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Authors: Edward Jay Epstein
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anthrax.
My assessment is that the FBI failed to find the perpetrator of the anthrax attack. Indeed, it failed twice. Its first wrong man was Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, whose career was ruined by its 24/7 investigation of him; the second wrong man was Dr. Bruce Ivins, who committed suicide under its relentless pressure. In a case such as the anthrax attack, in which the weapon leaves microscopic traces everywhere, the equivalent of Sherlock Holmes’ dog-that-did-not-bark is the conspicuous absence of evidence. The FBI investigation was possibly the most massive in history in terms of expended man-hours. Consider then what evidence the FBI did not find that would have implicated their final suspect, Dr. Ivins.
First, no traces of anthrax were found in Ivins’ home, car,clothing, garbage, or personal effects, so there is no evidence that Ivins ever removed anthrax from his lab.
Second, none of the dozens of scientists, technicians, and security guards that worked or visited Ivins’ lab, and were relentlessly interviewed by the FBI, ever witnessed him with the apparatus or growing vats necessary to process liquid anthrax (which was stored in a lab flask) into the powdered anthrax used in the attack. Yet to grow and dry this attack anthrax required gallons of media, as well as drying equipment such as a fermentor, which, according to other scientists who worked with him (and whom I interviewed), were not available to Ivins.
Third, the FBI was not able to find tollbooth records, gas purchases, or surveillance-camera evidence that Ivins drove his car to Princeton, or was in Princeton, during the period when the anthrax letters were mailed. If he was there, no one saw him, and he did not leave a trace of his presence.
Finally, the FBI could not trace the copies of the anthrax letters to any photocopying machine available to Ivins (or any other scientist at Fort Detrick). Nor could it find any pre-paid envelopes in Ivins’ home that matched those in which the anthrax letters were mailed. In short, there is no physical evidence actually linking Ivins to the anthrax attack.
Since the science by which the FBI attempted to eliminate all other suspects also turned out to be flawed, according to the exhaustive review by the National Academy of Science panel, it is not certain that the attack anthrax originated at the Fort Detrick lab. It could just as likely have come from the Battelle Memorial Lab in Ohio or the Army’s Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. In fact, the silicon signature in the anthrax points directly to Dugway. The Dugway lab had been making dry anthrax there, using the same strain of anthrax, since the late 1990s to test anthrax-detection devices. The concern here was that Iraq would use anthrax against U.S. forces, so Dugway scientists employed a multi-stage process to mill test anthraxusing a silica-based flow enhancer that was not available at Ivins’ facility at Fort Detrick. As there had been a number of security breaches at Dugway during this period, it is plausible that someone at Dugway stole a minute ampule of anthrax anytime after 1997 and, like any classic espionage operation, delivered it to another party, either foreign or domestic, who used it in the September 2001 attacks.
The lesson to be taken away from this unresolved crime is the vulnerability of even the most massive investigations to a preconception embedded in a behavioral profile. Just weeks after the attack, the FBI had arrived at a “behavioral assessment” pointing to a lone American scientist. It described, as David Willman reports in his 2011 book Mirage Man , a well-educated “single person” with “legitimate access to select biological agents,” who is “stand-offish,” and who prefers not to work in a “group team setting.” It was this assessment that steered the FBI first to Hatfield and then to Ivins. When the FBI’s behavioral science unit was created in 1972, its primary mission was profiling unknown serial killers by
My assessment is that the FBI failed to find the perpetrator of the anthrax attack. Indeed, it failed twice. Its first wrong man was Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, whose career was ruined by its 24/7 investigation of him; the second wrong man was Dr. Bruce Ivins, who committed suicide under its relentless pressure. In a case such as the anthrax attack, in which the weapon leaves microscopic traces everywhere, the equivalent of Sherlock Holmes’ dog-that-did-not-bark is the conspicuous absence of evidence. The FBI investigation was possibly the most massive in history in terms of expended man-hours. Consider then what evidence the FBI did not find that would have implicated their final suspect, Dr. Ivins.
First, no traces of anthrax were found in Ivins’ home, car,clothing, garbage, or personal effects, so there is no evidence that Ivins ever removed anthrax from his lab.
Second, none of the dozens of scientists, technicians, and security guards that worked or visited Ivins’ lab, and were relentlessly interviewed by the FBI, ever witnessed him with the apparatus or growing vats necessary to process liquid anthrax (which was stored in a lab flask) into the powdered anthrax used in the attack. Yet to grow and dry this attack anthrax required gallons of media, as well as drying equipment such as a fermentor, which, according to other scientists who worked with him (and whom I interviewed), were not available to Ivins.
Third, the FBI was not able to find tollbooth records, gas purchases, or surveillance-camera evidence that Ivins drove his car to Princeton, or was in Princeton, during the period when the anthrax letters were mailed. If he was there, no one saw him, and he did not leave a trace of his presence.
Finally, the FBI could not trace the copies of the anthrax letters to any photocopying machine available to Ivins (or any other scientist at Fort Detrick). Nor could it find any pre-paid envelopes in Ivins’ home that matched those in which the anthrax letters were mailed. In short, there is no physical evidence actually linking Ivins to the anthrax attack.
Since the science by which the FBI attempted to eliminate all other suspects also turned out to be flawed, according to the exhaustive review by the National Academy of Science panel, it is not certain that the attack anthrax originated at the Fort Detrick lab. It could just as likely have come from the Battelle Memorial Lab in Ohio or the Army’s Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. In fact, the silicon signature in the anthrax points directly to Dugway. The Dugway lab had been making dry anthrax there, using the same strain of anthrax, since the late 1990s to test anthrax-detection devices. The concern here was that Iraq would use anthrax against U.S. forces, so Dugway scientists employed a multi-stage process to mill test anthraxusing a silica-based flow enhancer that was not available at Ivins’ facility at Fort Detrick. As there had been a number of security breaches at Dugway during this period, it is plausible that someone at Dugway stole a minute ampule of anthrax anytime after 1997 and, like any classic espionage operation, delivered it to another party, either foreign or domestic, who used it in the September 2001 attacks.
The lesson to be taken away from this unresolved crime is the vulnerability of even the most massive investigations to a preconception embedded in a behavioral profile. Just weeks after the attack, the FBI had arrived at a “behavioral assessment” pointing to a lone American scientist. It described, as David Willman reports in his 2011 book Mirage Man , a well-educated “single person” with “legitimate access to select biological agents,” who is “stand-offish,” and who prefers not to work in a “group team setting.” It was this assessment that steered the FBI first to Hatfield and then to Ivins. When the FBI’s behavioral science unit was created in 1972, its primary mission was profiling unknown serial killers by
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