Swiss police: Suspected anthrax letter sent to Chile was probably mailed from New York

BERN, Switzerland (AP) -- A suspected anthrax letter sent to Chile bore a Swiss postmark but may have been mailed from New York, Swiss police said Wednesday.

Dr. Antonio Banfi, a pediatrician in Santiago, Chile, received the letter -- with a Swiss postmark and a Florida return address -- two weeks ago in what may be the first confirmed case of anthrax-contaminated mail outside the United States.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention initially confirmed the contamination last week and was conducting further tests to determine whether the suspected spores in the letter to Banfi was from the same strain as anthrax found in letters in Washington and New York.

"We're certain it's anthrax but what strain of anthrax is something that's very important to determine," said Tom Skinner, a CDC spokesman in Atlanta.

"It will go a long way to help us determine as to whether there may be any correlation between the incident in Chile and those in the U.S. in regards to anthrax in the mail," Skinner said. Test results could be returned by late Wednesday, he said.

Skinner said a sample taken from the letter tested positive for anthrax in Chile. Researchers then sent the sample to a laboratory in Miami, where technicians confirmed the findings. The letter remains in Chile, he said.

Dr. Segaran Pillai, director of the Florida Department of Health lab in Miami, said he was told that the letter contained a pamphlet with medical literature. He said tests taken at the lab confirmed the anthrax on Nov. 21.

The Swiss Federal Police Office said the letter was part of a large mailing sent on behalf of a Florida company by the New York branch of the Swiss Post Office.

Swiss Post International Inc. provides worldwide bulk mailing services for companies. Under U.S. rules, letters sent within the country by international post offices must carry a foreign postmark.

The letter sent to Chile bore a postmark from Zurich, Switzerland, but had no date -- typical of letters sent by the New York branch, Swiss officials said.

On Tuesday, officials at Mosby Inc., a publisher of medical journals, told the Orlando Sentinel that whoever mailed the letter listed their Orlando, Fla., headquarters as the return address. Mosby is one of three publishing imprints owned by Harcourt Health Sciences.

Brandon Borrman, a company spokesman, said Mosby was working with federal investigators and would test the building and offer testing for employees.

"We have no reason to believe that anyone at our facility was exposed however as an extra precautionary measure we are voluntarily going to test the building and offer screenings to our employees," Borrman said.

Borrman said the Orlando facility -- with 1,100 employees -- is primarily used for the mailing of billing and renewal notices for company publications. He referred all questions about the route taken by the letter to the FBI.

Neither the person who opened the envelope nor 12 others who were nearby have tested positive for exposure to anthrax spores. All were given antibiotics as a precaution, Chilean health officials said.

Five people in the United States have died of anthrax exposure since last month.

this sounds like a convoluted way to keep this "domestic" until we are good and ready to broadcast our evidence against Iraq. We probably know damn well where the antrax came from and how it got in the hands of Al-Qaeda and who paid for it and who (Iraqi Secret Service) coordinated the operation and why (Gulf war is not finished according to Saddam) but we have to wait until OBL and afghanistan is in the books and all our other "coalition-building" is complete. Would bet money on Turkey, Jordan, Iran, and some former soviet states (and maybe some gulf states) to be very friendly when the time comes. Also bet Saudi, Egypt and Europe will be pulling their hair out (including Britain) but Syria will be shaking in its boots. And we will probably tell Israel to be martyrs again but stay put. Sounds like a DEBKAesque story right now but you wait and see...

Keep your eye on the target - not on the vehicle - in looking at the politics. I doubt the person who prepared this particular letter knew that the Los Angeles Times owned the publishing house. In fact, it's highly likely the Los Angeles Times doesn't know either!

Apparently the guy on the other end, in Chile, didn't expect to receive a letter like this, but he did recognize trouble. Another thread yesterday noted that the targeted individual worked for the same company as the biological researcher who disappeared in Memphis last week!

Now, back to the vehicle - and not for the politics of it all. Notice the use of BULK MAIL, or STANDARD MAIL as it has been called since 1996 for all of you out there who didn't bother changing your permit imprints until the last minute.

These guys demonstrated conclusively that they could enter anthrax laden letters as single piece First-Class Mail and get them delivered to or very near to their targets, such targets leading right up to the various broadcast media news anchors and Congressional leadership. They also proved there was little the USPS or the FBI could do about it short of finding contamination and closing down postal facilities.

In this case the bio-terrorists have shown they can use one of the most complex and sophisticated mailing techniques to circumvent USPS and FBI monitoring. At the same time top level analysts in both agencies had concluded that it was highly unlikely the bioterrorists could use STANDARD MAIL to mount an attack. Guess they were wrong.

Here's where the AOL Marketing Director's kidnapping comes into play. He had authority over as well as access to AOL's mailing list. This is not just the customer files for 35,000,000 paying customers, but the list they use(d) to mail solicitations for new customers. I really have no idea how big this list is, but I suspect that it is the largest mailing list in the world. It should include every household in America, South America, the Middle Class sectors in the Far East, and all of Western Europe! What would that be? Over 150,000,000 households maybe? Someone else can compute that. Creating this list was no trivial matter and cost tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars. In general lists like this with some demographic information are held tight by their owners and are not available for sale.

At this point we know this:

1. USPS cannot stop such mailings in advance, whether single-piece or standard.

2.Biologically hazardous mail can travel end to end, potency intact.

3. People knowledgeable in the biohazard and mailing business are at risk of disappearance, presumably because the terrorists need either their knowledge or access.

My suspicion is that the bio-terrorists are going to make use of that AOL list (presuming they have it) to mail some sort of biohazard, either something like anthrax, or maybe just a powerful poisonous toxin, to targets all over Western civilization. They will enter it as Standard Mail, most likely prepared as Enhanced Carrier Route to bypass most postal operations. It will seem to be something the chosen intermediary company regularly mails - might even go out as an AOL mailing.

It is time to start rounding up for questioning virtually every Egyptian or Arabian origin person in the mailing business, public or private, in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York, because that's where this attack will probably be mounted. No doubt the mailing agent will be one of several companies AOL prefers to do business with in New Jersey.

It will seem to be just another mailing.

So, pass it along to your control.

Here's a thought for you. in the earlier mailings they used ordinary USPS embossed/peprinted indicia envelopes. In this mailing they used a higher quality paper.

The first pieces "leaked" readily since 10 micron particles go right through paper with 100 micron pores. This second mailing did not leak.

The fact that the first pieces were taped to reduce particle flow proves that the bio-terrorists know something that USPS/FBI/CDIC did not know - and that is that depending on the porosity of the container (envelope) the bio-attack can be detected early in the process. In fact, the FBI/CDC examination demonstrated conclusively to the bio-terrorists exactly the quality of our detection capability. Kind of like King Shaka sending out men to be targets for English guns so that he could determine their relative strength and position!

This second attack suffers from none of the problems in the first attack, but then, it wasn't supposed to - the bio-terrorists needed to test our capabilities, and they found out. Having seen that we have no detection capability at all, they will mount the attack.

So, how do we defend against this?

Well, one way would be through the simple expedient of every mailer allowing the USPS to pull a "sample piece" from each and every mailing. This piece would be tossed into a box with appropriate reagents which would break down the paper, turn red for toxins, and purple for anthrax bacterial spores - something like that. There are a variety of ways this might be done, but I don't see any way out of using all of them and testing at least one piece from each mailing.

You present a disturbing but logical case.

If we approach this from the standpoint that all anthrax doses to date are tests in preparation for the real thing, we reconcile the seeming anomalies littered throughout the anthrax occurrences. The widespread notion that the perpetrators' success ratio has been low due to their limited resources and our fine defenses may be a dangerous miscalulation.

I agree, it stands to reason that efficacy, detection, etc. would all be carefully gauged before mounting the real attack. In fact, it would be unreasonable to imagine a group capable of pulling off the impossible on Sept. 11 would risk wasting their precious product on theoretical infection probabilties. They'd want hard evidence.

By most accounts, the Sept. 11 airliner attacks were in the planning for at least five years. There were numerous dry runs and rehearsals. Such patient planners would be expected to afford the same careful attention to detail to an anthrax attack. Placing sleepers inside bulk mail operations far enough in advance to avoid suspicion would be one of those details.

In varying targets and delivery methods, they get the most mileage out of each test case--the most and best info on our defenses and detection methods, which they wouldn't get from scattered unnoticed deaths. They'd want to watch what we did when we knew there was a threat. Hence, the warning notes to just the high-profile targets, ensuring the investigational process and defense responses would make the news.

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