Anthrax War. Bob Coen
before he died. Eight days after that, the FBI announced that Ivins was the man they had been hunting for seven years—the fiend who in the weeks after 9/11 put a highly lethal strain of powdered anthrax in sealed envelopes and sent it through the US mail to Capitol Hill, the network news and a supermarket tabloid, killing five random Americans along the way. Television crews flocked to Fort Detrick; daycare in the Ivinses’ house was suspended.
It was a major development in a case that, for most of America, had faded from memory. But for the FBI, burned by bungles and false accusations in the hunt for the anthrax killer, Ivins needed to be more than a break—he needed to be a closer.
“We regret that we will not have the opportunity to present evidence to the jury,” said US Attorney Jeffrey Taylor at a news conference meant to slam the door shut on an investigation that had cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.
But the bombshell failed to level the many doubts raised during seven years of “Amerithrax,” the government’s name for what it called one of the largest and most complex investigations in the history of US law enforcement. Indeed, the government’s insinuation that the dead man’s guilt was the cause of his death was met with instant incredulity and demands to see the evidence Taylor had alluded to. Much of the skepticism surrounding the Ivins revelation was the deserved response to an investigation that had spent valuable time and resources on a false lead that earlier forced a $5.8 million payout to a wronged man. There was also a clear lack of confidence from the scientific community, which even after a four-hour briefing by the FBI and consulting scientists on the methods used to trace the murder weapon to Bruce Ivins’ lab counter, was divided on the forensics.
Overriding questionable science and general antagonism towards the FBI probe was the sense that this latest suspect was a product of the bureau’s growing desperation to close the case; that time had run out; and that in pinning the anthrax attack on Ivins, investigators had themselves adopted the cynical mantra that the outcome was “good enough for government work.” Because no matter how obscure the mysterious scientist appeared to be when he dropped into a late summer news cycle, and no matter how often the FBI spokespeople repeated a scenario in which the suspect had killed himself only when the bureau was days away from an indictment, in fact, Bruce Ivins had been near the radar throughout the investigation.
In October 2001, Ivins was among a select group of experts given a viewing of the anthrax powder sent in an anonymous letter to Senator Tom Daschle. He reportedly marveled at its sophisticated properties. He was among the group of ninety Fort Detrick scientists tasked by the FBI in the following months to analyze the thousands of copycat powders running amok in the mail system. A year later, he was among a group of local Red Cross volunteers who assisted divers looking for discarded contaminants and equipment in a lake not far from Fort Detrick; and for the following six years, right up to the point when he became the Feds’ primary suspect, Ivins continued to pass on samples, suggestions and suspicions of his own to investigating officials.
Beyond his physical presence in the labyrinthine investigation, Ivins left other red flags for the Amerithrax investigators: manic e-mails evidencing his unstable mental health; a stash of unmailed letters to congressmen and media outlets; reported outbursts and homicidal threats at his AA meetings. Bruce Ivins, on paper and in fact, was a loose cannon and a stranger neither to anthrax nor to the Amerithrax investigation. So why did it take seven years for this noose to close?
The answer, according to the FBI probe, was in the science. The case against Ivins was circumstantial, but it did have going for it the enticement of cutting-edge microbial forensics involving genetic sequencing not even available until 2005. Only after sequencing more than a thousand different strains, carried out by genomic programs across the country, was the murder weapon identified: a four-mutation blend of multiple anthrax samples that apparently had been prepared at the government’s testing site at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah before being shipped to Fort Detrick in Maryland a decade earlier. The blend, coded RMR-1029, was said to have a unique genomic “fingerprint” that could be traced to a “sole creator and custodian.” Bruce Ivins, concluded the FBI in early 2007, was that unique individual.
But this was no smoking gun. Yes, Ivins had custody of the lethal blend ten years earlier, but since then RMR-1029 had been distributed to at least 100 other scientists in two dozen labs in a handful of countries, according to the Feds’ own estimation. Independent experts wanted to see the data that had ruled out other strains and other anthrax handlers. And they wanted to know how the bureau could be sure that the blend Ivins had allegedly concocted had not been replicated elsewhere by another rogue scientist.
Because the FBI’s Quantico facilities are not authorized to work with biohazardous material, the forensic investigation had been farmed out to reputable microbiologists at labs throughout the US. The bureau called a press briefing on August 18, 2008, three weeks after Ivins’ death, to quell a rising tide of incredulity among the citizenry. Some of the scientists who played lead roles in the sequencing work found themselves hauled before journalists at the FBI’s headquarters in the J. Edgar Hoover Building to help put the FBI indictment to rest along with Ivins himself. But even the experts, who had themselves been kept in the semi-dark about the true purpose of their work until the press briefing identifying Ivins as the anthrax murderer, were unable to provide definitive answers, or even complete unanimity, on the scenarios that could have ended with RMR-1029 in five envelopes in a New Jersey mailbox.
That day, with questions swirling about Ivins, additives, genomics and, particularly, the investigation’s methodology, even the FBI’s own bioweapon specialist had to acknowledge the obvious—that the case was not airtight. “There will always be a spore on the grassy knoll,” concluded Dr. Vahid Majidi of the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate. With that, he rolled out the red carpet for conspiracy and gave the journalists their headline for the day.
Indeed, paranoia had taken on epic proportions among the bioweapon scientific community in the Amerithrax years. Once the FBI seemed determined to prove in late 2001 that the deadly anthrax most probably had its origins in an American lab and not in some jihadi cave in Afghanistan, Fort Detrick ceased to be a relaxed workplace. By then, 30,000 members of the American Society for Microbiology had received a letter from the Feds, alerting them that “it is very likely that one or more of you know” the anthrax killer. As speculation swirled that only a military lab could have produced the apparently “weaponized” anthrax, Fort Detrick became a Janus-faced hub—at once suspect and expert for the FBI probe. As more and more scientists were drawn into the investigation on a highly secretive, need-to-know-basis, the environment became tenser. There was finger pointing, there was terseness, there were relationships terminated on the advice of lawyers.
Ivins himself reportedly offered up names to the bureau—coworkers he posited as potential suspects. When scientists from Fort Detrick were called to testify before a grand jury they could not be sure whether they were witnesses or suspects. It made for an unpleasant working environment, this failure of investigators to clarify the positions of the various researchers involved. By keeping these relationships to the investigation opaque, the FBI hoped to protect the bureau from the fallout of having an adviser turn out to be a perpetrator. In the end, it didn’t work.
As it became clear to Ivins in late 2007 that he had become the Feds’ primary suspect, he reportedly turned up the crazy. According to the FBI narrative, he was drinking heavily, stalking his therapist, telling his AA group that he had a list of witnesses he planned to kill. He bought weapons and ammo and hid them in his house. He spent a week in a psych ward and when he came home, he killed himself. The FBI spun this tale into closure. They said they were days from an indictment. But that Ivins beat them to it.
Anthrax was in the headlines again for about a week. The media speculated, and the public recalled an anxious time years ago. Then they both turned the dial—there were Olympic gold medals to be won in Beijing and higher-stakes games to be played in the Caucasus, where fighting in a mountainous enclave between Russians and Georgians promised to bring back the Cold War. But in a small studio office with a river’s edge view of the post-9/11 New York skyline, two veteran journalists had a moment of deeper ambivalence. Bob Coen and Eric Nadler were four years into their own investigation; they were working on a documentary on the dangers posed by today’s biological