Anthrax, Ivins, FBI--more

Weakness in character assessment and a bungling FBI?

"Anthrax-Case Affidavits Add to Bizarre Portrait"

by

Eric Lichtblau and Scott Shane

September 25th, 2008

The New York Times

A judge unsealed a new batch of court documents in the anthrax case on Wednesday, filling in further details of the bizarre behavior of Bruce E. Ivins, the Army scientist who the F.B.I. has said carried out the letter attacks of 2001.

Last September, according to a sworn statement from an F.B.I. agent, Dr. Ivins sent himself an exuberant e-mail message under the heading "Finally! I know Who mailed the anthrax!" He did not identify the perpetrator but said he was close to assembling the final proof.

"I'm not looking forward to everybody getting dragged through the mud, but at least it will all be over," Dr. Ivins wrote, adding, "I should have been a private eye!!!!" and signing the message "Bruce."

The documents do not speculate about his motive, though Dr. Ivins was aware by that time that he was under suspicion and might have believed that his e-mail — he maintained at least eight e-mail addresses — was being monitored.

Dr. Ivins, 62, an anthrax vaccine specialist at Fort Detrick, Md., killed himself with an overdose of medication in July after learning that he was likely to be charged in the death of five people exposed to the anthrax-laced letters. The F.B.I. has said he carried out the attacks alone, but friends, colleagues and lawmakers have said they remain skeptical about the evidence the bureau has made public.

The hundreds of pages of search-warrant affidavits made public on Wednesday, after a request by The New York Times, offer no major disclosures. Rather, the documents, unsealed by Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the Federal District Court here and posted online by the Justice Department, add to a portrait of Dr. Ivins's eccentric personality and threatening statements as he faced possible murder charges.

For instance, the documents give a fuller account of a group therapy session on July 9 where Dr. Ivins said that he was a suspect in the anthrax investigation and "that he was angry at the investigators, the government and the system in general."

"He said he was not going to face the death penalty but instead had a plan to kill co-workers and other individuals who had wronged him," an affidavit by a federal agent said, citing accounts of those present.

A search of Dr. Ivins's home in Frederick, Md., three days later found ammunition, a bulletproof vest and a homemade body armor plate, the documents say. F.B.I. agents had already taken guns and ammunition from the house in a search the previous November.

In a further development related to the case, an Army document released this week to The Frederick News-Post revealed that Dr. Ivins was placed on administrative leave and barred from all laboratory space at Fort Detrick in March after spilling anthrax on himself and failing to report the incident immediately. Before telling anyone, he walked home and washed and dried his clothes, the report said.

Earlier, after the November search of his home, he had been barred from the most secure laboratories. But until March, he had been allowed to use less secure areas, where, Army officials said Wednesday, he spilled a nonlethal strain of anthrax.

"Ivins claimed he knew who sent anthrax"

Unsealed documents indicate that the suspect was consumed with the criminal case closing in on him

by

David Willman

September 24th, 2008

Los Angeles Times

On Sept. 7, 2007, as investigators were building the case against him for the deadly anthrax mailings, Army scientist Bruce E. Ivins sent himself an excited e-mail titled, "Finally! I know Who mailed the anthrax!"

The e-mail -- along with other correspondence showing that Ivins more recently mused about how to blind or kill a reality TV participant -- was among previously confidential investigative documents unsealed on Wednesday by a federal judge.

Ivins, 62, a microbiologist who specialized in handling anthrax at the Army's biological warfare research facility at Ft. Detrick, Md., died July 29 in a suicide. Justice Department prosecutors were preparing to charge him in connection with the anthrax mailings, which in 2001 killed five people and sickened or injured 17 others.

The unsealed documents had originally been submitted by investigators last month to win the judge's permission to search seven e-mail accounts that Ivins had maintained. Federal officials declined to comment on the newly unsealed e-mails, which had remained under wraps while investigators combed through Ivins' correspondence.

At face value, the new e-mails reinforce the view that Ivins was consumed with the criminal case closing in on him and, in the final months of his life, behaved in a way that suggested madness.

By early September 2007, the FBI had determined with the help of outside experts that the anthrax used in the mailings originated in a flask of material maintained by Ivins at Ft. Detrick.

But the bureau had not yet done all of the investigative work necessary to exclude as suspects colleagues of Ivins at Ft. Detrick and scientists elsewhere who also had worked with or had access to the material, labeled RMR 1029.

It was against that backdrop that Ivins, at 5:49 p.m. EDT on Sept. 7, sent the e-mail to himself, proclaiming that he had solved the case. Sent from one of the addresses he had registered, KingBadger7@aol .com, Ivins wrote:

"Yes! Yes! Yes!!!!!!! I finally know who mailed the anthrax letters in the fall of 2001. I've pieced it together! Now we can finally get all of this over and done with. I have to check a couple of things to make sure ... absolutely sure . . . and then I can turn over the info. I'll probably turn it over to my lawyer, and then he'll turn info over to the authorities."

Ivins added -- in an apparent reference to his colleagues at Ft. Detrick:

"I'm not looking forward to everybody getting dragged through the mud, but at least it will all be over. Finally! I should have it TOTALLY nailed down within the month. I should have been a private eye!!!!"

Paul F. Kemp, a lawyer whom Ivins had hired to represent him, said that the e-mail "was a note with himself to discuss with me certain information that he wanted to pass on to the FBI. He did, and I passed it on. It was an attempt to say who might have had access to the beaker" containing the RMR 1029 anthrax.

Officials from the FBI and the Justice Department have said that their investigation determined that Ivins, alone, perpetrated the anthrax mailings. Kemp has said that he would have won Ivins' acquittal had the case gone to trial.

Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.) introduced legislation Wednesday calling for a "9/11-style" commission to investigate the anthrax mailings.

Holt does not have any co-sponsors for his bill, an aide said.

As for the e-mails in which Ivins discussed the TV participant, federal officials said they brought these to the attention of the judge because they wanted to search for any evidence that Ivins had targeted witnesses in the anthrax case, according to the court documents. In the e-mails, Ivins focused on Kathryn Price, who appeared in 2001 in episodes of "The Mole," an ABC-TV reality series.

The FBI, after searching Ivins' trash outside his home, found mentions of addresses that enabled investigators to trace to him this e-mail, discussing how another participant in the "The Mole" could have detected Price's arranged role as the show's spoiler from within.

"He should have taken the hatchet and brought it down hard and sharply across her neck, severing her carotid artery and jugular vein," Ivins wrote in early July. "Then when she hits the ground, he completes the task on the other side of the neck, severing her trachea. . . . I personally would have paid big money to have do[n]e it myself."

Ivins also wrote, "The least someone could do would be to take a sharp ballpoint pin or letter opener and put her eyes out, to complete the task of making her a true mole!"

And...an error by the FBI?

"FBI did not analyze anthrax from biodefense lab"

by

Dan Vergano and Steve Sternberg

2008

USA TODAY

The FBI never examined anthrax samples from the 2001 contamination of a biodefense lab that was covered up by their lead suspect in the anthrax mailings — a decision that one of the FBI's leading anthrax experts calls "weird."

Researcher Bruce Ivins in 2002 confessed to cleaning up the office contamination without telling anyone during an Army investigation at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md. Ivins became a suspect in 2005 in the mailings that killed five and sickened 17.

FBI investigators have not yet analyzed the genetic fingerprints of 25 anthrax samples supplied from the lab contamination investigation, says Vahid Majidi of the FBI's Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate.

"They're still in my lab," says Paul Keim, a microbiologist at Northern Arizona University. Keim called the FBI's decision not to examine the contamination samples "weird" given the intensity of investigators' focus on biodefense researchers, which included polygraphs of Army institute researchers.

Keim, until June, retained duplicates of the FBI's repository of 1,070 anthrax samples collected from researchers worldwide after the mailbox attacks. Genetic fingerprints of those repository samples eliminated suspects other than Ivins by 2007, says FBI lab director Chris Hassell.

The investigation into the 2001 anthrax mailings has drawn harsh reviews from critics in recent Senate and House hearings, such as Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who questioned whether one person could have carried out the attacks. The Justice Department publicly named Ivins, 62, as their lead suspect in the attacks in August, days after his suicide.

Ivins' attorney, Paul Kemp, says his client was innocent and suggested many researchers had access to the anthrax identified by genetic fingerprints.

Before landing on the FBI's radar, Ivins emerged as the central figure in the separate investigation of anthrax contamination at Fort Detrick, where he confessed to cleaning up spilled anthrax in his office without telling superiors. "I had no desire to cry wolf," Ivins told an Army investigator at the time. The Army's investigation found samples of the type of anthrax used in the letter attacks on Ivins' desk and elsewhere in his office, according to a report May 9, 2002.

"Why didn't (the FBI) analyze it? One presumes this was pretty relevant evidence," says biodefense analyst Michael Stebbins of the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, D.C., who was not part of the investigation. "It raises questions about systematic errors in the FBI investigation."

Majidi, an FBI scientist involved in the investigation, says the bureau viewed the 2002 contamination investigation as an Army matter. As a result, he says, the FBI never submitted samples from Ivins' office for the detailed genetic analysis that later tied a flask in his laboratory to the anthrax used in the attacks.

"I don't know" why the FBI never analyzed the 2002 anthrax in Ivins' office, says Debbie Weierman of the FBI's Washington Field Office. "Suspicion on him was immense, if you look at this in hindsight."

For Keim, the revelation in August that the FBI had shifted its focus to Ivins cast the omission in a new light. In 2002, he says, "I got the samples and thought, 'What a sloppy place.' But I'm starting to think Bruce was taking anthrax out of his lab and then covering his tracks."


FBI firm on conclusion on anthrax case

FBI firm on conclusion on anthrax case

Robert Mueller

[FBI director]

caricature

by

Kerry Waghorn

It still isn't clear and suspicion of FBI tactics will remain.

"FBI's Mueller tells Congress anthrax inquiry conclusive"

by

Kevin Johnson,

September 17th, 2008

USA TODAY

FBI Director Robert Mueller on Tuesday defended the long federal inquiry into the 2001 anthrax attacks, expressing confidence that Army scientist Bruce Ivins was responsible for the assaults that killed five people.

Mueller, in his first appearance before Congress since Ivins was publicly identified last month as the lone attacker, also said the National Academy of Sciences is conducting an independent review of the FBI investigation.

Some congressional leaders have raised questions about the FBI's conclusions in the case against Ivins, who committed suicide in July as federal investigators built their case against him.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., publicly rebuked Mueller on Tuesday for what Conyers called a belated response to the committee's requests for additional information about the case and about the government's plans to expand the FBI's authority in national security investigations.

"When are we going to get some straight answers?" Conyers asked Mueller. "These are serious and important questions."

Mueller later told the panel that investigators had made a "clear identification," tracing the deadly anthrax contained in a series of letters to the substance found in a vial controlled by Ivins, an anthrax scientist at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md.

The FBI director said investigators "eliminated every other person" who might have had the skills to produce the material.

Federal investigators initially focused largely on Ivins' colleague Steven Hatfill. Hatfill later sued the government for violating his privacy. In June, the Justice Department paid $5.8 million to settle the legal action.

Tom Daschle, one of two U.S. senators targeted in the attacks, has described the bureau's inquiry implicating Ivins as "complete and persuasive." Paul Kemp, Ivins' attorney, says the scientist was innocent.

Mueller is likely to face additional questions today in Senate testimony about new Justice Department guidelines that would allow FBI agents to conduct surveillance and interviews and use other methods without specific suspicions or suspects.

"These new guidelines open the door to using race and ethnicity in the name of national security," ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero said. Mueller says the additional powers are needed to combat terrorism.


Congress desires answers from FBI on anthrax case

FBI to release more data on anthrax case this week

The third week of August will be when the FBI presents more hard data regarding the anthrax issue and their decision to charge Bruce Ivins in order to quell doubts and suspicions.

"F.B.I. Will Present Scientific Evidence in Anthrax Case to Counter Doubts"

by

Eric Lichtblau and David Johnston

August 16th, 2008

The New York Times

Growing doubts from scientists about the strength of the government’s case against the late Bruce E. Ivins, the military researcher named as the anthrax killer, are forcing the Justice Department to begin disclosing more fully the scientific evidence it used to implicate him.

In the face of the questions, Federal Bureau of Investigation officials have decided to make their first detailed public presentation next week on the forensic science used to trace the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks to a flask kept in a refrigerator in Dr. Ivins's laboratory at Fort Detrick, in Maryland. Many scientists are awaiting those details because so far, they say, the F.B.I. has failed to make a conclusive case.

"That is going to be critically important, because right now there is really no data to make a scientific judgment one way or the other," Brad Smith, a molecular biologist at the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. "The information that has been put out, there is really very little scientific information in there."

F.B.I officials say they are confident that their scientific evidence against Dr. Ivins, who killed himself last month as the Justice Department was preparing an indictment against him, will withstand scrutiny, and they plan to present their findings for review by leading scientists. But the scrutiny may only raise fresh questions.

The bureau presented forensics information to Congressional and government officials this week in a closed-door briefing, but a number of listeners said the briefing left them less convinced that the F.B.I. had the right man, and they said some of the government’s public statements appeared incomplete or misleading.

For instance, the Justice Department said earlier this month in unsealing court records against Dr. Ivins that he had tried to mislead investigators in 2002 by giving them an anthrax sample that did not appear to have come from his laboratory.

But F.B.I. officials acknowledged at the closed-door briefing, according to people who were there, that the sample Dr. Ivins gave them in 2002 did in fact come from the same strain used in the attacks, but, because of limitations in the bureau’s testing methods and Dr. Ivins's failure to provide the sample in the format requested, the F.B.I. did not realize that it was a correct match until three years later.

In addition, people who were briefed by the F.B.I. said a batch of misprinted envelopes used in the anthrax attacks — another piece of evidence used to link Dr. Ivins to the attacks — could have been much more widely available than bureau officials had initially led them to believe.

Representative Rush Holt, the New Jersey Democrat who has followed the anthrax case closely and requested this week's briefing from the F.B.I., said in an interview that he was not ready to draw any firm conclusions about the investigation. But he said: "The case is built from a number of pieces of circumstantial evidence, and for a case this important, it's troubling to have so many loose ends. The briefing pointed out even more loose ends than I thought there were before."

Naba Barkakati, an engineer who is the chief technologist for the Government Accountability Office and who also attended this week's briefing, said of the F.B.I.'s forensics case against Dr. Ivins: "It's very hard to get the sense of whether this was scientifically good or bad. We didn't really get the question settled, other than taking their word for it."

The bureau's lab work has come under sharp criticism in recent years for problems over DNA analysis, bullet tracing and other important forensic technology. In 2004, the laboratory mismatched a fingerprint taken from the Madrid terror bombings to a lawyer in Portland, Ore., Brandon Mayfield, who was then arrested. He won a $2.8 million settlement.

With the main suspect in the anthrax killings now dead, F.B.I. officials say they realize they will again face tough scrutiny over the strength of their scientific evidence against Dr. Ivins. Indeed, conspiracy theories are already flourishing on many Web sites, with skeptical observers asking whether the Maryland scientist was set up to take the fall for the attacks or, worse yet, was a murder victim. The fact that the bureau pursued another scientist, Steven J. Hatfill, for years before agreeing to pay $4.6 million to settle a lawsuit he had filed and then later exonerating him has only fueled the skepticism.

"Do you believe Bruce Ivins was responsible for the anthrax attacks?" The Frederick News-Post, the hometown newspaper in Fort Detrick, asked its readers this week. (Of those who responded, 34 percent said no, compared with 26 percent who said yes.)

In its case against Dr. Ivins, the F.B.I. developed a compelling profile of an erratic, mentally troubled man who could be threatening and obsessive, as in his odd fascination with a sorority from his college days. But investigators were never able to place him at the New Jersey mailboxes where the anthrax letters were dropped, and the case against him relied at its heart on the scientific evidence linking the anthrax in Dr. Ivins's laboratory to the spores used in the attacks.

It took the F.B.I. several years to develop the type of DNA testing that allowed them to trace the origins of the "attack strain," as it was called, and they concluded that the anthrax that Dr. Ivins controlled was the only one of more than 1,000 samples they tested that matched it in all four of that strain's genetic mutations.

Dwight Adams, a former director of the F.B.I. laboratory who was deeply involved in managing the anthrax genetic research until he left the bureau in 2006, said he was confident that the groundbreaking forensic effort would be validated by the broad scientific community.

Recalling the early skepticism that a genetic fingerprint of an anthrax could ever be obtained, Mr. Adams said, "I think the bureau and the national assets, including the national labs and others, that were applied as a team can very easily defend what they did and the results."

But had Dr. Ivins lived and faced trial for the anthrax killings, Thomas M. DeGonia II, one of his lawyers, said his legal team would have quickly tried to have the genetic testing of the anthrax strains thrown out of court as unreliable. The type of testing the F.B.I. developed, he said "has never been proven or tested by the courts."

Even if a jury had heard evidence about the genetic testing, Mr. DeGonia said the lawyers would have tried to show that many other scientists had access to that same strain of anthrax. He said the fact that the Justice Department had Dr. Ivins under investigation for perhaps two years or longer — and that it was executing search warrants in the case even after his death — suggests that the department itself had doubts.

"It’s interesting that they're still attempting to gather evidence," he said, "if the case is as strong as they say it is."


Anthrax, FBI...questions continue

Bruce Ivins--"scapegoats for sale or rent"

Bruce Ivins

Despite the lost of life and tragedy of the anthrax murders, the issue of Bruce Ivins and his association with the case and the methodologies of the Federal investigators should be a matter of public scrutiny and analysis. This is a healthy check of the system.

ALLEGATION: Investigators say the spores used in the attacks genetically match a flask of spores that Bruce Ivins created and had custody of. They say they gathered more than 1,000 anthrax samples from various laboratories and that the spores from the attack only matched eight of those samples. Of those, Ivins' sample was the "parent" from which the others were derived. "No one received material from that flask without going through Dr. Ivins," said Jeff Taylor, U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C. "We thoroughly investigated every other person who could have had access to the flask and we were able to rule out all but Dr. Ivins." The flask, Taylor later said, was effectively "the murder weapon."

RESPONSE: "In this country we prosecute people, not beakers," says Paul Kemp who was Ivins' attorney. Kemp says the University of New Mexico and a Battelle lab in Ohio had received portions of the anthrax in the flask. "There are dozens ... if not hundreds, of scientists, contractors, students, professors, who used that same anthrax — the very anthrax that would have the same genetic component" as the flask Ivins had, Kemp says. He also questions why, if Ivins was guilty, he wouldn't have covered his tracks better, by altering the sample in the flask.

Read more...

NPR

And this...

"Anthrax Case Had Costs for Suspects"

by

William Broad and Scott Shane

August 9th, 2008

The New York Times

When Perry Mikesell, a microbiologist in Ohio, came under suspicion as the anthrax attacker, he began drinking heavily, family members say, and soon died. After a doctor in New York drew the interest of the F.B.I., his marriage fell apart and his practice suffered, his lawyer says. And after two Pakistani brothers in Pennsylvania were briefly under scrutiny, they eventually had to leave the country to find work.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s path to Bruce E. Ivins, the Army scientist who committed suicide late last month as federal officials moved closer to indicting him for the 2001 anthrax letter attacks, was long and tortuous. Before the investigators settled on Dr. Ivins — and his defenders still say the F.B.I. hounded an innocent man to death — they had focused on Steven J. Hatfill, another Army researcher, for several years.

But along the way, scores of others — terrorists, foreigners, academic researchers, biowarfare specialists and an elite group of Army scientists working behind high fences and barbed wire — drew the interest of the investigators. For some of them the cost was high: lost jobs, canceled visas, broken marriages, frayed friendships.

At the Army biodefense laboratory in Frederick, Md., where Dr. Ivins worked, the inquiry became a murder mystery, the cast composed of top scientists eyeing one another warily over vials of lethal pathogens.

"It was not pleasant," recalled Jeffrey J. Adamovicz, a former official there. "There was a general sense of paranoia that they were going to get somebody no matter what."

Some critics fault the F.B.I.’' investigation as ignorant, incompetent and worse. Representative Rush D. Holt, a New Jersey Democrat who was a Princeton University physicist, said that the disclosures linking Dr. Ivins to the crime notwithstanding, the inquiry was "poorly handled" and "resulted in a trail of embarrassment and personal tragedy."

The bureau's defenders, though, say it did what was necessary to track down a dangerous killer.

"You do the best you can, and it’s not always pretty," said Robert M. Blitzer, a former director of the F.B.I.'s section on domestic terrorism. "Here you have a bunch of people dead and several diminished, and you’re charged with solving the crime. You try not to step on people's toes, but sometimes it happens."

Over seven years, the anthrax investigators conducted nearly 100 searches and more than 9,000 interviews in the most complex criminal case in bureau history. They hunted an attacker who, in September and October 2001, had mailed anthrax-laden envelopes that killed 5 people, sickened 17 others and threw the nation into a panic.

Early on, with more zeal than solid information, agents turned on three Pakistani-born city officials in Chester, Pa. One, Dr. Irshad Shaikh, was the health commissioner; his brother, Dr. Masood Shaikh, ran the lead-abatement program. The third, Asif Kazi, was then an accountant in the finance department.

Mr. Kazi was sitting in his City Hall office one day in November 2001 when F.B.I. agents burst in and began a barrage of questions.

"It was really scary," Mr. Kazi recalled in an interview last week. "It was: 'What do you think of 9/11? What do know about anthrax?'"

Across town, an agent pointed a gun through an open window at Mr. Kazi's home while others knocked down the front door as his wife was cooking in the kitchen. At the Shaikh brothers’ house, agents in bioprotection suits began hunting for germ-making equipment and carted away computers.

None of the three men had ever worked with anthrax. But for days, they were on national television as footage of the searches ran on a video loop and news announcers wondered aloud if they were the killers.

The men were cleared after it turned out that a disgruntled employee had sought revenge by calling in a bogus tip. But for all three, trouble followed. The Shaikhs' path to citizenship was disrupted, their visas ran out and both had to find work abroad, Mr. Kazi said.

Mr. Kazi, already a citizen, was searched and interrogated for as long as two hours every time he traveled back from visiting his brother in Canada. Only about a year ago was his name removed from a watch list, allowing him to travel freely.

When Mr. Kazi heard that Dr. Ivins was said to be the culprit in the attacks, he had only one request.

"We'd just like our names cleared," Mr. Kazi said. "There’s no problem for people who know us. But out in the community, someone might still think, 'Maybe these guys were guilty.'"

In late 2001, agents discovered that the germ used in the attacks was not foreign in origin but a domestic strain. That prompted the F.B.I. to focus mainly on scientists inside the United States. Casting a wide net, the bureau sent a letter to the 30,000 members of the American Society for Microbiology. "It is very likely," it said, "that one or more of you know" the attacker.

The bureau began looking at biodefense insiders like Mr. Mikesell, an anthrax specialist who had worked in the 1980s and 1990s with Dr. Ivins at the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, in Frederick. He had then joined Battelle, a military contractor in Columbus, Ohio, that became deeply involved in secret federal research on biological weapons.

In 2002, Mr. Mikesell came under F.B.I. scrutiny, officials familiar with the case said. He began drinking heavily — a fifth of hard liquor a day toward the end, a family member said.

"It was a shock that all of a sudden he's a raging alcoholic," recalled the relative, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of family sensitivities.

By late October 2002, Mr. Mikesell, 54, was dead, his short obituary in The Columbus Dispatch making no mention of his work with anthrax or the investigation. "He drank himself to death," the relative said.

Dr. Hatfill, who worked at Fort Detrick from 1997 to 1999, also drew the investigators' attention. He loved covert exploits and padded his résumé, habits that intrigued F.B.I. agents and, not long after that, reporters.

In June 2002, officials tipped off television stations that the bureau would search Dr. Hatfill's apartment, just outside the gates to Fort Detrick. Later, F.B.I. agents told the woman he was living with at the time that he was a murderer and warned that she could be charged as an accomplice if she failed to tell all. At a teary press conference in August 2002, Dr. Hatfill protested his innocence.

For at least a year, F.B.I. surveillance teams followed him — and in one remarkable encounter, a car that was trailing him ran over his foot. (Dr. Hatfill, not the agent, was given a ticket.)

But there was no arrest, and Dr. Hatfill, who said his career was ruined, fought back, filing a series of lawsuits, including against The New York Times. In June, long after the hunt had been narrowed to Dr. Ivins, the government agreed to pay Dr. Hatfill $4.6 million. On Friday, the Justice Department issued a statement exonerating him.

Another casualty was Kenneth M. Berry, an emergency room physician with a strong interest in bioterrorism threats. In August 2004, agents raided his colonial-style home and his former apartment in Wellsville, a village in western New York, as well as his parents' beach house on the Jersey Shore.

In scenes replayed for days on local television stations, the authorities cordoned off streets as agents in protective suits emerged from the dwellings with computers and bags of papers, mail and books.

"He was devastated," Dr. Berry’s lawyer at the time, Clifford E. Lazzaro, said in an interview. "They destroyed his marriage and destroyed him professionally for a time."

By 2005, thanks to new genetic testing, the F.B.I. had traced the anthrax in the letters to a single flask at Fort Detrick. Dr. Ivins had created and controlled the batch of deadly germs. But more than 100 scientists potentially had access to the pathogens.

For decades, the researchers of Fort Detrick had worked to build defenses against deadly germs used in war, mainly by creating new vaccines. They considered themselves patriots. In the early days of the anthrax investigation, the experts — including Dr. Ivins — threw themselves into helping the F.B.I., working around the clock.

Increasingly, though, the scientists found themselves viewed as potential culprits in the nation’s worst case of bioterrorism.

Dr. Adamovicz, the former Fort Detrick official, said the bacteriological division, which eventually had about 100 people including technicians and assistants, was like a family. But the growing air of mutual suspicion caused conversations to become stilted, even as some scientists became increasingly agitated and isolated from friends and colleagues.

"It became a game to talk in platitudes without mentioning the specifics," Dr. Adamovicz said. "You had to."

A least a dozen members of the division eventually were called to testify before a grand jury. "We were unclear on whether we were all suspects or whether there were specific suspects," Dr. Adamovicz recalled.

The air of growing distrust ended some relationships. At one point, Dr. Ivins was advised by his lawyer to stop speaking with Henry S. Heine, an anthrax colleague. Dr. Ivins was led to believe that Dr. Heine might have raised questions about him.

"They implied that Hank was pointing the finger at him," recalled W. Russell Byrne, a retired Army doctor who once supervised Dr. Ivins. "They told Bruce that 'Hank Heine is not your friend.' Then Bruce's lawyer told him not to talk to Hank anymore."

And even Dr. Ivins, according to court documents, began pointing his finger at specific colleagues as suspects.

Dr. Heine, who said he considered himself a close friend of Dr. Ivins, confirmed that Dr. Ivins had been warned to stop speaking with him, but Dr. Heine said he believed it was part of the F.B.I. strategy to isolate friends from one another. He added that although he did appear before the grand jury, he never pointed the finger at Dr. Ivins, and he still believes that Dr. Ivins was not involved in the anthrax letter mailings.

"I was Bruce's big brother," Dr. Heine said. "I needed to look out for him. And they needed to separate us."

Dr. Byrne, who did not know of Dr. Ivins's history of deep psychological problems that was disclosed by federal officials last week, said he could see signs of the growing stress Dr. Ivins was under as the investigation seemed to focus on him. One day, in March 2008, he showed up for a Sunday church service with a black eye.

"The F.B.I. been roughing you up?" Dr. Byrne recalled joking.

Last month, Dr. Ivins told an Army colleague that his experience of F.B.I. pressure was similar to what Mr. Mikesell went through.

"Perry drank himself to death," the colleague recalled Dr. Ivins as saying some two weeks before he killed himself.

Federal officials say they are confident Dr. Ivins was responsible for the anthrax attacks, even if his suicide means their case will not be proved in court. And they reject criticism from lawmakers and others about the conduct of the investigation and express no regret about those who were caught up in it.

The F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, in his first public comments since the presentation of the evidence against Dr. Ivins on Wednesday, said Friday that he was proud of the inquiry.

"I do not apologize for any aspect of the investigation," he told reporters. It is erroneous, he added, "to say there were mistakes."


Bruce Ivins--a rush to an accusation?

Bruce Ivins--a rush to an accusation?

Bruce Ivins

April 22nd, 1946 to July 29th, 2008

"Attorneys on both sides of the FBI's anthrax case against microbiologist Bruce Ivins acknowledge much of the evidence is circumstantial." so wrote NPR's Ari Shapiro. Bruce Ivins committed suicide shorty before he was to be charged with the anthrax murders following 911...we may never know the truth. And just because he took his life does not make an admission to guilt of the pending charges. Granted, it has been displayed that Ivins had peculiar and unusual habits but that does not make one a criminal. The point is one of jurisprudence, criminal investigation methodologies, and sound analysis for a conclusion...to establish sound empirical evidence to link a person with a crime. The current popular vogue of linking one to a crime is DNA evidence which has not been 100% definitive in proving a case. Later in the article..."Tom DiBiagio, Baltimore's former U.S. attorney, says that "probably 90 percent of the cases that are tried every day" depend at least in part on circumstantial evidence." Sadly this is true. Bruce Ivins appeared to be in the right place at the right time exhibiting quirky behavior and drew the attention of the FBI but then that's what the FBI thought regarding Steven J. Hatfill and were wrong and it cost the Federal Government [you and me] over 5 million dollars to correct spurious accusations. It has been stated that the FBI used their powers of persuasion and influence to intimidate the players. What we citizens ask is that the FBI and similar Federal investigative branches perform their duties without bias, decency, and an adherence to the facts and refrain from a regimen of deceitful tactics and poor data collection. And by all means when errors are found within a system that the culpable individuals show personal responsibility.

NPR