Hunt For Anthrax Terrorist

Porton Down, Britain's bio-defence centre, has become the focus of a $4 million FBI hunt for the terrorist who has terrified the United States with an unprecedented wave of anthrax attacks.

The FBI are today urgently examining if the milled weapons-refined anthrax the terrorists used in the United States is a strain of anthrax from Porton Down code-named "Ames."

Scientists working with the FBI say "Ames" was sent from Porton Down in 1997 to America's most secret germ manufacturing plant.

The decision to send "Ames" to the plant was part of the still ongoing bio-defence exchanges between the U.S. and Britain.

The U.S. plant is known as Camp 12. It is sited in the depths of the high-security Nellis military range in Nevada.

The area is guarded by armed troops and state-of-the-art detection equipment. Until now the plant has been a closely-guarded secret - its existence repeatedly denied.

But now the FBI has focused on the plant's contact with Porton Down, President Bush spokesman, Ari Fleischer, has confirmed:

"Camp 12 is created to mimic steps a rogue state like Iraq would take to create a bio-arsenal.It is designed to protect our servicemen and women from such weapons."

The FBI have not ruled out a scientist with a grudge may have worked at Camp 12 - and obtained quantity of the milled Ames strain from Porton Down to create the fear and panic still ongoing in America.

Professor Martin Hugh-Jones of Louisiana State University, a world-ranking authority on anthrax, said: "The attacks have all the signs of being done by an expert microbiologist working in the bio-defence industry. Ames would be virtually impossible to be used by terrorists."

Yesterday another expert in bio-defence research, Dr. Barbara Sternberger, who in Washington, D.C. monitors work going on at Fort Detrick, America's other bio-chemical research complex, claimed: "The FBI have a short list of people. They have all been interviewed. But suspicion and proof are two different things."

This coming week those suspicions may harden as MI5 report to the FBI on its investigation into the trail that sent the deadly anthrax spores flying out in lead containers from Porton Down some 5,000 miles to Camp 12 in Nevada.

The FBI believe this evidence will enable them to establish if their chief suspect learned some of his expertise in Porton Down.

There are regular exchange visits between the establishment and scientists from Fort Detrick and Camp 12.

FBI psycho-profilers - the real life version of Clair Stirling who tracked down Hannibal Lecter in the movie - have concluded:

"Our prime suspect is a loner. His lab equipment probably costs no more than £2,000. But he is not the traditional 'mad scientist' with long hair and a crazed laugh. He's going to turn out to be the classic member of his community. But he's unlikely to be married. If he was, his wife or kids would have turned him in by now," a profiler at Quantico said this week.

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Gordon Thomas is a writer on intelligence for a number of leading European newspapers (the Sunday Express, UK; El Mundo, Spain; Welt am Sonntag, Germany). His work is also syndicated internationally by World Wide Syndication. Any use of the above must carry a clear attribution to both Gordon Thomas and Globe-Intel. He is a Contributing Editor to Globe-Intel, an international newsletter devoted to intelligence matters.

All of the following is a matter of public record, but I found the following synopsis of the Porton Down/Bioport connection here

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There are 2 foreign-owned vaccine companies that had the Ames strain used in the attack on Senators Dashle and Leahy.

At issue here is the virulent version of the Ames strain of the Anthrax bacteria, which was developed by the US chemical- biological-warfare establishment (CBW) For obvious reasons, a non-virulent version, lacking a protective shell and toxic proteins, is provided to non-CBW defense researchers. The virulent version is stored in Fort Detrick, the Dugaway (Utah) testing facility, and Department of Agriculture repositories at Iowa State, Northern Arizona and Louisiana State universities.

But it was used by two vaccine-makers for testing. One is located in Britain, the other in the United States.

The British lab is Porton Products.

David R. Franz, who headed the defense-related biological-research program for the Army at Fort Detrick, Md., between 1987 and 1998, explained that when the U.S. military had to obtain its Ames anthrax in the powdered form for testing during his tenure, it obtained it from a British military research laboratory. That lab, owned by the British government, was the Porton Downs CBW facility in Willshire.
Subsequently, in 1993, part of the anthrax defense program was "privatized" through a complex LBO of the anthrax vaccine unit, Porton Products, by a company called Speywood Holdings Ltd. Speywood, in turn was controlled by another corporate front, I&F Holdings NV, which was incorporated in the Netherlands Antilles. The I&F shell was owned by Fuad El-Hibri, a Lebanese Arab with German citizenship, his father, Ibrihim El-Hibri and other undisclosed investors.
Prior to the LBO, Fuad El-Hibri had worked in the key Citibank branch in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia that specialized in arranging investments for large Saudi investors. Saudi Arabia, at that point, was interested in obtaining an anthrax vaccine, which the US would not provide, to counter Saddam's CBW capabilities. When El-Hibri took over and became biotech director of Porton, he reorganized its bio-terrorism defense business, and helped supervise deliveries of bio-tech defense products to Saudi Arabia.

The second foreign-controlled company is Bioport in Michigan.

Bioport had gotten in the CBW defense business in September 1998 by taking over Michigan Biology Products Institute, or MBPI. MBPI, which held the exclusive contract for providing the US government with Anthrax vaccine, originally had been owned by the State of Michigan, In the mid 1980s, it was found that its Anthrax vaccine was less effective against the Ames strain than against the Vullom strain used by the USSR. So further testing was necessary with the virulent version of the Ames strain on guinea pigs, mice and monkeys.
Like Porton, MBPI got specimens of the virulent strain. (In November 2001, an environmental assessment report of its planned laboratory renovations was found in the Kabul house of a Pakistani scientist by US intelligence, suggesting its facility was of interest to foreign scientists).
The take-over of MBPI had been organized by the same Fuad El- Hibri who took over Porton in the UK, He used a labyrinth of corporations, including an entity called Intervac, whose controlling shareholder was his I and F Holdings N.V in the Netherlands-Antilles. To facilitate the deal, El-Hibri applied for (and received) US citizenship and gave a valuable stake in Intervac to Admiral William J. Crowe Jr, who had headed the Joint Chief of staff during the Clinton Administration.
As a result of these maneuvers, I&F NV— Ibraham and Fuad and their Antillian associates— had a controlling stake in two private labs that had the only vaccine for Anthrax. Their facilities also may have had the only specimens of the virulent version of the Ames strain outside of government repositories. At least one of these facilities, Porton, moreover, had it in the dry powder form used in the attack on the US Senate Office Building. It would take only one technician— bribed, blackmailed or otherwise compromised— to steal a minute sample of the deadly bacteria. The remaining mystery: Did such a bio-tech transfer take place?

So today we learn that Porton Down is under intense scrutiny. But will we ever learn the truth? I doubt it.

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