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

FBI firm on conclusion on anthrax case

Robert Mueller

[FBI director]

caricature

by

Kerry Waghorn

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

"FBI's Mueller tells Congress anthrax inquiry conclusive"

by

Kevin Johnson,

September 17th, 2008

USA TODAY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Congress desires answers from FBI on anthrax case

FBI's methodology in the anthrax case

From Chemical & Engineering News:

""After nearly seven years of investigation, we have developed a body of powerful evidence that allows us to conclude that we have identified the origin and the perpetrator of the 2001 Bacillus anthracis mailings," said Vahid Majidi of the FBI's Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate."

"...the experimental data need to be validated through a peer review process. He tells C&EN that the FBI has a publication plan, and the process is already under way. Speaking of the science, he adds, "We are hoping to get as much as we can into peer-reviewed journals.""

And, I might add, the judicial system.


FBI's Anthrax Analysis


FBI to release more data on anthrax case this week

FBI to release more data on anthrax case this week

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

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

by

Eric Lichtblau and David Johnston

August 16th, 2008

The New York Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Anthrax, FBI...questions continue

Anthrax, FBI...questions continue

This is beginning to deepen the quest of data gathering and scientific methodologies which transcends the guilt or innocence of Bruce Ivans.

"Nagging Questions in Anthrax Case"

by

Laura Fitzpatrick

August 13th, 2008

Time

As probable bioterrorists go, Bruce Ivins was a near perfect suspect. Among the hundreds of pages of evidence that the FBI had mounted against him (which were released last week), there were electronic records documenting Ivins' late-night sojourns in the lab, e-mails revealing a mind wracked by paranoia and an inventory of a November 2007 FBI search of his home, which turned up a paperback copy of Albert Camus's novel The Plague.

The FBI says the government biodefense researcher acted alone in the 2001 anthrax mailings that killed five people and sickened 17. But as anthrax experts begin seeking hard data behind the eerie and suggestive details of the case, they are left with nothing but questions. For one thing, the FBI says its anthrax evidence is based on "new and sophisticated scientific tools" — i.e., new DNA technology that the agency says is more accurate than older methods — which investigators have used to trace the anthrax from the deadly mailings back to Ivins. The FBI began with 1,000 distinct samples of the Ames strain of anthrax, the type used in the attacks, from 16 laboratories that handled the bacterium. From there, investigators whittled their way down to a match: a single spore batch taken from a beaker in Ivins' laboratory. No scientist has ever been able to accomplish a feat of such precision before, not even those familiar with the subtle variations of the anthrax genome — but the FBI won't reveal its methods.

Now, scientists and some members of Congress are calling for the FBI to release details about the new DNA technology, so that its validity can be confirmed. "It's a general rule," says Donald Henderson of the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Biosecurity, who heads the federal Office of Public Health Preparedness. "When you develop a new test for something, it usually has to go through a fairly rigorous examination: Does it really do what it claims to do?"

Anthrax experts interviewed by TIME point to the peculiarities of anthrax research that underscore why it is critical that the FBI's methodology be evaluated. Most important is that anthrax has historically been shuttled freely around the world — a fact that the FBI has not explicitly accounted for. Until the security crackdown that followed the 2001 attacks, most labs readily sold anthrax strains — including the type linked to Ivins — to scientists doing research in other parts of the world. "Bruce, like most people in the lab, derived most of his strains from outside sources," says Jeffrey Adamovicz, a former bacteriology chief who worked with Ivins at Fort Detrick's U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) for 12 years. If the FBI has not investigated every one of those possible sources, in other words, it can't be certain that the path to Ivins is solid. No one but the FBI knows for sure.

Equally troubling, scientists say, is the complete lack of forensic evidence in the FBI dossier. Documents reveal, for instance, that investigators swabbed Ivins' home and cars for anthrax DNA and spores, but they don't say whether the subsequent lab tests linked those samples to the 2001 envelopes. "Until we see the details, who knows?" says Richard Spertzel, a bioweapons expert who worked at USAMRIID with Ivins. "There are too many loose ends."

Scientists also say that the FBI's recent bungling of certain high-profile investigations throws doubt on federal investigators' ability to understand scientific evidence. The most obvious and recent example is the agency's unwarranted fingering of Steven Hatfill in 2001 as a "person of interest" in the same attacks for which Ivins is now believed responsible. Hatfill's reputation was irreparably damaged by the accusation, which was never supported by concrete evidence. The government officially absolved Hatfill this month and awarded him $5.8 million in damages. "You have less confidence in how much [the FBI is] really sharing and how accurate this might be," says Henderson, who would like to see the FBI release its data to a neutral body, such as the National Academy of Sciences or the National Institute of Medicine, for review.

While even the staunchest critics of the FBI acknowledge that publicizing details about new technology may pose a national security risk, others insist that doing so and hastening a firm conclusion to the "Amerithrax" case would only make the country safer. "To know what challenge you're defending against is terribly important," says Henderson. Further, the FBI's technology may prove useful for other "benign reasons," such as in vaccine research or legal investigations involving poisoning, says Adamovicz.

Scientists' best hope to budge the FBI may be through Congress. Iowa Senator Charles Grassley and New Jersey Congressman Rush Holt — whose district is home to the Princeton, N.J., mailbox from which the FBI says Ivins mailed the anthrax letters — are pushing for a government inquiry into the FBI investigation. In an early indication of what Grassley may seek to accomplish, the Senator has composed 18 questions for the FBI and the Justice Department. Chief among them is a request for clarification of the timing of the FBI's scientific discoveries. In tandem with other facts of the case, Grassley says, that timeline could help determine how definitive the FBI's data is. "If top FBI officials knew in 2005 that the anthrax used in the attacks came from Dr. Ivins' lab, then why didn't they clear Dr. Hatfill until [Aug. 8]? Either they were unsure of the scientific evidence against Dr. Ivins, or they knew long ago that Dr. Hatfill was not the killer," Senator Grassley said in a statement to TIME. "Both possibilities are disturbing."

Representative Holt says his goal is to uncover enough physical evidence to satisfy those who doubt the FBI's conclusions about Ivins. "I don't want it to reside in the court of public opinion. Then we'll end up with something like the Lee Harvey Oswald case," says Holt in reference to the conspiracy theories that still dog the John F. Kennedy assassination. "There [will be] too many people in whose minds the case is never closed."

Congress is unlikely to begin hearings until it reconvenes in September. Holt, a former assistant director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and the only scientist to sit on the House Intelligence Committee, expects the hearings to spark broader debate about the way the government handles certain scientific issues, including policy questions — such as how to ensure lab security — and a general attitude regarding the scientific method. "[The FBI] try to confirm their hunches, whereas a scientist tries to refute his or her own conclusions," says Holt. "The whole point of science is to publish it so that other people can tear it apart."



Anthrax--chemical signatures

Bruce Ivins--"scapegoats for sale or rent"

Bruce Ivins--a rush to an accusation?

Anthrax--chemical signatures

Now the chemist's skill is revealed in the analysis of the strand of anthrax that assisted the FBI. However, regardless of the analysis and conclusions the ultimate test in a criminal investigation is through the rigors of the judicial system. Such data may or may not survive as genuine evidence.

"Anthrax Analyzed"

Technology helps investigators build case against government researcher

by

Rochelle Bohaty

August 11th, 2008

Chemical & Engineering News

USING NEW and sophisticated scientific techniques, investigators have made substantial progress in the seven-year-old anthrax investigation, the FBI has confirmed. This information comes only days after the lead suspect committed suicide.

When Bruce E. Ivins, a senior biodefense researcher at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Fort Detrick, Md., died on July 29, federal prosecutors were about to identify him as the one who sent the 2001 letters laced with anthrax and charge him with killing five people and injuring 17 others.

According to government officials "a scientific breakthrough" that creates a DNA equivalent of a fingerprint allowed investigators to identify the origin of the anthrax used in the 2001 mailing and link Ivins to the crime. The FBI, with help from the scientific community, developed four individual, highly sensitive, specific tests to detect the unique qualities of anthrax, government officials said.

One company that has been developing and marketing such a technology is Carlsbad, Calif.-based Ibis Bioscience. Ibis Vice President of Research Steven A. Hofstadler confirms having a service contract with the FBI, but he will not comment, because of the ongoing investigation, on any details regarding anthrax, despite a recent publication on the topic (Emerg. Infect. Dis. 2008, 14, 653). He tells C&EN that the FBI has three Ibis systems.

The technology developed by Ibis, and presumably used by the FBI, uses specifically targeted primers and the polymerase chain reaction to amplify highly conserved genomic regions. The amplified products are analyzed by electrospray ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry followed by base composition analysis to identify and determine the relative quantity of pathogenic bacteria in a sample. Multiple genomic regions can be amplified in parallel for a given sample. High-resolution genotyping of a specific species can be achieved with additional primers targeted to flank highly variable regions of a specific genome.

Court documents reveal that more than 1,000 anthrax isolates were compared with the anthrax used in the attacks. Only eight of these isolates contained the four genetic markers that characterized the mailed anthrax. All eight isolates are directly related to a single anthrax strain stored in a secure location at USAMRIID, where Ivins was the sole custodian since 1997.



Bruce Ivins--"scapegoats for sale or rent"

Bruce Ivins--a rush to an accusation?

Bruce Ivins--"scapegoats for sale or rent"

Bruce Ivins

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

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

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

Read more...

NPR

And this...

"Anthrax Case Had Costs for Suspects"

by

William Broad and Scott Shane

August 9th, 2008

The New York Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Bruce Ivins--a rush to an accusation?