NY TIMES, December 3, 2001: "Terror Anthrax Linked to Type Made by U.S." By WILLIAM J. BROAD
The dry powder used in the anthrax attacks is virtually indistinguishable
in critical technical respects from that produced by the United States
military before it shut down its biowarfare program, according to federal
scientists and a report prepared for a military contractor.
The preliminary analysis of the powder shows that it has the same
extraordinarily high concentration of deadly spores as the anthrax produced
in the American weapons program. While it is still possible that the
anthrax could have a foreign source, the concentration is higher than any
stock publicly known to be produced by other governments.
The similarity to the levels achieved by the United States military lends
support to the idea that someone with ties to the old program may be behind
the attacks that have killed five people. The Federal Bureau of
Investigation recently expanded its investigation of anthrax suspects to
include government and contractor laboratories as a possible source of the
deadly powder itself, or of knowledge of how to make it.
Its high concentration is surprising, weapon experts said, and far beyond
what military analysts once judged as the likely abilities of terrorists.
Still, experts caution that the emerging evidence is tentative and that it
is too early to rule out other possible suspects, be they domestic lone
wolves or hostile foreign states like Iraq.
A yardstick for measuring the quality of anthrax emerged almost three years
ago when William C. Patrick III, a longtime federal consultant and one of
the nation´s top experts on biological weapons, wrote a report assessing
the possible risks if terrorists were to send anthrax through the mail.
Based on the difficulty of developing advanced anthrax, he predicted that
the terrorist germs would be one-twentieth as concentrated as what the
government developed and what has recently turned letters into munitions.
"The quality of the spores is very good," said a federal science adviser
who shared the Patrick report with The New York Times. "This is very
high-quality stuff" - equal, he said, in concentration to that produced by
the United States military before it abandoned germ weapons.
The high quality, the adviser said, lends credence to the idea that someone
with links to military laboratories or their contractors might be behind
the attacks. "It´s frightening to think that one of our own scientists
could have done something like this," he said. "But it´s definitely
possible."
He said the anthrax sent to the Senate contained as many as one trillion
spores per gram, a figure confirmed by an administration official.
A gram is just one-twenty-eighth of an ounce. Yet in comprising up to one
trillion spores, a gram of anthrax powder has vast potential to kill. If a
lethal dose is estimated conservatively at 10,000 microscopic spores, then
a gram in theory could cause about 100 million deaths.
The letter sent to Tom Daschle, the Senate Democratic leader, is said to
have held two grams of anthrax - enough, in other words, to make about 200
million lethal doses, assuming it could be distributed to victims with
perfect efficiency.
Analysis of the Daschle powder has been hampered by the small amount
recovered after an aide opened the letter, and by technical missteps as the
investigation got under way, making some conclusions iffy. That is why
investigators are taking great care in opening the anthrax-contaminated
letter sent to Patrick J. Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary
Committee. The aim is to scrutinize the evidence as closely as possible.
Spore concentration is just one factor experts will examine in the Leahy
letter, and their findings could significantly alter their picture of the
powder. Other factors that reflect the quality of anthrax production
include whether the powder has been ground to a size that easily lodges in
the lungs and whether it has been treated to make it static free and
free-floating. Investigators will look for antistatic additives that might
be a possible hallmark of a particular government´s weapons program.
Mr. Patrick, in his risk assessment, sketched out both what the American
military achieved and what a terrorist might do. His 28- page report, dated
February 1999, was written for a federal contractor advising the government
on how to handle the growing number of anthrax hoaxes and what to expect if
real anthrax were to be sent through the mail.
"When these hoaxes first came up, we assumed none of the bad guys" could
achieve high-grade anthrax, said a contractor official, who spoke on the
condition of anonymity.
It is unknown publicly exactly how makers of anthrax weapons achieve high
spore concentrations, but the black art is said to involve precise drying,
sifting, milling and removal of impurities.
In his assessment, Mr. Patrick drew on personal knowledge acquired while
working in the nation´s offensive biological weapons program from 1951 to
1969, when it was dismantled, at which time he was chief of the division of
product development. He won five patents with his colleagues for ways to
make biological weapons.
His 1999 report focused on what kinds of contamination terrorist anthrax
would cause when a letter was opened and what the requirements for
decontamination were.
Mr. Patrick postulated that the concentration of anthrax would be 50
billion spores per gram. "This assumes a dried powder of moderate ability
to generate into an aerosol when the envelope is opened," he wrote.
He predicted that an envelope would hold 2.5 grams of anthrax - an amount
strikingly close to what is thought to have been mailed to Senator Daschle.
In his report, Mr. Patrick said the American program had achieved a
concentration of one trillion spores per gram - what scientists today say
is near the theoretical limit of how many of the microscopic spheres can be
packed into a tiny space.
Today, no terrorist or scientific maverick is known to have published
anything that comes close to describing how to make concentrated anthrax
powders. Timothy W. Tobiason, a habitué of gun shows who sells a
self-published cookbook on how to make germ weapons, including "mail
delivered" anthrax, sketches out only the most rudimentary steps.
Experts judge Mr. Tobiason´s recipes as flawed in spots and at best capable
of producing only low-quality anthrax. His book deals mostly with the
production of wet anthrax, though it does suggest a way to grind clusters
of dried anthrax into microscopic pieces, which can settle into the lungs.
It is unclear if any foreign nation has achieved high anthrax
concentrations. The United States suspects that more than a dozen countries
are clandestinely studying biological weapons, with anthrax among the top
agents.
Ken Alibek, a former top official in the Soviet germ weapons program who is
now president of Advanced Biosystems, a consulting company in Manassas,
Va., said that it was routinely possible to create dry anthrax that
contained 100 billion spores per gram and that, with some effort, 500
billion was possible.
"The infectious dose," Dr. Alibek said, "can be quite large."
Still, the 500 billion figure is half the concentration that the American
government and whoever sent the letters are said to have achieved.
"I don´t think they´re manufacturing this in caves," Dr. Alibek said of the
terror anthrax. "It´s coming from another source."