax-laced letters had to have been dropped sometime between 5 p.m. Monday and Tuesday’s noon pickup at the Princeton mailbox. </p><p>If Ivins did make the seven-hour round-trip drive from Fort Detrick, he would’ve had to travel overnight. Investigators said he reported to USAMRIID at 7 a.m. Tuesday for a business trip to Pennsylvania.</p><p>Opportunity, yes, but the FBI can’t prove Ivins twice slipped away to mail the letters to news media outlets and two U.S. senators, only that he had an opportunity to do so undetected. </p><p>Prosecutors decline to provide a specific account of when they think Ivins grew spores for the attacks or how he manufactured the dry powder from the type of wet anthrax suspensions used at Fort Detrick.</p><p>In any event, he would have had to propagate trillions of anthrax spores for each letter. The bug can be grown on agar plates (a kind of petri dish), in flasks or in a larger vessel known as a fermenter. </p><p> To make at least 5 grams of dried powder — roughly what was in the letters — up to 30 gallons of fermenter broth or 400 to 1,200 agar plates were needed, according to a National Academy of Sciences report in May.</p><p>Henry Heine, a fellow microbiologist who’s now with the University of Florida, estimated that it would have taken Ivins “30 to 50 weeks of continuous labor” to brew spores for the letters.</p><p>Andrews, Ivins’ former boss, said Ivins didn’t know how to use the fermenter, which Andrews described as “indefinitely disabled,” with its motor removed. He said the freeze dryer was outside the hot lab, so using it would have exposed unprotected employees to lethal spores. </p><p> FBI searches years later found no traces of the attack powder in the lab and drying equipment, nor in Ivins’ home and vehicles.</p><p>The National Research Council, part of the National Academy of Sciences, convened a prestigious panel of researchers at the FBI’s request to review the science in the case.</p><p>The committee concluded earlier this year that prosecutors had overstated the certainty of the scientific evidence against Ivins.</p><p>The outside scientists, called the Red Team, urged the FBI to do more basic research to ensure that the test results were reliable, a recommendation that was rebuffed. </p><p>Lieber, the lead prosecutor, said agents tried to ensure the science was rigorously vetted, but there were limits and the science was only a piece of the case. </p><p> “You look at the lines of a trial and where do we spend our resources,” Lieber said. “Are we doing a science project or are we looking for proof at trial? These are two very different standards.” </p><p>To Fraser-Liggett, it is anything but an airtight case.</p><p>“I think that, for an awful lot of people, there is a desire to really want to say that ‘Yes, Ivins was the perpetrator. This case can reasonably be closed. And we can put this tragic chapter in U.S. history behind us,’ ” she said. “But I think part of what’s driving that is the fact that, if he wasn’t the perpetrator, then it means that person is still out there.” </p><p>
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</p></p><p><em>The “Frontline” report airs at 8 p.m. today on KCPT.</em>
Source: Kansas City Star
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