FBI and Einstein

If you have nothing else to do, you may plow through all the documents released by the FBI on Albert Einstein.

THE EINSTEIN FILE

FBI telling a FIB?

Over the years, mostly through a plethora of crime programs, the FBI has come off as the repository of forensic justice...smoking guns were found everywhere, usually through DNA analysis, metallurgical spectral analysis, chromatography, computer wizardry, etc. Sometimes, justice is compromised and bad science abounds.

"FBI Lab in Serious Trouble"

A sweeping critique of many forensic methods that the police and prosecutors rely on

by

Ludwig De Braeckeleer

February 17th, 2009

OhmyNews

"My hope is that this report will provide an objective and unbiased perspective of the critical needs of our crime labs." -- Senator Richard C. Shelby, Republican of Alabama

In a few days, the National Academy of Sciences will release a report regarding forensic science in the US in general. The report takes a special look at the FBI forensic laboratories.

Scientists who worked on the report allege that the National Institute of Justice, a research arm of the Justice Department, tried repeatedly to block its release. Senator Shelby accuses the National Institute of Justice of having attempted to influence the panel.

According to people who have seen the current draft, the document is "a sweeping critique of many forensic methods that the police and prosecutors rely on, including fingerprinting, firearms identification and analysis of bite marks, blood spatter, hair and handwriting."

The report suggests that that Congress should create a federal agency to guarantee the independence of the forensic analyses.

It states that the Bureau forensic lab relies on untested theories conducted by poorly trained technicians who have no training in sciences and statistics.

A 2004 National Academy of Sciences report, sharply critical of the FBI's bullet-lead technique, had forced the agency to abandon this method.

Nationwide, it has been estimated that the technique has been used in more than 2,000 cases over the last four decades.

Several former FBI employees believe that a review of all cases where the lead identification method was used in testimony should be urgently conducted.

So far, the FBI has rejected such reviews on the basis that it would be very expensive. A sum of US$70,000 was mentioned. For comparison, a recent survey conducted by Boston attorney Juliane Barillo indicates that the compensation for a year of wrongful imprisonment averages about $1 million.

The new report also establishes that the FBI lab fingerprint identification methods are faulty, as spectacularly revealed in the case of Brandon Mayfield.

Since 2005, the nonpartisan Forensic Justice Project, run by former FBI lab whistle-blower Frederic Whitehurst, has tried to force the bureau to release a list of bullet-lead cases under the Freedom of Information Act. I asked Whitehurst if he thought the FBI labs would survive the criticism.

"The labs will survive of course. We need the labs out there. But they will not be the freewheeling pirates of pseudo science that they have been in the past. In reality the government does not need to form a whole new agency to protect its people. If a new agency is formed the FBI will compromise it by threats, blackmail and under-the-table dealings," Whitehurst told the author.

"What needs to happen is for the US government to require that any crime lab in the US be licensed to operate and that any protocols, audits, scientific papers, quality assurance, etc. that form the basis for the forensic opinions be made clear and open information available to the American people who pay the wages of the crime lab workers... Crime labs cannot operate in secret. Science in secret ceases to be science."

In academic circles, some experts have not hidden their anger toward certain programs and what seems to be an attempt to cover-up decades of fraudulent forensic sciences.

Clifford Spiegelman is a statistician at Texas A&M University. He reviewed the FBI's statistical methods for the science academy.

"They said the FBI agents who went after Al Capone were the untouchables," he said, "and I say the FBI experts who gave this bullet-lead testimony are the unbelievables."

"I'm sure that every defense attorney in the country is waiting for this report to come out," a person who read it says. "There are going to be challenges to fingerprints and firearms evidence and the general lack of empirical grounding. It's going to be big."

The author can now announce that the technical report regarding the bomb that exploded on board of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie is seriously flawed. Once corrections are made, a spectacular conclusion follows. The Lockerbie verdict is scientifically impossible. A summary of this new report, which was reviewed by top experts in the field, will be soon made available to our readers.

And, "comparative bullet-lead analysis" is questioned...

"FBI's Forensic Test Full of Holes"

Lee Wayne Hunt is one of hundreds of defendants whose convictions are in question now that FBI forensic evidence has been discredited.

by

John Solomon

November 18th, 2007

Washington Post

Hundreds of defendants sitting in prisons nationwide have been convicted with the help of an FBI forensic tool that was discarded more than two years ago. But the FBI lab has yet to take steps to alert the affected defendants or courts, even as the window for appealing convictions is closing, a joint investigation by The Washington Post and "60 Minutes" has found.

The science, known as comparative bullet-lead analysis, was first used after President John F. Kennedy's assassination in 1963. The technique used chemistry to link crime-scene bullets to ones possessed by suspects on the theory that each batch of lead had a unique elemental makeup.

In 2004, however, the nation's most prestigious scientific body concluded that variations in the manufacturing process rendered the FBI's testimony about the science "unreliable and potentially misleading." Specifically, the National Academy of Sciences said that decades of FBI statements to jurors linking a particular bullet to those found in a suspect's gun or cartridge box were so overstated that such testimony should be considered "misleading under federal rules of evidence."

A year later, the bureau abandoned the analysis.

But the FBI lab has never gone back to determine how many times its scientists misled jurors. Internal memos show that the bureau's managers were aware by 2004 that testimony had been overstated in a large number of trials. In a smaller number of cases, the experts had made false matches based on a faulty statistical analysis of the elements contained in different lead samples, documents show.

"We cannot afford to be misleading to a jury," the lab director wrote to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III in late summer 2005 in a memo outlining why the bureau was abandoning the science. "We plan to discourage prosecutors from using our previous results in future prosecutions."

Despite those private concerns, the bureau told defense lawyers in a general letter dated Sept. 1, 2005, that although it was ending the technique, it "still firmly supports the scientific foundation of bullet lead analysis." And in at least two cases, the bureau has tried to help state prosecutors defend past convictions by using court filings that experts say are still misleading. The government has fought releasing the list of the estimated 2,500 cases over three decades in which it performed the analysis.

For the majority of affected prisoners, the typical two-to-four-year window to appeal their convictions based on new scientific evidence is closing.

Dwight E. Adams, the now-retired FBI lab director who ended the technique, said the government has an obligation to release all the case files, to independently review the expert testimony and to alert courts to any errors that could have affected a conviction.

"It troubles me that anyone would be in prison for any reason that wasn't justified. And that's why these reviews should be done in order to determine whether or not our testimony led to the conviction of a wrongly accused individual," Adams said in an interview. "I don't believe there's anything that we should be hiding."

The Post and "60 Minutes" identified at least 250 cases nationwide in which bullet-lead analysis was introduced, including more than a dozen in which courts have either reversed convictions or now face questions about whether innocent people were sent to prison. The cases include a North Carolina drug dealer who has developed significant new evidence to bolster his claim of innocence and a Maryland man who was recently granted a new murder trial.

Documents show that the FBI's concerns about the science dated to 1991 and came to light only because a former FBI lab scientist began challenging it.

In response to the information uncovered by The Post and "60 Minutes," the FBI late last week said it would initiate corrective actions including a nationwide review of all bullet-lead testimonies and notification to prosecutors so that the courts and defendants can be alerted. The FBI lab also plans to create a system to monitor the accuracy of its scientific testimony.

The Post-"60 Minutes" investigation "has brought some serious concerns to our attention," said John Miller, assistant director of public affairs. "The FBI is committed to addressing these concerns. It's the right thing to do."

The past inaction on bullet-lead contrasts with the last time the FBI's science was called into question, in the mid-1990s, when 13 lab employees were accused of shoddy work and of giving overstated testimony involving several disciplines, including explosives as well as hair and fiber analysis. Back then, the Justice Department reviewed hundreds of cases in which FBI experts testified, and it notified prisoners about problems that affected their convictions. The government did so because prosecutors have a legal obligation to turn over evidence that could help defendants prove their innocence.

Current FBI managers said that they originally believed that the public release of the 2004 National Academy of Sciences report and the subsequent ending of the analysis generated enough publicity to give defense attorneys and their clients plenty of opportunities to appeal. The bureau also pointed out that it sent form letters to police agencies and umbrella groups for local prosecutors and criminal defense lawyers.

Even the harshest critics concede that the FBI correctly measured the chemical elements of lead bullets. But the science academy found that the lab used faulty statistical calculations to declare that bullets matched even when the measurements differed slightly. FBI witnesses also overstated the significance of the matches.

The FBI's umbrella letters, however, glossed over those problems and did little to alert prosecutors or defense lawyers that erroneous testimony could have helped convict defendants, one of the recipients said.

"Frankly, the letters that they sent them, you know, were minimizing the significance of the error in the first place," said defense lawyer Barry Scheck, whose nonprofit Innocence Project has helped free more than 200 wrongly convicted people. The letters said that "our science wasn't really inaccurate. Our interpretation was wrong. But the interpretation is everything."

The FBI said last week that the 2005 letters "should have been clearer." Scheck has now been asked to assist the FBI's review.

Since 2005, the nonpartisan Forensic Justice Project, run by former FBI lab whistle-blower Frederic Whitehurst, has tried to force the bureau to release a list of bullet-lead cases under the Freedom of Information Act. The Post joined the request, citing the public value of the information. But the government has stalled, among other things seeking $70,000 to search for the documents.

"By stonewalling and delaying the release, Justice has ensured that wrongfully convicted citizens are deprived of their right to appeal or seek post-conviction relief because the statute of limitations in many states has expired," said David Colapinto, the lawyer for the group.

As part of its review, the FBI will release all bullet-lead case files involving convictions.

The Scope of the Cases

Most of the estimated 2,500 instances in which the FBI performed bullet-lead exams involved homicide cases that were prosecuted at the state and local levels, where FBI examiners often were summoned as expert witnesses for the prosecution.

To compile an independent list, The Post and "60 Minutes" conducted a nationwide review, interviewing dozens of defense lawyers, prosecutors and scientific experts. The effort also included a sweep of electronic court filings conducted by four summer associates at the New York law firm Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom.

In many of the cases that raise the most compelling questions, the inmates might have a hard time winning the public's sympathy. Some had criminal backgrounds and most were convicted with at least some additional circumstantial evidence linking them to gruesome crime scenes. But the common thread is that removing the flawed bullet-lead evidence has created reasonable doubt about guilt in the minds of legal experts, the courts and at least one juror.

In North Carolina, Lee Wayne Hunt, 48, remains in prison after being convicted 21 years ago of a double murder. Hunt was an admitted marijuana dealer, but has steadfastly denied involvement in the killings. The FBI testified that its bullet-lead analysis linked fragments from the victims to a box of bullets connected to Hunt's co-defendant. That was the sole forensic evidence against Hunt. State prosecutors recently conceded that the analysis should not be considered "scientifically supported and relied upon."

In addition, the attorney for Hunt's co-defendant, who committed suicide in prison, has since declared that his client carried out the murders alone.

Despite both developments, Hunt has been denied a new trial.

"What they're relying on here is technicalities to keep an innocent man in prison," said Richard Rosen, Hunt's attorney.

Another North Carolina case highlights the impact that FBI bullet-lead testimony had on local jurors. James Donald King faces execution after being convicted of killing his two wives. He admitted to killing his first wife, spent time in prison, was released on parole, remarried and then was convicted of murdering his second wife.

The court is considering whether to grant a new trial.

"If the state had not introduced evidence linking a bullet in Mr. King's car to the bullet fragments in the victim, there would have been reasonable doubt in my mind as to Mr. King's guilt," juror Michelle Lynn Adamson said in an affidavit supporting his appeal.

Other defendants have had mixed results:

* In Maryland, the Court of Appeals last year reversed the murder conviction of Gemar Clemons and ordered a new trial, concluding that the FBI's bullet-lead conclusions "are not generally accepted within the scientific community and thus are not admissible."

* In New Jersey, courts have reversed and reinstated convictions in cases involving bullet lead. The conviction of one defendant, Michael Behn, was reversed, but he recently was re-convicted on other evidence.

* Shane Ragland's conviction in the 1994 killing of a University of Kentucky football player was reversed after Kathleen Lundy, an FBI bullet-lead examiner, pleaded guilty to giving false testimony in his case about bullet-lead manufacturing. A few weeks ago, Ragland pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and is now free.

Ernest Roger Peele, a retired FBI agent who testified about bullet matching in 130 cases, stands by his testimony but said that sometimes the nuances of science get "lost in the adversarial nature of the courtroom." He said he would no longer tell jurors that bullets can be linked to specific boxes because of the science academy's findings.

Peele, who said he was frustrated that he was never contacted by the academy, added that his bullet matches were meant to be "a part of a puzzle" and never the only forensic evidence. "Is it possible there are innocent people in jail? Yes. Is it possible that bullet lead was part of that process? Yes."

The Origins of the Science

The FBI's bullet-lead analysis was created more than four decades ago to link suspects to crimes in cases in which bullets had fragmented to the point where traditional firearms tracing -- based on gun-barrel groove markings -- would not work.

So FBI scientists used chemistry to try to find matches. Their assumption was that bullets made from the same batch of lead would have the same chemical composition. U.S. bullet-makers recycle lead from car batteries and melt it down in huge amounts, and it was believed that each batch would produce bullets sharing the same trace elements.

The FBI first used the technique after Kennedy's assassination, hoping to determine whether various bullet fragments came from the same gun. In July 1964, then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wrote to the commission investigating the assassination that the bureau's findings were "not considered sufficient" to make any matches.

By the early 1980s, the bureau was the only practitioner of the science and routinely used it to help state and local police link crime-scene bullets to those in a gun or a box owned by a suspect. There are few federal murder statutes, but the FBI routinely helps local law enforcement by providing forensic expertise in homicide cases.

In the mid-1990s, Lundy used the science to help prove that Clinton White House lawyer Vincent W. Foster committed suicide, internal FBI documents show.

In the early days, bullet fragments were subjected to neutron beams that would allow scientists to measure the presence and amounts of at least three chemical elements: antimony, arsenic and copper. If two bullets had similar measurements of those three elements -- the FBI allowed for a small margin of error -- they were declared a match.

In 1996, the bureau switched to a new method called "inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectroscopy," in which scientists identified and measured seven trace elements in the bullets, adding the elements bismuth, cadmium, tin and silver. The goal was to increase the precision of the tests. But at the same time that it was measuring more elements, the FBI doubled the margin of error for declaring matches.

"Not enough suspects were being caught in the new net using seven elements, so they chose to use a bigger net," said Clifford Spiegelman, a statistician at Texas A&M University who reviewed the FBI's statistical methods for the science academy.

The bureau conducted a study in 1991 that called bullet-lead analysis a "useful forensic tool" that produced "accurate" and "reproducible" matches.

The study, however, raised two concerns.

First, it found that bullets packaged 15 months apart -- a span that assumed separate batches of lead -- had the exact composition, potentially undercutting the theory that each batch was unique.

Second, it found that bullets in a single box often had several different lead compositions. That finding, it cautioned, should have "significant impact on interpretation of results in forensic cases."

Peele, the retired bullet-lead examiner, was the primary author of that study. He said he still felt comfortable having told jurors in the past that bullets from the same box could be expected to match, as long as his remarks were carefully qualified.

In the Hunt case, he testified that his match of the crime-scene bullets to those in the suspects' box was "typical of everything we examined coming from the same box or the next closest possibility would be the same type, same manufacturer, packaged on or about the same day."

Peele said that he always tried to tell jurors that some bullets in the same box might not match. Still, he said it was reasonable for jurors to conclude that matching bullets could have come from the same box. "I don't think it's misleading as long as it's fully explained," he said.

Some of Peele's colleagues went further. FBI examiner John Riley told a Florida jury: "It is my opinion that all of those bullets came from the same box of ammunition." A New Jersey prosecutor suggested that the bullets matched by the FBI were as unique as a "snowflake or fingerprint."

Today, the FBI regards all such testimony as inaccurate. "The science does not and has never supported the testimony that one bullet can be identified as coming from a particular box of bullets," said Adams, the retired FBI lab director.

A Challenge From Within

The FBI's about-face was prompted by a challenge from within its ranks.

William Tobin, an FBI lab metallurgist for a quarter-century, won accolades working on cases such as the crash of TWA Flight 800, in which he helped prove that the plane was downed by an accidental fuel-tank explosion, not terrorism. Shortly before he retired, Tobin was approached by a woman who believed that the bullet-lead science used against her brother, a New Jersey murder defendant, was flawed. Still employed by the bureau, Tobin was not permitted to help.

But when he retired in 1998, he decided to look further. Bullet matching had always been done by the lab's chemists, and as a metallurgist, Tobin wondered about their assumptions. Soon he joined with Erik Randich, a metallurgist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

By 2001, the two had finished a study that challenged the key assumptions that the FBI had been making about bullet lead. They found that bullets made from the same batch did not always match, because subtle chemical changes occurred throughout the manufacturing process. Tobin bought bullets at several stores in Alaska and found that a large number of bullets with the same composition and manufacturing date were often sold in the same community, suggesting that it was wrong to assume that a bullet match could be narrowed to one suspect.

"It hadn't been based at all on science but, rather, had been based on subjective belief," Tobin said in an interview. "Courts, and even practitioners, had been seduced by the sophistication of the analytical instrumentation for over three decades."

Soon, Tobin began appearing as a witness for defendants challenging FBI bullet-lead matches. Courts began to take notice, too, and the FBI suddenly faced a barrage of questions about a science that had gone unchallenged for three decades.

Adams asked the National Academy of Sciences in 2002 to examine the FBI's work, temporarily halting new bullet-lead matches. Two years later, the academy's findings stunned the bureau.

The panel concluded that although the FBI had been taking accurate bullet-lead measurements in its lab, the statistical methods and its expert testimonies were flawed.

The science "does not . . . have the unique specificity of techniques such as DNA," and "available data does not support any statement that a crime bullet came from a particular box of ammunition," the panel concluded. All the FBI could say going forward was that bullets made from the same batch "are more likely" to match in chemical makeup than those made from different batches. Adams soon declared that such testimony was so general that it had no value to jurors, and he ended the technique.
The FBI Response

The FBI went on the offensive to portray its decision in the best light.

In a news release dated Sept. 1, 2005, the bureau declared that it "still firmly supports the scientific foundation of bullet lead analysis" but that it was ending the technique because of the questions about its "relative probative value," the "costs of maintaining the equipment" and the "resources necessary to do the examinations."

The bureau also sent form letters to the more than 300 police agencies it had assisted with the science and to the umbrella groups representing local prosecutors and local criminal defense lawyers so they could "take whatever steps they deem appropriate."

The letters cited the academy's report but did not call attention to the magnitude of the FBI's internal concerns.

For instance, the letters stated that the impact of the academy's findings "on previously issued examination reports remains unaddressed." In fact, the FBI had conducted its own review to determine how often bad statistics led to mistaken matches.

In March 2005, the chief of the FBI chemistry unit that oversaw the analysis wrote in an e-mail that he applied one of the new statistical methods recommended by the National Academy of Sciences to 436 cases dating to 1996 and found that at least seven would "have a different result today." Marc A. LeBeau estimated that at least 1.4 percent of prior matches would change.

If the FBI employed other statistical methods the number of non-matches would be "a lot more," LeBeau wrote. In fact, when the bureau tested one method recommended by the academy on a sample of 100 bullets, the results changed in the "large majority of the cases," he wrote.

Despite the concerns, the FBI provided affidavits in at least two cases seeking to help prosecutors sustain convictions that were based on bullet-lead matches.

In one such affidavit introduced in Maryland, the FBI cited the academy's report but did not mention it faulted the bureau's statistical methods.

That omission concerns the chairman of the academy panel.

The affidavit "does not discuss the statistical bullet-matching technique, which is key and probably the most significant scientific flaw found by the committee," said Kenneth MacFadden, a private chemistry expert.

MacFadden and Spiegelman said they also believed the affidavit was misleading, because it estimates that the maximum number of .22-caliber bullets in a batch of lead was 1.3 million. The academy said the number could be as high as 35 million.

In a May 12, 2005, e-mail, the deputy lab director told LeBeau, "I don't believe that we can testify about how many bullets may have come from the same melt and our estimate may be totally misleading."

FBI officials said Friday they will stop using the affidavit.

"They said the FBI agents who went after Al Capone were the untouchables, and I say the FBI experts who gave this bullet-lead testimony were the unbelievables," Spiegelman said.

Ivans...FBI's trail of blunders & tragic end

FBI ineptness and a disturbed individual...a tragic end and more questions.

Brad Garrett, a respected F.B.I. veteran who helped early in the case before his retirement, said logic and evidence point to Dr. Ivins as the most likely perpetrator.

"Does that absolutely prove he did it? No," Mr. Garrett said. With no confession and no trial, he said, "you're going to be left not getting over the top of the mountain."

One of several FBI blunders...

Agents were excited when they dredged from the mud a plastic box that they thought might have been a homemade biological “glove box,” built to work safely on dangerous germs. The excitement lasted only until a Fort Detrick scientist with a rural Southern upbringing took one look and recognized what the $20,000-a-day pond-draining had turned up: a turtle trap.

"Portrait Emerges of Anthrax Suspect’s Troubled Life"

by

Scott Shane

January 4th, 2009

The New York Times

FREDERICK, Md.

Inside the Army laboratory at Fort Detrick, the government’s brain for biological defense, Bruce Edwards Ivins paused to memorialize his moment in the spotlight as the anthrax panic of 2001 reached its peak.

Dr. Ivins titled his e-mail message "In the lab" and attached photographs: the gaunt microbiologist bending over Petri dishes of anthrax, and colonies of the deadly bacteria, white commas against blood-red nutrient.

Outside, on that morning of Nov. 14, 2001, five people were dead or dying, a dozen more were sick and fearful thousands were flooding emergency rooms. The postal system was crippled; senators and Supreme Court justices had fled contaminated offices. And the Federal Bureau of Investigation was struggling with a microbe for a murder weapon and a crime scene that stretched from New York to Florida.

But Dr. Ivins was chipper — the anonymous scientist finally at the center of great events. "Hi, all," he began the e-mail message. "We were taking some photos today of blood agar cultures of the now infamous 'Ames' strain of Bacillus anthracis. Here are a few." He sent the message to those who ordinarily received his corny jokes and dour news commentaries: his wife and two teenage children, former colleagues and high school classmates. He even included an F.B.I. agent working on the case.

Dr. Ivins, who had helped develop an anthrax vaccine to protect American troops, had spent his career waiting for a biological attack. Suddenly, at 55, he was advising the F.B.I. and regaling friends with scary descriptions of the deadly powder, his expertise in demand.

One recipient of his e-mail message, however, a graduate-school colleague, looked at the photograph of Dr. Ivins and leapt to a shocking conclusion.

"I read that e-mail, and I thought, He did it," the fellow scientist, Nancy Haigwood, said in a recent interview.

Nearly seven years and many millions of dollars later, after an investigation that included both path-breaking science and costly bungling, the F.B.I. concluded that Dr. Haigwood had been right: the anthrax killer had been at the investigators' side all along. Prosecutors said they believed they had the evidence to prove that Dr. Ivins alone carried out the attacks, but their assertions immediately met with skepticism among some scientists, lawmakers and co-workers of Dr. Ivins.

With the F.B.I. preparing to close the case, The New York Times has taken the deepest look so far at the investigation, speaking to dozens of Dr. Ivins's colleagues and friends, reading hundreds of his e-mail messages, interviewing former bureau investigators and anthrax experts, reviewing court records, and obtaining, for the first time, police reports on his suicide in July, including a lengthy recorded interview with his wife.

That examination found that unless new evidence were to surface, the enormous public investment in the case would appear to have yielded nothing more persuasive than a strong hunch, based on a pattern of damning circumstances, that Dr. Ivins was the perpetrator.

Focused for years on the wrong man, the bureau missed ample clues that Dr. Ivins deserved a closer look. Only after a change of leadership nearly five years after the attacks did the bureau more fully look into Dr. Ivins’s activities. That delay, and his death, may have put a more definitive outcome out of reach.

Brad Garrett, a respected F.B.I. veteran who helped early in the case before his retirement, said logic and evidence point to Dr. Ivins as the most likely perpetrator.

"Does that absolutely prove he did it? No," Mr. Garrett said. With no confession and no trial, he said, "you’re going to be left not getting over the top of the mountain."

The Times review found that the F.B.I. had disproved the assertion, widespread among scientists who believe Dr. Ivins was innocent, that the anthrax might have come from military and intelligence research programs in Utah or Ohio. By 2004, secret scientific testing established that the mailed anthrax had been grown somewhere near Fort Detrick. And anthrax specialists who have not spoken out previously said that, contrary to some skeptics' claims, Dr. Ivins had the equipment and expertise to make the powder in his laboratory.

F.B.I. agents, moreover, have shown that Dr. Ivins, a church musician and amateur juggler whom colleagues cherished, hid from them a shadow side of mental illness, alcoholism, secret obsessions and hints of violence.

Still, doubts persist. The case will be reviewed this year by the National Academy of Sciences and by Congress. If the F.B.I. is wrong, then a troubled man was hounded to death and the anthrax perpetrator is still at large, as many of Dr. Ivins's colleagues at Fort Detrick believe. When institute scientists began their own review of the evidence, nervous Army officials ordered the inquiry dropped.

In November, four of Dr. Ivins's closest co-workers wrote a glowing obituary of their "valued collaborator" for Microbe, the leading microbiology journal. It did not mention the anthrax accusations and was a singular protest by the four scientists against the F.B.I.'s conclusion.

"His colleagues and friends will remember him not only for his dedication to his work," the obituary said, "but also for his humor, curiosity and great generosity."

Fearing an Attack

The Sunday night after the Sept. 11 attacks, Dr. D. A. Henderson, who led the global campaign to eradicate smallpox and had long been a lonely Cassandra warning of the bioterrorism threat, was summoned to an emergency meeting with the secretary of health and human services, Tommy Thompson.

Fearing a germ attack, officials had grounded crop dusters. Apocalyptic warnings were all over the news media: one study said 100 kilograms of anthrax released over Washington could kill 1 million to 3 million people.

Now, Dr. Henderson was told, intelligence reports indicated that there might be a second attack by Al Qaeda, most likely biological. Dr. Henderson gave Mr. Thompson and his aides a disturbing tutorial on anthrax and smallpox. As the meeting ended, an aide thanked him.

"I just hope we're not too late," Dr. Henderson replied.

Days later came word of the anthrax letters. First, the death of a tabloid photo editor in Florida, Robert Stevens. Then the poison letters mailed to NBC News and The New York Post with notes declaring "Death to America! Death to Israel!"

And finally the letters to Senators Tom Daschle, Democrat of South Dakota, and Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, spewing deadly spores through the postal system and across official Washington.

Whoever had ignited panic with a tablespoon of anthrax powder, officials assumed, would not stop there. Dr. Henderson wondered if the powder came from the tons of anthrax weaponized by the Soviet Union. Some assumed Al Qaeda was behind the letters; others suspected Iraq.

"My fear was that this first mailing was the tip of the iceberg," said Bill Raub, a senior official at the Health and Human Services Department. "We feared we would be at their mercy."

Then — nothing. Within days, investigators were piecing together clues pointing to a domestic source.

First, there were the notes. One warned, "We have this anthrax," and advised the recipients to take penicillin. Al Qaeda, F.B.I. agents reasoned, would hardly reduce the death toll with an alert that might have saved lives.

Then there was the strain of anthrax. Dr. Paul S. Keim, an anthrax geneticist at Northern Arizona University, identified the spores as Ames, a lethal strain most common in United States research. "It was chilling," Dr. Keim recalled, but also puzzling. "How in the world did Stevens get a lab strain?"

An alternative theory of a possible perpetrator took shape: the bioevangelist. An American obsessed by the bioterrorism threat — maybe a biodefense insider who might gain in pay or prestige from an attack — had decided to alert the nation.

That meant the potential suspects included the very Army scientists now working so closely with the F.B.I. And at the core of that group was Bruce Ivins.

In 21 years at the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, Dr. Ivins supplied Hershey's Kisses to office visitors and always showed concern when a colleague was ill. He toasted departing colleagues with humorous poems. He livened up parties with his juggling act and led songs from a portable keyboard at his Catholic church.

Colleagues knew Dr. Ivins, whose e-mail Christmas card one year spelled out "Happy Holidays" in anthrax spores, was an oddball, wearing outmoded bellbottoms and lunching on concoctions of tuna, peas and yogurt. But in a place where red tape and petty rivalry often darkened spirits, he was a bright spot.

"He actually thought of other people," said Melanie Ulrich, who worked with him on an anthrax project and invited him to the house she shared with her husband, Ricky Ulrich, also an Army scientist. "He was fun."

Arthur O. Anderson, the top ethicist at the institute, bonded with Dr. Ivins in the 1980s over their shared experience of adopting children. After that, every corridor encounter led to a long, probing talk on adoption or the ethical conundrums of biodefense.

Dr. Anderson said Dr. Ivins had relished provocative conversation. "If you didn’t bite at one of his emotionally laden questions, he’d find another way to shock you," he said.

They often discussed what they considered groundless criticism of the anthrax vaccine Dr. Ivins had helped produce, which some soldiers blamed for their illnesses. "Bruce was thin-skinned," Dr. Anderson said.

In the emotional days after Sept. 11, friends were not surprised when Dr. Ivins signed up as a Red Cross volunteer. On Sept. 22, 2001 — a date, it would turn out, between the two anthrax mailings — he attended a Red Cross class, Introduction to Disaster Services. He liked the atmosphere, he told friends, and three months later, as the crushing workload created by the anthrax letters began to ease, he applied for more training.

Noting that he worked at the Army institute, he wrote in his December 2001 application, "Perhaps I could help in case of a disaster related to biological agents."

Odd and Pressing

There was more to Bruce Ivins than his Army colleagues imagined, and Nancy Haigwood knew it.

She met him in 1976 in the biology department at the University of North Carolina, where he was a post-doctoral fellow and she was a graduate student. She found him odd and tried gently to disengage, but he kept in touch, pressing her with questions about her sorority, Kappa Kappa Gamma.

Dr. Ivins's boss at U.N.C., Dr. Priscilla B. Wyrick, received similar queries about her sorority, Chi Omega. "He'd say, 'What’s your secret password? What's your secret handshake?'" she recalled. "I thought he was intellectually interested in secret things."

Dr. Wyrick said she thought of him then as "a goody-two-shoes, aggressive about his science but very sensitive about how he was portrayed by other people." She kept up a correspondence with him, and after the letter attack, arranged for him to give a talk at her current university, East Tennessee State.

Dr. Haigwood's experience with Dr. Ivins was not so benign. Outside her home in Maryland in 1982, a vandal spray-painted her sorority’s Greek initials, "KKG," on her fence, sidewalk and fiancé's car window. A year later a letter she had not written appeared under her name in The Frederick News-Post, defending Kappa Kappa Gamma and the hazing of recruits. She was certain Dr. Ivins was responsible.

She said she had found Dr. Ivins’s attentions creepy. She never told him her Maryland address, but he found it anyway. Later, in e-mail messages, he mentioned details about her sons that she had not shared with him.

"He damaged my property, he impersonated me and he stalked me," said Dr. Haigwood, now director of the Oregon National Primate Research Center.

In November 2001, when she got the e-mailed photograph of Dr. Ivins working with anthrax in the laboratory, she noticed that he was not wearing gloves — a safety breach she thought showed an unnerving "hubris." That fed her hunch that he had sent the deadly letters.

Knowing her suspicion was an extraordinary leap, she kept it to herself. But three months later, the American Society for Microbiology sent an appeal from the F.B.I. to its 40,000 members.

"It is very likely that one or more of you know this individual," the message said. F.B.I. profilers thought the killer might have made the anthrax during "off-hours in a laboratory."

Dr. Haigwood called the bureau, and two agents visited her. After that, they called periodically but gave no hint that they had tried to confirm the vandalism and stalking.

Soon after Dr. Haigwood's call, there was another reason for investigators to scrutinize Dr. Ivins. The Army found that in December 2001 he had secretly swabbed for anthrax spores outside his secure laboratory space.

Suspecting a technician's desk was contaminated, he later told an Army investigator, he had tested and found a bacillus, the class of bacteria that includes anthrax. He scrubbed the desk with bleach but did not report the spill, though he mentioned it several weeks later to Dr. Anderson, his ethicist friend.

"I had no desire to cry 'Wolf!'" Dr. Ivins wrote to Army investigators in April 2002. "I would have been agitating many people for no real reason." Yet Dr. Ivins wrote that he could not recall whether he had retested the desk for anthrax after his cleanup, as regulations required.

His conduct was a flagrant violation of biosafety standards. Anthrax spores outside containment areas could endanger anyone who was not vaccinated. When the spill was properly investigated, three strains of anthrax were found outside the laboratory, including the Ames strain on Dr. Ivins's desk.

By then, too, the bureau had detailed records showing when scientists entered and left the secure laboratories. The documents showed that Dr. Ivins had worked unusually late hours in his laboratory for several nights before each of the anthrax mailings, a pattern that stood out even at an institute where night hours were common.

Yet neither the spill nor the night hours sparked the suspicions of the anthrax investigators. They were intently focused on another suspect.

Focus on Hatfill

Dr. Ivins's modest bungalow was across the street from Fort Detrick, and he often walked to work. If he did so on June 25, 2002, a sunny Tuesday, he would have noticed the hubbub as he passed by the Detrick Plaza apartments.

F.B.I. agents and postal inspectors trudged in and out of one unit, toting away items for inspection. A horde of reporters milled around nearby; television helicopters circled overhead. It was one of the most heavily publicized searches in the history of criminal investigations.

Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, who had given permission for the search, never imagined this media circus. It was just the beginning of an intrusion into his life by the F.B.I. and the news media that would show just how tantalizing a case could be built against a man the government would, six years later, officially clear.

For months, agents had been growing more focused on Dr. Hatfill, a physician and virologist who had worked from 1997 to 1999 at the Fort Detrick institute.

He had earned a medical degree but had forged his Ph.D. diploma, written an unpublished novel about a covert bioattack on Washington and bragged on his résumé of a "working knowledge" of biowarfare pathogens. In his apartment, agents found a harmless bacteria commonly used as an anthrax simulant and a notebook on anthrax dissemination.

Then there was the timing. One month before the anthrax attacks, the government suspended Dr. Hatfill’s security clearance after questionable results on a polygraph test, and he told friends he expected to be fired from his job as a bioterrorism consultant. Two days before each of the two anthrax mailings, Dr. Hatfill filled a prescription for Cipro, an antibiotic that protected against anthrax.

Could it all be a coincidence? F.B.I. officials did not think so.

Desperate to find something more definitive against Dr. Hatfill, lead investigators — who had to brief the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, on their progress every week — ordered round-the-clock surveillance. Meticulous study of tiny brown fibers found stuck to the envelopes led nowhere. Handwriting comparisons proved useless because the perpetrator had printed in block letters. DNA found on the outside of the Leahy anthrax envelope turned out to be inadvertent contamination by a laboratory worker.

Ignoring the grave doubts of some F.B.I. scientists, agents used bloodhounds to try to link the letters by scent to Dr. Hatfill. They sent divers into a pond outside Frederick, and when that did not turn up anything, they drained two ponds hunting for discarded anthrax-making equipment.

Agents were excited when they dredged from the mud a plastic box that they thought might have been a homemade biological "glove box," built to work safely on dangerous germs. The excitement lasted only until a Fort Detrick scientist with a rural Southern upbringing took one look and recognized what the $20,000-a-day pond-draining had turned up: a turtle trap.

Soon after the pond debacle, Dr. Hatfill began fighting back, filing lawsuits and dragging F.B.I. officials to all-day depositions. But investigators did not want to give up on him as a suspect — in part because overwhelming scientific evidence was tying the mailed anthrax to Fort Detrick.

By early 2004, F.B.I. scientists had discovered that out of 60 domestic and foreign water samples, only water from Frederick, Md., had the same chemical signature as the water used to grow the mailed anthrax.

By late 2005, genetic analysis by top outside experts had matched the spores to a flask of anthrax at the Army institute. Dr. Ivins had custody of the flask, but some agents were still convinced Dr. Hatfill was the culprit.

The science alone could not close the case. "We could get to a lab, to a refrigerator, to a flask," said Dwight E. Adams, the F.B.I. laboratory director until 2006. "But that didn't put the letters in anyone's hand."

Sudden Interest

Early in 2006, with the investigation largely stalled, Nancy Haigwood heard from two different F.B.I. agents. Four years after she had reported her suspicions of Dr. Ivins, the bureau suddenly seemed interested.

"They said, 'We need your help,'" Dr. Haigwood recalled. She was frustrated by the delay, but when the agents asked her to strike up a new correspondence with Dr. Ivins, she reluctantly complied. "I was afraid of this man," she said. "I was convinced he had done it, and I was afraid he'd send me an anthrax letter."

Some agents believed that their bosses were stuck on Dr. Hatfill, and an internal F.B.I. investigation confirmed their complaint. In mid-2006, Mr. Mueller, the F.B.I. director, quietly moved Richard Lambert Jr., who had led the anthrax investigation since 2002, to a new job running the bureau’s office in Knoxville, Tenn. His replacement, Edward Montooth, a veteran of security and intelligence cases who had worked overseas in places from the Balkans to Indonesia, ordered a fresh look at the evidence.

For four years, Dr. Ivins, like others at Fort Detrick, had simultaneously been a trusted F.B.I. technical consultant and a possible suspect. Now the balance was tipping.

As the bureau's undercover informant, Dr. Haigwood struck up a breezy e-mail correspondence about scientific grants, pets and travel. Dr. Ivins complained about psychological screening and other "rather obnoxious and invasive measures" imposed at Fort Detrick since the anthrax attacks.

"I got so tired of the endless questions that I finally got a lawyer, after almost three dozen interviews," he wrote in late 2006, referring to interviews by the F.B.I. agents. One session, he said, was "virtually an interrogation."

In another message, Dr. Ivins complained about feeling "thoroughly beaten down" but said his volunteer work with the Red Cross had provided welcome relief. "The Red Cross is my fraternity/sorority," he said.

For Dr. Haigwood, the reference carried disturbing overtones, reflecting the old obsession with sororities, and with certain women, that Dr. Ivins had hidden from family and colleagues.

Dr. Ivins still carried resentment from four decades earlier at Lebanon High School in Ohio, where he had been a nerdy, awkward teenager devoted to photography and, even then, to the study of bacteria.

In recent years, said Rick Sams, a pharmacologist who had been among Bruce Ivins's few school friends, Dr. Ivins "shared with me feelings about how he’d been treated in high school. He was bitter about being excluded."

When Dr. Sams urged him to attend their 40th class reunion, Dr. Ivins refused. "He said, 'Why should I go? Look how they treated me,'" Dr. Sams said.

The agents learned, in part from Dr. Ivins himself, that he had in his post-college years made uninvited visits to Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority houses at U.N.C., the University of Maryland and West Virginia University, once making off with a sorority’s ritual book and cipher device.

That was more than 20 years ago. But more recently, agents discovered, Dr. Ivins had left a long trail of online postings about Kappa Kappa Gamma. There were inquiries about arcane details of sorority rituals and a bitter editing battle over the KKG entry on Wikipedia.

Dr. Ivins hid behind the online handles he used for his proliferating e-mail addresses — KingBadger, Jimmyflathead, goldenphoenix. Once, on GreekChat.com, he described what he said was a family history of mental illness, calling his mother "an undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenic."

The agents learned that Dr. Ivins had long maintained a post office box to receive mail without his family's knowledge and took long walks or drives on sleepless nights. Once, he admitted, he drove all night to Ithaca, N.Y., and back to leave gifts for a young woman who had left her job in his laboratory to attend Cornell University.

The agents also found e-mail messages in which Dr. Ivins confessed to alarming psychiatric problems. During paranoid episodes, he wrote, he felt like "a passenger on a ride." Even as he worked at his desk, he wrote, "I'm also a few feet away watching me do it."

Of his group therapy program, he wrote on Sept. 26, 2001, between the two anthrax mailings, "I'm really the only scary one in the group."

On the face of it, Dr. Ivins's strange secret life seemed less relevant to the case than Dr. Hatfill’s boasts about his bioweapons expertise. But anthrax was the core of Dr. Ivins’s working life.

"He was in charge of producing large quantities of wet spores for research," said John W. Ezzell, a Fort Detrick colleague whose anthrax expertise rivaled that of Dr. Ivins. "So if anybody could have produced a lot of spores without arousing suspicion, it was him."

Though a public debate had raged for years over whether the mailed anthrax had been "weaponized" with sophisticated chemical additives, the F.B.I. had concluded early on that it was not. Dr. Ezzell agreed, as did Jeff Mohr, an expert on anthrax and other pathogens at the Army's Dugway Proving Ground in Utah.

Without giving an opinion of Dr. Ivins's guilt or innocence, both Dr. Ezzell and Dr. Mohr said they believed that any experienced microbiologist could have grown and dried the anthrax using equipment Dr. Ivins had in his laboratory. The trickiest step, they said, was producing anthrax with the letters' high concentration of spores per gram, a skill Dr. Ivins had mastered.

Evidence Problems

But even if Dr. Ivins could have made the anthrax, did he? "It's been difficult for a lot of us to accept this," Dr. Ezzell said. "He was a loyal friend. He was a diligent worker."

The agents were building what they thought was a prosecutable case against Dr. Ivins, but gaping holes remained. No evidence placed him in Princeton, N.J., where the letters were mailed. No receipt showed that he had bought the same type of envelopes. No security camera had caught him photocopying the notes.

Nor, in his e-mail messages and conversations with confidants, could agents find any hint of a confession. One colleague who knew Dr. Ivins well told them, "If Bruce had done this, he never would have been able to keep quiet about it."

Yet the agents knew he led a compartmentalized life. He went on vacation with his brother, Charles, each year, but Charles had no idea Bruce had a drinking problem for which he had been in residential treatment and Alcoholics Anonymous. Dr. Ivins spent hours in online exchanges about sororities, but his family knew nothing about it.

Some F.B.I. agents were haunted by the Hatfill precedent. Dr. Hatfill, too, was eccentric. He, too, had begun drinking heavily as he came under scrutiny. He, too, had grown depressed and erratic under the F.B.I.'s relentless gaze.

What if Dr. Hatfill had committed suicide in 2002, as friends feared he might? Would the investigators have released their evidence and announced that the perpetrator was dead?

In May 2007, Dr. Ivins — assured by prosecutors that he was not a target of the investigation — testified under oath to a grand jury on two consecutive days. He answered all the questions about anthrax. Only once did he plead his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, when he was asked about his secret interest in sororities.

A Life Coming Apart

Starting with the search of his house on Nov. 1, 2007, Bruce Ivins's life began to come irrevocably apart. While some agents carted files, computers and guns from the house, others questioned his wife and children, intimating that they knew he was the killer. Fort Detrick officials banned him from working with anthrax. His career was over.

Last March, after drinking the fruit juice and vodka mix that he had come to rely on and adding a big dose of Valium, he passed out and was discovered by his wife, Diane. Despite his denials, she was convinced it was a suicide attempt.

"You know, he's been incredibly, incredibly stressed, because of the way he's been hounded by the F.B.I.," Mrs. Ivins would later tell Frederick police officers in a recorded interview. "They've always treated him as if he was guilty, and I just felt that he couldn't take it anymore."

Dr. Ivins spent much of the spring in residential alcohol treatment outside Washington and in western Maryland. But when he returned, the F.B.I. agents were still there, watching his house and trailing him around Frederick.

On July 10, Dr. Ivins reached a breaking point. With a strange smile, he told his therapy group that he expected to be charged with five murders and rambled on about killing himself and taking others with him, using his .22-caliber rifle, Glock handgun and bulletproof vest.

Tipped off by the therapist, Frederick police officers removed Dr. Ivins from the Army laboratory that day. He voluntarily checked himself in at the Sheppard Pratt psychiatric hospital in Baltimore.

After a two-week stay, Dr. Ivins was brought home by his wife. She had left a heartfelt note in his bedroom, saying she hoped that he could turn his life around and that they could enjoy life together.

"He didn't understand that so many people in the treatment program with him had lost their families because of their alcoholism," Mrs. Ivins later told the police. "So I wanted to write down how I felt because I loved him — you know, I wanted him to come back and get healthy again so we could continue. He was retiring in September, and we were going to travel and enjoy our adult children finally."

Her note was blunt. "I'm hurt, concerned, confused and angry about your actions the last few weeks," she wrote. "You tell me you love me but you have been rude and sarcastic and nasty many times when you talk to me. You tell me you aren't going to get any more guns, then you fill out an online application for a gun license."

Mrs. Ivins wrote to her husband that he was paying his lawyers a lot of money but ignoring their advice by contacting two former female laboratory assistants he was preoccupied with. He was keeping odd hours, walking the neighborhood late at night and drinking so much caffeine that he was "jumpy and agitated," she wrote.

But Mrs. Ivins's note also expressed support. "I had written on the bottom of the paper that I knew he had not been involved in the anthrax letters in any way and I never doubted his innocence," said the woman who thought she knew him best.

Even as Mrs. Ivins picked up her husband at the Baltimore hospital last July 24, his group therapist, Jean C. Duley, was in a Frederick courtroom, testifying about threats he had left on her answering machine. A judge signed an order at 10:37 a.m. directing Dr. Ivins to stay away from her.

The order would not be necessary. At 12:31 p.m., according to records checked by the Frederick police, Dr. Ivins stopped in at the Giant Eagle grocery store near his house and bought Tylenol PM, acetaminophen and an antihistamine. He bought a few groceries and filled three prescriptions for his psychiatric illness, possibly a sign that he was thinking about the future.

Then, at 1:21 p.m., evidently concerned that he did not have enough medication for the purpose he was contemplating, he bought a second container of Tylenol PM.

Over the next two days, Mrs. Ivins worked her lunchtime shift at a nearby cafe, went for a swim at Fort Detrick and ran her regular Friday bingo game. In and out of the house, she saw that her husband was sleeping but had risen at least a few times, bringing in the mail and eating breakfast.

She did not worry much; depressed, banned from his laboratory, he had been spending many days in bed. And on the back of her note, he had scribbled that he had a terrible headache and was going to rest.

"Please let me sleep," he wrote. "Please."

When she found him on the bathroom floor in the middle of a Saturday night, her voice on the 911 tape was calm and methodical: "He's unconscious. He's breathing rapidly. He's clammy."

She had been through this before. The dispatcher offered to stay on the line until the ambulance arrived. "I'm O.K.," Mrs. Ivins said.

One Last Message

Bruce Ivins, the connoisseur of secrets, took with him any knowledge he had of the anthrax attacks. But he left one more surprise for his family: a clause in his will intended to enforce his wish to be cremated and have his ashes scattered. If his demands were not met, $50,000 from his estate would go not to the family but to Planned Parenthood of Maryland, whose abortion services Mrs. Ivins abhorred.

It was one last, devious step for a man whose oddities, for many people, made the F.B.I.’s anthrax accusation more plausible.

But like so much about Dr. Ivins, it cut the other way, too. The F.B.I. theorized that Dr. Ivins had sent anthrax letters to Senators Leahy and Daschle because they were pro-choice Catholics, offending his anti-abortion views. Would an anti-abortion absolutist have flirted with a donation to a cause he despised?

On Oct. 6, a lawyer for the Ivins family filed with the Orphans' Court of Frederick County certification that Planned Parenthood would not receive the money. His ashes, the document said, "were scattered or spread on the ground, as he directed."


Anthrax--chemical signatures

Anthrax, FBI...questions continue

Anthrax, Ivins, FBI--more

Bruce Ivins--a rush to an accusation?

Bruce Ivins--"scapegoats for sale or rent"

Congress desires answers from FBI on anthrax case

FBI firm on conclusion on anthrax case

FBI to release more data on anthrax case this week

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