Amerithrax (44 page)

The anthrax mailed to Daschle had an extremely narrow- size range and had been processed to a grade of one trillion spores per gram—fifty times finer than anything produced by the U.S. bioweapons program. In fact it was ten times finer than the finest known grade of Soviet anthrax. How had Amerithrax achieved such an “extraordinary concentra- tion” with his anthrax and at the same time given his en- ergized spores such an astonishing mobility in the air?

The physical properties of the very pure, finely powdered spores were characteristic of the secret U.S. processes for producing anthrax. The optimal process, actually several processes, had been created by Bill Patrick, inventor of a sophisticated form of anthrax and chief of the abandoned

U.S. offensive biological weapons program. Patrick held five secret patents on the technique and would only say of his process that it involved a combination of chemicals. As far as U.S. authorities knew, there was no evidence that any other country possessed the formula. This suggested, more than ever, that Amerithrax was a domestic terrorist.

Under the microscope, the anthrax appeared to be un- milled. But reports on this were at odds with various experts who had studied the small sample the government had. Milled anthrax spores are identifiable because they contain debris. A milling machine is used to grind down clumps of spores to their most infectious size. The optimal U.S. pro- cess does not use milling. The toxin that Amerithrax mailed was identified as a strain that had been originated in the

U.S. and created within the last two to three years. It had not been genetically modified. They had learned that from the Florida attack. Had it been grown in liquid medium or on petri dishes? A “coating” on the Daschle spores (to elim- inate static charge so the particles would float and not clump) was also indicative of the secret U.S. weaponization process. The Daschle letter contained a special form of silica used in the U.S. process, and not bentonite as used by the Iraqis.

When Lockheed technicians first heard anthrax-laced en- velopes were surging through the mail stream, they began accommodating existing military sensors, sampling devices, and filters to serve homeland defense. By January 14, they had constructed an inexpensive mail biohazard detection system. Instead of killing the anthrax, the Lockheed setup ventilated the air around the letters and sampled it to detect any harmful biohazard. The system potentially removed

1. percent of contaminants that were greater than 0.3 microns in diameter. On October 27, 2002, SureBeam Corp. had won a contract from the USPS to provide them with e- beams to eliminate anthrax bacteria.
   

   The FBI narrowed the focus of its investigation to em- ployees of U.S. military laboratories. On January 17, genetic analysis began at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff on Ames strain samples from the suspect labs winnowed down through analysis from twenty to eight. They were the Institute at Fort Detrick; the United Kingdom defense estab- lishment at Porton Down; the Battelle Memorial Institute; Louisiana State University; Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas; the Salk Center in Swiftwater, Pennsylvania; the U.S. Army’s Dugway Proving Ground; and Northern Arizona University itself. All the labs possessed identical anthrax stocks that matched the letter anthrax. Tests would continue until the end of the month.
   

   A complete sequence was also being determined for the genome of both the anthrax in Florida and the Ames strain to which it corresponded. This work was done under gov- ernment contract by the Institute for Genomic Research, a private nonprofit organization.
   

   On January 20, the
   Hartford Courant
   revealed in an ex- clusive story that anthrax might be missing from the Insti- tute, the nation’s premier biological defense lab facility. The Institute had failed to adopt strict safeguards against the theft of lethal viruses and bacteria. During the early 1990s twenty-seven biological specimens, including several an- thrax specimens and the virus that causes Ebola hemorrhagic fever, went missing. A search turned up all but three. The only remaining one containing anthrax bacteria had been rendered harmless.
   

   The Institute defended its security policies and stated no evidence existed that any of its hazardous microbes had been stolen. In the last four months safeguards had been inten- sified in line with the National Institute of Health’s guide- lines.
   

   Joby Warrick of the
   Washington Post
   told the story of Army biodefense researcher Richard Crosland. “No one asked questions,” Crosland told the
   Post
   about lax security at the Institute. “You could literally walk out with anything [at Fort Detrick]. Crosland “had kept scrupulous notes about the frozen (botulinum toxin) crystals he kept in his lab.”
   

   A single gram of them could wipe out a million people. For eleven years, he logged every shipment of toxin re- ceived and accounted for every molecule. However, not once during his career, and not when he left, did anyone check to see what he was carrying. Labs are poor at keeping track of their inventory. Security is poor. For a government scientist getting hold of anthrax was not hard. One U.S. government lab in Utah had covertly manufactured a small amount of weapons-grade anthrax since the early nineties. Reports revealed that anthrax like that used by Amerithrax had been grown secretly at the Institute and taken to Dug- way to be weaponized. Another secret Army project in- volved the construction of bomblets for delivery of anthrax in defiance of the BTWC.
   

   Someone could “just put a Baggie in his coat and walk out of a lab with the stuff,” said Crosland. Was the mailable anthrax already prepared before Amerithrax made up his mind to send it? Preparing and delivering anthrax was the tough part—the mailer would contaminate himself and his work area. The man would need a “clean room” or sophis- ticated home lab. The finely milled powder floats off glass slides before it can be gotten under a microscope. Getting the stuff into an envelope and not everywhere else took ex- traordinary skill. The FBI privately had developed a theory of how Amerithrax may have done this. It had to do with why the letters had gotten wet. Did Amerithrax do the wea- ponizing himself? “Biological agents can easily be ob- tained,” said Ron Atlas, president of the American Society of Microbiology. “A survey of nearly fifteen hundred U.S.
   

   academic institutions indicated that 22 percent work with pathogenic microorganisms and toxins that could be used in biological weapons development.”
   

   CIA research on biological production exemplified itself in Project Jefferson, a study of classical germ agents. The Institute’s Project Clear Vision was an attempt to see into the future of biowarfare and reproduce a Soviet anthrax bomb. In 1998 the Pentagon began a project to see if it could manufacture bioweapons using material available on the commercial market. A year later, agents in the Pentagon’s Project BACHUS (Biological Activities CHaracterized by Unconventional Signatures)
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   spread out across the nation to buy pipes, glassware filters, a fermenter to breed colonies of anthrax, nutrients, and a secondhand milling machine to grind down spores to the most infectious size. By the sum- mer of 2000 their $1.6 million budget had equipped a mini- bioweapons plant at the U.S. Nevada Test Site where there existed a series of underground tunnels for testing the du- rability of biological and chemical components. By January and February 2001, ten months before the first anthrax letter, the modest plant was able to produce
   Bacillus thuringiensis
   , the same biopesticide made at Iraq’s Al Hakam, and another powdered anthrax simulant that could be weaponized by the addition of anthrax spores.
   

   The agents manufactured two pounds of simulated an- thrax (the bacterium
   B. globigii
   ) to stand in for the deadly one. In an investigation in February 2001, it was learned that labs were exchanging microbe samples, including an- thrax, without reporting the transfers to the CDC as required by law. The investigation concluded that departments lacked sufficient federal oversight. At one DOE facility, scientists experimented with anthrax bacteria for years without anyone being notified. Though no one had been harmed (as far as was known) the lapses could have placed the public at risk. According to former Institute scientists, lab workers until recently could have slipped away with live microbes without
   

   

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   A group of agents with the Science Applications International Cor- poration (SAIC).
   

   being challenged. There was little or no accountability, nor stringent inventory controls over the pathogens and toxins used—a standard practice at private labs. “No one checked,” said one microbiologist. “It was easier to get something out of Fort Detrick than into it.” Scientists worked “covertly” on unauthorized projects and technicians were coming in on weekends for off-the-books assignments and sometimes bringing their girlfriends. “It wasn’t just a matter of [lax] security,” said a scientist granted unsupervised access to se- cure biohazard labs. “There was absolutely no security.”
   

   “It was a concern to me,” said Dr. Assaad, “that these scientists were being allowed access not only to lethal [mi- crobes] but to knowledge and information.” He complained that “shenanigans had been going on at the lab.” The Army’s policy of recruiting foreign researchers from China and the former Soviet bloc to work in some of the Institute’s most secure labs was troubling. Foreign scientists, selected for their expertise with deadly microbes and as leverage against an aging workforce, had unrestricted access to secure lab facilities. They worked at the Institute for months. It was not uncommon to find them working nights and weekends. The FBI’s operating theory was that the Institute was the anthrax source and that an insider took the spores to another location to prepare the letters.
   

   And so there was anthrax at the Institute, apparently of the letter strain. And it was possible that it had been stolen from there—not bought, although the same germs had been for sale in the past for research.
   

   Eubacteria,
   the microbes that cause infectious disease, reproduce asexually and rapidly. Not only are they nucleus- free, but they have a genome that is a single circle of DNA. Only a few U.S. labs had the ability to tease apart subtle genetic variants. It was hoped they could compare them to strains from around the world and determine if the strain was common in U.S. livestock or used in U.S. labs or weap- ons development.
   

   Scientists had already traced the bacterial lineage of the Ames strain that killed Stevens and the others back to an anthrax-infected Texas cow in 1981. The FBI had focused with particular attention on former and current employees
   

   and insiders with access to laboratories and research facili- ties that had samples of the Ames strain of anthrax, the type contained in the letters. Because of the strain’s virulence, it was parceled out to labs in the U.S. and other countries like Canada to help them test vaccines. The researchers needed to discriminate between the various stocks of Ames to see if they could pinpoint the laboratory of origin.
   

   One federal laboratory sequenced the DNA of several individual genes in various Ames stocks and failed to dis- cover any real differences between the Florida and Porton Down samples. Since all Ames stocks came from a single source, the bacteria were essentially members of a single large clone, as alike genetically as identical twins.
   

   Now the hunt for Amerithrax was headed for truly un- charted ground—the rarified atmosphere of bacteriological DNA.
   

   STRAIN 25
   

   

   Anthrax Tiger
   

   BY
   January 26, 2002, scientific investigators were pinning their hopes on identifying the source of the bacteria by com- paring it to a collection of nearly one hundred anthrax strains gathered from around the world. The strains were curated by Martin Hugh-Jones at Louisiana State University, and molecular biologist Paul S. Keim of Northern Arizona University. Dr. Keim, Dr. Hugh-Jones, Dr. Paul J. Jackson of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and other scientists had come up with a genetic identification test for anthrax strains, similar to the DNA fingerprinting test used in human forensic cases. They discovered eight markers, or points of
   

   genetic difference, that they made the basis for distinguish- ing one anthrax strain from another.
   

   Because the Ames strain had been widely distributed to labs in the U.S. and overseas this recognition proved of little help at first. When Dr. Keim still could not distinguish be- tween the different stocks of Ames anthrax, he set about trying to develop more markers. To help in the search for new markers, the National Science Foundation asked the Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) in Rockville, Mary- land, to decode the full DNA sequence of the anthrax bac- teria recovered from Bob Stevens, the photo editor who died in the Florida attack. TIGR, founded in 1992, had sequenced the complete genome of the first living organism in 1995. Before the attacks, TIGR had started sequencing a nonpath- ogenic derivative of the Ames strain of anthrax from Porton Down.
   

   In January, TIGR added the bacteria isolated from the Florida attack to its sequencing task. The idea was to tease out subtle divergencies between the two genomes that might identify the source of the attack strain. TIGR also had an Ames strain sample from Dugway in Utah.
   

   Working independently of Dr. Keim, TIGR was already sequencing the full genome of the Ames strain owned by Fort Detrick’s laboratory. TIGR was already making good on its $200,000 National Science Foundation grant. TIGR specialized in microbial genomes and was in the process of determining the sequence of chemical building blocks in the DNA of the anthrax bacterium. TIGR had started the project two years earlier at the behest of the Office of Naval Re- search and the British Defense Evaluation and Research Agency.
   

   TIGR was also negotiating for a second grant to sequence the full genome of other strains of anthrax and of other samples of the Ames strain to speed up the investigation. Having the full sequence of several Ames stocks might help pinpoint the source. Under Dr. Timothy D. Read, who headed its anthrax genome sequencing, TIGR expanded its anthrax sequencing and mapped the bacteria recovered from the Florida strike at AMI, the attack strain. The TIGR sci- entists used a sample of the Ames strain obtained from the
   

   British biodefense laboratory at Porton Down in England, which in turn had received it a decade earlier from the In- stitute at Fort Detrick and modified it in 1998 and 2001. TIGR compared the sequencing of the Florida anthrax iso- late to its nearly completed sequence of another Ames-strain isolate obtained from the Porton Down sequencing project. Read looked for DNA differences throughout the bacte- rium’s genome. “Because the two bacteria studied are of the same strain,” said Dr. Read, “it’s like taking two first cousins from a remote village, determining their differences, and then trying to differentiate the whole human race based on those differences.” TIGR focused on the main chromosome of the highly monomorphic bacterium, a large ring of DNA now known to contain 5,167,515 DNA letters holding in- formation for 5,960 genes. The bacterium contained two tiny rings of DNA known as plasmids. Plasmids carry the genes essential for the Ames strain’s virulence. The plasmid’s DNA had already been decoded several years earlier by sci- entists at the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory. Read and his team found it generally identical to the other mailed anthrax except for the rare errors made in copying the five million units of DNA that compose its genome, its complete set of heredity information. DNA’s long double-helix resembles a spiral staircase with four types of nucleotide bases compris- ing its steps. Human DNA consists of four billion of these