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FBI Vise Tortured Anthrax Suspect

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The New York Times

Published: August 2, 2008

Updated: 08/02/2008 01:11 am

WASHINGTON - After four years pursuing one former Army scientist on a costly false trail, FBI agents investigating the deadly anthrax letters of 2001 finally zeroed in last year on a different suspect: another Army scientist from the same biodefense research center at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md.

During the past 18 months, even as the government battled a lawsuit filed by the first scientist, Steven J. Hatfill, investigators built a case against the second, Bruce E. Ivins, a highly respected microbiologist who had worked for many years to design a better anthrax vaccine.

Last weekend, after learning that federal prosecutors were preparing to indict him on murder charges, Ivins, a 62-year-old father of two, took an overdose of Tylenol with codeine. He died in a Frederick hospital Tuesday, leaving behind a grieving family and uncertainty about whether the anthrax mystery had finally been solved.

The apparent suicide of Ivins, a Red Cross volunteer and amateur juggler who had won the Defense Department's highest civilian award in 2003, was a dramatic turn in one of the largest criminal investigations in the nation's history. The attack, the only major act of bioterrorism on U.S. soil, came in the jittery aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. It killed five people, including one in Boca Raton, sickened 17 others and set off a wave of panic.

In the early days after the letter attacks, in September and October 2001, Ivins joined about 90 of his colleagues at the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in a round-the-clock laboratory push to test thousands of samples of suspect powder to see whether they were anthrax. Later, in April 2002, he came under scrutiny in an Army investigation of a leak of potentially deadly anthrax spores outside a sealed-off lab at Fort Detrick. He later admitted he had discovered the leak but not reported it.

Whether the focus on Ivins had resolved the case of the anthrax letters was unclear. A federal law enforcement official said that Ivins had been regarded as a strong suspect and that agents had been nearing an arrest, and a lawyer familiar with the investigation said he thought that prosecutors had planned to charge only Ivins. The link between Ivins' suicide and the federal investigation was first reported Friday in The Los Angeles Times.

The FBI declined Friday to disclose its case against Ivins, noting that evidence is under court seal as part of a grand jury investigation. Officials said they were briefing the victims of the anthrax letters - those who recovered, as well as family members of those who died - and would need to go to court to have evidence unsealed before it could even be summarized for the public.

Ivins' attorney since May 2007, Paul F. Kemp, insisted that Ivins was innocent and had been driven to suicide by false suspicions.

"For six years, Dr. Ivins fully cooperated with that investigation, assisting the government in every way that was asked of him," Kemp said in a written statement, calling the microbiologist "a world-renowned and highly decorated scientist who served his country for over 33 years with the Department of the Army."

"We assert his innocence in these killings and would have established that at trial," Kemp said. "The relentless pressure of accusation and innuendo takes its toll in different ways on different people, as has already been seen in this investigation."

Kemp was referring to the case of Hatfill, who was the focus of intensive FBI and news media attention in the case beginning in mid-2002 and received a $4.6 million settlement from the government in June to settle a lawsuit accusing the FBI and the Justice Department of destroying his career and personal life with leaks.

Whatever the cause of his suicide, Ivins had been behaving bizarrely in the weeks before his death. He was hospitalized briefly for depression and, according to a complaint filed with the police, threatened to kill a social worker who had treated him in group therapy, among others, in rants referring to his expectation that he would be charged with five counts of capital murder.

"It's out of character," said Norman M. Covert, a former spokesman and historian for the Army biodefense center who served with Ivins on an animal-care committee. "But if the FBI was really leaning on him, what a tremendous load that was on him."

Investigators in the huge inquiry traveled to many countries and by late 2006 had conducted 9,100 interviews, sent out 6,000 grand jury subpoenas and conducted 67 searches, the FBI said. The prime focus steadily narrowed: first to the Army infectious diseases laboratories, apparently linked to the letters by genetic analysis, then to Hatfill, a medical doctor who had become a bioterrorism consultant, and finally to Ivins, who worked in the same building as Hatfill and lived two blocks away outside the gates to Fort Detrick.

Two puzzles have haunted investigators from the beginning: the motive of the perpetrator and his skills. Because the notes in some of the letters mailed to news media and two U.S. senators included radical Islamist rhetoric, investigators initially thought the letters might have been sent by al-Qaida.

However, the FBI quickly narrowed its main focus on a different profile: a disgruntled American scientist or technician, perhaps one specializing in biodefense, who wanted to raise an alarm about bioterrorism.

The other puzzle involved the skills necessary to produce the high-quality aerosol powder contained in the letters addressed to the senators, Tom Daschle, D-S.D., and Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt.

Scientists familiar with germ warfare said there was no evidence that Ivins, although a vaccine expert with easy access to the most dangerous forms of anthrax, had the skills to turn the pathogen into an inhalable powder.

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