Scientia Press

As readers of Was Abderraouf Jdey the Anthrax Mailer? will appreciate, more likely than not Canadian al Qaeda operative Jdey was indeed the person who mailed the anthrax letters of 2001.  But we must ask:  How did al Qaeda gain access to the anthrax? 

According to attorney Ross Getman, an expert on al Qaeda's biowarfare program, it had opportunities at several university laboratories, most prominently George Mason University. (See the graphics summarizing his findings.)

In this writer's opinion, going beyond the conclusions of Getman, the most likely route was via a collaborative biodefense research project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) involving Advanced Biosystems, Inc. and what would become George Mason University's National Center for Biodefense and Infectious Diseases. At GMU's Manassas, Virginia facility, Islamic ideologue Ali Al-Timimi, later imprisoned for recruiting American Muslims to fight U.S. forces in Afghanistan, was a graduate student in computational biology with an office around the corner from that of Charles Bailey, Vice President of Advanced Biosystems and former deputy commander of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland.  (Here is a floor plan of Discovery Hall at GMU showing the close proximity of Al-Timimi's office to Bailey's.)

The project was using an avirulent Delta strain of anthrax from NIH.  However, Bailey may have been the "former deputy commander" who was one of FBI's ultimate four main suspects--presumably meaning that he had obtained a sample of virulent anthrax from Bruce Ivins, whose former boss he was.

Ivins seems also to have been working on a DARPA anthrax project. 

DARPA  would have wished to devise countermeasures to the alarming technological innovations of the Soviet biowarfare program learned from Ken Alibek, former deputy director of the program, and other defectors (this explanations appears far more likely than that the U.S. Government itself was running an offensive bioweapons program; biowarfare is antithetical to U.S. interests, whereas it was a major component of Soviet weapons development and strategy).   One of these innovations appears to have been a special high-quality anthrax.  To devise countermeasures, DARPA would have required both high-quality and standard dried anthrax to identify through comparison testing the differences in dispersion and lethality caused by the special properties of the high-quality type.

FBI's theory of the case treats the problem of preparing the high-quality anthrax as one of merely purifying and drying spores.  But the anthrax in the senators' letters in addition possessed remarkable special characteristics.  It had a high silicon content--reportedly 1.45% in the Leahy letter and possibly higher in the Daschle one, far above natural background levels.  And the crude anthrax in the letter to the New York Post had a much higher level still.  While the silicon collected in the spore coat inside the exosporium, the spores resisted clumping, suggesting the possibility that the presence of the silicon in the coat, changes in electrical or chemical properties caused by the uptake of the silicon, or a hard-to-detect silicon monolayer on the exosporium had influenced the interaction of the spores.   The anthrax also had much smaller spores (1.5-3 microns in diameter) than known U.S. and Soviet anthrax; and the spores were of a fairly uniform size.  In addition, the spores  possessed unusual physical and chemical properties that permitted them spontaneously to waft upward individually. 

These characteristics suggest that the formula for preparing them was the result of years of effort by a team of expert Soviet scientists with complementary skills.  In effect, this was a high-technology product.  Any individual scientist, no matter how skilful, would have had an exceedingly hard time creating this special formulation of high-quality anthrax--unless he possessed detailed instructions.  Trying to add these special properties from scratch on one's own in a matter of days or weeks, without proper equipment and while hiding one's activities from colleagues, would represent an impossible task. 

Thus the special characteristics of the high-quality anthrax constitute a fatal flaw in FBI's theory of the case.  FBI's theory is not just open to doubt; it cannot possibly be true.

How might Ivins have gained access to the powdered anthrax subsequently used in the letters?

DARPA may have authorized him to prepare dried samples at a facility like Southern Research Institute (SRI) in Frederick that presumably had considerably more appropriate equipment than was available at USAMRIID as well as a Biosafety Level 3 facility. Patricia F. Fellows, Ivins's former close collaborator at USAMRIID who later moved to SRI, appears to have been the only one of his close associates who thought that he was the Mailer--perhaps because she knew that he had had access at SRI to the anthrax that showed up in the letters. 

David Franz, commander of USAMRIID from 1995 to1998, then retired and became head of the Chemical and Biological Defense Division of SRI until around 2003.  Neither Franz nor the current top management of SRI responds to inquiries about pre-9/11 work on virulent anthrax at SRI.  SRI was also subcontractor with Hadron/Advanced Biosystems, the partner with GMU on the DARPA anthrax contract; SRI's role was to perform testing.

Therefore, although confirmatory evidence is lacking, SRI emerges as the most likely place for the high-quality anthrax in the letters to the senators to have been prepared; and propinquity, seniority, expertise, custodianship of flask RMR-1029, and working relationship with DARPA would make Ivins the most likely preparer.    

Alternatively, and less likely, DARPA may have arranged for the two grades of anthrax to be prepared elsewhere, then provided them to SRI, where Ivins might have been involved in experiments.

Either way, Ivins could have brought samples back to his lab at USAMRIID for further investigation.  This would explain why, subsequent to the anthrax mailings, he twice swabbed down his lab without authorization.  He could also have provided samples, perhaps the same ones, to Bailey with or without DARPA's authorization.  

At GMU, Bailey has remained silent and refers questioners to a university lawyer.

Bailey filed a patent application in March, 2001 along with co-principal investigator on the  DARPA project Ken Alibek on a method for treating biological samples such as anthrax spores. This method can be characterized as a primarily Soviet technique for preparing cells, with wide commercial potential. It included repeated references to silica. 

Amid lax laboratory security, Al-Timimi seems to have stolen from an unlocked refrigerator small amounts of anthrax of both kinds--standard RMR-1029 dried anthrax and the various forms of the high-quality or, in the New York Post case, at least high-silica version.  Al-Timimi then provided the anthrax to Mohamed Atta.  

An important implication of this is that al Qaeda in Afghanistan or elsewhere had nothing to do with the anthrax mailings.  The attacks were a 100% North American al Qaeda operation.  Nor did al Qaeda require any sophistication to prepare the anthrax; all Al-Timimi had to know was that these vials contained virulent anthrax.  The transmission route was simple and rather short:  Ivins to Bailey to Al-Timimi to Atta to Jdey.  Moreover, it seems quite likely that Jdey did not inform his colleagues in Canada that he had obtained or used the anthrax, so once he committed suicide no one would know that he was the Mailer. 

Thus it appears that:

--the high-quality anthrax was DARPA's replica of a secret Soviet technology, to be comparison-tested against the standard anthrax, which explains why the letters contained standard anthrax and the various high-quality or high-silica kinds, with the standard anthrax serving as a control.  The attacks therefore revealed a Soviet (and presumably current Russian) anthrax weapon intended for the lungs of those Americans who would survive a nuclear attack;

--Al Qaeda conducted DARPA's experiment on human subjects;

--Bruce Ivins sought to hide his role as either the preparer of the high-quality anthrax or, less likely, as a handler of it because he sensed that, if he admitted to having had access to it or if FBI found evidence that he had had it, FBI would never believe that he hadn't mailed it.  In turn, the FBI investigators interpreted his behavior as betraying guilt.  Ivins was also constrained by the secrecy attached to the DARPA project;

--the Department of Defense and SRI may have concealed highly relevant information from FBI investigators, allowing them to pursue their erroneous theory of the case; and they might have destroyed the remaining high-quality anthrax after the attacks; and

--the anthrax mailings--carried out for al Qaeda by a Canadian citizen of Tunisian origin based in Montreal and using anthrax prepared for DARPA on a Soviet model and prepared or handled by a key U.S. Army scientist, then stolen by an American al Qaeda sympathizer--were an inextricable mixture of foreign and domestic elements.

*****

See also FBI v. Bruce Ivins:  The Missing Pieces.