All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio, and our next guest is Greg Gordon from McClatchy Newspapers.
Website is clatchymclatchydc.com, and today's article is FBI's case against anthrax suspect rife with questions, and this is part of a continuing series, I think, with PBS Frontline and ProPublica.
This is article number two or three in a series, right, Greg?
Well, this is actually the series.
We were kind of forced into writing some stories this summer when there was some action, and the only civil case filed on behalf of one of the fatality victims of the letter attacks, and some information came out that seemed pretty newsworthy.
It probably looks more like a molehill than a mountain now, but the Justice Department had gone into or had filed papers trying to get this suit dismissed, wrongful death suit, on behalf of the first victim who died, and in their papers that they filed, they said, well, the Army researcher who the FBI labeled as the perpetrator in this didn't have the equipment to do it, and they had to backtrack because the FBI and the Criminal Division of the Justice Department said, what?
You filed what?
They had a powwow and had to retract, and ask the judge's permission, may we please withdraw what we filed the other day.
Right, and then the judge said no, right?
Oh, the judge said, at first he said no, he said, no, you can't just file a notice of errors or errata.
You must ask my permission, but they did, and then he then he granted approval for them to file 10 revisions.
Now, but this you're saying is the culmination of your joint investigation?
Yes, many months of work.
Right, okay, so now it was in 2008, correct, that this Army biologist, Bruce Ivins, killed himself on the eve of his indictment in the case of the anthrax attacks of 2001, correct?
Well, I want to be clear about that, because the Justice Department, we've all reported that the Justice Department was on the verge of seeking an indictment from a grand jury, but just to be technically correct, the prosecutors had yet to have formal approval, or even complete what they call a prosecution memorandum, in which they seek approval from the senior officials at the department to go and get an indictment, and they hadn't gone all the way through that process, but just to be technically correct, yes, he was told that he was on the verge of facing five capital murder charges, but the truth is the Justice Department, the senior attorney general, or whomever he delegated to make the final call on that, hadn't done so yet.
I see, although he had been given plenty of indications that he was, you know, the guy that they were singling out this time, right?
They'd been dogging him for a long time.
And isn't it right that they even had been hassling his son and his daughter too?
There are differing reports about that, we've never been able to confirm that.
His attorney said that his son may have been offered a sports car if he would turn on his father.
He did say that, and we didn't put that in the stories because we didn't go that direction with the stories, but he did say that.
But let's put it in context.
By then, the FBI was offering a two and a half billion dollar reward for whoever turned in information leading to his successful prosecution, to the perpetrator's successful prosecution, so the sports car would have been an easy acquisition with that reward.
Well, in other words, he was under quite a bit of pressure at the time of his suicide anyway.
So then the FBI, or the Justice Department, they released their case against him, and it was a circumstantial case, but they seemed pretty confident in it, and yet your joint investigation with Frontline and ProPublica here has poked quite a few holes.
I guess most notably, the scientists who work with Bruce Ivins don't seem to believe that he could have done what the FBI claims he had to have done to the anthrax in their laboratory in order to weaponize it and get it ready for mailing in the form it was mailed.
Is that correct?
Well, it is essentially correct, except for the last words, weaponizing.
That is a matter that's still in dispute.
The FBI's final verdict on weaponization of the anthrax was that it was not weaponized.
They used the argument that what happened was when these letters pull these spores...
Let me stop for a second and talk about weaponization.
Weaponization means that some way you have made these anthrax spores, these tiny particles, more floatable or able to get into a person's breathing zone so they'll be inhaled and thus more deadly.
The FBI's final verdict on that, after they had a national laboratory look at the data, is that it was not weaponized.
Generally, what you were saying is correct.
His colleagues, with one or two exceptions that we know of so far, are pretty much of the view that he was innocent and that he did not have the means, the ability at that laboratory, certainly without being detected, to turn these spores, these wet spores that he worked with, into a dry powder that would be put in the letters.
All right.
Now, there's so much in this article to go over, but can we talk about the motive here for a minute?
Because I think you kind of explained that, contrary to the FBI's narrative, he was not under threat of losing all of his funding for his work on a new anthrax vaccine at all.
Well, this kind of, Scott, goes to the heart of why we felt it was important to dig into this.
You know, he died.
The prosecution then put out its side of the story and basically, except for what investigative reporters turned up or authors, there's a few books that have been written about this from different perspectives, but with the exception of what they turned up and put into the public domain, we have not really been able to see the whole story.
If there's a criminal trial, there's a defense team, and they have discovery, and their duty is to piece together the defendant's side of the story.
So what we were really doing here was digging that up, and when you look at the FBI's account of why Ivins wanted to do this, there's some big question marks.
They talk about the fact that there was a big controversy in the 1990s, heading right into 2001 when this all happened, about the anthrax vaccine, the mandatory inoculations that were being given to soldiers, all soldiers, for a while, and then it was gradually narrowed down to those going into war theaters and so forth.
And there were a lot of health complaints from soldiers, and it was becoming a big problem, a political problem, almost, when the Bush administration came in.
Karl Rove made the comment that maybe they needed to narrow that program, scale it back somehow.
And so, in the prosecution narrative, they talked about how devastating this all was to Bruce Ivins, but there's just a problem, there's a disconnect here, because Bruce Ivins was working on a next-generation vaccine, and in fact, one could pretty easily come to the conclusion that if the existing vaccine were shelved because of some kind of, you know, health problems for a small number, small percentage of the troops who were being inoculated, that it would benefit the folks who were putting the second-generation vaccine together.
And now, there's so many different important details in this article, I want to try to fit in as many as we can here.
Really quickly, can you talk about the so-called cover-up by Bruce Ivins in submitting these samples to the FBI, where then you guys' investigation turned out self-incrimination, as opposed to cover-up?
Well, that was a major, that was probably the central focus of our stories, because...
Okay, well, I won't have time to let you elaborate.
I'll tell you what, I'll go ahead and reintroduce you to the audience.
We'll go out and take this break, which is coming up and unavoidable, and then when we come back, we'll get to that and some more very important questions brought up in this combination, I don't know what you call it, investigation by McClatchy Frontline, PBS Frontline, and ProPublica on the Anthrax case.
FBI's case against Anthrax suspect rife with questions is the piece at McClatchy DC today.
Greg Gordon's on the phone, and we'll be right back after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Talking with Greg Gordon from McClatchy Newspapers.
He's got this joint investigation with PBS Frontline and ProPublica published today, FBI's case against Anthrax suspect rife with questions.
It's at McClatchyDC.com and perhaps local newspapers near you, and we've talked about a doubt cast on Ivan's supposed motive in the Anthrax case, and it's also been referred to, even the government admits under some circumstances, that there's no way he could have used the equipment in that laboratory to do what we accused him of doing, left-hand, right-hand miscommunication there, and apparently his colleagues at Fort Detrick agree with that assessment, but now I wanted to talk about what you say is really a central part of this case, Greg, and that is Ivan's mysterious behavior and supplying, according to the FBI, supplying samples of things that would tend to lead them away from him, and then you guys found out that the opposite was true.
Well, we can't prove what Bruce Ivan's motive was when he submitted the sample that came back negative, but let me just take a step back here.
Ivan's work at Fort Detrick, he was solely, for his career, and had been for 20 years, was researching Anthrax, looking for ways to protect the U.S. military and Americans in the event anybody unleashed Anthrax.
So he had this flask on his desk that he'd shared contents of it with other researchers, some at other laboratories, one in particular in Ohio, and the FBI, when they started digging into this, all they had was these letters in block print that sort of mimicked what an Islamic terrorist might write, and the letters said, take penicillin now, which is probably not something that an Islamic terrorist would advise, and they had a New Jersey postmark, and they didn't really have anything else except the Anthrax that was in the letters.
They had powder.
So they started doing every kind of laboratory test they could on this powder, and they, in the course of that, found, by accident, actually one of the researchers at Fort Detrick found, by accident, when she left some of the spores on a slide too long, that little variants grew called morphotypes, and these morphotypes became the singular clue that enabled them to eventually point back at Bruce Ivins, because they found them in the letter spores, and then they started looking to see if anybody in the U.S. biodefense industry, in particular, or elsewhere, had matching morphotypes in their spores, and the reason they, I skipped one step, and that is that they had identified this as being a strain that was only used at certain research or bioweapons laboratories.
So now they've got these morphotypes, and they're zeroing in, starting to figure out who it is, and they asked, they issued subpoenas to the laboratories saying, turn in samples of all of your Anthrax stocks, and so in the first time around, Ivins turned in samples, and he didn't use the right protocol, he didn't have the right glass vessels, which, for short, we'll say test tubes, so they rejected those, or they rejected some of those, and half of them were sent off to a repository in Arizona.
All the samples that were collected, there was a separate set that was stored at this university lab in Arizona.
So that, we'll just set that aside for a minute.
So now, they've got, they've rejected his samples, and so they come back in late March and say, let's see another set of samples.
The FBI alleges that, they suspect that sometime between February and April, Dr. Ivins learned something more about what they were trying to trace, got nervous, and decided he would try to throw them off the track.
So he submitted another set of samples, and when they were tested, they came back negative.
Ultimately, both sets, the set that they tested out here on the East Coast, and the set that they sent to the laboratory in Arizona.
What the FBI doesn't tell us, the Justice Department doesn't tell us in their prosecution memorandum, what we had to find, buried in thousands of pages of files, was that Dr. Ivins also gave a second laboratory sample to a colleague at Fort Detrick, who wanted to compare them, his spores to those in the letters, looking through a microscope, and that there was another sample of his in February, I'm sorry, in 2004, that was found in the back of a refrigerator in another building.
The researcher who found it, or who it was handed to, called Dr. Ivins and said, what should I do?
And he said, you send it into the FBI along with everything else, because the FBI was coming back for more samples.
So now we've got, and then they went back later on and looked at the duplicate of the first set that I mentioned in February, and I know this is a little confusing, but what we have here are four sets of samples that were eventually put into the FBI's hands, either by Dr. Ivins or by people that he gave samples to, and the chain of custody is pretty clear, and ultimately the duplicate set of samples that he initially submitted that they'd rejected came back positive.
It matched the morphotype.
The one that was found in the back of the refrigerator came back positive, and the one that he let his fellow researcher look at came back positive.
So the FBI, the Justice Department, would have us believe that Dr. Ivins submitted this sample in April and that it was strong evidence of his attempt to throw them off, but it turns out that he's handing out stuff that leads back to his flask anyway, and let's remember that he shared his anthrax ferment flask with other researchers from the get-go, from the time he began to build that flask up.
You have to grow these spores, and he had another lab grow a lot of the spores, and he had these spores.
He was sharing them with all kinds of people.
He had to know that when the FBI was testing everything, that it was going to lead back to his flask.
So maybe he was trying to throw him off the track, but it wouldn't seem to be a very cunning strategy, given that he would have known that his flask was going to be found out anyway.
So it sounds like he just figured that, well, I don't have anything to hide, so what am I going to do?
Here you go.
Yeah, most of the anthrax that people have in their labs around the country came from here, right?
He admitted in his lawyer's presence to the investigators that he didn't follow their instructions on the April sample, and he took his sample in a way where you could just submit a single colony of these little bacteria, so it wouldn't show the morphs.
So he admitted, yeah, I did it in a way.
Now, was he trying to slow him down so that he could avoid detection longer?
That's going to be debated forever, I guess.
All right.
Well, I'm so sorry that we're all out of time, because there's much more in here to cover, but I think we got a good chunk of it here.
I really appreciate your time on the show today, Greg.
My pleasure, Scott.
Everybody, that's Greg Gordon from McClatchy Newspapers.
He's got this piece, FBI's case against anthrax suspect rife with questions.
I didn't get to ask him who he thinks did it, or if they're going to report on that.
You can find it at McClatchyDC.com.
We'll be right back.
