Prevention of disclosure of a piece of the bigger picture or Prevention of the possibility of future 'Networking'.
There would need to be false trails laid.
Just an early thought.
This sounds more likely to me that prevention of "networking." But someone needs to start a list so we can look at it all at once to look for any big picture that may be there. Don't forget that the doctor in Chili who received the anthrax letter had an affiliation with St. Jude Hospital, as did the missing biologist, Don Wiley.
Then again, don't forget that all these deaths and disappearances may go on all the time among this population, but most of the time no one notices. What we REALLY need is a statistician!
Forgot to say that I've had the same awful thought myself...