The Anthrax Mailer: An al Qaeda Operative

The most famous bioterrorist episode of recent times has been the series of anthrax-laced envelopes mailed from Trenton, New Jersey in September and October 2001 to various newspaper and government offices. In spite of enormous media coverage and painstaking investigation by the FBI, aided by hundreds of thousands of tips from the public and by dozens of teams of scientific researchers, thus far neither the Anthrax Mailer himself (or, against all supposition, herself) nor the source of the anthrax has been identified.

In its investigation of the anthrax mailing case, the FBI has relied heavily on specialists. While specialized knowledge can prove very helpful in many investigations, it always needs to be scrutinized with an eye to spotting embedded assumptions and biases. Experts can often be utterly incapable of handling problems that require originality. They tend to define problems in terms of their specialization rather than to seek to develop new perspectives on it.

Skills in conceptualization and intellectual synthesis are needed in order to integrate inputs from specialists into a general theory of the case. This is especially true when the problem is an out-of-the-box one such as that posed by the Anthrax Mailer.

In the Anthrax Mailer case, one cannot help but suspect that the long, frustrating hunt for the Unabomber, the most notorious criminal mailer in American history, has colored FBI's approach to the anthrax case. The Bureau's psychological profile of the Anthrax Mailer sounds very much like the Unabomber. The basis of the profile is acknowledged to be solely the letters sent by the Anthrax Mailer--a dubious analytical approach, relying as it does on a text isolated from its context. It runs the risk of being like the analysis of a Rorschach test that reveals more about the mind of the psychologist than it does about the person taking the test.

So, too, various small deviations from presumed authenticity of such a letter, noted by certain experts, could easily be accounted for by personal idiosyncrasy, time spent in the United States, or an intent to deceive.

Therefore, FBI's main working hypothesis--that the Anthrax Mailer is a domestic terrorist, a disgruntled U.S. Government microbiologist or perhaps a contractor scientist who worked on his spores after hours or in a lab in his basement--seems to lack any solid grounding.

So how does one go about analyzing the evidence and narrowing down the possibilities in an unusual case like this?

It helps to apply several principles of qualitative analysis and detective work:

· Entia non sunt multiplicanda. (Occam's Razor), literally, "Entities are not to be multiplied," which means we should favor the simplest of competing hypotheses, all other things being equal. In broader terms, the world may be a complicated place, but some things in it are simple. So it is wise to think simply at first and only if this fails to seek more complex explanations. If one starts with complex explanations, one is apt to miss the simple ones and end up wandering around in the wilderness;

· the goal of qualitative analysis as applied to detective work is not necessarily to find perfect, airtight solutions but rather to narrow down the possible explanations and to orient oneself toward the more fruitful directions. Judgmental, dismissive, narrow-definer personalities--people who want their information sliced and diced and served up to them on a silver platter--fare poorly in this game;

· "It is not always by plugging away at a difficulty and sticking to it that one overcomes it, but often rather by working on the one next to it. Certain people and certain things ought to be approached at an angle." (Andre Gide) As on the battlefield, frontal attacks can often bog down in detective work and lead to high casualties; and

· context is king. Failure to consider the context of evidence is perhaps the most frequent source of analytical errors.

Applying these principles of analysis to the anthrax mailings, what does one come up with?

First, that the handwriting, linguistic, and putative psychological evidence in the anthrax letters shows them to be a fake seems quite a stretch. No observer has found a single piece of evidence that conclusively demonstrates that the anthrax letters are not what they seem to be. If they are a fake, they are a rather good one, done by someone who had carefully studied the subject and worked hard to develop a mastery of it. Such mastery is unlikely to have been the product of a few days of work between the September 11 terrorist attacks and the September 18 first anthrax letter mailings. This is not inconceivable, but it also isn't easy to believe.

If, however, the letters were written by an al Qaeda operative, the opening sentence (without a period)--"This is next"--is a marvelously suggestive and menacing one, the clear suggestion being that al Qaeda has an entire series of dirty weapons at its disposal. Putting this menace in the first sentence is very good literary style, which can make up for the supposedly significant deviation from starting with the traditional invocation of Allah.

If the letters are the work of a Middle Eastern warrior, then the psychological meaning of them is radically different than that of the Unabomber's mailings, and so is the personality. Admonishing the recipient to get "penacilin", taken by adherents of a domestic terrorist interpretation to be inconceivable as coming from al Qaeda, admits to many possible motives:

1. as an attempt to mislead readers into suspecting a domestic terrorist; 2. as a kind of gloating characteristic of a person who derives such pleasure from the exercise of power over a victim that revealing valuable information is of little concern; or who is intensely pleased at having struck a blow against the great enemy America; or who simply needs to tell his story or boast to someone and so does so to the victim because he dares not tell anyone else; or 3. as a way to ensure that the attack is correctly understood to be anthrax bioterrorism and does not simply lead to an unexplained death.

So it seems very believable that the letters are exactly what they purport to be--or at least there is no strong reason to doubt that they are.

A second point: despite meticulous efforts to discover some trace of DNA or other identifying mark on the various letters, not a shred of evidence has turned up. This strongly suggests that the Anthrax Mailer has excellent forensic skills. A domestic terrorist could acquire such skills; but this capacity is not characteristic of such an individual, which makes it somewhat hard to believe that indeed this was the kind of person who mailed the letters.

Third, while the first mailings on September 18 seem to have contained the ordinary Ames strain of anthrax of Fort Detrick, Maryland (U.S. Government) provenance, the second mailings on October 9--to Senators Daschle and Leahy--contained anthrax at a much higher level, reaching the stupendous level of one trillion spores per gram. The hypothesis that this refinement resulted from milling by postal machinery is far less persuasive than one that looks in the direction of the original production of the anthrax because the anthrax in the letters to the senators was clearly the product of an exceptional technical process, with each infinitesmal spore wrapped in its own coating of a special, undisclosed chemical and all of the spores exquisitely stacked. Evidently, in any case, the Mailer had access to more than one batch of anthrax.

Several aspects of all this deserve explanation. Why two leading Democratic senators, of all potential U.S. Government targets? A frequent explanation holds that this is a tipoff that the Mailer was a domestic terrorist with a rightwing agenda. Of course, it is hardly likely that the anthrax would have ever reached the senators themselves; still, the symbolism of such hate mail is clear. However, there is another, twofold explanation:

1. Senator Leahy was of special interest to al Qaeda as the head of the appropriations panel in charge of aid to Egypt and Israel. In 1998 this panel formulated the "Leahy Law", which permitted the U.S. Government to continue appropriations to military and security units that conduct torture if there are "extraordinary circumstances". Under the Leahy Law, the U.S. has "rendered" Egyptian Islamic Jihad members to the Government of Egypt, a practice that drew the fierce condemnation of Dr. Ayman Zawahiri, leader of the EIJ and second only to Bin Laden in al Qaeda. So targeting Leahy with an anthrax letter must be considered highly characteristic of al Qaeda (see http://members.bellatlantic.net/~vze43v8m/); and

2. al Qaeda contains some very sophisticated, devious minds; and it follows the American scene very closely. So addressing the letters to leading Democrats would be a clever way in which to make these mailings seem to be of domestic provenance.

In other words, rather than suggesting a domestic terrorist, the targeting of Leahy and Daschle provided al Qaeda the double value of striking at a specific enemy and misleading observers.

A second aspect is the underlying explanation of the sequence. If the Mailer has such high-grade anthrax, why didn't he use it in the first mailings? A plausible explanation would be that he doesn't have much of it, that it is precious, in very short supply, that it would not be easy or cheap to come up with more of it. In turn, that suggests that the Mailer acquired this high-quality anthrax from someone else and does not have the capacity to produce it himself.

A third and most vital aspect: one trillion spores per gram is a phenomenal engineering feat. It means that the spores were packed together with unbelievable precision and tightness (to avoid contamination), yet they were splendidly aerosolizable, floating up without being disturbed. They were also coated with an unusual chemical preparation--most likely, fumed silica--to enhance aerosolization. In effect, this problem is one of physical chemistry, a stacking problem, as of oranges; but it is also one of chemical and mechanical engineering, actually to produce the stuff in a reliably usable form. Both in addition to the knowledge of microbiology involved and expertise at containment measures.

There are two explanations for who might have done this. One, the common explanation, is that a highly intelligent, disgruntled domestic scientist did the job. That is very, very hard to believe. For a single person to possess to such a high level of three distinct skills--physical chemistry, chemical engineering, and microbiology--would certainly be something highly unusual that would have singled him out as a unique star performer. Also, the equipment required is very expensive, which rules out the basement laboratory notion.

The other interpretation is that this astounding feat was the product of a team effort. In fact, it has Team Effort written all over it. And not just any team. To reach the very demanding specifications of a perfected, ready-to-go high-technology product that these one trillion spores per gram represented required a "national program" with a team of at least a half-dozen highly skilled scientists and engineers working with advanced equipment and many millions of dollars over years of effort in an iterative fashion, with multiple frustrations and setbacks along the road. The scientific, engineering, and project management skills of such a team must have been at an exceptionally high level--suggesting that only a few advanced countries could have accomplished this feat.

Generally speaking, it is better to believe things that are easy to believe than those that are hard to believe!

So, which country's government was the perpetrator of this crime against humanity? For that is exactly what one trillion spores per gram of a deadly biowarfare agent are. Developed, of course, in the name of self-defense against a potential aggressor. And how did this superbly refined anthrax come into the hands of the Anthrax Mailer? To get to the answers to these questions, it is useful to adopt Andre Gide's suggestion of working on a related problem.

Assuming that the Anthrax Mailer might be guilty of other terrorist crimes, it is useful to ask, what other terrorist-like acts occurred in the United States in the autumn of 2001?

[***] According to this Just One Terrorist hypothesis, the Anthrax Mailer is no domestic Unabomber type or disgruntled scientist but rather a battle-hardened, well-trained Middle Eastern intelligence/special forces/security police operative. He is quite possibly a member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a former special forces type who came to al Qaeda along with Zawahiri and Atef, Osama bin Laden's chief lieutenants (Atef was subsequently killed by an American bomb in Afghanistan). This operative might have lived for many years in the U.S., having originally escaped Egypt at the time of the crackdown in the early 1990s. He would be implicitly trusted by the leadership of al Qaeda, which would explain why they would entrust him with precious anthrax.

It is also possible that he is from another Arab country and arrived more recently. He did not necessarily have any direct connection with the September 11 hijackers, at least one of whom evidence now suggests had been handling anthrax. As for his location, Trenton and JFK Airport would quite likely to define his initial range; together they suggest that he is located in northeastern New Jersey. If so, heading to Trenton to drop off the letters would be a logical way to throw suspicion on Pennsylvania or at any rate away from his true location while not getting noticed for out-of-state license plates. A New Jersey license plate around JFK Airport, in contrast, is nothing unusual. Shooting down an airplane at JFK would be better than doing so at Newark Airport, which would have tended to disclose his northeastern New Jersey location.

In general, the pattern is one of a fox who throws the hunters off the scent, consistent with the identity of an intelligence operative. That such an al Qaeda type would display impeccable forensic skills is readily understandable. It is also characteristic of a Middle Eastern intelligence operative to be skilled in the handling of biowarfare agents. He didn't need to do much more with them, at any rate, than empty them from vials into the letters while using protective equipment.

What kind of a personality would such an al Qaeda member have? Clearly, he can be completely cold-blooded. However, like many in the world of intelligence, he might possess a fair amount of charm and the capacity to display warmth, to be an excellent actor. Therefore, it is entirely possible that he can be quite convivial, and he even could be the life of the party in order to throw off suspicion. Certainly, he would become aware of the FBI's profile of the bioterrorist as a Unabomber type and have strong incentive to behave in a very different way. He may be living in motels and be highly mobile, in part to avoid becoming known and observed by neighbors. Meanwhile, the standard profile is not only wrong; it also has helped to mislead both the FBI and the public regarding the likely profile of the Anthrax Mailer.

So how did al Qaeda come into possession of the anthrax, including the ultrahigh-quality version? If, as has been argued, this version was the fruit of a national program, then there are only a few likely suspects. If it had been the United States, one assumes that the extensive inquiries in the months following the attack would have uncovered the offending U.S. Government program. But it seems somewhat illogical that there would have been such a program in the first place, since the deployment of biological weapons is not something that plays to the advantages of the United States. Conceivably, for "defensive" testing purposes, something of this sort might have been developed. But it would have been a major violation of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on Their Destruction). Any U.S. Government agency that had developed it would have been asking for trouble if the program were revealed. So an American origin seems not at all likely.

The Russians may have obtained the Ames strain via espionage, then worked on it to bring it up to one trillion spores per gram. However, that explanation requires two difficult steps.

In favor of the Iraq explanation is that the chemical coating of the spores is likely to have been fumed silica. Iraq is known to have imported silica for use as a dispersant in its chemical weapons program. So the Iraqis possessed the ingredients for engineering the 1 trillion-spore anthrax. However, it is less clear whether they had the scientific and technical capabilities to do so, or if they chose to expend the resources on such a project. In addition, even if they tackled this problem, they may not have been able to solve it. Lastly, had they actually developed such high-grade anthrax, they would have had little incentive to provide it to al Qaeda. Theft of a few grams of the anthrax by a participating Iraqi scientist for resale to al Qaeda would have been a more likely route.

The third candidate is the UK. In a clearcut violation of the Convention, which states explicitly that no country is to provide biowarfare agents or knowhow to any other country "whatsoever", the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland gave its British counterpart, the Chemical and Biological Defence Establishment at Porton Down, the Ames strain in the late 1980s. The reason offered was to permit the British to develop their own defensive measures against the anthrax.

The British certainly have the scientific expertise to achieve such an engineering feat. Porton Down is not too far from Oxford University, a leading center of physical chemistry. The justification of developing ultrahigh-quality anthrax in order to test defensive measures could always be applied. A spirit of rivalry with the Americans may have been involved: "We can do better than the Yanks did." And there may have been the motive of seeking a surprise weapon that would strengthen the UK's military posture.

How might the various versions of this British anthrax find their way to al Qaeda?

First, it is well known that Soviet agents had penetrated British intellectual and government circles during the Cold War, so the possibility that their network extended to Porton Down is significant--much more likely than that Iraq or any other such nation managed to gain access. If a British scientist in Russian pay had provided small amounts of the original American and successively higher grades of British anthrax to his Russian liaison in the period following the collapse of the Soviet Union, moreover, the chances of diversion would have been very good. The KGB mafia would have offered a much more lucrative customer for Russian spies in Britain than the Government of Russia itself, where the best a spy could hope for would be a medal or a plaque on the wall some day. A plausible scenario: at a price of perhaps $10 million, a network like that of Victor Bout, ex-Russian officer who became an arms salesman to UN-embargoed countries, would have sold to al Qaeda several vials containing a few grams each of the American strain and the ultrahigh-quality strain of British anthrax.

The pattern of small amounts of several grades of anthrax in the letters is very consistent with a situation in which a scientist would have surreptitiously sequestered a few grams each of various batches of anthrax as it was being iteratively upgraded. It is also suggestive of a constraint that would have led the ultimate attacker to decide to disperse the anthrax via mail rather than into the air above a city: that the perpetrator only had a few grams of each type at his disposal.

Second, the 1993 partial privatization of the civilian Centre for Applied Microbiology and Research (CAMR) associated with the Chemical and Biological Defence Establishment at Porton Down included the transfer of all British Government anthrax vaccine to Porton Products Ltd. Through a series of holding companies, Porton Products is owned in part by the Lebanese-origin Fuad El-Hibri, who had worked for Citibank in Saudi Arabia arranging investments for rich Saudis. El-Hibri subsequently acquired the Michigan Biological Products Institute, thereby forming BioPort, Inc., the sole supplier of anthrax vaccine in the U.S. and UK (see the commentary "FBI Overlooks Foreign Sources of Anthrax" by Edward Jay Epstein in the Wall Street Journal, December 24, 2001).

With part of El-Hibri's rationale apparently being to protect Saudi Arabia against Iraqi anthrax, the company managed to acquire at least one virulent Ames strain for testing on animals. What else transpired in the obscure relationships between and among the Chemical and Biological Defence Establishment, the civilian CAMR, and Porton Products Ltd is not clear; but surely the opportunities for surreptitious appropriation of a few grams of various grades of anthrax were considerable. The Saudi connection alone makes this route of transmission of the anthrax to al Qaeda very plausible.

The unusually proactive conduct of British foreign and military policy during the American-led war in Afghanistan might be a way of trying to compensate for or cover up UK culpability in this entire deeply embarrassing episode--compounded now by the cover-up itself. And the silence of the British Government regarding anthrax may speak louder than words.

How likely is this or some similar scenario? One view is that it is highly likely compared to all other explanations of the development of the ultrahigh-quality anthrax and the transmittal of it and the original Ames strain to al Qaeda. Perhaps the odds could be notionally assessed like this: UK-10; Iraq-2; United States-1; Russia-1; some other country or source-1.

A crime against humanity, a flagrant violation of the Convention, and a source of a weapon of mass destruction that the terrorists then used with superlative disruptive and psychological effect against the United States, and are likely to use again.

A final note on all this analysis: it suggests that al Qaeda has been much more successful in striking blows against the United States than is generally understood. Whether other accidents and instances of disruption like the train derailments in Florida and Maryland in the time since September 11, 2001 are attributable to al Qaeda is not completely clear. According to the Just One Terrorist theory, the same highly skilled al Qaeda operative has--in a phased, decathlon-like manner with no overlap or backtracking--mailed the anthrax letters, shot down Flight #587 and the USAF jet on the Jersey shore, and perhaps derailed the two Amtrak trains.

This analysis suggests that al Qaeda possesses a highly effective weapon against vulnerable civilian and military aircraft worldwide (the shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile); it has possessed and may still possess a biological weapon of mass destruction (high-quality anthrax); and it has had the skill and luck to strike against the United States in ways that hide its role while spreading confusion, terror, and disruption.

Whoa. A LOT of work went into this. Very interesting.

We cannot forget that one of the hijackers rented an apartment from the first man who died of anthrax.

Also a doctor in Florida came forward after the anthrax attacks. He had treated one or two of the hijackers and although they complained of a rash, he later recognized their symptoms as an anthrax rash.

I'm interested to know if the "two unrelated materials" Ken Alibek used to weaponize anthrax that he talks about below to Ricahrd Preston are the SAME two materials found in the senate anthrax - that is silica nanoparticles and a siloxane binder (sometimes called "polymerized glass").

http://hackvan.com/pub/stig/articles/bioweapons.htm

One day, Ken Alibek and I were sitting in a conference room near his office talking about the anthrax he and his research team had developed. "It's very difficult to say if I felt a sense of excitement over this. It's very difficult to say what I felt like," he said. "It wouldn't be true to say that I thought I was doing something wrong. I thought I had done something very important. The anthrax was one of my scientific results -- my personal result."

I asked him if he'd tell me the formula for his anthrax.

"I can't say this," he answered.

"I won't publish it. I'm just curious," I said.

"Look, you must understand, this is unbelievably serious. You can't publish this formula," he said. When I assured him I wouldn't, he told me the formula for the Alibekov anthrax. He uttered just one sentence. The Alibekov anthrax is simple, and the formula is somewhat surprising, not quite what you'd expect. Two unrelated materials are mixed with pure powdered anthrax spores. It took a lot of research and testing to get the trick right, and Alibek must have driven his research group hard and skillfully to arrive at it. "There are many countries that would like to know how to do this." he said

Remember, right after 9.11 anthrax was mailed to antijihadi journalists in Pakistan.

Has that proven to really be anthrax?

That leaves three prime suspects: Russia, Iraq, and the UK.

Actually there's a fourth, as born out farther in the article. Saudi Arabia.

The apartment rented by Hamza Alghamdi and Marwan al-Shehhi didn't belong to Bob Stevens, it belonged to Gloria Irish, wife of Sun editor Michael Irish and co-worker of Stevens.

http://www.sptimes.com/News/101501/Worldandnation/Hijackers_linked_to_t.shtml

This article quotes an FBI spokeswoman named Judy Orihuela, who to the best of knowledge has not commented upon this, one of the most incredible facts in the entire anthrax saga, since way back in October of '01. Personally, I believe that not does she most likely know the truth about the anthrax letters, but I believe she has been placed under a strict gag order for her superiors regarding this whole case. That's one brain I sure would love to get inside.

I don't think that either Occam or Andre Gide were forensic pathologists. It would, I suppose, be really neat if we could tie the 9/11 hijackers to the congressional anthrax, and tie the strain of anthrax to Iraq. It would bring everything full circle. I have to believe that the Feds had something: an ex-wife's suspicions about her husband, a co- conspirator, office rumors, something to steer them toward the domestic terrorist/mad scientist model.

Some of the hijackers lived in an apartment whose leasing agent was the wife of an AMI editor...not the dead guy.

There are two "pharmacist/doctor" incident. One, Atta and cohort appeared - Atta with red hands, cohort with a cough. Not anthrax, but might have been playing with some chemical for some purpose.

On a different occasion, another cohort visited a doctor with a wound on his leg that looked like, possibly, cutaeous anthrax.

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