Getting warmer.
" ... Jonathan A. King, a professor of microbiology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says he, too, is suspicious of the government's handling of the investigation.'The first place one would have looked for the anthrax perpetrator is at the U.S. facilities where people have grants from the government to do biological defense research,' King said in an interview. 'But for months, there was no statement from any federal authorities naming these laboratories as under suspicion. It's extraordinary.' ... "
"[Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a biological arms control expert at the State University of New York at Purchase and chair of a bioweapons working group at the independent Federation of American Scientists ... ] says the perpetrator has dangled plenty of clues in front of investigators. One of those clues, she says, is a letter sent to the military police at the Quantico, Va., Marine base (and forwarded to the FBI) in late September -- well before the public was aware that anthrax was being sent in the mail -- that tried to frame a former U.S. biowarfare researcher as a bioterrorist. That anonymous letter stated that the writer had worked with the man, Dr. Ayaad Assaad, and had details about him that only an insider would know (although some details in the letter turned out to be incorrect.) The FBI has cleared Assaad of any possible connection to the case, but Assaad himself has criticized the agency for not zeroing in on his accuser as a likely culprit, since that person seemed to have foreknowledge about the anthrax attacks.
'The perpetrator has left multiple, blatant clues, seemingly on purpose,' Rosenberg writes. 'Second letters, addressed similarly to the anthrax letters and containing [talc] powder ... The postal addresses and dates of these letters map out an itinerary of the perpetrator(s) ... which single out the perpetrator from the other likely suspects.'
Rosenberg also says three senior U.S. biodefense officials have given the same name of a likely suspect to the FBI. She would not reveal that person's name, but said he is a former USAMRIID scientist, who she understands is working for a defense or CIA contractor in the Washington metropolitan area. Rosenberg says that the FBI has questioned the individual, along with many other former biodefense scientists.
Interestingly, William C. Patrick III, the founder of the U.S. military's biological weapons program, and the man who taught the folks at the Army's Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah how to make dry anthrax (using a harmless anthrax substitute, though), is no longer willing to talk to the press. Contacted by Salon Thursday, Patrick said that he has been misquoted in the media, and doesn't wish to comment on the investigation anymore. Rosenberg believes that the anthrax perpetrator may know Patrick, because the attack resembles a classified study that Patrick wrote for a CIA contractor a couple of years ago, which tried to predict how an anthrax attack through the mail would work... "