Amerithrax (45 page)

1. steps.
   

   TIGR scientists discovered several points of difference between the Porton Down Ames strain and the Florida Ames strain:
   

   1. Single unit changes (Single Nucleotide Polymor- phisms, or SNPs) in DNA.
      

   2. Variable repeats (Variable Number Tandem Repeats, or VNTRs, where the same tiny sequence of DNA units are repeated a few times. The variable regions are the type of differences used for human DNA fingerprinting.
      

TIGR scientists sent their list of DNA differences to Dr. Keim, who began analyzing the Ames strain samples in his

collection and new Ames samples the FBI had just given him to find out if he could now distinguish among them. A comprehensive collection of Ames samples would increase Dr. Keim’s chances of identifying the exact lab that pro- duced the attack strain. He had an enormous number, but a few Ames samples remained outside his collection at private and foreign labs. The Defense Research Establishment at Suffield in Alberta had the Ames strain. The Canadians had converted an agricultural experiment station into a govern- ment testing area for anthrax. However, they had received no FBI requests for samples and the agency soon rectified that.

In September, Defense Research and Development Can- ada (DRDC) had produced a classified paper that demon- strated how a single anthrax letter with slits in its envelope could poison the mail system and kill swiftly through the air once opened. The Canadian report may have been cir- culated at the Institute just before the first anthrax letters were mailed on September 18. On October 4, as Bob Ste- vens lay dying at JFK Hospital, the letter was widely re- leased by e-mail throughout the U.S. scientific community. Dr. Read said the current plan was for Dr. Keim to test each Ames stock in his collection at the points of difference TIGR found on the anthrax genome. Each sample was to then be graded as to how close it was to the Florida attack strain and two Porton Down specimens. The index strain the Institute sent to Porton Down in 1982 and 2001 had been cured there of the pXO1 and pXO2 plasmids. That gave TIGR a before and after reference. The two preparations of genomic DNA sent to TIGR, Porton 1 and Porton 2, had been grown from the Institute’s original frozen culture and prepared in a lab at the University of California at Berkeley for the new test. Because the Porton isolate was cured of the pXO plasmids, TIGR was only able to compare the Flor- ida plasmids against the
Bacillus anthracis
Sterne strain in pXO1 and the Pasteur strain in pXO2. This data could not be used to infer a higher mutation rate in pXO2 because the Ames strain is more closely related to Sterne than to the Pasteur strain. The Florida isolate contained a mixture of both orientations. If one of Dr. Keim’s stocks was nearer to

the Florida specimen than others, that would point to the lab that provided it as the likeliest source from which the per- petrator stole or grew the attack anthrax.

The anthrax fingerprinting test (which looks for unique patterns of repeating DNA) now had over fifty markers to work with. The test could differentiate between the letter germs and the various samples of the Ames strain. Although the test itself can be completed in hours, “quality control measures” expanded out the required time. Read hoped to learn Dr. Keim’s preliminary results in a week or two. He waited anxiously. TIGR worked with Keim to use the new markers to analyze six anthrax isolates that initially had ap- peared to be indistinguishable from the original Ames strain based on existing genotype information. The new markers allowed the scientists to divide the six Ames isolates into four different categories.

If successful findings were publicized they could tip off Amerithrax, worried an FBI official. He was unwilling to give Amerithrax “a road map” to the investigation. Dr. Claire M. Fraser, TIGR’s director, said that Dr. Keim’s find- ings of whether the genetic differences pointed to particular laboratories might remain secret at the FBI’s request; TIGR’s own results, however, would be openly published the following month. “We are working on a draft of the paper now,” Dr. Fraser said. “Nothing TIGR has done will be censored by the FBI.” That was not the case with Dr. Keim, who was dying to talk about what he had learned.

In late January and early February, agents from the Bal- timore, New York, and Washington FBI field offices visited the Institute. They conducted inquiries over a number of days, then asked about a former scientist who had returned in 1999 and taken away discarded biological safety cabinets. Reached at his job with a defense contractor, the scientist admitted that, with Army permission, he had taken three biosafety cabinets that were being discarded. He said they were for use in a classified Defense Department project. He considered the questioning to be part of a routine effort to exclude people with the knowledge to mount a biological attack. “I think they had a profile,” he told the
Baltimore Sun
later. “They had a bunch of people on the list. They

have to rule people out....I certainly didn’t appreciate get- ting called in. No one likes that. I’m one of the good guys.” By February, Ernie Blanco was back handling mail at AMI’s new office in Boca Raton and FBI agent Van Harp was e-mailing forty thousand members of the Washington- based American Society of Microbiology. In his letter, Harp requested help in discovering if one of their members could be Amerithrax. He explained that the FBI was looking for a single person with lab experience and a clear and rational thought process. Amerithrax had appeared to be very orga- nized in the production and mailing of his letters. “It is pos- sible this person used off-hours in a laboratory or may have even established an improvised or concealed facility com- prised of sufficient equipment to produce the anthrax,” Van Harp wrote. “It is very likely that one or more of you know this individual.” Unless Amerithrax was a brilliant amateur. In the months to come, a large number of U.S. scientists and biowarfare experts would reject the FBI’s theory that a disgruntled American scientist prepared the spores and mailed the letters. “In my opinion, there are maybe four or five people in the whole country who might be able to make

this stuff, and I’m one of them,” said Dr. Spertzel.

“And even with a good lab and staff to help run it, it might take me a year to come up with a product as good.” Spertzel and other experts would suggest that the FBI might reexamine other theories—state-sponsored terrorism, wea- ponized spores stolen or provided by an accomplice from an existing, but secret, biodefense program.

Spertzel believed that developing a weaponized aerosol so sophisticated and virulent as Amerithrax’s required sci- entific know-how, technical competence, and unfettered ac- cess to expensive equipment—capabilities beyond a lone individual’s.

By February 6, 2002, more than 1600 suspicious mail items had been checked by Postal Inspectors. There had been 569 evacuations of post offices, 72 recent anthrax hoaxes, and 11 convictions. Sometimes the task of protect- ing the mail staggered even these iron men. Seven hundred million letters coursed through the mail stream each day, 207 billion pieces each year.

* * *

ON
February 12, 2002, Dr. Keim made a startling statement at a national conference on microbial genomes in Las Vegas. Dr. Keim said he had distinguished between stocks of the anthrax strain kept in different laboratories. The method should help tell which laboratory’s stock of anthrax was closest to that used by Amerithrax. That could limit the search to people with access to that particular laboratory and its store of anthrax. Dr. Keim succeeded by analyzing a site on the second of these plasmids called a poly-A tract.

Ames stocks held in different labs varied in the number of A’s, one of the four units of DNA, contained in the poly- A tract. The number varied from eight to twenty-five, the exact number depending on which lab provided the Ames sample. On the basis of the poly-A test, Keim distinguished between the Ames strains held in four laboratories (Porton Down and three labs he did not name), and in a natural Ames isolate taken from a goat that died of anthrax in Texas in 1997. Marker stretches of DNA were tested then against five other samples of Ames anthrax. The goat sample dif- fered at four markers, showing a divergence among anthrax lineages. Two differed at one marker, “a stretch of repeated adenines on pXO2, one of the two DNA plasmids that give anthrax its virulence.”

“It may be the most polymorphic site in the genome,” Keim told
New Scientist.
Strain A can immediately be ruled out as the attack strain as it is missing a plasmid (a short ring of DNA) and is nonpathogenic.”

Dr. Keim’s agreement with the FBI prevented him from listing the labs. One could guess. The reference Ames in Keim’s collection came from a freezer at Porton Down, which in turn had gotten it from the Institute. Another was a culture that came directly from the Institute, and the third from the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. When TIGR published its paper in May everyone would know.

On February 22, civilian workers at the U.S. Army Re- serve Command headquarters at Fort McPherson, Georgia, discovered a suspicious package with a “white powdery sub- stance” inside a plastic sandwich bag. Field tests indicated

that anthrax might be present, but since such tests can pro- vide false positives, six people who handled the package were sent to the hospital for decontamination. “We’re going to treat it as if anthrax is present.” Most of the military personnel had been inoculated with the anthrax vaccine, but not the civilians. While Atlanta’s CDC conducted further tests, the building was locked down for five hours. Two hundred people trapped inside were permitted to leave when the powder proved to be harmless.

Three days later, federal authorities subpoenaed docu- ments and anthrax samples from U.S. scientific labs to nar- row their search through genetic analysis. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said there were several suspects but declined to elaborate. “The FBI has not narrowed the list down to one,” he said. “I wish it were that easy and that simple right now.” Fleischer said President Bush wanted the case resolved quickly, but “also wants the FBI to take its time and build a case that would stand in court, that is thor- ough, that is conclusive.” He reported that the source of the anthrax was definitely domestic and of the so-called Ames strain of
Bacillus anthracis
; the suspect probably has or had legitimate access to the bio agents in a lab and the block handprinting on the envelopes was “chosen by design” to throw off investigators.

Fleischer was asked, “Well, is the suspect an American, and is it a scientist from Fort Detrick that is being looked at out of the group?”

“All indications are that the source of the anthrax is do- mestic,” Fleischer replied. “And I can’t give you any more specific information than that. That’s part of what the FBI is actively reviewing. And I just can’t go beyond that... Obviously, anybody who would engage in that type of ter- rorism through the mail puts people in a position where it becomes very difficult not only for them, but for local com- munities, for all the people who were affected by all the hoaxes that followed those attacks. But I think the federal government responded as well as it could, given the knowl- edge the federal government had, as quickly as it could.”

“What’s the sense here about the pace of the investiga- tion?” asked a reporter.

“Obviously, the person who did this is very smart,” said Fleischer, “has employed means that are very difficult to track. The pace of justice is a methodical one. And that’s the effort of the FBI, and the President believes the FBI is doing a good, solid job.”

“Does the White House feel the government has a full handle now on the inventories of anthrax at universities, at military facilities?” asked a reporter.

“To the best of all the information that we have received here,” said Fleischer, “that was never a question. The mili- tary laboratories, other laboratories accounted for their an- thrax.”

The FBI doubled its reward for the capture of Amerithrax to $2.5 million for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the bioterrorist. The
Washington Times
quoted unidentified law enforcement authorities and biochemical experts as saying one of the suspects was believed to have worked at the Institute and had been fired from government jobs.

The next day, the FBI conducted tests with swabs to de- tect the presence of anthrax spores in the homes, offices, and vehicles of about a dozen people with the attributes Fleischer had listed. All of them were cleared of suspicion after the tests came back negative. The tests were conducted with the consent of those under investigation and did not require search warrants.

The searches took place amid burgeoning concern on Capitol Hill over an apparent lack of progress in the probe. There were no firm suspects, despite thousands of inter- views. Investigators claimed they kept a fluid list of about twenty who were under scrutiny at any time. No one had remained on the list more than a month. It was frustrating not to have a target yet. “It’s not stalled.. .” said one in- vestigator, “but there are no easy answers or instant grati- fication.”

At the Institute, agents conducted hundreds of interviews. One agent, assigned there full-time, supervised a hastily formed library of anthrax strains. Investigators now knew which labs possessed live cultures of the Ames strain. All but three of the labs were in the U.S. The FBI flew agents

to a Canadian defense lab with anthrax stocks. More visits were scheduled to British and French research agencies.

Nine research groups were helping with the analysis of Amerithrax’s lethal powder. Experts peered at the genetic structure of the bacteria, looking for chemical and physical clues that would reveal exactly where the poison was man- ufactured. Tests to this point had shown a match between spores used in the attacks and a strain of anthrax used in

1. biodefense since the mid-1980s, the Ames strain. The FBI had already e-mailed forty thousand members of the American Society for Microbiology asking for aid. Now they sent letters to a half-million New Jersey residents ap- pealing for their eyes and ears. It would be ironic if Amer- ithrax was captured because of a letter.
   

   FBI and outside scientists continued their examination of the large repository of anthrax spores from the attacks. Highly sophisticated tests kept a snail’s pace to allow for elaborate protocols that would ensure that the analyses were scientifically accurate and legally defensible. “You can’t be in a hurry on this stuff,” one official said. Only Leahy’s letter contained enough anthrax to permit extensive testing. The FBI commissioned a series of sophisticated forensic ex- periments by outside laboratories to try to determine when, where, and how the anthrax had been produced.
   

   In Washington, D.C., the quip was that mail was so slow that only anthrax mail was being delivered. One congress- man complained that, due to the irradiating and sterilization of mail, he was only now, in February, getting his Christmas cards. “I’m not sure this irradiation of mail does any good. My suggestion is that if you have anything to send to Wash- ington, D.C., send it by e-mail.” Senators had their mail opened for them and photostated for reading. At no time did they touch the originals.
   

   When postal officials caught up with the mail, there was a string of unusually late deliveries—overdue bills, holiday wishes, business mail, vehicle registrations, parking tickets, jury summonses, and passports. An invitation to a christen- ing on November 18 finally arrived. One couple’s three- thousand-dollar wedding ring, mailed to a jeweler for their tenth anniversary by registered mail in October, had not yet
   

   arrived. Somewhere in the system a mail-order suit had gone missing. The irradiation and redistributing of one million pieces of mail quarantined inside Brentwood had delayed everything. Above all, the mail had to be kept safe for the public and for the postal workers.
   

   The CDC had also contracted a number of private labs to work through the backlog of thousands of environmental swabs. Investigators hoped the processed specimens would give them an idea how far anthrax spores had spread at contaminated sites.
   

   On Thursday, February 28, a technician at a Texas lab- oratory cut his jaw while shaving. The next day, he began working on some of the spores collected the previous fall from the Amerithrax letters. He was not wearing gloves (in violation of CDC protocol) as he moved vials of spores from a cabinet into a freezer. At some point he touched his face. While workers at labs who regularly handle anthrax speci- mens are usually vaccinated against the disease, none of the forty workers at the Texas lab had been.
   

   Over the next three days, the technician’s shaving cut became larger. He developed a low-grade fever and a swell- ing on his neck. When an unusual skin lesion festered, he went to his doctor, who swabbed the sore. He gave the swab to the technician, who brought it back to the private lab to analyze. A test told him he had developed cutaneous an- thrax. On antibiotics, he spent five days in the hospital re- covering. It was the first known anthrax case in the United States since the anthrax-by-mail attacks.
   

   More than five months after the first envelope from Amerithrax was postmarked in Trenton the FBI finally is- sued new subpoenas to the labs in North America and Eu- rope that had been identified as having live cultures of the same general strain of anthrax used by Amerithrax. The sub- poenas demanded samples from each facility.
   

   The labs were still analyzing the anthrax spores mailed to Leahy. FBI Director Mueller defended the sluggish pace of the Amerithrax investigation. Allegations from some sci- entists that the FBI was fumbling the case were “totally inaccurate,” he said. He had begun his FBI tenure a week before the terror attacks in New York and Washington. “Be-
   

   cause of the unique nature and form, it takes some time. We are going to have to come into court and explain to the jury the process we went through to identify this individual and, if there is a match, the scientific procedure to make that match.” The FBI, he said, had not focused on any group of biodefense laboratories and had not ruled out a terrorist con- nection, though FBI profilers now believed the culprit was not connected to international terrorists.
   

   Mueller dismissed recent comments by scientist Barbara Hatch Rosenberg who contended that the FBI likely knows who Amerithrax is, but is “dragging its feet.” Dr. Rosenberg, a professor at the State University of New York at Purchase and an expert on biological weapons, was a specialist on the treaty banning bioweapons. She told UPI that samples like anthrax posted to researchers must be mailed in three- layered packaging, consisting of sturdy, watertight contain- ers to prevent leakage. “Most, if not all, bags, envelopes, and the like are not acceptable outer shipping containers,” the CDC wrote at the time. Dr. Rosenberg said, “The CDC had given some thought to the prospect anthrax could leak during mailing and certainly they knew [the Daschle letter] was not packaged according to prescription.” The Postal Service’s previous policy, issued in 1999, called for evac- uating the building upon discovery of a suspicious letter. In Dr. Rosenberg’s articles, “Analysis of the Anthrax Attacks,” posted on the Federation of American Scientists website in January and February, she theorized that the FBI knew Amerithrax was an insider with “hands-on experience” and that the number of their suspects was under fifty. In an in- terview reported in
   Salon
   , she said, “This guy knows too much, and knows things the U.S. isn’t very anxious to pub- licize. Therefore, they don’t want to get too close.”
   

   On March 6, the National Academy of Sciences endorsed the Pentagon’s controversial anthrax vaccine as a safe and effective treatment. The NAS said it was effective and safe enough to be used by high-risk people against inhalational anthrax. It presented no higher incidence of adverse reac- tions than other vaccines in common use. The NAS said it was “unlikely” that any natural or bioengineered strain of anthrax could evade the antigen produced by the vaccine
   

   and still produce a toxin lethal to humans. This was a vote of confidence to BioPort Corp., the embattled company that had needed more than three years to bring its manufacturing practices into compliance with the FDA before resuming making vaccine.
   

   On March 21, Theodore J. Gordon, D.C. deputy director for public health assurance, felt they were “nowhere near” ordering a prefumigation of the commercial areas fringing the Brentwood mail hub. The project was still “embryonic.” Thomas G. Day, vice president of engineering for the Postal Service, said the same thing: “If there’s any message I want to give you it is that we’re going to make sure we get it right, so that there is an effective treatment and [Brentwood] is effectively decontaminated. We are absolutely committed to getting this done, but we need to get it done right.” Two days later the grand strategy to cleanse Brentwood was laid. On April 9, intensive lab tests of Amerithrax’s “wispy white powder” demonstrated it followed a recipe commonly used by U.S. scientists. They were narrowing the suspect labs. The FBI refused to name the chemical used to coat the trillions of spores to keep them from clumping together. Pre- viously authorities had disclosed that the anthrax powder contained silica—a chemical used in the U.S. germ warfare program in the 1960s. “The powder’s formulation was not routine,” said one law enforcement official. “Somebody had to have special knowledge and experience to do this.” Months of lab analysis of the anthrax spores suggested that Amerithrax did not merely copy U.S. techniques or those used in the former Soviet Union or Iraq. More than ever the government was convinced that Amerithrax was a U.S. sci- entist with highly specialized training and skills and with access to a government lab. “If anything, this has narrowed
   

   our focus,” said one investigator.
   

   On April 19, an Institute worker tested positive for an- thrax exposure after a researcher on April 8 noticed a bio- logical deposit on a flask inside an anthrax testing lab. This lab was not connected to the FBI Amerithrax inquiry. Sub- sequently, spores were discovered in the hallway and ad- ministrative area despite strict rules on the handling of the agent. The worker, though immunized against anthrax, be-
   

   gan taking antibiotics as a precaution. The Pentagon said, “The presence of the spores appears to be highly localized based on negative results from sampling of surrounding ar- eas.”
   

   The Postal Service gave an informational standup talk to Brentwood workers and updated the decontamination status. Six months after inhaling anthrax spores six mailworkers who’d survived the deadly anthrax attack had yet to make a full recovery. Experts wondered why they were not back to normal. Five of the six experienced memory loss and trouble concentrating, fatigue, and frequent exhaustion that required daily naps.
   

   The day after tests isolated an anthrax spore in material collected for analysis, scholars from the Brookings Institu- tion released a new report. The study, “Protecting the Amer- ican Homeland,” estimated a million people would die if terrorists launched a biological attack that widely dispersed anthrax and other agents. It recommended that the Bush ad- ministration concentrate homeland security efforts on ter- rorist scenarios that have the potential for causing the greatest number of deaths, economic loss, and psychological damage.
   

   Tom Ridge’s national strategy was already devoted to “high consequence” scenarios. But administration officials warned that appraising threats and allocating probabilities is tough. Some terrorist cells are obscure and terrorists fre- quently shift tactics. Since it is impossible to guard against every probable kind of attack, resources should be used to guard against nuclear, chemical, or biological terrorism and conventional large-scale attacks on airports, seaports, nu- clear and chemical plants, and stadiums.
   

   “We really should be focusing on potentially catastrophic attacks, meaning large numbers of casualties or large dam- age to the economy,” said the report’s author Michael E. O’Hanlon. Meanwhile the Department of Health and Human Services continued stockpiling smallpox and anthrax vac- cines.
   

   A widespread biological attack against shopping malls or movie theaters could cost $250 billion. The White House sought $38 billion in the fiscal 2003 budget for homeland
   

   security: over $10 billion for border security, nearly $6 bil- lion to defend against bioterrorism, and over $700 million for new technology—a down payment in a multiyear plan. An emergency spending bill passed in January had added an extra $2.5 billion to President Bush’s biowarfare defense budget. The Brookings scholars considered $45 billion a year closer to the mark.
   

   The Army scientists could not get over how Amerithrax’s mailed anthrax had grown more potent from one letter to the next. Was he making gradual improvements through ex- perimentation, ratcheting up the potency of his germ pow- der? “It could be that the final steps of the processing were done in steps,” a senior government official said. “You take it so far, and take off a bunch. You go further, and take off another bunch.”
   

   So far the measured FBI inquiry had consumed millions of hours in interviews, detectives’ time, and lengthy neighbor- hood sweeps. The detectives still had no idea who was behind the tainted letters. Increasingly, the Bureau looked to science to unravel the mystery. When they learned the exact genome of the strain, the agents could narrow the search for the labo- ratory from which the anthrax sprang. The deadly powder could have been made in any of thousands of biological lab- oratories—with the right starter germs.
   

   The analysis of the contents of the Leahy letter was pro- ceeding with glacial pace. They were learning the science as they went along. The technicians wanted to be positive none of the lightweight, but extremely valuable, evidence was lost, corrupted, or misinterpreted. Authorities said, “We had to assure ourselves that we had a quality program.” A senior Bush administration official expressed sympathy for the FBI because the inquiry had grown so scientifically com- plex. The FBI lacked advisers skilled in the subtleties of germ weapons. “They’re having to review a lot of the initial takes on things,” he said. “There’s an evolving picture. The Bureau has gone back to scratch to invent the science.”
   

   At least the investigators could do deeper analyses be- cause of the relatively large amounts of powder in the Leahy letter. The amount of anthrax inside the other tainted letters was just 0.871 grams, less than a pat of butter. One trillion
   

   spores present in one gram of letter anthrax had been easily contained within a one-ounce (twenty-eight-gram) letter. Such an envelope could theoretically hold a million lethal doses easily dispersed to sleep and wake, hibernate and rein- fect for longer than the life span of a man.
   

   Amerithrax had to have made his anthrax stable and du- rable enough to survive its delivery system and small enough to infect the lungs of his victims. Weaponizing it would have involved nutrient media, perfect temperature, and lots of time. Federal experts investigated whether the anthrax powders had electrostatic charges and chemical coatings meant to increase dispersal, potency, and shelf life. On April 26, the USPS began precautionary random test- ing in the D.C. area and found that seventy-one postal lo- cations showed the presence of
   B. anthracis.
   On April 29, the Office of Personnel Management closed its mailroom after new tests found one anthrax spore in a batch of ma- terial collected for analysis. On May 2, four days of tests began which would prove negative for anthrax. This was the same day anthrax cleanups began at the Wallingford, Con- necticut, facility and there was an anthrax scare in St. Louis. On Tuesday evening, May 7, the Federal Reserve Board detected traces of anthrax spores in twenty pieces of busi- ness and commercial mail. Since October’s attacks, the Fed had processed all its mail in a secure trailer in the courtyard
   

   outside its downtown headquarters.
   

   Every piece of the Fed’s mail was irradiated by the Postal Service before it arrived at the trailer where it was subjected to random testing. Although this procedure kills anthrax spores, U.S. Postal Inspector Daniel L. Mihalko said it does not preclude the possibility that dead spores could produce a positive swab test. Screeners wearing protective suits found more the next morning. False positives had proven fairly common during the anthrax scare, but the twenty let- ters were rushed to the lab for further analysis anyway. Fed spokesman David Skidmore did not know when test results would be available. On May 8, the cleanup contract for Brentwood decontamination was signed, with a goal of fin- ishing within ninety days.