Many leads, many dead ends
Frustration inside the FBI's anthrax investigation: a so-far perfect crime
Less than a sugar packet's worth of evidence, and not a whole lot of clues. That's what the Federal Bureau of Investigation's massive anthrax probe comes down to six months after a spurt of mystery mailings killed five people, sickened 17 others, paralyzed mail delivery, and terrified the nation. The FBI's aggressive--and some declare flawed--probe of the attacks has run into one dead end after another, causing frustration and disappointment. "As an investigation, it's a nightmare," one official tells U.S. News.
Whoever was behind last fall's anthrax attacks committed a so-far perfect crime. Five anthrax-laced letters were mailed to the Sun tabloid in Florida, the New York Post, television anchor Tom Brokaw, and Sens. Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. The FBI has turned up no fingerprints, no match to the handwriting, no witnesses, and no source for the bacterium, Bacillus anthracis. It was so finely aerosolized that it floated through the fine weave of the envelopes, so lethal that it killed or sickened those who touched or inhaled it. Much of it dissipated or was lost, to the dismay of FBI investigators, leaving little beyond that sugar packet's worth--the .871 grams extracted from the Leahy letter. Its DNA is now being sequenced in hopes of identifying its lab source, though whether that will ever point to the killer is uncertain.
This investigation has been a grind for the bureau, which has deployed hundreds of agents at a cost of millions of dollars. Agents, many with science degrees, have run a list of 80 questions past nearly 5,000 "persons of interest"--including perhaps 600 thought to have specific expertise--and pursued thousands of tips and leads to no avail. They've more than doubled the reward to $2.5 million. They've obtained subpoenas, conducted surveillance, searches, and polygraphs, done swabs and forensics tests, knocked on doors. Yet they say they have drawn a blank on the most basic questions: who, how, and why.
Curious cases. Investigators say they still don't understand the case of Kathy Nguyen, 61, a New York hospital worker who suddenly developed symptoms in October and died from inhalation anthrax before she could be interviewed. Despite enormous effort by the FBI, how she became infected remains a mystery. More curious is the death of Ottilie Lundgren, 94, of Oxford, Conn. Investigators took nearly 450 swabs of her house, her closet, her garden, her mailbox and other places. "That's a lot of swabbing to not come up with even one spore," says a federal investigator.
Recently, one Connecticut health official theorized that Lundgren may have become infected from bulk mail (that she ripped before tossing out) possibly sorted on the contaminated Trenton, N.J., postal machines that processed at least two of the anthrax letters. But U.S. Postal Inspector Dan Mahalko says bulk mail gets presorted by the sender and is merely routed via loading docks of the Postal Service. Perhaps another false lead.
So far, say senior FBI officials, they've found no motives. They are proceeding on gut sense that could be wrong, using a psychological profile that could be flawed. Was Osama bin Laden behind it? Investigators believe not but haven't ruled it out. Was it a foreign power like Iraq? Most likely not, they say, but they're still pursuing that possibility. Was it a neo-Nazi extremist or an abortion foe? They don't think so but don't rule it out either.
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