Anthrax

I've criticized the Washington Post in the past for running lead stories on the front page that were not worthy of attention–particularly in the Monday paper, which is the recipient of a lot of stories that have been languishing on the in-type list for months. But today the Post led with a story that I think deserves the attention the paper has given it. "FBI Is Casting a Wider Net in Anthrax Attacks" is the headline. The story suggests that the FBI investigation of the anthrax attacks that occurred almost exactly five years ago–five years ago!–was pitifully incompetent. The first three paragraphs report that the initial laboratory tests of the anthrax were inaccurate. "Countless scientific tests at numerous laboratories" have shown that the anthrax was "far less sophisticated than originally believed" and undercut the FBI's theory that it must have come from a government scientist.

The sixth paragraph says that the FBI "has assigned fresh leadership to the case"–a sure sign that FBI leaders have concluded that the original investigation was botched. The story doesn't say when this reassignment was made. But it does tell us that the finding that the anthrax was not sophisticated was announced by an FBI scientist in the August issue of the science journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology. Presumably the article appeared sometime in July (how long has this story been on the in-type list?) and was written sometime before that.

Other interesting information comes from "one knowledgeable scientist who spoke on the condition that he not be identified by name because the investigation is continuing" and from unnamed "scientists":

Moreover, scientists say, the particular strain of anthrax used in the attacks has turned to out to be a less significant clue than first believed. The highly virulent Ames strain was first isolated in the United States and was the basis for the anthrax weapons formerly created by the United States. The use of the Ames strain in the 2001 attack was initially seen as a strong clue linking the terrorist to the U.S. biodefense network.

But the more the FBI investigated, the more ubiquitous the Ames strain seemed, appearing in labs around the world including nations of the former Soviet Union.

"Ames was available in the Soviet Union," said former Soviet bioweapons scientist Sergei Popov, now a biodefense expert at George Mason University. "It could have come from anywhere in the world."

It could have come from anywhere in the world. There's the real lead. As I recall earlier stories on the anthrax investigation, the FBI was focusing on U.S. scientists and especially on former Army scientist Steven Hatfill, who, as the Post notes, has never been charged and is now suing the Justice Department for leaks (notably to the New York Times's Nicholas Kristof) that damaged his reputation. The FBI evidently put great stock in a profile developed by one Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, who said the perpetrator was a CIA contact worker and an expert in biowarfare: the lone-scientist theory. The Post story doesn't mention this. Here's one description of the profile the FBI developed:

The FBI profile of the anthrax killer originally described an adult male with a science background who worked in a laboratory where he had access to anthrax. Profiles often change during an investigation, but the FBI refuses to discuss any revisions it may have made. Still, agents say they believe they are looking for one culprit. . . .

There is a finite number of people with the expertise to have produced the finely ground anthrax spores found in the letters. Agents have reduced that number to about 30 to 40 scientists.

It's pretty convenient to narrow down your list of suspects to "30 or 40 scientists." And evidently the FBI homed in on Hatfill, who seems like kind of a strange guy. But it also seems likely that the FBI's concentration on the profile suspects caused it to ignore or scant other possibilities–possibilities that have always seem likelier to me.

Those possibilities include some connection between the anthrax terrorists and the September 11 hijackers. Remember that a Florida doctor reported that he treated someone he thought was one of the September 11 hijackers for what he concluded, after the anthrax attacks, looked like anthrax-caused lesions. Remember that one of the anthrax packages was sent to the offices of a Florida publisher near the place where some of the hijackers lived. And remember that the anthrax arrived only days after September 11.

Match that last fact against the FBI profile. A lone scientist has been working to develop anthrax that he can send in envelopes–work that presumably takes many months if not many years. Then he just happens to have it ready in time to send the letters a few days after September 11. Seem likely? Not to me.

If you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The FBI is a (mostly) domestic investigative agency, seeking evidence that can stand up in court. It seeks to narrow down lists of suspects, because that makes investigations much easier. The definitive comment comes from Sen. Charles Grassley, a frequent FBI critic, at the end of the Post article:

"If the FBI's investigation has become a cold case, then it's time for [FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III] to acknowledge that and take steps to deal with it," said Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), a frequent critic of the FBI. "I'm concerned that the FBI may have spent too much time focusing [on] one theory of what happened and too little effort on the other possibilities."

I hope our foreign intelligence agencies have been trying to track the anthrax perpetrators down. My own guess–and it is only a guess–is that the anthrax came from some terrorist-supporting government that had been developing chemical weapons and was transmitted through al Qaeda terrorists. Why haven't we suffered more anthrax attacks since then? Perhaps because the perpetrators observed that the death toll was very low.

But that's not to say that the death toll from chemical or germ warfare must always be low. Three books that I have read recently have led me to the observation that the biggest killer in human history has not been war but disease. Jack Weatherford's Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World points out how the Mongolian conquests resulted in a vast free-trade area across the Eurasian continent in the 13th and 14th centuries, roughly from 1250 to 1350–the age of Marco Polo. John Kelly's The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time notes that this helped to create a "friendly climate" for epidemic disease. He also points out that global warming beginning around 800 did so, too, but was otherwise benign. "Rather than producing catastrophe, as many current theorists of global warming predict, the warm weather produced abundance. England and Poland became wine-growing countries, and even the inhabitants of Greenland began experimenting with vineyards. More important, the warm weather turned marginal farmland into decent farmland, and decent farmland into good farmland." That led to a population increase, almost an explosion in the 12th and 13th centuries; meanwhile, the Mongolian empire and the trade routes across Eurasia opened up the avenue for bubonic plague, which killed perhaps one third of the people of Europe and some unknowably high percentage in India and China. Insulated from that plague were the peoples of the Americas, but as Charles Mann's 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus points out, they were vulnerable to the diseases brought by the Europeans who began arriving in 1492. (I've written about this book before.) Indeed, in most of North America the diseases arrived before the explorers and settlers. The English, French, and Spanish found an almost empty continent, but not long before it had been filled with people. The disease kill-off was enormous, though exactly how enormous we do not and probably cannot know.

Could disease–disease spread by terrorists–result in vast human kill-off again? Germs, by Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg, and William Broad, suggests we can't rule it out. It's something to think about, now that the FBI has conceded that the anthrax attacks of 2001 "could have come from anywhere in the world."