Scientia Press

A top secret Canadian Security Intelligence Service report leaked on August 27, 2004 may provide the missing piece of evidence needed to identify the long elusive Anthrax Mailer of 2001.

While confirmation is still lacking, we now have enough shreds of evidence to piece together a theory of the case that resolves key anomalies. In turn, that theory can point us toward where we might find confirmatory evidence.

According to the article in Canada's National Post, Mohammed Mansour Jabarah, a 22-year old Canadian, told interrogators that he had heard from an assistant of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, that the November 12, 2001 crash of American Airlines Flight #587 in New York was the result of an al Qaeda shoe bomb. The bomber was "Farouk the Tunisian". Newspaper photographs showed him to be Abderraouf Jdey, a 36-year old Montreal-based Canadian of Tunisian origin.

Jdey is one of the seven al Qaeda terrorists listed in the FBI's plea for information from the public in May, 2004. He had emigrated to Canada in 1991, gained citizenship in 1995, and then travelled to Afghanistan where he trained as one of the ten substitutes for the 9/11 attackers. According to KSM, Jdey was slated for pilot training and was to be in the second wave of attacks. Jdey recorded a martyrdom statement in a video later found by American forces in Afghanistan. He returned to Montreal in summer 2001 and was detained while carrying biology textbooks (and evidently released), according to a 2010 Harvard report.

A Theory of the Case

Al Qaeda had a history of interest in biological weapons. There is evidence that the 9/11 attackers had anthrax in their possession during the months preceding September 11, 2001. They were evidently seeking a way to use a cropduster to spread anthrax over an American city. A medical doctor who treated a future hijacker for a skin lesion has stated that the lesion he treated was consistent with one caused by anthrax. A pharmacist reported to FBI that Mohamed Atta, leader of the 9/11 attacks, had sought a remedy for skin irritation on his hands, which were red from the wrists down. An accompanying fellow terrorist sought a remedy for a cough.

If the 9/11 attackers possessed anthrax, they would have had to hand it off to another al Qaeda operative before September 11. Otherwise the precious vials of anthrax, the first and only weapon of mass destruction that al Qaeda had ever possessed, would have been wasted.

But they wouldn't necessarily trust just any al Qaeda operative to safeguard and perform with the anthrax, and perhaps they knew very few of al Qaeda's sleepers in North America anyway. They would want to give the anthrax to an operative they knew and trusted, one who would use it to the best effect.

Abderraouf Jdey appears to have been exactly such a person. He differed markedly from the nine other 9/11 substitutes. He was older, from a different country of origin, with Canadian citizenship, with semi-sleeper status, and with a clear designation as part of the second wave. He had trained in Afghanistan simultaneously with Mohamed Atta. He was well enough educated to have been slated for pilot training. In effect, Jdey can be viewed as the counterpart of Atta, as the leader of the second wave of al Qaeda attacks following 9/11.

And he had studied biology at the University of Montreal in his late twenties. He was the only al Qaeda operative in North America known to have studied biology.

So Jdey was the logical person for Atta to hand off the anthrax to. We can also identify the logical time and place for such a transfer to have occurred.

An especially hard-to-explain anomaly in the hijackers' story has been why Atta and a fellow hijacker travelled from Boston to Portland, Maine on September 10. Taking a feeder flight from Portland to Boston on the morning of September 11 caused Atta nearly to miss his connection, and he and his companion had to pass through security questioning twice rather than once--at a significant added risk of detection.

So Atta must have had a reason to go to Portland that outweighed such risks. The most obvious explanation would be that he had an important meeting on a subject that required face-to-face contact, not just a veiled telephone conversation. A transaction with someone coming from the North, arranged for outside of Boston to lessen the risk of surveillance.

Clearly, Jdey would be a very likely "someone", and handing over the vials of anthrax would furnish a compelling reason for their otherwise risky meeting.

More Anomalies Resolved

If Jdey indeed was the recipient of vials of anthrax in Portland, then subsequent events could have followed this course:

While the 9/11 hijackers had sought access to a cropduster to spread the anthrax over an American city, Jdey presumably saw that receiving training at an American flight school was not in the cards after 9/11. So he had to resort to another method of distributing the anthrax. (Another, perhaps more telling explanation is that it was Atta who had the idea of mailing letters and who provided Jdey with a mailing list of targets. Seeking revenge against specific individuals and organizations seems to have been a very characteristic personality trait of Atta.)

Jdey decided to mail the anthrax. The first mailings took place in September soon after the 9/11 attacks. The second mailings, to Senators Daschle and Leahy, occurred in October and included high-quality anthrax. Driving hundreds of miles from Montreal to Trenton to mail the letters made sense because it perfectly disguised Jdey's Canadian base. The presumed trip to Portland indicates that such a long cross-border drive to reduce the likelihood of surveillance was a modus operandi of Jdey.

The anthrax letters do not show any obvious Gallicisms that would betray that they were from a fluent French-speaker, which Jdey presumably was. But they are consistent with a person who has acquired English as a second language, and there is nothing in them that is inconsistent with Jdey as author. In fact, Jdey is a highly believable author of the anthrax letters. Various objections that have been raised to al Qaeda authorship of the letters can be readily met. For instance, the concept of warning the target that he/she was being attacked was standard al Qaeda procedure in keeping with an injunction from the Prophet Mohammed.

One of the main characteristics or anomalies of the Anthrax Mailer case has been how remarkably elusive the Mailer was both during his period of activity in autumn, 2001 and thereafter. Despite a massive FBI investigation backed by hundreds of thousands of tips from the American public, the Mailer has succeeded in hiding his tracks. Being based in Canada, contrary to every expectation, would nicely explain his elusiveness during his period of activity.

The recently leaked Canadian intelligence report from 2002 provides a plausible explanation for the lack of information about Jdey's whereabouts since then (as well as for the cessation of the anthrax mailings): Jdey committed suicide on Flight #587 on November 12, 2001.

Why might Jdey be a likely candidate to do this, quite aside from the Jabarah account?

If he was indeed the Anthrax Mailer, he was a hard-headed man of action. Instead of dreaming about impractical schemes of sowing the anthrax in the skies above a city, he realized that he had to use it before being captured. And in a way (mailing letters) that would minimize the possibility of arrest, which would keep him from fulfilling his pledge to commit suicide in an attack on the enemy. This tactic also enabled him to target the hated Senator Leahy, author of the legislation permitting "renditions" of suspected terrorists to their countries of origin, where they were subjected to torture. (These considerations explain another anomaly--that al Qaeda would use its first weapon of mass destruction in a manner unlikely to cause mass casualties.)

In early November, 2001, Jdey recognized that--as the Anthrax Mailer--he was likely to be arrested at any moment, so he would do well to act on his pledge of martyrdom by turning himself into a shoebomber. The Canadian intelligence report has him leaving Canada in November, though the date is not provided. On November 12 he showed up at Kennedy International Airport and boarded Flight #587. No Canadian passport holders are listed on the final passenger list of Flight #587.

Possessor of many aliases, Jdey presumably had several other passports. A number of the passengers were plausibly francophones; perhaps one of them was Jdey.

The cessation of the mailings after October, 2001 after their initial success is another anomaly neatly explained by this account. Yet another anomaly, of course, is that Flight #587 disintegrated and crashed for no apparent reason.

Seeking Confirmation

The scenario sketched out above has the virtue of conforming to the evidence available in a logical manner. Three main perceptions support it: 1) it would powerfully explain Atta's mysterious Portland trip; 2) it would show why the Mailer has proven so elusive and why the mailings ceased (Jdey might also not have revealed to any other al Qaeda operatives that he had the anthrax, so no one would know that he had been the Mailer once he committed suicide); and 3) it fits very well the characteristics that caused Jdey to stand out among the substitute hijackers, and indeed that differentiated him from the actual hijackers as well.

Of course, there are major gaps in the evidence. The putative Portland meeting may never have occurred. The cause of the crash of Flight #587 remains controversial. According to the official inquiry, there was no evidence of an explosion on board. Accounts of eyewitnesses from the ground, however, are highly consistent with a shoe bomb explosion. The explosion could have been small enough to be masked by wake turbulence from the preceding JAL aircraft. The co-pilot's frantic manipulation of the rudder would thus have been a hopeless attempt to rescue a doomed aircraft.

We don't know when or how Jdey crossed the border. We have no proof that he ever was in Trenton. It is also possible that Atta left a vial of anthrax behind in Florida with an al Qaeda sleeper who then mailed several anthrax letters, including the one that killed photoeditor Bob Stevens. In short, we don't know a lot that we need to know.

So it is necessary to seek evidence that would confirm, refute, or modify this account. Here are some ways to do so:

• Review the security videos from Kennedy International Airport.
• See if the ticket agents recognize Jdey's photo.
• Check the backgrounds of the likely suspects from the final passenger list.
• Check both Canadian and U.S. border crossing and airport records.
• Test Jdey's apartment for anthrax.
• Test any vehicles he owned or rented for anthrax.
• Interrogate al Qaeda detainees regarding Jdey, shoebombs, and anthrax. Richard Reid, whose unsuccessful shoebombing attempt occurred just one month after the Flight #587 crash, might know something relevant.
• Hunt through Jdey's background. He was educated in Tunisia as a architectural engineer, then studied geology at the University of Montreal. What kind of biology did he study in Montreal? Or did he learn about biowarfare in Afghanistan? Did he hold any subsequent job? Had he served in the Tunisian police or army? What kind of a person was he?
• Publicize Jdey and his photo more widely than at present, in hopes of finding further evidence from the public.

 

The publicly available evidence suggests that Abderraouf Jdey brought down Flight #587 with a shoebomb.

Was he also the Anthrax Mailer? Evidence and logic make him the leading suspect.

*****

 

A Critical Stage

The original version of this article was submitted to FBI in September, 2004. Within a few days of its submission, security for at least some international flights was intensified and included special doublechecking of shoes. On October 22, 2004 the judge in the Steven Hatfill, M.D. suit said that FBI had told him that its investigation had reached "a critical stage." Around this time FBI stopped providing regular briefings on the investigation to the targets and relatives of victims of the anthrax mailings. Also, the information that Abderraouf Jdey had studied biology at the University of Montreal was added to his FBI public profile after September, 2004; the original version of the above article had only suggested that Jdey might have had a pertinent education such as in chemical engineering. In other words, in a sense, the Jdey theory proved predictive. (Subsequently, FBI removed detailed information about Jdey from its Websites, including the reference to his study of biology.)

On April 20, 2005, the U.S. Government announced a new reward of up to $5 million for information on Jdey.

An isolated report that Jdey entered Turkey in 2002 is evidence contrary to the above account, but it could readily be explained by the use of an altered passport by another al Qaeda operative. Also, as a suicide pledger, Jdey was committed to follow the example of his 9/11 comrades. Failing to do so would have earned him the contempt of his peers. Besides, he would have known that using his real passport in the post-9/11 era was too risky. So this Turkish report merits plenty of skepticism.

On May 16, 2005 this writer submitted a Freedom of Information Act to FBI requesting its documentation on Abderraouf Jdey. In a letter dated May 27, 2005 FBI stated that it would require "proof of death" before commencing processing of the request. Otherwise, it wrote, "disclosure of law enforcement records or information about another person is considered an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy."

Although the above article couches its argument in terms of a search for conclusive proof, in the circumstances of a case where the leading suspect appears to have committed suicide, conclusive proof may never emerge. Therefore, it may be necessary to shift the standard of proof to "preponderance of the evidence". It is very possible that FBI has sufficient evidence for a reasonable person to conclude that, more likely than not, Jdey was the Anthrax Mailer. Indeed, some might conclude that simply on the basis of the evidence and arguments in this article.

All other theories of the case (including FBI's weak, 100% circumstantial one) face the severe handicap of having to provide plausible explanations for anomalies that this theory persuasively resolves, including above all the outstanding anomaly of Atta's trip to Portland, Maine.  FBI's theory provides no plausible explanations for some of these anomalies and only feeble ones for others.  In addition, FBI's claim to have cleared all those with access to the anthrax other than Bruce Ivins does not account for the possibility of theft of the anthrax, as discussed below. 

For the sake of argument, one could still assume that Jdey was not the Mailer. This would make the evidence and logical connections adduced in the discussion above a mere string of coincidences. Atta's trip to Portland, Jdey's study of biology, his apparent role as leader of the Second Wave, the ways in which he stood out from the hijackers and their substitutes, his high believability as the author of the anthrax letters, the perfect match in regard to timing, the compelling reasons for his elusiveness, the account of Mohammed Mansour Jabarah--all these would become sheer happenstance.

Hard to believe.

So it is reasonable to think that the answer to "Was Abderraouf Jdey the Anthrax Mailer?" is: more likely than not. Or rather: much more likely than not.

*****

 

DARPA's Experiment

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 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.

Suppression of Evidence

As for the FBI investigation, one can surmise that FBI found enough further evidence in 2004 successfully to identify Jdey as the Anthrax Mailer and shoebomber of Flight #587.  But this finding (to which only a tiny number were privy) would have been exceptionally embarrassing to both FBI Director Robert Mueller and President George W. Bush.  At a time of the highest alert, the Bureau and the rest of the U.S. Government had failed to stop an al Qaeda operative, whose whereabouts were known and who had even been detained, from perpetrating two major attacks. 

It is also possible that Mueller and Bush had previously covered up the evidence that Flight #587 had been brought down by a terrorist shoebomb.  At any rate, via Mueller's "briefings" of the President on the anthrax case, they seem to have conspired to suppress all evidence regarding Jdey and to find some other suspect, which led eventually to the of necessity invalid case against Bruce Ivins. 

For further information and analysis regarding the 2001 anthrax mailings, see Intriguing Anomalies: An Introduction to Scientific Detective Work; Leading Theories of the Anthrax Mailings Case; Who Was the Real Anthrax Mailer?; "The Anthrax Mailings Can't Have Been al Qaeda"; FBI v. Bruce Ivins:  The Missing Pieces; and Did Ivins Prepare the Anthrax for DARPA?. 

---

Kenneth J. Dillon is an historian and former Department of State intelligence analyst.  See the biosketch at http://scientiapress.com/aboutus .