Ex-anthrax makers want FBI to talk with them

Retired Army veterans offer unique experience, eagerness to help effort

By Scott Shane, Sun Staff

Two months after the FBI mobilized hundreds of agents to investigate the anthrax attacks, the bureau has still not interviewed the only Americans with experience producing anthrax for use as a weapon: aging veterans of the U.S. biological warfare program based at Fort Detrick.

Scientists and former federal law enforcement officials say they are baffled by the FBI's failure to contact the former Army biowarfare specialists, who have rare technical expertise and might offer useful leads on finding the perpetrator.

In fact, as the biowarfare veterans themselves admit, the perpetrator might be one of them - investigators have yet to do the work necessary to rule them out.

"That is really, really surprising," said I. Michael Greenberger, who was in charge of counterterrorism at the U.S. Justice Department during the Clinton administration, of the FBI's failure to interview the former bioweapons makers. "That just takes my breath away. This is supposed to be a no-stones-unturned investigation."

Greenberger, now at the University of Maryland law school, said, "My first instinct would be to go to these guys and ask them what it's like to make stuff like this. Plus, they're potential suspects, because of their experience."

Milton Leitenberg, an expert on biological weapons at the University of Maryland, called the FBI's failure to talk to the anthrax veterans "gross incompetence. The FBI certainly should have talked to them."

But no one is more disturbed by the FBI's omission than the anthrax veterans themselves. Most are men in their 70s and 80s, living in retirement around Frederick, where Fort Detrick is situated, or in Florida. They estimate that their number has dwindled to about two dozen, and many have been trading ideas about the anthrax attacks over lunch, by phone and by e-mail since October.

Since they were among the few Americans with the knowledge necessary to mount such an attack, they figured they would be among the first people FBI agents would visit. That was many weeks ago.

"We've been reading about how thorough the Department of Justice is," said James R.E. Smith, who made anthrax and other bioweapons at Detrick and other Army facilities from 1943 to 1971. "That's a bunch of nonsense. They haven't investigated me."

'I want to be examined'

Smith, 84, now retired in Port Charlotte, Fla., said, "I've got the education to do it. I live alone. I've got two baths, so I could use one as a lab. I want to be examined as a potential terrorist."

He added, more seriously, that he is alarmed about the quality of the investigation because it has not scrutinized people like him: "Part of being thorough is talking to people who are knowledgeable about anthrax."

Asked Friday why agents have not questioned the men, FBI spokeswoman Tracey Silberling said: "Because this is an ongoing investigation, we cannot talk specifically about who we are interviewing, other than to say we are interviewing hundreds of people from many different groups, including experts in the field."

It is impossible to prove that FBI agents have spoken to none of the anthrax veterans. But The Sun found and interviewed 10 of the veterans, including those most familiar with anthrax production, and none had been contacted. Neither had any of the 10 heard of even one former colleague being contacted by investigators.

The FBI has assigned more than 4,000 agents to the overlapping investigations of the Sept. 11 hijackings and the anthrax attacks. The mailed anthrax has killed five people, forced U.S. senators and Supreme Court justices out of their offices and seriously disrupted the postal system.

At least two federal grand juries, in Florida and Iowa, have issued subpoenas to U.S. laboratories for records of anthrax. FBI agents have interviewed working scientists who have had access to anthrax, including some at the Army's biodefense program at Fort Detrick. Called the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, it replaced the offensive weapons program after President Richard M. Nixon ordered the latter shut down in 1969.

The FBI has posted a $1.25 million reward in the anthrax case and last month took the unusual step of making public on its Web site (www.fbi.gov) its analysis of the perpetrator, based on handwriting and behavioral study. But there are few public signs that the FBI's investigation, which it calls "Amerithrax," has made progress toward identifying the person or people involved.

The extraordinary purity and tiny particle size of some of the mailed anthrax have led some scientists to conclude that the perpetrator probably had experience making bioweapons for the United States or another country, perhaps the Soviet Union or Iraq. Others say that the terrorist might not have actual weapons-program experience, but almost certainly had access to technical information from such a program.

Dr. Richard O. Spertzel, who worked at Fort Detrick from 1959 to 1987 and later as a United Nations bioweapons inspector, said Friday that the anthrax in the letter mailed to Sen. Tom Daschle exceeded the purity of any anthrax previously known, with a concentration of 1 trillion spores per gram.

That standard was never attained by weapons programs in the United States, the Soviet Union or Iraq, Spertzel said. Contrary to a recent story in The New York Times, he said, the U.S. program achieved a level only of "tens of billions" of spores per gram.

Genetic findings appear to rule out the attacker having used anthrax saved for more than 30 years from the U.S. program, according to several scientists. The weapons program used a strain called Vollum. The anthrax in the letters contains a strain known as Ames, which is genetically similar to Vollum but not identical.

On the other hand, Ames-strain anthrax has been used since 1980 in Detrick's biodefense program, chiefly to test the effectiveness of vaccines in animals. Since 1980, Ames anthrax has been passed from lab to lab and has been used by 20 or more labs in the nation.

Spertzel, Leitenberg and many other experts maintain that the anthrax used in the attacks had to be produced in a state-sponsored weapons program or its equivalent. Some scientists, however, including former Soviet bioweapons official Ken Alibek, believe it could be the work of one terrorist or small group working on their own.

Both Smith and Orley R. Bourland Jr., of Walkersville, who ran three bacterial pilot plants at Detrick where anthrax was produced, wrote several weeks ago to Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge, offering their expertise. Smith has followed up with several more letters; Bourland, figuring anthrax fears might interfere with the mail, arranged for his letter to be hand-delivered to a Ridge aide. Neither has received a response.

Bourland says he still has a 1969 Detrick phone directory and a list of all former pilot plant employees, which he compiled 30 years ago in hopes of holding a reunion someday. "That might be useful for the investigation," he said.

Another employee waiting to hear from the FBI is Donald B. Schattenberg, 76, of Frederick, who spent 10 years drying and milling anthrax for the U.S. weapons program. He can talk about the difficulties of spray-drying vs. freeze-drying and the need to refrigerate the milling machine to prevent heat from killing spores - all subjects relevant to the important question of what equipment the terrorist might have used.

'Cookbook' for bioterrorism

Or, consider Bill Walter, 76, of Lake Placid, Fla., a top weapons scientist who says he worked on every batch of anthrax made in Building 470 at Detrick from the first, in the early 1950s, to the last, in 1969. He wrote 35 papers on making weapons of anthrax and other agents, all but two of them classified. In 1970, he spent months reading and categorizing the 6,200 secret papers on bioweapons produced during the 27 years of the U.S. program.

The papers were then shipped for storage to Dugway Proving Ground in Utah and other military facilities, Walter said. It is not clear what has become of them since then, but he fears some may have been routinely declassified - in which case, the anthrax attacker might have gained access to them.

"A lot of us are shook up by this declassification thing," he said. "It would give the terrorists a cookbook."

Some of the papers describe such horrifying methods for mass-scale killing, Walter said, that they should be destroyed to eliminate the possibility of their falling into the wrong hands. Other papers, however, might be useful in the FBI's current quest, he said.

The FBI's investigation had come in for previous criticism, notably for giving its approval to Iowa State University in October to destroy anthrax specimens dating to 1928. Scientists say the specimens might have been valuable in the continuing effort to match the genetic fingerprint of the mailed anthrax with existing stocks to try to pinpoint the source.

The bureau's failure to question the anthrax veterans stands in sharp contrast to its aggressive pursuit last month of three Pakistan-born city officials of Chester, Pa. More than 30 FBI and other federal agents broke down the doors of their houses, conducted an all-day search and questioned the men for hours about anthrax and other biological agents.

The search turned up no anthrax, and the FBI has not charged the men: Dr. Irshad Shaikh, Chester's health commissioner and a part-time faculty associate at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; his brother, Dr. Masood Shaikh, who runs a lead poisoning prevention program; and Asif Kazi, the city accountant.

The evidence presented by the FBI to get a search warrant is sealed, but friends of the men speculate that they were targeted because they were Pakistani.

Pressure on the FBI to interview veterans may increase in light of a memorandum posted on the Internet at http://fas.org/bwc/news/anthraxpaper.htm by Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a molecular biologist who heads a working group on bioweapons for the Federation of American Scientists. Her hypothesis, much debated by scientists in the past two weeks, is that "the source of the mailed anthrax, or the information and materials to make it, is a U.S. government program."

Hatch wrote that the "most likely hypothesis" is that the anthrax attacks were carried out by "an American microbiologist who has access to recently weaponized anthrax" or to its recipe "in a U.S. government or contractor lab."