Anthrax Inquiry Looks at U.S. Labs
By WILLIAM J. BROAD and JUDITH MILLER
The F.B.I. has expanded its investigation of the deadly anthrax attacks to
include the laboratories of the government and its contractors as a possible
source of the anthrax itself or the knowledge to make it, scientists and law
enforcement officials say.
While theories about the attacker have focused mainly on domestic loners and
foreign states or terrorists, law enforcement officials are now also
examining the possibility that the criminal may be a knowledgeable insider.
Asked if the Federal Bureau of Investigation was investigating American
military and nonmilitary laboratories that have had the powdery anthrax
strain used in the attacks and individuals associated with such centers, a
law enforcement official replied, "Certainly." The official said, "We are
aggressively investigating every possible lead and every possible avenue,"
adding it was logical.
Few details of the insider investigation are known. But federal agents are
already interrogating people in the military establishment that replaced the
old program for making biological weapons. The facilities for that effort,
in western Maryland, are major repositories of the Ames strain of anthrax,
the particularly virulent form that federal officials have identified as the
type used in the attacks that killed five people.
Col. Arthur M. Friedlander, the senior research scientist at the Army's
biodefense laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md., said in an interview on Friday
that officials there were cooperating with federal investigators.
"They've asked us about personnel who had access," he said, speaking
reluctantly.
"They didn't talk to me about my personal experience," said Colonel
Friedlander, a physician and leading anthrax expert. "They asked me about
other personnel."
He went on to dismiss the insider idea as improbable. Whoever made the
killer anthrax, he said, "clearly knew what they were doing."
"But to make the leap that this came out of a government lab is somewhat
large," he added.
He emphasized that no one in his organization, the Army Medical Research
Institute of Infectious Diseases, a leader in developing germ defenses, even
knew how to make dry anthrax, as was found in the letters used in the
attacks. Instead, he said, scientists there used wet anthrax, which is far
easier to make. It is used in developing vaccines and testing their
effectiveness.
"We haven't had an offensive program for a long time," Colonel Friedlander
said. Nobody at the Army's laboratory, he added, "has that kind of expertise."
A dozen or two American laboratories are said to have the Ames strain,
though no one knows for sure because researchers over the decades have
informally shared pathogens like anthrax. Military laboratories like the one
at Fort Detrick, as well as military contractors, are central to the Ames
network, as they have often pioneered the nation's research on vaccines and
other defenses against germ weapons.
The United States began its military program to make germ weapons during
World War II and over the decades developed many ways to spread many
diseases. A top agent was anthrax, a gallon of which was strong enough to
kill eight billion people. President Richard M. Nixon, after renouncing germ
weapons in 1969, championed a global treaty that, starting in 1975, banned
such arms.
Since the start of the anthrax attacks, federal officials, scientists and
amateur sleuths have scrambled to identify the source. Some see the attacker
as home-grown perhaps a disaffected scientist or a militia group while
others discern a conspiracy by a state like Iraq or a foreign terrorist
group. In the United States, there are probably scores of laboratories and
contractors and hundreds of people who have access to essential anthrax
ingredients and recipes.
The insider avenue of inquiry is consistent with the official profile of the
suspect, released on Nov. 9 by the F.B.I. The profile describes a man with a
strong interest in science who is comfortable working with hazardous
material and has "access to a source of anthrax and possesses knowledge and
expertise to refine it."
Separately, a private expert in biological weapons, Barbara Hatch Rosenberg,
has recently published a paper contending that a government insider, or
someone in contact with an insider, is behind the attacks.
Though not an expert on criminal profiling, Dr. Rosenberg, a molecular
biologist at the State University of New York, has testified on biological
weapons before Congress, advised Bill Clinton when he was president and made
addresses to international arms control meetings, including one a few days
ago in Geneva.
Law enforcement officials said Dr. Rosenberg's assertion might turn out to
be well founded, though they emphasized that the investigation was still
broadly based. One official close to the federal investigation called the
Rosenberg theory "the most likely hypothesis."
Referring to her paper, the official said, "I might not have put it so
strongly, but it's definitely reasonable."
Other analysts, including some scientists and experts in germ weapons,
expressed more skepticism of the theory that it had to be an insider,
contending that the skills and knowledge needed to produce the type of
anthrax in this attack were widely available.
The paper laying out Dr. Rosenberg's thesis was distributed on Thursday by
the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, an arms control group.
Dr. Rosenberg, who is chairwoman of an arms control panel at the Federation
of American Scientists, a private group in Washington, has argued repeatedly
that states, not individuals, tend to have the wherewithal to make advanced
biological weapons. International treaties that prohibit that work, she
believes, are thus critical.
Dr. Rosenberg contends that the Ames strain probably did not originate in
1980 or 1981, as is often asserted, but arose decades earlier and was used
in the secret American program to make biological weapons.
She agrees with a conclusion, reached by some experts knowledgeable about
the investigation, that the anthrax powder distributed in the attacks by
letter was treated in a sophisticated manner so it floated easily, as was
done in the old American offensive weapons program, unlike Colonel
Friedlander's defensive program, which uses the wet anthrax.
"All the available information," she said, "is consistent with a U.S.
government lab as the source, either of the anthrax itself or of the recipe
for the U.S. weaponization process." Dr. Rosenberg contended that the
anthrax used in the attacks either originated in the weapons program itself
or was made by someone who had learned the recipe.
The killer, Dr. Rosenberg concludes, is "an American microbiologist who had,
or once had, access to weaponized anthrax in a U.S. government lab, or had
been taught by a U.S. defense expert how to make it. Perhaps he had a vial
or two in his basement as a keepsake."
The paper, "A Compilation of Evidence and Comments on the Source of the
Mailed Anthrax," dated Nov. 29, is based on interviews with federal and
private experts, published reports and scientific articles.
Richard H. Ebright, a microbiologist at Rutgers University who has followed
the anthrax case and has read the Rosenberg paper, said he found it
provocative but unconvincing.
"This is one extreme in the theorizing," Dr. Ebright said. "There are
elements that are reasonable, but elements that are not. I'm confident that
she started with the insider conclusion and then selected the facts." Even
so, he said, American foes seem likely to seize on the paper and amplify the
provocative thesis.
"Every state that's hostile to the United States is going to pick up on
this," Dr. Ebright said. "They'll say it was an orchestrated government
attack, which I don't believe for a second. But you can see people believing
it."
Dr. Rosenberg's theory is getting attention in Europe, where the
environmental group Greenpeace Germany is citing it as credible.
An American official sympathetic to her thesis said the Ames strain might
have come from a place other than a military laboratory.
"There are other government and contractor facilities that do classified
work with access to dangerous strains," the official said. "But it's highly
likely that the material in the anthrax letters came from a person or
persons who really had great expertise. We haven't seen any other artifacts
that point us elsewhere."
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