-Caveat Lector-
http://www.msnbc.com/news/826855.asp
FBI theory on anthrax doubted
Attacks not likely work of one person, experts say
By Guy Gugliotta and Gary Matsumoto
THE WASHINGTON POST
Oct. 28 — A significant number of scientists and biological warfare
experts are expressing skepticism about the FBI’s view that a single
disgruntled American scientist prepared the spores and mailed the deadly
anthrax letters that killed five people last year.
THESE SOURCES say that making a weaponized aerosol of such
sophistication and virulence would require scientific knowledge, technical
competence, access to expensive equipment and safety know-how that are
probably beyond the capabilities of a lone individual.
As a result, a consensus has emerged in recent months among experts
familiar with the technology needed to turn anthrax spores into the deadly
aerosol that was sent to Sens. Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) and Patrick J.
Leahy (D-Vt.) that some of the fundamental assumptions driving the FBI’s
investigation may be flawed.
“In my opinion, there are maybe four or five people in the whole
country who might be able to make this stuff, and I’m one of them,” said
Richard O. Spertzel, chief biological inspector for the U.N. Special
Commission from 1994 to 1998. “And even with a good lab and staff to help
run it, it might take me a year to come up with a product as good.”
Instead, suggested Spertzel and more than a dozen experts
interviewed by The Washington Post in recent weeks, investigators might
want to reexamine the possibility of state-sponsored terrorism, or try to
determine whether weaponized spores may have been stolen by the attacker
from an existing, but secret, biodefense program or perhaps given to the
attacker by an accomplice.
‘LONE INDIVIDUAL’
The Defense Department and FBI refused repeated requests from The
Post to discuss recent developments in the anthrax investigation. But in
some important respects, the official version of events — developed in
part during the early, frantic days of the probe — is at odds with the
available evidence, the experts say.
A profile of the attacker issued by the FBI last November described
an angry, “lone individual” with “some” science background who could
weaponize the anthrax spores in a basement laboratory for as little as
$2,500. The FBI acknowledged that the sender may not have been a native
English speaker but emphasized that there was no “direct or clear” link
between the attacks and foreign terrorism.
More recently, investigators appear to have abandoned the idea of
an amateur attacker, but they continue to focus on a lone, domestic
scientist, probably an insider. Attention has centered on medical doctor
and virologist Steven J. Hatfill, a former U.S. Army scientist identified
by the Justice Department as a “person of interest” in the investigation.
Hatfill vigorously denies any involvement.
Scientists suggested that the loner theory appeared flawed even in
the opening days of the investigation. The profile was issued three weeks
after U.S. Army scientists had examined the Daschle spores and found them
to be 1.5 to 3 microns in size and processed to a grade of 1 trillion
spores per gram — 50 times finer than anything produced by the now-defunct
U.S. bioweapons program and 10 times finer than the finest known grade of
Soviet anthrax spores. A micron is a millionth of a meter.
“Just collecting this stuff is a trick,” said Steven A. Lancos,
executive vice president of Niro Inc., one of the leading manufacturers of
spray dryers, viewed by several sources as the likeliest tool needed to
weaponize the anthrax bacteria. “Even on a small scale, you still need
containment. If you’re going to do it right, it could cost millions of
dollars.”
POSSIBLE FOREIGN SOURCE
Also early in the case, U.S. authorities dismissed the possibility
that Iraq could have sponsored the attacks because investigators
determined that the spores had been coated with silica to make them
disperse quickly, rather than the mineral bentonite, regarded by the U.S.
Army Medical Research and Materiel Command as Iraq’s additive of choice.
In fact, however, Iraq’s alleged preference for bentonite appears
to be based on a single sample of a common pesticide collected by U.N.
authorities from Iraq’s Al Hakam biological weapons facility in the
mid-1990s.By contrast, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency warned in
declassified documents as early as 1989 that Iraq was acquiring silica to
use as a chemical weapons additive.
In 1998, Iraq reported to the United Nations that it had conducted
an artillery test of a live biological agent that used silica as a
dispersant. And U.N. and U.S. intelligence documents reviewed by The Post
show that Iraq had bought all the essential equipment and ingredients
needed to weaponize anthrax bacteria with silica to a grade consistent
with the Daschle and Leahy letters.
Daschle, Leahy and a few other senators and representatives have
received periodic FBI briefings on the investigation, and Leahy said last
week that the agency “has not foreclosed the possibility of a foreign
source of this attack.” However, the FBI’s continued focus on Hatfill
shows the agency’s preoccupation with a domestic loner.
Bush administration officials have acknowledged that the anthrax
attacks were an important motivator in the U.S. decision to confront Iraq,
and several senior administration officials say today that they still
strongly suspect a foreign source — perhaps Iraq — even though no one has
publicly said so.
That Iraq had the wherewithal to make the anthrax letters does not
mean it is the guilty party. Still, the FBI’s early dismissal of the
possibility may have prematurely closed a legitimate line of inquiry.
“Iraq almost certainly had their anthrax spores in a powdered
form,” Spertzel said. “They had used silica gel to aid in dispersibility
of [wheat] smut spores, and also indicated they were looking at it as a
carrier for aflatoxin,” a carcinogen.
OUTER LIMITS OF TECHNOLOGY
Since the attacks one year ago, scientists have been able to
identify the anthrax bacteria used in the Daschle and Leahy letters as the
“Ames strain,” a virulent anthrax used in U.S. biodefense programs.
Analysts are examining lab variants of the Ames strain to find
possible sources for the original spores, but scientists and biowarfare
experts say the additive used to disperse the spores may be as instructive
as the spores themselves.
Even the sparse evidence made public by the investigation — the
uniformly tiny particle size and the trillion-spore-per-gram concentration
— has been enough to show many researchers that whoever weaponized the
spores was operating at the outer limits of known aerosol technology. The
mailer was brutally efficient in making a very special product for a very
special mission.
The anthrax mailer needed a powder that could negotiate the U.S.
postal system without absorbing so much moisture that it would cake up. At
the end of the trip, the coated spores had to be light and supple enough
to fly into the air with no delivery system beyond the rip of a letter
opener through an envelope.
Finally, the spores had to be small enough for potential victims to
inhale them deep into their lungs so that only a tiny number of spores
would be needed to kill — far fewer than the dosages anticipated by the
U.S. government for the cruder aerosols of the past.
The answer was silica-the same silicon dioxide that comprises
substances ranging from beach sand to window glass. The attacker needed a
special kind of silica, however, because the aerosol that delivered the
spores was as sophisticated as any on the market.
“You need to get a drug into the bloodstream as an alternative to
injecting it,” said pharmaceutical scientist Richard Dalby of the
University of Maryland’s Aerosol Lab. “You need the drug to get much
deeper into the lung, where the membranes are thinner, and to do that, you
need smaller particles.”
The pharmaceutical industry is the leader in this technology, Dalby
added, but “there’s only been an interest in generating tiny particles for
that purpose for about the last 10 years.”
Several sources agreed that the most likely way to build the coated
spores would be to use fine glass particles, known generically as “fumed
silica” or “solid smoke,” and mix them with the spores in a spray dryer.
“I know of no other technique that might give you that finished product,”
Spertzel said.
According to William C. Patrick III, the former chief of product
development for the U.S. Army’s now-defunct bioweapons program, U.S.
government scientists made biological agents using spray dryers, but did
not spray dry anthrax.
Fumed silica grains are between 0.012 and 0.300 of a micron in
size, and will readily adhere to the surface of any larger particle, such
as an anthrax spore. Coated particles will easily disperse, because the
grains act as tiny “ball bearings,” enabling the larger bits to skid past
one another.
Under an electron microscope, fumed silica would look like cotton
balls strung together into strands that branch out in every direction.
Their extremely small size gives them an aerodynamic quality, and their
high surface area allows them to readily trap moisture, acting as a
natural dessicant.
“If you packaged this stuff in a container, it would float out, and
it’s highly dispersible and messy to deal with,” said C. Jeffrey Brinker,
a University of New Mexico chemical engineer and a senior scientist at the
Sandia National Laboratories.
Moreover, Brinker added, simply by shaking the particles in a jar,
they acquire an electric charge, which causes them to repel one another
and not clump together. A few passes through a mail-sorting machine would
create the same effect. The particles would float, but they would remain
separated.
“This concept of using something that would serve as a dessicant
and a carrier at the same time is new,” said Harvard University chemical
engineer David Edwards. “It’s a diabolically brilliant idea.”
Fumed silica has myriad uses, mostly as a thickening agent in
products including ceramics, house paint, toothpaste and cosmetics. It is
not widely known as an aerosol additive.
“If you’re going to put it into the lung, there has to be a
mechanism to clear it, otherwise you just fill up somebody’s lung with
silica after repeated dosings,” said Dalby, of the Aerosol Lab. The
anthrax mailer, he noted, obviously wasn’t worried about giving his
victims silicosis.
Some fumed silicas are extremely difficult to make, but at least
two — Aerosil and Cab-O-Sil — are readily available and sold commercially
in bulk. Either product, in theory, could be used to coat anthrax spores.
Aerosil is based in Germany and Cab-O-Sil, in Boston. Both firms have
offices around the world.
Ken Alibek, a former deputy director of the Soviet bioweapons
program now running an Alexandria biotechnology firm, said the Soviets
used Aerosil in agent powders, and a classified Defense Department memo in
1991 said Iraq had “imported approximately 100 MT [metric tons] of Aerosil
during the last 8-9 years.” Spertzel said the United Nations reported in
the 1990s that Iraq had 10 metric tons of Cab-O-Sil, probably destined for
its chemical weapons program.
EXPENSIVE EQUIPMENT
The United Nations also documented the presence of three Niro Inc.
spray dryers in Iraq in the 1990s. Spertzel said two were destroyed, and
the third was scoured and sterilized before inspectors could examine it.
In spray drying, a technician mixes fumed silica and spores with
water, then sprays the mist through a nozzle directly into a stream of
superheated air shooting from a second nozzle into an enclosed chamber.
The water evaporates instantly, leaving spores and additive floating in
space.
“Surface tension will pull those little [silica] particles together
onto the big one,” said California Institute of Technology chemical
engineer Richard Flagan. “You will end up with some degree of coating.”
Whoever made such an aerosol would “need some experience” with
aerosols and “would have to have a lot of anthrax, so you could practice,”
Edwards said. “You’d have to do a lot of trial and error to get the
particles you wanted.” It would also help to have an electron microscope
to examine the results.
This would mean at least several hundred thousand dollars worth of
equipment, several experts said. Niro’s cheapest spray dryer sells for
about $50,000. Electron microscopes cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
In all, said Niro’s Lancos, “you would need [a] chemist who is
familiar with colloidal [fumed] silica, and a material science person to
put it all together, and then some mechanical engineers to make this work
. . . probably some containment people, if you don’t want to kill anybody.
You need half a dozen, I think, really smart people.”
One way to assemble such a team would be with “the knowing
complicity of the government of the state in which it [the agent] is
made,” Spertzel said. Another way to acquire the agent, several sources
acknowledged, would be to steal it from a biodefense program that uses
live biological agents for research or training purposes.
The Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention of 1972 bans offensive
biowarfare research, but it clearly allows signatory nations to undertake
biodefense programs using small quantities of live agents.
The Daschle and Leahy letters each contained 1.5 grams of anthrax
powder or less, well within the boundaries of what researchers describe as
“laboratory quantities” of agent. It is impossible to account publicly for
all the anthrax powder that may exist in the United States, because most
of the defense projects that use it are classified.
The Post asked the Defense Department whether the U.S. armed forces
have made any anthrax powder comparable to that which was mailed to the
Senate. The department declined to comment, citing the ongoing anthrax
investigation.
There is, however, no public evidence that the Army has used
spray-dried agents in recent biodefense projects, choosing instead to test
small amounts of irradiated — and therefore nonlethal-anthrax bacteria
that had been dried with older technologies.
In a written response to questions about the U.S. interpretation of
the weapons convention, the Defense Department said its personnel may use
live biological agents in a number of research settings: for vaccines and
treatment; protective clothing and containment; alarms and detection; and
decontamination.
The department “does not set quantitative thresholds for the agents
or toxins in its possession,” but “these quantities are generally small,”
the response said. “DOD continues to evaluate its procedures to ensure
dangerous materials are safely stored and properly disposed of when no
longer required.”
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