Lone Wolf Terrorism (13 page)

When the bestselling novel
The Hot Zone
was written by Richard Preston in the 1990s, it made famous a little-known military research facility located just an hour's drive from Washington, DC. The US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), located at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland, is the military's premier research laboratory for developing medical defenses against biological warfare threats. In 1989, USAMRIID personnel helped contain an outbreak of an Ebola virus among primates in a commercial laboratory animal-holding facility in Reston, Virginia. Had the virus spread to humans, it would have been a national medical catastrophe. Preston's book described the incident and rightly portrayed the USAMRIID scientists as national heroes.
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Ivins, however, who began working at USAMRIID in 1980, was definitely not a national hero. He was a very troubled man who turned his brilliant mind against his own country. His path to becoming the first person to successfully send “live” anthrax through the mail is one filled with obsession, revenge, fear, and mental illness.

When Ivins first came to USAMRIID in 1980, he was assigned to work on developing a new and more effective anthrax vaccine. This was a high priority for the US defense community, since, only one year earlier, there had been an accidental anthrax outbreak at a secret Soviet military microbiology plant in Sverdlovsk that killed at least sixty-six people. That incident proved that the Soviets were producing anthrax to be used as a biological weapon. Ivins, who had a doctorate in microbiology, thus began his lifelong research on anthrax. By the time of his death by suicide in 2008, Ivins had become one of the world's leading authorities on growing anthrax spores. He not only provided spores to his colleagues at USAMRIID for their own research, but many other anthrax researchers around the world also relied on his work.
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Ivins was a family man who volunteered at the local Red Cross and attended church regularly. He led what his friends called a “hippie mass” in church, playing keyboards and acoustic guitar. He was known as an eccentric, showing up for work in clothes that were a few sizes too small and working out at the gym in dark socks and heavy boots. When he became flustered over something, he would stammer and flap his arms, trying to make his point. His colleagues liked him, finding him to be both smart and generous.
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Ivins, however, hid a dark side from everyone. He was obsessed with the Kappa Kappa Gamma (KKG) sorority, driving three hours or more to visit KKG chapter houses on various campuses, look at the house for approximately ten minutes, and then drive home for another three hours. He broke into the houses on two occasions, once to steal the sorority's cipher, which was a decoding device for the sorority's secret rituals, and another time to steal the actual ritual book.
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He also showed an excessive interest in a former University
of North Carolina (where Ivins did postdoctoral work) graduate student when he learned that she had been an advisor to the sorority. He vandalized the property where she lived.
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Later in the anthrax investigation, when FBI agents asked Ivins about his interest in KKG, he stated, “Oh, it's not an interest. It's an obsession.”
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What, then, could have caused Ivins to focus so much energy on the sorority and want to take revenge against it? All it took was a Kappa Kappa Gamma co-ed turning him down for a date when he was a student at the University of Cincinnati.
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Ivins did not have a happy childhood. He had a dominating mother who was physically abusive to his father. She struck her husband on different occasions with a broom, a skillet, and a fork.
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Ivins felt that his family treated him as an “unwanted outsider” and that his father ignored him.
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He was a loner as a teenager and had difficulty communicating with females.
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Nevertheless, Ivins eventually married and raised a family. However, although he was a renowned microbiologist, he became very worried by the summer of 2001 that funding for his anthrax-vaccine research at Fort Detrick would be drastically cut or even eliminated. Ivins was working on two different types of anthrax vaccines. One was a military anthrax vaccine, known as AVA, which had come under intense scrutiny and criticism by many military personnel who had been given the vaccine. They complained about its side effects, which included painfully swollen muscles and joints, headaches, and serious immune-system disorders. There were also questions raised about whether the vaccine would remain effective after up to three years in storage. Ivins was working with a private company to solve these problems, but the company was having trouble in its efforts to produce a better AVA vaccine. Meanwhile, Ivins was also working on another type of anthrax vaccine, called rPA (recombinant Protective Antigen). This was a genetically engineered vaccine, also known as the “Next Generation Vaccine,” that Ivins believed would solve all the problems associated with the AVA vaccine. Ivins was coinventor of that new vaccine and was set to collect patent royalties if the vaccine ever
came to market.
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This was unlikely, though, as Pentagon officials were telling managers at USAMRIID to shift personnel and resources away from research on anthrax vaccines and into the research and development of products that could be used against other biological agents, such as glanders, tularemia, and plague. When USAMRIID management approached Ivins in the summer of 2001 about working on glanders (a bacterium that kills both livestock and humans), Ivins replied angrily, “I am an anthrax researcher. This is what I do.”
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The fear of not being allowed to work on anthrax vaccines was cited by the US government as a motive for his anthrax letter attacks.

According to the Department of Justice's official report on the incident, “Dr. Ivins' life's work appeared destined for failure, absent an unexpected event.”
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That event would, of course, be an anthrax attack that created demand for anthrax vaccines. And that is exactly what happened following the September and October 2001 anthrax letter attacks, when the Food and Drug Administration fast-tracked approval of the AVA vaccine, putting Ivins back to work on anthrax vaccines.
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Ivins may also have had a financial motive for the attacks, since, as noted above, he had a patent for the rPA vaccine. The more concern there was throughout the country about the threat of anthrax, the higher the probability that Ivins's rPA vaccine might someday make it to market.

In addition to worries over not being able to work on anthrax vaccines, Ivins was also under severe emotional distress in the period leading up to the anthrax letter attacks. He wrote several alarming e-mails to a former female colleague, Mara Linscott, who used to work with him at Fort Detrick. In one e-mail, sent in October 1999, he wrote: “It's getting to be lately that I've felt there's nobody in the world I can confide in. You're gone now, and one of the reasons I was so sorry to see you go was a very selfish one—I could talk to you openly and honestly, and that was in itself a great lifter of my spirits.”
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He confided in her that he was seeing a psychiatrist and going to group therapy sessions but that it wasn't helping. In a June 2000 e-mail, he
wrote: “Even with the Celexa [an antidepressant drug] and the counseling, the depression episodes still come and go. That's unpleasant enough. What is REALLY scary is the paranoia…. Depression, as long as I can somewhat control it with medication and some counseling, I can handle. Psychosis or schizophrenia—that's a whole different story…. Ominously, a lot of the feelings of isolation—and desolation—that I went through before college are returning. I don't want to relive those years again.”
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In an earlier e-mail, in April 2000, he wrote that, at times, “it's like I'm not only sitting at my desk doing work, I'm also a few feet away watching me do it. There's nothing like living in both the first person singular AND the third person singular!”
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In yet another e-mail sent to Linscott, in August 2000, Ivins wrote: “I wish I could control the thoughts in my mind. It's hard enough sometimes controlling my behavior. When I'm being eaten alive inside, I always try to put on a good front here at work and at home, so I don't spread the pestilence…. I get incredible paranoid, delusional thoughts at times, and there's nothing I can do until they go away, either by themselves or with drugs.”
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Ivins was fixated on Linscott, who was twenty-nine years younger than him. He told one of his therapists that he had intended to kill Linscott (at one point he had been angry with her) by driving to upstate New York in 2000 to watch her play in a soccer game and offering her a glass of wine afterward from a jug of wine that he had spiked with poison. Linscott, however, was injured during the game, and Ivins changed his mind. The therapist told Ivins that she would have to report this to the authorities and had him sign a statement pledging to contact her immediately if he had any further homicidal thoughts.
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Despite his deteriorating mental health, nobody stopped Ivins from continuing to work with anthrax spores at Fort Detrick. A report in later years (March 2011) by a panel of behavioral analysts stated that Ivins's history of mental problems should have disqualified him from obtaining a security clearance and that he should not have been allowed by the army to work with dangerous biological agents.
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But work he did, and in the weeks leading up to the first wave of
anthrax letters in September 2001 and the second wave in October 2001, Ivins spent unusually long hours alone at night in his lab, a behavior that investigators later argued was evidence he was preparing the deadly anthrax spores for the letter attacks. There was even stronger circumstantial evidence pointing to Ivins as the anthrax letter culprit, including the finding by the FBI that an anthrax spore-batch (from the Ames anthrax strain) known as RMR-1029 was the parent material for the anthrax letter attacks and that Ivins had created and maintained this spore-batch in his laboratory at USAMRIID. Ivins was also among the few anthrax researchers in the country who had the ability to produce the highly purified spores that were used in the mailings.
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Additional circumstantial evidence identifying Ivins as the perpetrator was the fact that the anthrax letters were sent from a mailbox outside the Princeton University offices of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, the same sorority with which Ivins later admitted he was obsessed. Even though Princeton, New Jersey, was an approximately three-hour drive from Frederick, Maryland, where USAMRIID is located, as noted earlier, Ivins often took three-hour or even longer drives to visit various KKG sorority chapter houses in different states.
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Investigators also learned that Ivins had taken unauthorized environmental samplings (by taking swabs) for anthrax contamination after the attacks in the Fort Detrick building where he worked. When he found anthrax contamination only in the area where he himself worked and realized that it would point to him as a suspect in the attacks, he decontaminated his office and lab and failed to report it.
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He also submitted questionable samples of RMR-1029 when asked to do so by the FBI, a move viewed by investigators as a way to deceive them into thinking that he never had the same batch of anthrax spores that were used in the attacks.
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The anthrax letter attacks occurred in two waves. First, two letters postmarked on September 18, 2001, were sent to television news anchor Tom Brokaw at NBC News and to “Editor” at the
New York Post
, both located in New York City. Then, two more letters, postmarked
on October 9, 2001, were mailed to the Washington, DC, offices of Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. Another envelope filled with anthrax spores that was never recovered was believed to have been sent to the American Media, Inc., building in Boca Raton, Florida. Five people died from inhaling the
Bacillus anthracis
spores, and seventeen others were infected, some by inhaling the spores and others by absorbing the spores through the skin, which is known as cutaneous anthrax. Ten thousand more people believed to have been exposed to the anthrax spores underwent antibiotic prophylaxis. Several postal facilities and mailrooms were contaminated, as were buildings and offices on Capitol Hill. The Environmental Protection Agency spent $27 million from its superfund program to decontaminate the Capitol Hill facilities.
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The anthrax attacks, coming on the heels of the 9/11 suicide attacks, spread fear throughout the country that al Qaeda had struck again. There was also concern that the United States would now experience bioterrorism in addition to the usual conventional terrorist attacks such as hijackings, bombings, assassinations, and so forth. Meanwhile, the investigation by the FBI would last nearly seven years and become one of the largest and most complex in the agency's history. The Amerithrax Task Force, as the investigative effort was called, involved twenty-five to thirty full-time investigators from the FBI, the US Postal Inspection Service, and other law-enforcement agencies, as well as federal prosecutors from the District of Columbia and the Justice Department's Counterterrorism Section. More than ten thousand witness interviews were conducted on six different continents, as were eighty searches. More than six thousand items of potential evidence were recovered. The case also involved the issuance of more than 5,750 grand jury subpoenas and the collection of 5,730 environmental samples from sixty site locations.
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It took many years before the FBI was able to connect all the dots and identify Ivins as the prime suspect. Along the way, the agency wrongly suggested that a physician who used to work at Fort Detrick, Steven Hatfill, might be the anthrax attacker. Hatfill sued the government
and won a $5.8 million settlement from the Department of Justice, which also issued an official letter exonerating him.
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When the FBI finally started questioning Ivins in 2007 about his role in the anthrax attacks, the troubled scientist began to unravel. He never admitted to the attacks, but there were many inconsistencies in his interviews with investigators, including telling them that he really wasn't an expert on anthrax.
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His mental health, which was always fragile, further deteriorated during this period. In a group therapy session on July 9, 2008, he told the participants that he had access to a .22-caliber rifle, a Glock handgun, and body armor and planned to kill all his coworkers and everybody else who had wronged him in his life. The therapist called the police the next day. Instead of arresting him, though, the police took Ivins to Frederick Memorial Hospital for evaluation. He was released two weeks later. Soon afterward, he committed suicide by taking an overdose of Tylenol PM.
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