The Anthrax Trail

The Anthrax Trail

Just when most people felt safe again wielding a letter opener, anthrax is suddenly back in the news.

Several recent reports offer worrying reminders that the attacks that left five Americans dead last fall are far from solved. Most troubling, they suggest that the FBI's theory that this anthrax was the work of a domestic loner may be off the mark; or, even if it isn't, the more relevant reality may be that Saddam or al Qaeda is planning to cook up another biological attack. Months later, about the only thing we still know for sure is that there is nothing elementary about the cases of Americans killed by anthrax .

One of the new reports just emerged from Afghanistan. The commander of U.S. forces there said over the weekend that the U.S. has discovered what appears to be an abandoned biological-weapons lab near Kandahar. General Tommy Franks told "Meet the Press" there's no evidence al Qaeda actually had, or has, weaponized anthrax , but there's plenty of physical evidence that it was gathering the technology and expertise to get a production line up and rolling. The only good news here is that the discovered lab was unfinished; al Qaeda vamoosed before it could complete construction.

Another anthrax story is playing out closer to home. A Fort Lauderdale doctor, who last summer treated a leg lesion on what turned out to be one of the September 11 hijackers, now says the injury "was consistent with cutaneous anthrax ," according to a report in the New York Times Saturday. A group of experts from the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies concurs. The doctor, like virtually every other U.S. medical official, was newly sensitized to the symptoms of anthrax after the first attacks with the substance last October.

The circumstantial evidence here is strong. The future hijacker with the leg lesion lived and went to school in nearby Boca Raton, where the first anthrax victim worked at a publishing company called American Media Inc. Also, some of the hijackers rented apartments from a real estate agent whose husband worked at American Media. These may or may not be coincidences, but surely it doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to deduce that the September 11 terrorists might have had something to do with the subsequent anthrax attacks.

Of all the recent biowarfare reports, the most startling is an article just out in the March 25 New Yorker magazine about Saddam Hussein's chemical attacks on Iraqi Kurds in 1988. In the course of his chilling narrative of Saddam's chemical-warfare campaign against civilians there, Jeffrey Goldberg reports on the activities of Ansar al-Islam, a radical organization operating in northern Iraq. According to Mr. Goldberg's persuasively argued piece, the group is under the joint control of al Qaeda and Iraqi intelligence. Top officials of both have been in close touch for years, he believes.

The evidence of Saddam's repeated efforts to acquire biological and chemical weapons is overwhelming, so it's hardly a leap to imagine that he might have shared that expertise with his like-minded friends in al Qaeda. The famous meeting in Prague between Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi agent is unlikely to be the sole connection between al Qaeda and Saddam.

Meanwhile, back in the United States, the FBI persists in asserting that the anthrax letter writer was probably a domestic nut with no ties to al Qaeda. Maybe so. But it's also true that U.S. law-enforcement experts have been wrong about the sources of terror in the recent past, and are capable of becoming fixated on one theory of a case, which they then set out to prove. The first World Trade Center bombing, of course, turned out to be the culmination of a coordinated project carried out by a broad radical-Islamic network, not just a few disaffected crackpots living in the U.S.

The FBI, like the CIA and the other government intelligence-gathering agencies chasing terrorists, is a bureaucracy, and bureaucracies tend to operate under their own imperatives. In that context, it's not reassuring that two senior law-enforcement officials involved in the anthrax investigation are quoted in yesterday's Journal as saying that much of their work is aimed at ensuring that any evidence they bring forth will survive challenge in a courtroom. Well, we'd all like to arrest, convict and put away the individuals who dropped the anthrax letters in the mail, but the real national priority has to be forestalling more such attacks against the American people.

That means that we must be prepared to pursue the anthrax trail wherever it leads, even if it takes us to places, such as Iraq, that complicate choices about foreign policy for U.S. leadership.


THE ANTHRAX TRAIL