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government's struggle to deal quickly with an unsettling and unfamiliar threat. At an Oct. 29,2001, White House press briefing, Maj. Gen. John S. Parker, thencommanding general of the Army's Medical Research & Materiel Command at Fort Detrick, said silica had been found in the Daschle letter. Tom Ridge, then-director of the White House Office of Homeland Security, at a briefing a few days earlier said a binding agent had been used to make the anthrax powders. As one of the former government officials tells C&EN, "Those judgments were premature and frankly wrong." At the height of the attacks, top government officials with no scientific background received briefings from people who also were not scientists, and "the nuances got lost," he explains.
the attack material is really quite simple, one of the former government officials says. When the attacks occurred, "there was no systematic methodology in place to evaluate a biological powder forensically." Initially, he says, the studies were "done on the fly." And quite frankly, he says, "a lot of people didn't know what they were looking for. "The pace of the forensic investigation
ground to a halt," this official says, "because there was not a lot of available expertise in the scientific toolbox." Much of the material from the Daschle letter was consumed by destructive tests that produced little useful information, the official says. The government was understandably reluctant to proceed with tests on the Leahy powder until a validated test-
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SOMETIMES scientists misspoke as well, as was the case with the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. AFIP studied the anthrax powder from the Daschle letter using energy dispersive X-ray spectrometry, and a top AFIP scientist, Florabell G. Mullick, reported the presence of silica in an AFIP newsletter. Yet, the spectrum AFIP released shows a peak for the element silicon, not silicon dioxide (silica). Harvard University molecular biologist Matthew S. Meselson, who has consulted for the FBI on the anthrax probe, dismisses these early statements as misunderstandings or misinterpretations of the scientific studies conducted on the Daschle powder. "I don't know of anybody with spore expertise who actually worked on the stuff who said the spores were coated," he says. The FBI has never publicly claimed the spores were coated with silica and, in fact, told members of Congress at classified briefings that the spores were not coated, he says. Meselson alerted the FBI to a 1980 microbiology paper that reports finding silicon in the spore coat of Bacillus cereus, a cousin to Bacillus anthracis, the bacterium that causes anthrax. The silicon AFIP detected might be a natural element of the anthrax spore coat. Although the FBI has released no information on studies probing for the presence of silicon in the coat of anthrax spores, and no studies have been published, Peter Setlow suspects that such studies have been done. About two years ago, Setlow, a molecular biologist at the University of Connecticut Health Center, was invited to an FBI-organized meeting of spore specialists. The explanation for mischaracterizing
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TIMELINE
Chronology Of A Biocrime Sept. 17 or 18, 2001: Five anthrax letters likely mailed from Trenton, N.J., and postmarked Sept. 8 arrive at news organizations in New York and Florida. Only the letters addressed to the New York Post and NBC News are recovered; the existence of the others is inferred from the pattern of infection. Oct 4 : A photo editor at the National Enquirer in Florida is confirmed to have inhalation anthrax, the first known case in the U.S. since 1976. Oct. 5: The photo editor dies, the first of five fatalities in the anthrax attacks. Oct. 6 to Oct. 9: Two more anthrax letters are mailed from Trenton, postmarked Oct. 9. Oct. 15: Letter to former Sen. Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) is opened and tests positive for anthrax; the enclosed anthrax is described as a "fine, light tan powder." Oct. 16 and 17: Senate and House offices are closed. Oct. 19: Tom Ridge, then director of the White House Office of Homeland Security, tells the media that anthrax spores found in the letters to the Enquirer, NBC News, and Daschle are "indistinguishable," meaning they are from the same strain. Oct. 21 and 22: Two Washington, D.C., postal workers who handled anthrax letters die. Oct. 25: Ridge updates the scientific analysis of the anthrax samples, telling reporters that the anthrax from the Daschle letter was "highly concentrated" and "pure" and that a binding material was used. The Daschle spore clusters, he says, are smaller when compared with the anthrax found in the letter delivered to the New York Post. He describes the Post anthrax as coarser and less concentrated—"clumpy and rugged"— than the Daschle anthrax, which he says is "fine and floaty." Still, he says, the material from both samples is the same Ames strain of Bacillus anthracis, the bacterium that causes anthrax.
ing protocol was developed, he explains. So in December 2001, the FBI met with experts selected by the National Academies for advice on how to deal with the Leahy letter, a participant at that meeting says. Six NAS-vetted scientists attended that oneday meeting at the FBI's Washington field office and produced a flow chart, a scientific playbook on how to analyze the powder to garner the most information. Whether that flow chart was ever used is unknown. The December meeting was among the first of eight the FBI would eventually convene with scientists "to develop a comprehensive analytical scheme for evaluating and analyzing the anthrax evidence," the FBI's Persichini says. In fact, the "FBI has held two outreach sessions in the past 18 months, and Beecher was present at the first one," says Milton Leitenberg, an arms con-
Oct. 29: Maj. Gen. John S. Parker at a White House briefing says silica was found in the Daschle anthrax sample, and the anthrax spore concentration in the Daschle letter was 10 times that of the New York Post letter. Oct. 31: A New York woman dies of anthrax. Maj. Gen. Parker testifies before the Senate Subcommittee on International Security, Proliferation & Federal Services about the anthrax found in the Daschle letter. Nov. 7: Ridge briefs the press and dismisses bentonite as an additive for the anthrax spores in the Daschle letter and says it is silicon. (Iraq supposedly used bentonite in weaponizing anthrax.) Nov. 16: FBI finds anthrax letter addressed to Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt). Nov. 21: A Connecticut woman dies of anthax, the fifth and last person to die as a result of the anthrax mailings. Dec. 5: The Leahy letter is opened at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, a biodefense facility, at Fort Detrick, in Frederick, Md. Dec. 12: The Baltimore Sun reports that the anthrax spores used in the attacks match those produced in small amounts over the past 10 years by the Army's Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. Dec. 16: DNA testing of the anthrax spores in the Leahy letter shows them to be the Ames strain. The Washington Post reports that the spores in the Daschle and Leahy letters are identical to those produced at Dugway Proving Ground. Aug. 6,2002: Then-attorney general John Ashcroft, on CBS's "The Early Show," calls Steven Hatfill "a person of interest" in the FBI investigation. (Hatfill has never been charged with the crime, and he is suing the Justice Department, the New York Times, and others.) August 2006: FBI scientist Douglas J. Beecher publishes a paper in Applied & Environmental Microbiology in which he strongly implies that the spores in the anthrax letters were not produced with additives and were not specially engineered (that is, weaponized).
trols expert at the University of Maryland. Also in his paper, Beecher writes: "Individuals familiar with the compositions of the powders in the letters have indicated that they were comprised simply of spores purified to different extents." His citation for this statement is a 2003 article that investigative journalist Gary Matsumoto published in the news section of Science (302,1492). Meselson, who reviewed Beecher's article for the FBI, was asked to assess scanning electron micrographs of the anthrax powder. Early in 2002, he spent half a day at the FBI's Washington field office and looked at "a large heap of electron micrographs" of the powder from the Daschle letter. "I saw no evidence of anything except spores, no evidence of silica nanoparticles," Meselson says. "If silica was present, I would have seen it, but nothing could have been
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purer than what I saw," he insists. Though purified, the preparation "had not been milled," he adds. A government official who asked not to be named says the FBI knew early on that the Daschle and Leahy powders had a high concentration of spores. "But knowing the specific attributes of the spores took a longer time," he explains. A former top military scientist speaking on background because his current employer has government contracts, tells C&EN that he, too, "saw scanning electron micrographs" of the powder from the Daschle letter. "I saw only spores and almost no rubbish from the culture media." If the spores had been coated with silica, they would have looked like doughnuts with large sugar particles on them, he says. Instead, "the Daschle spores were clean doughnut holes with no sugars."
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He also says, "I had never seen a prepara Meselson, however, has another theory. tion that pure—io12 spores per gram—with He believes that "if the spores are pure no rubbish." Curious about the purity of the enough, they will be suspended into air, spores, he contacted William G. Patrick III, they will fly." He builds his theory on who had made bioweapons for the Army the scientific scaffold of triboelectricity, when the U.S. had an offensive pro gram. He says Patrick told him it was possible to get rid of nonspore mate rial by repeatedly washing the spores with water and spinning off the cul ture debris into the supernatant. This former military scientist nev er saw the material from the Leahy letter and i£heard nothing from the FBI regarding the Leahy letter." So, even though he saw pure spores in the electron micrographs of the Das chle powder he was shown, "It was never clear to me whether the spores were coated or not, because I heard it both ways." Daschle Leahy Media reports had described the material released when the Daschle let which, he notes, "aerosol physicists haven't ter was opened as looking like a cloud of considered." smoke. "I had always thought the spores Triboelectricity occurs, for example, had to be treated to get them to fluff up as when combing your hair on a dry winter's they did," he says. day causes sparks to fly as electrons move
from hair to bind more tightly to the comb. In Meselson's theory, all the purified spores carry the same electrical charge so they will fly apart. And, he says, "you don't need much to fly into the air" to cause harm. < Both Meselson and the former ^ military scientist agree that making the purified preparations didn't require an expensive laboratory setup. As the military scientist says, "A simple facility" is really all that's needed. "I have concluded that maybe the hardest part is doing it safely so you don't hurt yourself. Some experience is needed, but it's probably more an art than a sci ence," he says. Arms control expert Jonathan B. Tucker, a Bosch Public Policy Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, says, "The use of the Ames strain, the purity of the spores, and the extreme volatility of the material suggests that it was made by an individual with a high degree of technical sophistication." Other experts say Beecher's now fa-
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