The FBI is investigating whether the anthrax spores used in last fall’s mail attacks could have been grown secretly inside an Army lab and then taken elsewhere to be made into weapons’ grade material, according to three sources familiar with the inquiry.
A former government microbiologist, interviewed recently by the FBI, said the questions focused on the logistics of how someone with access to the Army’s biodefense labs at Ft. Detrick, Md., might carry out the scheme. The scientist, who once worked at the site, said the agents did not indicate if they had evidence that such an incident had occurred.
“They asked me: If I wanted to grow something I wasn’t supposed to, would there be somebody asking me about it and could I have taken it out of the lab?” said the microbiologist, who did not want to be identified. “I told them no one checked, and it was far easier to get something out of Ft. Detrick than into it.”
Another bioterrorism scientist said the FBI’s “operating theory” placed Ft. Detrick labs as the likely source of the anthrax, and that spores were perhaps removed covertly.
The scientists’ accounts are among several developments that suggest the FBI is seriously exploring the possibility that a knowledgeable insider at the military facility could have clandestinely produced and removed anthrax spores to a private location, where they could be refined into the lethal powder sent through the mail that killed at least four people starting in October.
That premise also is at the center of a new assessment by a prominent bioweapons expert, who says five biodefense experts have given the FBI the name of a former Ft. Detrick scientist with access to “a remote location” that could have been used to refine anthrax spores.
In her assessment, scheduled to be posted Thursday on the Federation of American Scientists’ Web site, Barbara Hatch Rosenberg all but names the scientist, and provides details about his background. The Hartford Courant obtained a copy of the six-page paper.
The assessment by Rosenberg, chairwoman of the federation’s biological weapons panel, notes that the unidentified scientist suffered a career setback last summer that “left him angry and depressed” and that the FBI, with his consent, searched his home and computer. She claimed that although the FBI had the scientist’s name for months, the agency dragged its feet before searching his home and, therefore, could have lost valuable evidence.
The unidentified scientist has declined interview requests, but in a voice-mail message left for a reporter last month he denied being a suspect.
His lawyer did not return repeated calls Wednesday.
The accounts of scientists who have been drawn into the sweeping anthrax probe shed light on a line of inquiry by the FBI that has emerged in recent months–the possibility that the anthrax and its user have ties to the Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases at Ft. Detrick.
Questions about lax security at the site were raised earlier this year in a series of stories in The Courant.
