[John Faust]

Phase One in a 2-stage op is a set-up phase, and AMI was crucial in that set-up. It put people in a certain frame-of-mind desired by the mailers.

Is this just a general comment or are you thinking of something specific? What frame of mind do you mean?

[Khan Noonian Singh]

KNS - "Phase One in a 2-stage op is a set-up phase, and AMI was crucial in that set-up. It put people in a certain frame-of-mind desired by the mailers."

JF - << Is this just a general comment or are you thinking of something specific? What frame of mind do you mean? >>

The comment about 2-stage covert ops is true ingeneral, but I had something specific in mind.

Phase One in the anthrax mailings was meant to get people in a frame-of-mind to connect the anthrax mailings with Muslim terrorism and specifically with 09-11.

For a start, the letters were dated 09-11-01, and they said "Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is Great."

The mailers realized that this was not enouf: people could say that the Muslim connection was a ruse. That's where the AMI attack in Boca Raton came into play. It established a geographically incontrovertible nexus of connexion between the anthrax and the 09-11 highjackers. This was convincing in a way that phrases written in the letters could not be, since it would have been much harder for a casually opportunistic piggybacker to find out that Boca Raton was where to go and then to go there so quickly after 09-11. Howsoever, this is preciisely what happened; that just proves that it wasn't a casual piggybacker.

Bob Stevens' death has kept the anthrax/09-11 connexion in play. That was the purpose of the Phase-One attack on AMI.