NYT : From a Helper to the Suspect in the Anthrax Case

From a Helper to the Suspect in the Anthrax Case

By RACHEL SWARNS and ERIC LIPTON | August 7, 2008

WASHINGTON — In December 2002, federal investigators scoured an icy pond on a snow-covered mountain near Frederick, Md., hunting for clues that would lead to the anthrax killer.

As they worked, the Army microbiologist now believed to be responsible for the five deaths stood calmly in their midst, chatting, smiling and watching.

Bruce E. Ivins, the scientist, mingled with the investigators in a military tent as a Red Cross volunteer, serving coffee, doughnuts and chocolate bars to agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and members of the search team.

Law enforcement officials hustled him away after they realized he was an anthrax researcher who could compromise the investigation, according to Red Cross volunteers who were there.

Dr. Ivins seemed embarrassed by it all, prompting his friends to tease him about the incident.

Nearly five years passed before the F.B.I. turned its attention to the man who had stood on the sidelines of the hunt that day. And Miriam Fleming, who was there as the divers plunged into the murky waters searching for evidence, said she still could not quite believe that the man identified as the anthrax killer was cheerfully working by her side.

“He was kind of goofy, but he was always in a good mood,” said Ms. Fleming, who was a Red Cross volunteer then. “He seemed so normal.”

She added: “Now we have to figure it out: Who was the real Bruce Ivins?”

Last week, Dr. Ivins killed himself as the authorities were preparing to indict him in the mailing of the anthrax letters in 2001. Yet as his friends and colleagues note, Dr. Ivins was almost always in plain sight, offering assistance — and misleading information, officials say — to federal agents running the nation’s longest and most expensive bioterrorism inquiry.

In the early days after the letter attacks in September and October 2001, Dr. Ivins joined about 90 colleagues at the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in a round-the-clock push to test thousands of samples of suspect powder to see if they were anthrax. He even helped to analyze a letter sent to Senator Tom Daschle, Democrat of South Dakota, and went to the Pentagon to discuss the results.

Jeffrey Adamovicz, who was Dr. Ivins’s supervisor at the time, remembers the day the scientists opened that envelope, placed in a double-sealed bag inside a protective hood designed to deal with dangerous pathogens.

“The anthrax was floating around inside the bag,” Mr. Adamovicz said. “It was very scary.”

He said he turned to Dr. Ivins and said, “That stuff is amazing.”

“Yes, it is unbelievable,” he recalled Dr. Ivins replying. “I have never seen anything like that.”

Months later, as the F.B.I. focused on the Army laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md., as a possible source of the anthrax, Dr. Ivins twice submitted samples from his own supplies that did not match the deadly spores used in the attack. Investigators later concluded he had chosen irrelevant samples to throw them off his trail.

He also repeatedly offered the F.B.I. the names of colleagues at Fort Detrick who he said might be potential suspects in the letter attacks, according to court documents.

And in recent years, as his status shifted gradually from adviser to suspect, Dr. Ivins continued to cooperate with the F.B.I., answering questions from agents and from a grand jury, said his lawyer, Thomas M. DeGonia.

Mr. DeGonia, who maintains that his client was innocent, denied the F.B.I.’s assertions that Dr. Ivins had tried to thwart the investigation.

“I think he continued to be motivated to genuinely help,” Mr. DeGonia said. “He was willing to cooperate to the very end.”

But officials are skeptical. In a news conference this week, a United States attorney, Jeffrey Taylor, said it was clear that Dr. Ivins “made far-reaching efforts to blame others and divert attention from himself.”

Mr. Taylor suggested that Dr. Ivins might have mailed the letters out of concern for the future of an anthrax vaccination program for the military, which was threatened after soldiers had claimed they were sickened by the injections. He said Dr. Ivins, who had dedicated his career to the anthrax vaccine, might have plotted the attacks to create “a scenario where people all of a sudden realize the need to have this vaccine.”

F.B.I. officials say Dr. Ivins, a skilled microbiologist with access to the crucial supply of anthrax, was on a short list of likely suspects at the Army laboratory. He wrote dozens of papers on anthrax defenses and held at least two patents on ways to fight the germ. He also distributed the pathogen to scientific colleagues.

Friends say his intense interest in science was apparent when he was growing up in Lebanon, Ohio, where his father owned a drugstore.

In high school, he joined the pep club and the current events club, ran cross-country and starred in the senior class play. But his heart was in science. He won state science fair prizes and was inducted into the National Honor Society.

While other students made science projects using kitchen supplies, Dr. Ivins used a high-powered microscope that his parents bought for him and wrote a detailed paper about the micro-organisms he had examined.

“I don’t know if the word ‘nerd’ was used in those years, but it would apply,” said Dean Deerhake, Dr. Ivins’s high school chemistry teacher.

Former classmates described him as the smartest student in class, but he never really fit in. He had few close friends. He never had a date, they said, not even when he went to the prom.

And his family, while prominent and privileged, was quite troubled. In an e-mail message written in recent years, Dr. Ivins described his mother as “an undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenic” and his years before college as a period of “isolation and desolation.”

But after Dr. Ivins received his doctorate in microbiology at the University of Cincinnati and joined the Army’s biodefense institute at Fort Detrick in the 1970s, his career took off.

At first Dr. Ivins worked on cholera, but, starting in the early 1980s, he turned his attention to anthrax. He quickly became an international expert on the Ames strain, a particularly virulent form that federal officials have identified as the type used in the 2001 attacks. And he worked to develop vaccines against the disease.

“I would not describe him as brilliant or some kind of genius,” said W. Russell Byrne, who supervised Dr. Ivins for several years. “But he was very diligent. Very careful. Very meticulous.”

In Frederick, where he lived, Dr. Ivins was known as a happy-go-lucky guy who composed funny songs, helped neighbors with their yard work and entertained friends with his juggling and piano playing.

“It is just very difficult to reconcile the person we had known with the person the F.B.I. says he was,” said Robert Duggan, who for many years lived down the street from Dr. Ivins, his wife and their two adopted children.

But in 2000, Dr. Ivins’s careful record-keeping landed him in trouble. Opponents of the Pentagon’s policy mandating vaccination of active-duty troops had filed Freedom of Information Act requests for notebooks of the scientists at Fort Detrick involved in research on the anthrax vaccine.

Dr. Ivins had written in one notebook that the vaccine had made some animals sick, Dr. Byrne recalled. When the notebook became public, critics of the vaccine cited it as evidence that the vaccine not only might have been ineffective but was also perhaps making military personnel ill, said Mark S. Zaid, a lawyer who filed the lawsuit.

It was a frustrating turn of events for the scientists who had worked so hard to produce safe vaccines, both the one that was being challenged and a separate, more advanced vaccine that they were developing.

In retrospect, Mr. Zaid said he wondered if the incident might have deeply angered Dr. Ivins, threatening his years’ worth of research on anthrax vaccines, as the opponents of the Pentagon program ultimately succeeded briefly in getting the military to discontinue mandatory vaccinations.

That remains uncertain. What is clear is that when the anthrax attacks occurred, Dr. Ivins was eager to participate in the inquiry and to talk about it.

He was particularly struck by the airborne nature of the deadly strain of anthrax found in the letters. Ellen Byrne, the wife of Dr. Byrne, remembers Dr. Ivins explaining how crafty the perpetrator had been to get the anthrax to be so finely ground that it was almost as light as air.

At a party, Dr. Ivins leaned over and, with his long, bony fingers, illustrated how the powder just sort of floated.

“He was just astonished,” Mrs. Byrne said. “Flabbergasted.”

“This was something that none of us ever dreamed of,” she remembered him saying. “It just could not be weighed. It could not be measured. It just hovered.”

At the time, though, Dr. Ivins was quietly growing increasingly troubled. He was taking antidepressant and antipsychotic medications to try to control what he described as “incredible, paranoid delusional thoughts,” fearful that his vaccine program would not survive. In November 2001, he sent photos by e-mail of himself working in the laboratory on the Ames strain of Bacillus anthracis to a group of people, including Nancy L. Haigwood, a microbiologist who had met him when he was doing postdoctoral work in North Carolina.

“I think this was someone who desperately wanted attention drawn to himself as a special person, as a hero,” Dr. Haigwood said.

In 2002, after the American Society for Microbiology sent an e-mail query on behalf of the F.B.I. to members asking if they knew anyone who could have carried out the attacks, Dr. Haigwood remembered Dr. Ivins’s e-mail message and went to the government with her suspicions.

That year, when the Red Cross called its members to support a weeklong law enforcement mission in the mountains near Frederick, Dr. Ivins offered to help. The mission was supposed to be a secret, but many people knew that the investigators were working on the anthrax killings.

The investigators had focused on another researcher who had worked at Fort Detrick, Steven J. Hatfill. Dr. Hatfill had worked on viruses, not anthrax, during his time at the Army laboratory, from 1997 to 1999, but agents were searching the pond in the woods near Frederick for any anthrax-making equipment that he might have disposed of there.

Humvees rumbled up the twisting dirt roads, and divers plunged into the water as Dr. Ivins took his post in the tent. He helped fix a leak in the corner and then helped distribute the supplies, until the investigators led him away.

For years afterward, he and his friends would joke whenever they went off to do relief work about whether the authorities were coming to get Dr. Ivins.

“He’d say, ‘Is it O.K. if I go?’ ” said Barb Christie, a Red Cross volunteer, recalling the conversations. “ ‘Nobody’s going to take me out, are they?’ And we’d all laugh.”

Scott Shane, William J. Broad, Sarah Abruzzese and Ginger Thompson contributed reporting.