A murderous puzzle, a ticking clock

Lives, economy at stake as agents sift clues in anthrax outbreak

10/27/2001

By TODD J. GILLMAN / The Dallas Morning News

First one letter, then another, and another. Death came by mail to three people. Two dozen were injured. The number of crime scenes escalated. Pressure and anxiety grew, and an army of profilers and postal inspectors tracked down leads.

After 18 years, a tip from the suspect's brother led federal agents to the Unabomber's mountain cabin.

The anthrax attacks have left even more victims and far more mysteries than answers. Who had access to the anthrax? How much expertise and equipment was needed? Who would want to kill senators and postal workers and Supreme Court justices and White House staff and anchormen and tabloid editors? Why?

This is like no investigation ever undertaken. More field agents and scientists are on the case than any in history. There's a race for time with not only lives, but a nation's economy at stake.

Yet it's just like any criminal investigation as well, the experts say. A process of elimination. A quest for motive and opportunity. Investigators follow the money, squeeze informants, and dangle rewards.

"Half the battle is finding out who didn't do it. The more you can narrow it down, the more you can focus your resources," said Brian Levin, an expert on terror groups and criminology. "It really is like taking a jigsaw puzzle with 350,000 pieces and putting it together. Once you find the spot for a piece, you don't have to worry about that piece anymore."

Physical evidence is vital to any investigation, and the spores recovered from letters, nasal cavities, post offices, newsrooms, and government offices provide a starting point. Under a microscope, and with coaxing in the lab, military and public health germ specialists have been making genetic comparisons to known anthrax strains; measuring the spores for uniformity; and trying to isolate chemical residues, including a component of kitty litter that can be used to make it easier for anthrax spores to float.

The testing provides clues to how the spores were prepared and which of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pharmaceutical companies, researchers, and medical schools might have had access to the strain.

But what's the source?

Dr. David Franz, former commander of the Army's germ weapons research lab at Fort Detrick, Md., said that even the "good-quality stuff" sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., could have been produced domestically by a small group or even a highly trained individual. But the timing of the letters – the first was sent within a week after the Sept. 11 hijackings – gives him pause.

"I don't believe someone could start from scratch on 9-11 and never have done it before and put out a quality formulation on 9-18," he said.

Dr. Barbara Rosenberg, who has served as a U.S. germ weapons inspector and is the chairwoman of the Federation of American Scientists' working group on biological weapons, said the evidence she has seen points to the spores having come from "an American who had some special expertise."

"This has characteristics that only the U.S. knew about," she said. "It's classified information. It turns out to be a very important clue."

But according to White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, investigators believe any number of people, in the United States or abroad, could have produced anthrax as pure, concentrated, and dangerous as that sent to Mr. Daschle.

"The quality anthrax sent to Senator Daschle's office could be produced by a Ph.D. microbiologist and a sophisticated laboratory," he said Friday.

The FBI has subpoenaed detailed records from domestic laboratories about stocks and transfers of anthrax. An estimated 250 U.S. labs maintain live anthrax, including universities and public health departments.

Authorities have detained more than 800 noncitizens on violations of immigration law, and there's little doubt among former law enforcement officials and experts in criminology and terrorism that investigators are leaning heavily on them, hoping for leads. They're also following money trails and entering facts and biographies into an expanding database.

"It's not unlike a lot of the organized crime investigations," said Ron Huff, president of the American Society of Criminology and dean of the school of social ecology at the University of California at Irvine.

Apart from the anthrax, the letters used to deliver it provide a wealth of leads.

FBI profilers are working with linguists and handwriting experts to discern what they can from the letters. Some see the obvious work of anti-American ideologues in the messages. Some see the hand of someone who learned English as a second language in the way the "G" in the phrase "Allah is Great" lacks any straight lines; it's rounded, like a six, the way Arabic is written.

Others use the same evidence to contend that whoever is sending the letters is using the Sept. 11 attacks as cover, to throw investigators off the scent.

"This kind of stuff is not science. It's art with a little bit of science thrown in," said Dr. Lawrence Kobilinsky, a forensic biologist, expert in DNA analysis, and associate provost at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.

Profilers would be looking at three broad groups of people, said Mr. Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate Crime and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, and a former New York City police officer: People motivated by religious or political ideology. Sociopaths who don't care about the pain they inflict, or who relish it. Revenge-seekers.

Mr. Levin leans toward a foreign ideologue. The timing, so soon after the hijackings, can't be ignored, he said. Although many American hate groups would be eager to target the government and media, none has managed to mass-produce germ weapons, and all lack the size and coordination that the anthrax attacks would require.

"You need someone who's educated enough to pull this off. You need some decent equipment. You need some money. ... The bar is pretty high," Mr. Levin said.

Immigration records probably have been scoured for anyone who entered the country after the World Trade Center was bombed in 1993, especially if they came to study microbiology or genetics or virology.

Because anthrax in the quantity needed for the mailings would be tricky to handle without getting infected, investigators have contacted pharmacies in New Jersey and Florida in hopes that someone suspicious came looking for antibiotics, and they are tracking down supplies of biohazard gear.

"There are a lot of things that are going on behind the scenes that the public doesn't hear about," Dr. Kobilinsky said.

Treading new ground

"It doesn't fit the MO of [Osama] bin Laden," said Dr. Harvey Kushner, a government consultant on terrorism, chairman of the Long Island University criminal justice department, and author of Terrorism in America, among other books. "It fits in the sense that he changes [his methods], but he looks for these big kabooms – the two embassies. Four airplanes."

Meanwhile, law enforcement is hoping for a break. Federal agents had plenty of suspicion and some evidence against mob boss John Gotti but no case until Sammy "the Bull" Gravano came forward. And a $2 million bounty helped snare Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind behind the 1993 Trade Center bombing.

"We don't care how the case gets broken, Mr. Levin said. But "these kinds of cases can take years. ... This isn't a 60-minute Law and Order show where you get the criminal handed over to you in a gift box."