Anthrax mystery silences Santa

16 Dec, 2001 06:45 AM8 mins to read

In the first of a two-part series, ROGER FRANKLIN examines the 'lone nut' explanation for the anthrax letters.

NEW YORK - Every year at this time, the United States Postal Service tries to burnish an image that it has spent the previous 11 months tarnishing with price increases, lost mail, surly counter assistants and the odd employee massacre.

Resolute postmen, the public is assured with a hokey wink, are braving snow, sleet and dark of night to make sure that Santa gets his Christmas mail from America's children.

Actually, the letters go no further than Anchorage, Alaska, where they are answered by volunteers, franked with a "North Pole" postmark and mailed back to their young senders.

Until this year, the biggest worry has been that the jailbirds who pen many of the replies might lace their responses with cheerful obscenity or mischievous drawings of what Santa and his elves get up to during those long Arctic nights.

But not this Christmas.

Kids continue to write, but postal authorities have let it be known that the chances of receiving a response are not all that good.

In this age of anthrax, when "dead letter" has acquired an entirely new meaning, mailmen and sorters are understandably nervous about odd-looking envelopes addressed in an untutored hand.

Sure, it could be from a child - or it might be another delivery of the toxic agent that has so far killed five people, made more than 40 others ill and prompted 100,000 preventative prescriptions for antibiotics.

"We don't want to disappoint America's youngsters," a postal spokesman said, "but these days we can't afford to be careless."

Santa's silence is but one small example of the way the US is altering its habits in response to what was, just a few short months ago, a threat to life and safety so improbable that only an author of the trashiest airport novels might have dared to dream it up.

It is a process of adjustment that has taken place with remarkably little fuss, as was demonstrated this month when a public opinion poll reported that, by a two-to-one margin, Americans are once again more fearful of the Internal Revenue Service than they are of being killed by their own mail.

Yet while America is apparently learning to live with anthrax, the identity of the individual or group that mailed out two batches of the lethal letters - the first only seven days after the September 11 attacks - is not nearly so clear.

True, there are plenty of suspects.

To one body of opinion, a "sleeper cell" of Muslim migrants is doing the bidding of Osama bin Laden, Iraq or both.

Another school of thought argues that the circumstantial evidence points to a homegrown bio-weapons expert, perhaps a laid-off employee of a Pentagon bio-weapons lab.

And that is the problem: there is such a wealth of conjecture that, until the mailer's identity is established, any one line of speculative inquiry is as good as the next.

Each scenario has its merits, but only when viewed in isolation. Compared and contrasted, none quite manages to convince.

The various task forces composed of FBI agents, Postal Service investigators and the intelligence arms of the armed forces might be able to put some of the wilder flights of fancy to rest.

But, for reasons of their own, they are not doing so.

So the dribs of rumour leaking out of the official investigations have served only to make the mystery that much deeper.

Here, then, is guide to the theories du jour, beginning with the one that Senator Tom Daschle, the recipient of a "weaponised" anthrax letter mailed in the second batch, seems to favour.

The Lone Nut: One of the three independent teams of FBI profilers working on the case believes the man responsible is most likely to be variation on the Unabomber model - a solitary and socially isolated academic, good with his hands and burdened by a lifelong sense of grievance.

It admits it has no hard and fast evidence to support this conjecture, other than the fact that it has chosen to regard anthrax, to quote one investigator, as "a bomb without the explosion - it kills from a distance."

Ergo, the anthrax killer must have worked at a bio-war facility, since such a history would match the techie stereotype and also explain how he obtained the spores or, less likely, the expertise to make them.

Government investigators have let slip only a few tantalising hints of their evolving theories, but the case has been neatly summarised and footnoted by the public speculations of Dr Barbara Rosenberg, a professor of biochemistry, who chairs the Federation of American Scientists panel on germ warfare and served as a consultant to the Clinton White House.

Rosenberg begins by noting that the anthrax is of the Ames strain, which has been at the centre of US bio-war research for the past 30 years.

Had it been another variant - Vollum 1B, say - the culprit would be much easier to identify, since research involving all other genetic lines was abandoned in the mid-60s.

Further, she insists that "there are no more than 20 laboratories known to have acquired the specific Ames sub-strain" from Fort Detrick, the Army's premier bio lab.

And the anthrax sent to Daschle - a two-gram dose the FBI has said was so powerful it could have killed 200 million people if evenly dispersed - is, in her view, the acme of the bio-warriors' black art.

With grains far smaller than the width of the finest human hair, it is, she says, the direct and deliberate result of an immensely sophisticated effort to shrink the spores.

Her evidence? Milling the anthrax, as she maintains a Russian or Iraqi laboratory would have done, leaves trace elements of the grinding surfaces through which it is processed.

Rosenberg says that since no accidental contaminants like Teflon or tungsten have been found, the anthrax must be of domestic US origin.

What has turned up, Rosenberg points out, is silica, which she maintains is a staple of all powdered US bio-agents.

Information obtained by United Nations weapons inspectors before they were barred from Iraq indicates that Saddam Hussein's laboratories favour bentonite, a fine clay which prevents clumping while keeping powdered spores fluffy enough to remain afloat for extended periods.

The downside of bentonite is that it is not nearly so effective at absorbing moisture, which will makes the fine, dry anthrax powder turn lumpy like damp sugar.

"The anthrax in the letters was probably made and weaponised in a US Government or contractor lab," Rosenberg says.

"It might have been manufactured recently by the perpetrator on his own, or made as part of the US bio-defence programme; or it may be a remnant of the US biological weapons programme before Nixon terminated the programme in 1969."

That might help to explain why US officials have been so reluctant to release progress reports on their sleuthing, says Rosenberg.

"Weaponisation of dry anthrax after 1972, when the Biological Weapons Convention was signed, could be construed as a violation" of international law, she writes.

In other words, if the anthrax is ever traced to an American facility, it would establish beyond doubt that Washington has been cheating.

There is a good deal more in the way of speculation when Rosenberg turns her attention from the laboratory to the issue of motive.

Noting that the anthrax letters were all carefully sealed with adhesive tape to stop the spores spilling out in transit, she speculates that mass murder might not have been the perpetrator's goal.

"The motive was not necessarily to kill but to create public fear," she says.

"The letters warned of anthrax or the need to take antibiotics, making it possible for those who handled the letters to protect themselves."

The fact that three of the letters were mailed to media organisations bolsters her argument that the mailer craves publicity more than corpses.

"The sender," Rosenberg says, "simply took advantage of September 11 to throw suspicion elsewhere ... to push the US Government toward retaliatory action against some enemy, or to attract funding or recognition to some programme with which he is associated."

If the object was simply to kill large numbers of people - as Iraq might wish to do - there would have been a lot more anthrax, and it would have been released in, say, the New York subway system, where big and simultaneous exposures would have preserved the element of surprise, overwhelmed hospitals with the resulting casualties and, thanks to lingering contamination, necessitated the long-term abandonment of the city.

Finally, this is how Rosenberg summarises the accusation that underlies her case.

"The US Government has undoubtedly known for some time that the anthrax terrorism was an inside job."

Its refusal to release ongoing details of its probers' findings must therefore be viewed, at least in her view, as the likely proof that Washington has been playing fast and loose with its treaty obligations.

A tight case, right? Well, yes - but only until you take a closer look at the other leading line of speculation.

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