1. Note that it was the publisher’s wife, not the photo editor’s wife, who was the realtor for the hijackers. I agree that it very interesting. As for whether the FBI ever considered the connection, absolutely.
2. The letters weren’t mailed from Newark, but were mailed from Trenton... New Brunswick. Which coincidentally was the where Al Qaeda’s website was maintained. Azzam.com was mirrored by a guy 6 miles from the mailbox. He was recently indicted for tax evasion. I know of no basis for the points you make about Iraqi intelligence or Saddam. I would think that Laurie M might have backed off a bit when her theory that KSM was not KSM was shown to be wrong. That was the main predicate of her theory. As for Saddam funding WTC 1993, that sounds dubious and unsupported — heck, the idiot bomber returned to Ryder for his deposit on the truck they were so hard up for cash. Ramzi on this flight home complained of the lack of cash. Saddam had hundreds of millions just in his compound collecting dust.
3. Your suggestion Germany gave Iraq Ames would require a URL. I highly doubt it and have exhaustively researched the narrow issue of access to Ames. ATCC, now at GMU (where Ali-Al Timimi) gave Iraq 5 strains of anthrax, including Vollum, in the mid-1980s. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. If you say Germany gave Iraq Ames, do you have a URL or citation? The best you can say is something like “Spertzel says they would have had it given the determined efforts they made to get it, such as after one UK conference.”
4. Prague has been been pretty roundly debunked. The short of the press you mention in the past years is that CIA Director has said it came to appear that it increasingly was unlikely and is not credited. The only thing supporting the suggestion was a waiter’s recollection from quite a while before. Against it were things such as Atta’s phone records. But it is a somewhat complicated matter and I can post what is known separately. The CIA believes that it never happened. Certainly the guy who Atta says he met stridently denies it. :0) In support of your position, Edward Jay Epstein has done good work, and gone to Prague for interviews.
5. There is no evidence Saddam’s regime had anything to do with the anthrax mailings. It is interesting that last year Scheuer says he is 100 percent certain Ansar Al-Islam was experimenting with anthrax in 2002. That is not corroborated by anything else in the public record but he was saying he knows for sure (based on intelligence that included humint and sigint). Now this is interesting because Ali-Al Timimi’s charity and friend gave money each year to the group that was renamed Ansar Al-Islam. That group was formed in December 2002 by several EIJ and IG operatives sent by Ayman Zawahiri who joined together several groups who had splintered. An Albany, NY imam who had worked for Mullah Krekar, the Ansar head, reportedly was contacted with a message from Bin Laden asking about flight schools and how close he could get to an [redacted] aircraft. So while Iraqi connections are interesting, they go to Salafists associated with Iraq and not Saddam.
Admittedly, answers don’t come easy given Ayman’s contacts with Iraqi intelligence over the years.
errata - Ansar al Islam was formed in December 2001, not December 2002 as I mistyped. (It was an amalgamation of different groups/splinters and put together by EIJ/IG leaders sent by Ayman Zawahiri — to include the blind sheik’s successor Taha.
But while I will be fascinated by any URL showing that someone in Germany gave Iraq Ames (and they did want it and covert and even over-the-counter acquisition not a hard thing to do), I haven’t see such support in the past.
Here’s what I think we have reason to credit about access to Ames. I’ll be thrilled to add a link re transfer to Iraq if it exists.
“As I worked through the letters, it became apparent that Fort Detrick was the best place for the FBI to begin looking for a suspect,” Dr Paul Keim, an anthrax expert at the University of Northern Arizona, was hired by the FBI to help with the investigation, told the Daily Mail [UK] in 2005. TIGR scientist Timothy Read who headed the project to sequence the anthrax used in the attacks said of the comparison of the anthrax that killed Bob Stevens to theanthrax held at USAMRIID “It is basically like looking for differences in identical twins.” Ari Fleischer had explained in December 2001, “The evidence is increasingly looking like it was a domestic source. But again, this remains something that is not final nor totally conclusive yet.... I can’t give you the scientific reasons behind it, but you can assume they’re based on investigative and scientific means.... There’s a big difference between the source of it [the anthrax] and who sent it, because the two do not have to be tied.” Dr. Martin Hugh-Jones of Lousiana State University expressed skepticism that the FBI was up to the technical challenges: “When you can’t even find a refrigerator to keep the bug, that doesn’t say much for your chances of ever finding the one who mailed it.”
The Ames strain came from a cow in Texas in 1980. Texas veterinarian Mike Vickers sent a sample from a carcass in south Texas to the Texas Veterinary Medical Diagnostic Lab (”TVMDL”). A now-retired Dr. Howard Whitford, who isolated it from a carcass, forwarded it. When it arrived at Ft. Detrick, it bore a preprinted label from Agriculture Department’s National Veterinary Laboratory in Ames, Iowa. The mailing label resulted in the name “Ames” and some initial confusion among outside experts as to the history of the strain. It was forwarded pursuant to a request by Dr. Knudson of Ft. Detrick who had sought field strains of anthrax. Dr. Knudson at Ft. Detrick still had the correspondence from the time, to include even the mailing label. Published accounts say that it was just a mistaken use of the lab mailer and was sent from USAMRIID directly from Texas. In reality, based on what United States Postal Inspector, a member of the Amerithrax Task Force has said, perhaps it was first sent to Iowa. In contrast, a USDA spokesman has formally denied to me, after having the answer vetted by counterterrorism officials, having any indication that it was ever at Ames. He had previously noted that they may have had it without knowing it as the “Ames strain.”
A preliminary related question is: Did the Texas lab that first isolated it keep a sample? Dr. Howard Whitford, now retired to Montana, in response to a telephone inquiry, reports he may have sent it elsewhere. But as a general rule, most diagnostic labs have such a high a volume of samples — and they are the same for veterinary purposes — that samples would be routinely destroyed. The isolate likely was chosen to be sent to Ft. Detrick in the first place because the notes by the veterinarian, Dr. Vickers, indicate that it was particularly virulent, killing 30 cattle in a short time. He gave the example of one cow that had been healthy in the morning and then dead a few hours later.
As for the testing of lab isolates where the strain is known to be (and a copy of the strain can be obtained for testing), the genetic analysis of Dr. Keim, from Northern Arizona, had potentially promised to remove all doubt as to the source of the anthrax. Hope has long since faded according to press reports. A spokesman at the Institute for Genetic Research in Rockville, Md. provided the FBI with its first genetic road map for anthrax, has said that the differences identified by his team could not pinpoint the source. The Science article reporting the Keim and Reid genetic analysis does not address the testing done with respect to isolates from the vast majority of labs where Ames was known to be. 15 lab isolates remained to be tested.
The research is reported in Science. The analysis is directed to showing the similarity between various samples of Ames. The institutions known to have fully virulent B. anthracis Ames include USAMRIID, Naval Medical Research Center, Dugway in Utah, CDC, CAMR-Porton [in Great Britain], Battelle in Ohio, University of Northern Arizona (Keim), University of New Mexico, Louisiana State University (Hugh-Jones), and University of Scranton (DelVecchio). Alibek says Russia had Ames. Porton Down reportedly provided it to four unnamed researchers. (That, for example, is where Martin Hugh-Jones at LSU got it in the late 1990s). American Type Culture Collection (”ATCC”) has written me to say that as a matter of policy, they will not address whether their patent repository (as distinguished from their online catalog) had virulent Ames prior to 9/11. They did not take the opportunity to deny it.
Anthrax that was destroyed at Iowa State University in early Fall 2001 had first been isolated as early as 1928. There were 100 or so vials of five or six strains.
By way of further background, there was no requirement to document transfers prior to 1997. One former USAMRIID-sponsored vaccine researcher at UMass, Dr. Curtis Thorne reports that samples used to be sent by ordinary mail. In 2001, his research on virulence of genetically altered anthrax strains was being built upon at the University of Texas (Houston) by Theresa Koehler under a grant from the CIA, the National Institutes of Health and others. The Ames strain, along with other strains, would be distributed not for nefarious purposes, but for veterinary and other research, to include use in challenging vaccines in development. “It’s critical to use a genetically complete strain of the [anthrax] bacterium in experiments involving virulence,” University of Texas (Houston) scientist Koehler has said.
“We just don’t know how many hands it went through before it got to the ultimate user,” explained Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and once a consultant to the government’s investigation. One expert, Dr. C.J. Peters, summarizes: “Knowing that this strain was originally isolated in the U.S. has absolutely nothing to do with where the weapon may have been prepared because, as I tried to make the point, these strains move around. A post doc in somebody’s laboratory could have taken this strain to another lab and it could have been taken overseas and it could have ended up absolutely anywhere. Tiny quantities of anthrax that you couldn’t see, that you couldn’t detect in an inventory can be used to propagate as much as you want. So that’s just not, in fact, very helpful.”
It’s naive to think that Al Qaeda could not have obtained Ames just because it tended to be in labs associated with the US military. As just one example, US Army Al Qaeda operative Sgt. Ali Mohammed accompanied Zawahiri in his travels in the US. (Ali Mohamed had been a major in the same unit of the Egyptian Army that produced Sadat’s assassin, Khaled Islambouli). Ali Al-Timimi was working in the building housing the Center for Biodefense funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (”DARPA”) and had access to the facilities at both the Center for Biodefense and the adjacent American Type Culture Collection. Michael Ray Stubbs was an HVAC system technician at Lawrence Livermore Lab with a high-level security clearance permitting access. That was where the effort to combat the perceived Bin Laden anthrax threat was launched in 1998. Aafia Siddiqui, who attended classes at a building with the virulent Vollum strain, later married a 9/11 plotter. The reality is that a lab technician, researcher, or other person similarly situated might simply have walked out of some lab that had it.
Among the documents found in Afghanistan in 2001, were letters and notes written in English by a scientist about his attempts to obtain an anthrax sample. One handwritten letter was on the letterhead of the Society for Applied Microbiology, the UK’s oldest microbiological society. The Society for Applied Microbiology of Bedford, UK, recognizes that “the development and exploitation of Applied Microbiology requires the maintenance and improvement of the microbiological resources in the UK, such as culture collections and other specialized facilities.”
Ft. Detrick sent its Ames strain to places like Porton Down in Great Britain and Suffield in Canada. Martin Hugh-Jones at Lousiana State University was sent the Ames strain in the late 1990s from Peter Turnbull at Porton Down. Jones says he traded anthrax strains like they were baseball cards. USAMRIID sent Ames to the lab at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff in March 2000. USAMRIID sent the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center, an Albuquerque research institute, the strain in March 2001. Aberdeen Proving Ground built a Biolevel-3 facility sometime in 2001 and by 2002, according to one newspaper account, had 19 virulent strains of anthrax, including Ames.
Peter Turnbull, then at Porton Down, has said that Porton Down shared Ames with “very few” researchers whom he declined to name. Porton Down scientists previously acknowledged sharing the Ames strain with the agency’s public health branch, the Center for Applied Microbiology and Research (”CAMR”). CAMR officials also acknowledged distributing Ames to a small number of private researchers. Keim’s analysis was able to exclude at least one Porton Down isolate: The Washington Post in the spring of 2002 reported that “it is now indisputable the mailed microbes are direct descendants of the germs developed at Fort Detrick.” According the Post article, the sequencing has allowed Keim’s lab to rule out three sources of the anthrax, including one isolate from the British biodefense lab at Porton Down.
At Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. — where Al Qaeda sympathizer Aafia Siddiqui studied — research scientist Daniel Perlman ran into trouble with university administrators after conducting experiments after the anthrax attacks, upon being asked by a company to devise a diagnostic tool to detect anthrax contamination. He and a colleague revived a sample of anthrax from an old strain and created a nutrient on which pretty much only anthrax would thrive.” Upon hearing of the scientists’ study, Brandeis’ administration became alarmed that anthrax had been grown without university approval. It called in authorities, and it shut the biology building for a week to test for spores. Microbiologist Mahler advises me that she and Dr. Perlman used virulent Vollum, the strain used by the US Army before Ames.
In 2005, Dr. Michael V. Callahan, who worked for the Department of Defense at the time of his testimony, told the House Subcommittee on Prevention of Nuclear and Biological Attack of the Committee on Homeland Security: “the choice of the near-ubiquitous Ames strain, combined with the absence of forensic details in either the agent or the letters, indicate that the terrorist is scientifically informed, wary of detection and extremely dangerous.”
The strain referenced in documents on Khalid Mohammed’s computer seized in March 2003 was not Ames and perhaps not even virulent. It is reasonable to assume that the anthrax purchased from the North Korea supplier was not Ames (if that report of an early acquisition is credited). Thus, the question relevant to an Al Qaeda theory is what access to the US Army strain might have been accomplished by someone with 1) an organization supported by funds diverted from charities backing his play, and 2) a lot of educated and technically-trained Salafists who believe in his Islamist cause. Some possible sources include England, Canada, Russia (or former Soviet bloc country), the US Army, or a facility that obtained Ames from the US Army or other researcher who had it. Former UN Inspector Richard Spertzel thought that Iraq would likely have Ames — having first sought it in 1988 (and security being so lax at so many laboratories that had it). The strains Iraq included Sterne, A-3, two Vollum strains, and five other strains from the American Type Culture Collection. Russia reportedly had Ames and a senior Russian scientist was assisting Iraq. Dr. Alibek has explained that Russia had spies at Ft. Detrick, which explains why they tended to copy everything Ft. Detrick had done 6 months later. But it seems more likely that Al Qaeda simply got it directly from a western laboratory — given that Ayman had a trusted scientist attending conferences sponsored by Porton Down scheduling 10-day lab visit as early as 1999 and had the support of other scientists (such as GMU’s Al-Timimi) who did advanced research at US and UK universities. NBC once reported that the 16 labs known to have Ames had been winnowed to 4 that were a match.
Dr. Read, a scientist helping with the Amerithrax investigation in the DNA sequencing, long ago published the news that the anthrax was a 50/50% mixture of genotype 62 (Ames) and genotype 62 with an inversion on the plasmid. This would mean two distinct nucleic acids were detected in the sample. This means that some of the Ames had a segment of DNA that is inverted, or flipped, relative to the remainder of the plasmid. (No properly trained microbiologist would propagate or archive a mixture. Standard microbiological procedure calls for isolation of single colonies - i.e., single, unmixed cells and their clonal, unmixed progeny — at each step.) Inversions are not an uncommon class of mutational events, however. It would only be especially probative if it were a rare inversion and if samples were to be present among samples collected from laboratory archives. It is possible that the anthrax used is highly distinctive (pinpointing a single lab) and the authorities just don’t have that sample collected.
In March 2005, at a bioterrorism conference, French Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin had claimed that al-Qaeda affiliates have produced biological and chemical weapons in Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge, which borders on Chechnya. The militants there had a connection and contact with Arab Chechen fighter Ibn Khattab. De Villepin told members of a bioterrorism conference in Lyons, France, that after the invasion of Afghanistan, al-Qaeda cells moved to the Pankisi Gorge in order to continue their efforts. Russia claimed that the Pankisi Gorge in the former Soviet republic of Georgia was a haven for Chechen militants and international terrorists. Bin Laden’s confidante Ibn Khattab, who was killed by a poison letter in 2002, once said that wounded fighters and some international aid organizations were located there.
Chechnya lies 40 miles to the North. The Georgians say a six-man team of chemists was brewing poisons to be used on Westerners in Central Asia. Until late 2001, the Arab fighters reportedly were protected by high-ranking and corrupt officials and operated with impunity in the dense forests. The FSB has identified Islamic charities operating in Chechnya and elsewhere in the region to include Al-Haramain and Benevolence International Foundation historically associated with Al Qaeda’s aspiration to develop anthrax for use against US targets. The Benevolence International Foundation, a Chicago-based charity, provided financial support to the Chechen Islamists, according to a U.S. government affidavit filed in a Chicago court.
In September 2005, more than 60 deadly bacterial strains that were the legacy of the former Soviet Union’s biological weapons program were brought to the US from Baku, Azerbaijan as part of a joint program to combat bioterrorism. Copies of the strain were shipped aboard a U.S. military plane — on one of those not-so-secret secret missions announced the same week by the Associated Press. Arriving at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware officials, analysis of the strains at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology began immediately. The shipment was pursuant to an agreement under which the US provided money for its security of the pathogens to prevent theft by bioterrorists. AP reported: “In exchange for the aid, Azerbaijan agreed to share copies of its strains with the United States, which could prove helpful in the event of future anthrax attacks similar to the mail contamination nearly four years ago in Washington and New York. Those cases remain unsolved.” Russia, in contrast, AP reported, “has declined to share its biological strains and has urged former Soviet republics not to share their pathogens.” Former Russian bioweaponeer Ken Alibek, however, has always said that Russia had Ames. Moreover, a former KGB spy master says that the Russians had a spy at Ft. Detrick who provided samples of all specimens by diplomatic pouch.
The strains were shipped in what looked like a large camping cooler — and it took a waiver by authorities to avoid going through the X-ray. An Army captain from the Walter Reed Institute of Research was waiting to bring the strains back to the United States. After the analysis by AFIP, the announcements by the FBI relating to Amerithrax, as reported by the press, began pointing to the fact that the Ames strain was more widely distributed than previously believed. In late October 2006, the Washington Post reported: “But the more the FBI investigated, the more ubiquitous the Ames strain seemed, appearing in labs around the world including nations of the former Soviet Union.” But the precise sourcing of the report is unclear. In May 2006, Scheuer also claimed that Ansar-al-Islam in Northern Iraq was experimenting with anthrax based on signals intelligence and human intelligence.
Thus, Zawahiri’s access to the Ames strain is still yet to be proved or disclosed, but there was no shortage of possibilities. Dr. Lorraine Hoffman, Iowa State University veterinary microbiologist, on the clearing up of the Ames strain confusion, summarized the issue of access to Ames nicely: “Whoever got it, got it from somewhere.”