After years of forensic examination, the FBI concluded that the anthrax used in a series of postal attacks almost seven years ago had such a unique scientific signature it could only have come from a single flask controlled by government scientist Bruce Ivins, according to newly unsealed government documents. The flask, known as RMR-1029, was a persuasive piece of evidence convincing prosecutors that he was the principal and, officials say, the sole perpetrator of the attacks.
Ivins, who worked at a government lab at Fort Detrick, Md., until he committed suicide last week, is depicted in the documents as secretive and obsessive and suffering from long-term mental illness. Even so, much of the evidence laid out by the FBI in thousands of pages appears to be circumstantial.
For instance, e-mails written by Ivins after the attacks of September 11, 2001, appear to match the childish screeds in the anthrax-laded letters. And around the time that the anthrax letters were mailed from Princeton, N.J., Ivins began working late at night and, investigators believe, was taking long late-night drives.
According to the documents, which the chief federal district judge in Washington, D.C., ordered to be unsealed today, the FBI had been dealing with Ivins, a senior biological weapons researcher, since shortly after the first anthrax postal attack was reported. Initially Ivins, an expert in anthrax vaccines, was regarded by investigators as a potential collaborator and source of information. But last year, investigators began to focus on him as a suspect. His lawyer has said Ivins had no part in the attacks.
E-mails written by Ivins to a friend between April 2000 and December 2001 showed increasing mental stress. According to an FBI affidavit, in an e-mail sent Sept. 26, 2001—a couple of weeks after the first anthrax letters were mailed—Ivins wrote to his friend that Osama bin Laden "has just decreed death to all Jews and all Americans." FBI investigators noted the language was similar to what was used in the anthrax letters postmarked two weeks later, warning "DEATH TO AMERICA" and "DEATH TO ISRAEL."
According to the FBI reports, Ivins's normal working hours were 7:30 a.m. to 4:45 p.m., spent in a laboratory especially equipped for bio-weapons research known as Suite B3. Periodically, according to the FBI, he would return in the evenings, presumably to check on experiments. Beginning in mid-August 2001, however, the FBI noted what it called a "spike" in his evening access to the B3 suite. Immediately before letters containing anthrax were sent to the NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw and the New York Post around Sept. 18, 2001 (the postmark date), the FBI established that Ivins had spent unusually long night hours in his lab.
On Sept. 14, the FBI says, he spent from 8:54 p.m. until 12:22 a.m. at the lab; the next day, a Saturday, he spent from 8:05 p.m. until 11:59 p.m. in the lab, and the following day, a Sunday, he spent from 6:38 p.m. to 9:52 p.m. at the lab. The FBI documents say that Ivins established a similar pattern of late-night visits to his lab during the weekdays and weekend right before Oct. 9, 2001, the day that anthrax letters to Sens. Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy were postmarked.
The FBI reports say that during the course of the investigation, Ivins was asked by the FBI to provide various anthrax samples for use in the inquiry. Samples he submitted to the bureau in 2002 turned out to be "unusable" due to Ivins's alleged "failure to follow" rules regarding the samples. The bureau later confronted Ivins about his actions, but he denied there was anything irregular in his behavior. Investigators now regard Ivins actions as evidence that he was trying to throw them off his trail.
Much of the other evidence against Ivins is even more circumstantial, though at a Justice Department press conference today, government officials said they believe that as a whole it demonstrates Ivins's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
According to the government's dossier, scientific analysis indicates that the anthrax used in the attacks came from a flask whose "sole custodian" had been Ivins since the anthrax strain was first grown in 1997. At the press conference, officials said that Ivins had total control over who had access to the contents of the flask. They also said that they had investigated everyone else who might have had access to the flask's contents and ruled them out as suspects.
Investigators noted pointedly that Ivins also had access to a lyophillizer—or freeze-drying machine—which the attacker used to convert the normally wet pathogen into a dry powdered form that was likely to be more deadly and effective in postal attacks.
What Ivins's motive might have been remains unclear. The government account suggests that the dead man's bizarre obsessions and serious long-term mental illness at least partly explain his actions. The unsealed FBI reports confirm that investigators established that Ivins had been fixated, perhaps since his own university days, with Kappa Kappa Gamma, a college sorority whose Princeton chapter was located 60 feet away from a mail box where some of the anthrax attack letters were posted. At today's press conference, however, investigators acknowledged that they had no piece of specific evidence—such as a gasoline receipt—which establishes conclusively Ivins's presence near the Princeton mailbox around the time the anthrax letters were mailed.
The FBI says it also discovered that over the past 24 years, Ivins was "known to have used at least two Post Office Boxes to communicate with members of the public, to pursue obsessions and possibly engage in the unauthorized use of another person's name." The Bureau said its investigation also demonstrated that the post office where Ivins maintained his post office boxes was a branch of the main post office in Frederick, Md., which had carried a specific kind of envelope used in the attacker's deadly anthrax shipments.
At Wednesday's press conference, Jeff Taylor, the chief federal prosecutor for the District of Columbia, said that last week, before Ivins's suicide, the government had scheduled a meeting with Ivins's lawyers to present an outline of the evidence they had collected against him. But even though Ivins was under what officials described as 24-hour surveillance, he still managed to hide himself away and acquire enough deadly drugs to commit suicide.
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