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

Congress desires answers from FBI on anthrax case

And so Congress has doubts and wishes answers too.

"Lawmakers Seek Anthrax Details"

by

Scott Shane and Eric Lightblau

September 7th, 2008

The New York Times

A month after the F.B.I. declared that an Army scientist was the anthrax killer, leading members of Congress are demanding more information about the seven-year investigation, saying they do not think the bureau has proved its case.

In a letter sent Friday to Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Democratic leaders of the House Judiciary Committee said that "important and lingering questions remain that are crucial for you to address, especially since there will never be a trial to examine the facts of the case."

The scientist, Bruce E. Ivins, committed suicide in July, and Mr. Mueller is likely to face demands for additional answers about the anthrax case when he appears before the House and Senate Judiciary Committees on Sept. 16 and 17.

"My conclusion at this point is that it’s very much an open matter," Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the top Republican on the Senate committee, said of the strength of the case against Dr. Ivins, a microbiologist at the Army's biodefense laboratory who worked on anthrax vaccines. "There are some very serious questions that have yet to be answered and need to be made public."

Bureau officials say they are certain they have solved the nation's first major bioterrorism attack, in which anthrax-laced letters killed five people, after a long and troubled investigation that by several measures was the most complex in the bureau's history.

But in interviews last week, two dozen bioterrorism experts, veteran investigators and members of Congress expressed doubts about the bureau’s conclusions. Some called for an independent review of the case to reassure the public and assess policies on the handling of dangerous pathogens like anthrax.

Meanwhile, new details of the investigation, revealed in recent interviews, raised questions about when the bureau focused on Dr. Ivins as the likely perpetrator and how solid its evidence was.

In April 2007, after the mailed anthrax was genetically linked to Dr. Ivins's laboratory and after he was questioned about late-night work in the laboratory before the letters were mailed, prosecutors sent Dr. Ivins a formal letter saying he was "not a target" of the investigation. And only a week before Dr. Ivins died did agents first take a mouth swab to collect a DNA sample, officials said.

Justice Department officials, who said in early August that the investigation was likely to be closed formally within days or weeks, now say it is likely to remain open for three to six more months. In the meantime, agents are continuing to conduct interviews with acquaintances of Dr. Ivins and are examining computers he used, seeking information that could strengthen the case.

But bureau and Justice Department officials insist that the delay, which they say is necessary to tie up loose ends in a complex investigation, reflects no doubts about their ultimate verdict. "People feel just as strongly as they did a month ago that this was the guy," said a department official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Even the strongest skeptics acknowledged that the bureau had raised troubling questions about Dr. Ivins’s mental health and had made a strong scientific case linking the mailed anthrax to a supply in his laboratory.

But they said the bureau's piecemeal release of information, in search warrant affidavits and in briefings for reporters and Congress, had left significant gaps in the trail that led to Dr. Ivins and had failed to explain how investigators ruled out at least 100 other people who the bureau acknowledged had access to the same flasks of anthrax.

In interviews, F.B.I. officials said they knew their findings would face intense scrutiny after the bureau admitted that for years it had pursued the wrong man, Steven J. Hatfill, whom the government paid $4.6 million in June to settle a lawsuit that accused the government of leaking information about him to the news media.

Officials also acknowledged that they did not have a single, definitive piece of evidence indisputably proving that Dr. Ivins mailed the letters — no confession, no trace of his DNA on the letters, no security camera recording the mailings in Princeton, N.J.

But they said the case consisted of a powerfully persuasive accumulation of incriminating details. Dr. Vahid Majidi, head of the F.B.I.’s weapons of mass destruction directorate, said the accumulation of evidence against Dr. Ivins was overwhelming: his oversight of the anthrax supply, his night hours, his mental problems and his habit of driving to far-off locations at night to mail anonymous packages.

"Who had the means, motive and opportunity?" said John Miller, assistant F.B.I. director for public affairs. "Some potential suspects may have had one, some had two, but on the cumulative scale, Dr. Ivins had many more of these elements than any other potential suspect."

Mr. Miller said the bureau ultimately planned to release much more information from its investigative files, including notes of F.B.I. interviews with Dr. Ivins and other suspects and witnesses and surveillance logs detailing his movements and actions. But those disclosures, requiring a detailed review to remove private and classified information, are likely to be months away.

Mr. Mueller, the F.B.I. director, is likely to face tough questions at next week's scheduled oversight hearings, not just about the case against Dr. Ivins but about the prolonged pursuit of Dr. Hatfill. Senator Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican and frequent critic of the bureau, said he was frustrated by the delay in closing the case and answering questions.

"If the case is solved, why isn’t it solved?" Mr. Grassley asked. "It's all very suspicious, and you wonder whether or not the F.B.I. doesn’t have something to cover up and that they don’t want to come clean."

Investigators have not reviewed three boxes of papers left by Dr. Ivins marked for the attention of his lawyer, Paul F. Kemp, because the records must first be reviewed to see whether they should be kept confidential under attorney-client privilege, Mr. Kemp said. A government lawyer not involved in the investigation will soon review the papers with Mr. Kemp, who said some might be given to investigators or made public.

What is clear is that the disclosures have not closed the matter.

"They took their shot," said Representative Rush D. Holt, a Democrat who holds a doctorate in physics and has followed the case closely because the letters were mailed in his New Jersey district. "They hoped and maybe believed that the case they laid out would persuade everyone. I think they’re probably surprised by the level of skepticism."

Many scientists who have tracked the case, too, have found the evidence less than decisive.

"For a lot of the scientific community, the word would be agnostic," said Dr. Thomas V. Inglesby, an expert on bioterrorism at the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. "They still don't feel they have enough information to judge whether the case has been solved."

Mr. Holt and Dr. Inglesby were among a number of outsiders who said that only an independent review of the investigation and the evidence against Dr. Ivins — either by Congress or a commission like the one that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks — could give the public confidence that the case was over.

Dr. Ralph R. Frerichs, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles who has created a Web site detailing the anthrax case, said that such a review was critical to establishing how the lethal powder was made.

"There's no clarity on the simplest aspect: is this hard to do or easy to do?" Dr. Frerichs said. If the powder could be made with basic laboratory equipment and no sophisticated additives, as the bureau maintains, laboratory security and background checks for workers may have to be tightened, he said.

Skepticism toward the bureau's case remains especially pronounced among Dr. Ivins's former colleagues at the Army laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md.

"Despite the F.B.I.'s scientific and circumstantial evidence, I and many of Dr. Ivins's former colleagues don’t believe he did it and don't believe the spore preparations were made at Detrick," said Dr. Gerry Andrews, a microbiologist who worked at the Army laboratory for nine years and was Dr. Ivins's boss for part of that time.

Laboratory records obtained by The New York Times show that the anthrax supply labeled RMR-1029, which the F.B.I. linked to the attacks, was stored in 1997 not in Dr. Ivins’s laboratory, in Building 1425, but in the adjacent Building 1412. Former colleagues said that its storage in both buildings at different times from 1997 to 2001 might mean that the bureau’s estimate of 100 people with physical access to it was two or three times too low.

Some microbiologists question the time records documenting Dr. Ivins's night hours, pointing out that one F.B.I. affidavit said he was in the secure part of the laboratory for exactly 2 hours and 15 minutes three nights in a row — an unlikely coincidence that they said raised questions about the accuracy of the records.

Confusion remains about silicon found in the mailed powder. Some F.B.I. critics say it shows that there was a sophisticated additive that might point away from Fort Detrick as a source, but the bureau concluded that it was merely an accident of the way the anthrax was grown.

Dr. Majidi said that many technical details would be cleared up by the papers published by bureau scientists and consultants over the next year or more. "It's the collective body of evidence that’s really strong," Dr. Majidi said.

Without witnesses or forensic experts linking the killings directly to Dr. Ivins, the Justice Department's public case against him relies largely on "opportunity evidence," said Robert J. Cleary, the lead prosecutor a decade ago in the Unabomber attacks.

"What prosecutors have to do to persuade the public that this was the guy is to show the uniqueness of the strain of anthrax and to eliminate everyone else who had opportunity and access to it." That, Mr. Cleary said, "is a challenge."


FBI's methodology in the anthrax case