Anthrax Attacks ‘Solved’

WASHINGTON (AP) — A top U.S. biodefense researcher apparently committed suicide just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him in the anthrax mailings that traumatized the nation in the weeks following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to a published report.

The scientist, Bruce E. Ivins, 62, who worked for the past 18 years at the government’s biodefense labs at Fort Detrick, Maryland, had been told about the impending prosecution.

Henry S. Heine, a scientist who had worked with Ivins on inhalation anthrax research at Fort Detrick, said he and others on their team have testified before a federal grand jury in Washington that has been investigating the anthrax mailings for more than a year.

Just last month, the government exonerated another scientist at the Fort Detrick lab, Steven Hatfill, who had been identified by the FBI as a “person of interest” in the anthrax attacks. The government paid Hatfill $5.82 million to settle a lawsuit he filed against the Justice Department in which he claimed the department violated his privacy rights by speaking with reporters about the case.

The Times said federal investigators moved away from Hatfill and concluded Ivins was the culprit after FBI Director Robert Mueller changed leadership of the investigation in 2006.

After the government’s settlement with Hatfill was announced in late June, Ivins started showing signs of strain, the Times said. It quoted a longtime colleague as saying Ivins was being treated for depression and indicated to a therapist that he was considering suicide. Family members and local police escorted Ivins away from the Army lab, and his access to sensitive areas was curtailed, the colleague told the newspaper.

Ivins was one of the nation’s leading biodefense researchers.

In 2003, Ivins and two of his colleagues at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick received the highest honor given to Defense Department civilian employees for helping solve technical problems in the manufacture of anthrax vaccine.

(USA Today) Oct. 13, 2004 – Bruce Ivins was troubled by the dust, dirt and clutter on his officemate’s desk, and not just because it looked messy. He suspected the dust was laced with anthrax.

And he was in a position to know. 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.

Rather than reporting contamination to his superiors, Ivins said, he disinfected the desk. “I had no desire to cry wolf,” he later told an Army investigator.

Months later, Army investigators would see Ivins’ desk cleanup as the first sign of an alarming anthrax contamination at the nation’s most renowned biodefense laboratory. A 361-page U.S. Army report on the events of that winter and the following spring, recently obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, opens a rare window into the government’s guarded biodefense establishment. (Related: Where labs are located or planned)

Operation Noble Eagle: Joint Biological Rapid Response Team [pdf – slide show]