About to be Charged in 2001 Anthrax Case, Top Govt. Scientist Suicides

On Tuesday, July 29, 2008, a well-respected scientist named Bruce Ivins died in Maryland, an apparent suicide. Doctors say Ivins may have ingested an overdose of Tylenol mixed with codeine. If the Federal Bureau of Investigation is right about Bruce E. Ivins, he may have had good reason to go.

In June, 2008, the United States Government paid a scientist named Steven Hatfill nearly six million dollars. For 6 years or so Hatfill had been the FBI's main suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks.

The attacks started shortly after September 11, 2001. Letters containing a finely milled, powder form of the toxin were mailed to NBC, the New York Post, and the National Enquirer. When all was said and done, five people were dead and the public was terrified. The anthrax scare served to ratchet up the national level of paranoia over terrorism to a true fever pitch. It briefly crippled even the venerable U.S. Postal Service.

Steven Hatfill's payday came about because by 2006 the FBI had begun to move away from him as a suspect in the case. They simply couldn't connect the man to the weaponized anthrax. Nothing would stick.

By the time Hatfill received his money and an exoneration on June 27, 2008, the feds had another suspect in the crosshairs. The Los Angeles Times reported early Friday that soon after it was clear that Steven Hatfill was safe to take his money and sink back into blissful anonymity, 62-year-old U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) scientist Bruce Ivins began to sweat.

Ivins was in therapy, and he apparently spoke of suicide. Eventually he was hospitalized for depression. Ivins got out of the hospital on July 24, but it was probably too late. His brother, Thomas Ivins, told the Times that Ivins had "buckled under the pressure from the federal government."

According to the Times, Ivins first drew the notice of Army investigators in 2002.

Ivins was working at Fort Detrick, and it was discovered that he'd neglected to report some anthrax contaminations. In fact, Ivins waited 5 months before making his reports. Ivins gave the following statement to the Army: "In retrospect, although my concern for biosafety was honest and my desire to refrain from crying 'Wolf!' . . . was sincere, I should have notified my supervisor ahead of time of my worries about a possible breach in biocontainment." Ivins added that he thought that "quietly and diligently cleaning" the affected areas would be enough to get rid of any potential anthrax contamination and also reduce the potential for any anxious moments at the facility.

The Army seemed satisfied with Ivins's explanations, but doubts about his truthfulness remained. The Times report put it this way: "Ivins' recollections should have raised serious questions about his veracity and his intentions, according to some of those familiar with the investigation."

Ivins glossed over some key steps in the process he said he followed to deal with the contaminations, for one thing. He was supposed to re-swab surfaces to detect any stray, remaining anthrax spores, and he told the Army that he "honestly" could not remember "if follow-up swabs were taken of the area."

A former USAMRIID official quoted by the Times termed Ivins's explanation "bullshit." The former official opined that Ivins may have been vague about re-swabbing because he feared investigators finding traces of spores in and around his office.

USA Today reporters Dan Vergano and Steve Sternberg even wrote about the incident in 2004. From that article:

Ivins, a biodefense expert, and his officemate were deeply involved in Operation Noble Eagle — the government's response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that killed almost 3,000 Americans and the anthrax attacks that killed five more less than a month later.

It was December 2001. Ivins, an authority on anthrax, was one of the handful of researchers at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Md., who prepared spores of the deadly bacteria to test anthrax vaccines in animals. He knew enough to grow alarmed when his officemate complained, as she had frequently of late, about sloppy handling of samples coming into the lab that could be tainted with anthrax.

It appears as though the feds had begun to suspect that Ivins was the anthrax killer in part because the incidents he reported 5 months too late supposedly fell right around the time of the anthrax mailings, and because an accidental spill of anthrax would account for anything missing from USAMRIID's inventory of weaponized spores.

If the FBI applied any profiling, Ivins's personality may have been another tangential clue. His own brother said these words about Ivins to the Times -- "He had in his mind that he was omnipotent."

Ivins had a doctorate in microbiology from the University of Cincinnati, and he held some interesting patents related to his field.

In 2006, Ivins filed for patent #20060019239. In the simplest terms, Ivins was seeking to patent a new way to shield potential victims from bioterrorism agents plague, smallpox, or yes, even anthrax.

A related patent was a bit easier to understand. Issued on November 13, 2001 -- at the height of the anthrax scare -- US Patent 6316006 was for "for production of protective antigen (PA) against bacillus anthracis [anthrax]."

Really, Ivins seemed to be a bit of a go-to guy for anthrax information in general. He'd even helped the FBI during the original investigation of the anthrax letters, analyzing spores from a letter sent to a Senator's office in Washington.

Prior to that, he had presented a paper to the 98th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology, held in May, 1998 in Atlanta. The title of Ivins's paper was, "Anthrax Vaccines - How Stable is the Potency?" The following is a quote from the paper that might be understood by most laymen: "Because anthrax spores are resistant to heat, light, drying, and disinfection, and because inhalation anthrax is a disease associated with high mortality and non-specific symptomatology, the potential use of anthrax spores as a biological threat agent has been recognized for many years.

"Furthermore, anthrax is endemic in many regions of the world. Military and civilian personnel in those areas could be subject to anthrax infection by natural means."

Ivins was mentioned in Gary Matsumoto's 2004 book titled Vaccine A: The Covert Government Experiment That's Killing Our Soldiers--And Why GI's Are Only The First Victims. From the product description of Matsumoto's book: "When troops went to the Middle East to fight the Gulf War in 1991 and the Iraq War in 2003, many -- perhaps thousands -- received an experimental anthrax vaccine instead of the FDA-approved vaccine. Without their knowledge or consent, the U. S. government used them as human guinea pigs in a massive medical experiment that went disastrously wrong."

One of the key figures in the creation of that experimental vaccine was Bruce Ivins.

The following is from Chapter 3 of Vaccine A, published on the website for the book:

Having invested decades into refining protective antigen to a singular purity, [Bruce] Ivins et al. were essentially polluting this new ultra-pure vaccine with extraneous antigens to make it work. That is what an adjuvant was—extra antigenic material for a vaccine that had been purified to such an extent that it could no longer do the job it was designed to do. Perhaps it was the importance of their apparent breakthrough that blinded these scientists to what they had done. Whatever it was, it prevented them from seeing the absurdity of their new creation, or its risks. A fully intact microbe presents dozens of different chemical binding sites an antibody can latch onto. Each of these sites is a separate target for a multi-front attack by the immune system. In pursuit of purity, Army scientists had removed all of the targets of anthrax germ but one. Now they had a dubious product that they were determined to improve, and they did it by adding targets from germs other than B. anthracis. Instead of adding more antigenic material from the anthrax microbe [...] the Fort Detrick team incorporated pieces of completely different germs.

Matsumoto contends that Ivins and his colleagues were indulging in "Rube Goldberg immunology."

A check of Vaccine A in Google Books shows Ivins's name on several pages. But Ivins surely wasn't happy about this. A quote from Matsumoto's footnote on page 296 seems to suggest so: "After faxing me a copy of his landmark paper in 1999, Dr. Bruce Ivins has refused every one of my requests for an interview."

So far, nothing explains why Ivins might have sent the anthrax letters, if he did send them. The Times article sketched a portrait of a sensitive, emotionally "labile" man, and Ivins's own brother seemed to think Bruce was an egomaniac.

Ivins did write a short letter to the editor of the Washington Post in May, 1991 that might have been a clue as to how he viewed the world outside the lab.

The letter was in response to a column by Richard Cohen published in a previous edition of the paper. Cohen had written about a student at Brown University who was expelled for using racial slurs against blacks, jews and homosexuals.

Bruce E. Ivins from Fredericksville, Maryland was succinct: "What Richard Cohen refuses to admit is that Douglas Hann's real sin was not that he was a non-gentleman, but rather that he was a politically incorrect non-gentleman {Critic at Large, March 17}. Had Hann screamed something anti-Catholic, anti-white or anti-male, he would still be a student -- a politically correct student -- at Brown University."

Was there a note of deep-seated resentment in Bruce Ivins's letter? It may be too brief to tell. But considering his status now as the deceased suspect of the moment in one of the more remarkable unsolved crimes of the last 20 years, a lot of questions about what went on inside Ivins's mind need to be asked, and answered.

[LAT; WaPo]