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A PERFECT FALL GUY

Bruce Ivins wanted no grave and perhaps not even the notoriety that his death generated. In his will he asked simply for his ashes to be scattered. And so, for weeks after he died in the summer of 2008, with his body cremated but not immediately disposed of, Bruce Ivins was in limbo. Reduced to ash, his body languished in a Maryland funeral parlor for more than a month as his wife, a devout Catholic, came to terms with his final request. His will stated that only with “documented proof” that his wishes had been granted would his wife receive her dead spouse’s modest bequeathment. It was strangely, morbidly appropriate that Ivins, an anthrax expert, had been reduced to powder.

Dr. Bruce Ivins was a civilian researcher at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Fort Detrick—the government’s leading biological defense lab. He was a church-going, piano-playing husband and father, a sixty-two-year-old microbiologist from Lebanon, Ohio, and an accomplished amateur juggler. He spent most of his adult life in the Fort Detrick facility or in his modest house just outside its gates. The Ivinses raised two children in that house. Once they were grown, Ivins’ wife ran a daycare center there; Ivins cultivated an extravagant garden in the backyard.

But Ivins messed with scary stuff: cholera, plague and then, for the last two decades of his thirty-year career, with anthrax. Scarier than the germs he worked with was the state of his mind as he worked on them. “I’m a little dream-self, short and stout, I’m the other half of Bruce—when he lets me out,” he wrote during breaks between composing scientific papers on peritoneal macro-phages and antibiotic post-exposure prophylaxis. There were other “eccentricities.” There was a secret personal post office box. There were threats to his therapist. There was an unhealthy fixation on the star of a reality TV show and with the women of Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, whom Ivins considered “lovely, highly intelligent campus leaders,” who had nonetheless issued a “fatwa” on their adoring fan. There were the multiple e-mail identities: kingbadger, goldenphoenix, jimmyflathead, prunetacos. And there was that spiteful condition in the will—have me cremated or fifty grand goes to Planned Parenthood, he instructed his wife, a former president of the local Right to Life chapter in Frederick, Maryland. Years before his suicide, Ivins confided to friends that he suffered paranoid delusions and schizophrenic symptoms.

Then on July 27, 2008, Ivins is said to have taken a heavy dose of prescription Tylenol with codeine and collapsed in his house. Transported to the local hospital, he lay unconscious for two days before he died. Eight days after that, the FBI announced that Ivins was the man they had been hunting for seven years—the fiend who in the weeks after 9/11 put a highly lethal strain of powdered anthrax in sealed envelopes and sent it through the US mail to Capitol Hill, the network news and a supermarket tabloid, killing five random Americans along the way. Television crews flocked to Fort Detrick; daycare in the Ivinses’ house was suspended.

It was a major development in a case that, for most of America, had faded from memory. But for the FBI, burned by bungles and false accusations in the hunt for the anthrax killer, Ivins needed to be more than a break—he needed to be a closer.

“We regret that we will not have the opportunity to present evidence to the jury,” said US Attorney Jeffrey Taylor at a news conference meant to slam the door shut on an investigation that had cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.

But the bombshell failed to level the many doubts raised during seven years of “Amerithrax,” the government’s name for what it called one of the largest and most complex investigations in the history of US law enforcement. Indeed, the government’s insinuation that the dead man’s guilt was the cause of his death was met with instant incredulity and demands to see the evidence Taylor had alluded to. Much of the skepticism surrounding the Ivins revelation was the deserved response to an investigation that had spent valuable time and resources on a false lead that earlier forced a $5.8 million payout to a wronged man. There was also a clear lack of confidence from the scientific community, which even after a four-hour briefing by the FBI and consulting scientists on the methods used to trace the murder weapon to Bruce Ivins’ lab counter, was divided on the forensics.

Overriding questionable science and general antagonism towards the FBI probe was the sense that this latest suspect was a product of the bureau’s growing desperation to close the case; that time had run out; and that in pinning the anthrax attack on Ivins, investigators had themselves adopted the cynical mantra that the outcome was “good enough for government work.” Because no matter how obscure the mysterious scientist appeared to be when he dropped into a late summer news cycle, and no matter how often the FBI spokespeople repeated a scenario in which the suspect had killed himself only when the bureau was days away from an indictment, in fact, Bruce Ivins had been near the radar throughout the investigation.

In October 2001, Ivins was among a select group of experts given a viewing of the anthrax powder sent in an anonymous letter to Senator Tom Daschle. He reportedly marveled at its sophisticated properties. He was among the group of ninety Fort Detrick scientists tasked by the FBI in the following months to analyze the thousands of copycat powders running amok in the mail system. A year later, he was among a group of local Red Cross volunteers who assisted divers looking for discarded contaminants and equipment in a lake not far from Fort Detrick; and for the following six years, right up to the point when he became the Feds’ primary suspect, Ivins continued to pass on samples, suggestions and suspicions of his own to investigating officials.

Beyond his physical presence in the labyrinthine investigation, Ivins left other red flags for the Amerithrax investigators: manic e-mails evidencing his unstable mental health; a stash of unmailed letters to congressmen and media outlets; reported outbursts and homicidal threats at his AA meetings. Bruce Ivins, on paper and in fact, was a loose cannon and a stranger neither to anthrax nor to the Amerithrax investigation. So why did it take seven years for this noose to close?

The answer, according to the FBI probe, was in the science. The case against Ivins was circumstantial, but it did have going for it the enticement of cutting-edge microbial forensics involving genetic sequencing not even available until 2005. Only after sequencing more than a thousand different strains, carried out by genomic programs across the country, was the murder weapon identified: a four-mutation blend of multiple anthrax samples that apparently had been prepared at the government’s testing site at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah before being shipped to Fort Detrick in Maryland a decade earlier. The blend, coded RMR-1029, was said to have a unique genomic “fingerprint” that could be traced to a “sole creator and custodian.” Bruce Ivins, concluded the FBI in early 2007, was that unique individual.

But this was no smoking gun. Yes, Ivins had custody of the lethal blend ten years earlier, but since then RMR-1029 had been distributed to at least 100 other scientists in two dozen labs in a handful of countries, according to the Feds’ own estimation. Independent experts wanted to see the data that had ruled out other strains and other anthrax handlers. And they wanted to know how the bureau could be sure that the blend Ivins had allegedly concocted had not been replicated elsewhere by another rogue scientist.

Because the FBI’s Quantico facilities are not authorized to work with biohazardous material, the forensic investigation had been farmed out to reputable microbiologists at labs throughout the US. The bureau called a press briefing on August 18, 2008, three weeks after Ivins’ death, to quell a rising tide of incredulity among the citizenry. Some of the scientists who played lead roles in the sequencing work found themselves hauled before journalists at the FBI’s headquarters in the J. Edgar Hoover Building to help put the FBI indictment to rest along with Ivins himself. But even the experts, who had themselves been kept in the semi-dark about the true purpose of their work until the press briefing identifying Ivins as the anthrax murderer, were unable to provide definitive answers, or even complete unanimity, on the scenarios that could have ended with RMR-1029 in five envelopes in a New Jersey mailbox.

That day, with questions swirling about Ivins, additives, genomics and, particularly, the investigation’s methodology, even the FBI’s own bioweapon specialist had to acknowledge the obvious—that the case was not airtight. “There will always be a spore on the grassy knoll,” concluded Dr. Vahid Majidi of the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate. With that, he rolled out the red carpet for conspiracy and gave the journalists their headline for the day.

Indeed, paranoia had taken on epic proportions among the bioweapon scientific community in the Amerithrax years. Once the FBI seemed determined to prove in late 2001 that the deadly anthrax most probably had its origins in an American lab and not in some jihadi cave in Afghanistan, Fort Detrick ceased to be a relaxed workplace. By then, 30,000 members of the American Society for Microbiology had received a letter from the Feds, alerting them that “it is very likely that one or more of you know” the anthrax killer. As speculation swirled that only a military lab could have produced the apparently “weaponized” anthrax, Fort Detrick became a Janus-faced hub—at once suspect and expert for the FBI probe. As more and more scientists were drawn into the investigation on a highly secretive, need-to-know-basis, the environment became tenser. There was finger pointing, there was terseness, there were relationships terminated on the advice of lawyers.

Ivins himself reportedly offered up names to the bureau—coworkers he posited as potential suspects. When scientists from Fort Detrick were called to testify before a grand jury they could not be sure whether they were witnesses or suspects. It made for an unpleasant working environment, this failure of investigators to clarify the positions of the various researchers involved. By keeping these relationships to the investigation opaque, the FBI hoped to protect the bureau from the fallout of having an adviser turn out to be a perpetrator. In the end, it didn’t work.

As it became clear to Ivins in late 2007 that he had become the Feds’ primary suspect, he reportedly turned up the crazy. According to the FBI narrative, he was drinking heavily, stalking his therapist, telling his AA group that he had a list of witnesses he planned to kill. He bought weapons and ammo and hid them in his house. He spent a week in a psych ward and when he came home, he killed himself. The FBI spun this tale into closure. They said they were days from an indictment. But that Ivins beat them to it.

Anthrax was in the headlines again for about a week. The media speculated, and the public recalled an anxious time years ago. Then they both turned the dial—there were Olympic gold medals to be won in Beijing and higher-stakes games to be played in the Caucasus, where fighting in a mountainous enclave between Russians and Georgians promised to bring back the Cold War. But in a small studio office with a river’s edge view of the post-9/11 New York skyline, two veteran journalists had a moment of deeper ambivalence. Bob Coen and Eric Nadler were four years into their own investigation; they were working on a documentary on the dangers posed by today’s biological weapons, the genesis of which was the 2001 anthrax attacks. Since those attacks, they had tracked the deadly bacteria through numerous covert and overt military and civilian programs to determine just how extensively anthrax has infiltrated the global armory. They found traces of it everywhere. Like the bodies of the five unfortunate victims of the October letters, the twenty-first century map was thoroughly contaminated. And the infection was spreading, fueled by fear, cultured with money.

On the anthrax trail, Coen and Nadler had followed many divergent leads, traveling with their cameras, contacts, and growing suspicions to Siberia, South Africa and London, along paths that always seemed to converge just at the point of an apparent dead end. They had learned to recognize these crossroads by a common landmark—the body of a dead scientist. And they had learned to navigate beyond these crossroads with a dead man’s ghost for a guide. Because none of the deaths met so far on the anthrax trail had ended in silence. Indeed, Bob Coen and Eric Nadler had grown adept at hearing the dead speak. Bruce Ivins, they agreed, told them more now than he would have ever told in life.

The journalists embraced the dead scientist as the newest character in a profoundly haunted cast: an erratic vaccine maker whose psychological profile seemed well suited for psychotic behavior. A slim, eccentric man of science who was known to dress up as a clown at county fairs and to put unexplained miles on his family van. A man who had written hundreds of unmailed letters and who had ransomed his own dead body. A man who owned a makeup kit . . . and body armor.

They had seen him coming—sort of. A few weeks earlier, a well placed source within the US military had tipped them off to an imminent breakthrough in the anthrax case—a tip that could possibly prove catastrophic for their working thesis—that there was a cover-up at the highest levels and that a systematic and sincere investigation into the source of the deadly anthrax would lift the veil on a world that the government wanted to remain secret at all costs. So when the FBI trotted out a dead suspect and at the same time slammed the door shut on the seven-year case, the journalists could only laugh in relief.

“We couldn’t have scripted it better,” said Nadler. “Another dead body and dozens more unanswered questions.”

Amerithrax would not be put to rest. Dogged by controversy and an incredulous press, the Justice Department hedged, saying that another three to six months would be needed to take care of “loose ends.” Critics balked. “If the case is solved, why isn’t it solved?” asked Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, as prelude to a direct accusation of a cover-up. By mid-September 2008, the clamor for answers forced FBI Director Robert Mueller himself to appear before the House and Senate Judiciary Committees to face questions about anthrax. Coen and Nadler drove to Washington to be in the front row.

Mueller, a career litigator, former marine and pretty tough hombré, had been FBI director for almost exactly as long as there had been an Amerithrax investigation. Since his swearing in one week before 9/11, Mueller had weathered political shit-storms over warrantless wiretaps, whistleblowers, and the so-called National Security Letters, which allowed unprecedented data collection on civilians. Mueller was the first FBI director to send agents into combat zones since World War II, and under his tenure more than 500 investigators would ship out to Iraq and Afghanistan. He displayed an independent streak at times and had the gumption to anger the White House in March 2004 when he publicly threatened to resign over what he interpreted to be an attempt by the Bush administration to subvert the authority of the Department of Justice over a controversial surveillance program run by the National Security Agency. As he made his way to Capitol Hill that morning in September of 2008, a long, fawning profile in a Washington magazine proclaiming him “The Ultimate G-Man” was still on the newsstands.

In the press gallery, Nadler could hardly wait for the action to start. It had already been an unsettling few hours in DC. The Capitol was an uneasy place during the final stage of the regime-changing presidential campaign, and an episode the previous evening had raised its own red flags. Nadler had a run-in with an old acquaintance, a guy he had worked with while investigating Saudi Arabia’s nuclear weapons connections back in the day. This source, hard-wired into the Capitol’s military and intelligence circles, was now running an Internet investigative journalism consortium and was all over the Ivins affair. He—we’ll call him “Teddy B”—agreed to meet Nadler and Coen at the Ritz Carlton in Arlington, Virginia near the Pentagon. Teddy B arrived in a long black limo leading a small C-list conga-line entourage that starred a provocatively dressed dynamite blonde who he introduced as a “fucking Emmy Award-winning producer for the shit we did together in Somalia.” Nadler and Coen took part in the requisite “how you been, man?” But they steadfastly refused the repeated slurred suggestions to “get in the limo and party.” When it was clear that Nadler and Coen would not be moving outside the Ritz, Teddy B slurped the dregs of his cocktail, pushed himself well into Nadler’s personal space and issued an incoherent stream of invective, slander and threats that promised an IRS audit of Nadler’s financial records. Then he stormed out with his posse, the blonde apologizing for the sudden turn of events in the twenty-minute encounter.

“They wanted us in that limo, man,” Coen sighed. “They were up to no good.” Nadler shrugged. “He was always a party kind of guy, but I’m not real sure which parties Teddy’s working for these days,” he said. “Maybe it was nothing.”

“Or maybe it was something,” replied Coen. “This town gives me the creeps,” he concluded before heading for his hotel room.

Later that night, Nadler spent some time going over the holes in the Amerithrax science with his brother, a congressman who would be sitting on the House committee questioning Mueller the next day. Despite the promises from the Washington Post that the congressional hearing would feature a dramatic anthrax showdown, Representative Jerrold Nadler, as it turned out, was the only member to address the anthrax issue over the course of the hearing. On his kid brother’s suggestion, Nadler, a liberal Democrat from New York City, asked Mueller to provide the relative weight of the additive silica reported to have been found in the attack powder. This arcane forensic detail, Coen and Nadler had learned, could help to determine if the anthrax had been manipulated in a highly sophisticated, multi-disciplinary operation, thereby cutting the heart out of the FBI’s lone gunman case. But FBI Chief Mueller deferred. He’d have to “get back” to him on that, he said. Representative Nadler pressed on, noting that “only a handful of laboratories” could achieve a silica content over 1 percent. Had the FBI investigated all of those labs? And how had it ruled them out as potential sources of the deadly anthrax?

“You can assume we looked at every lab in the US and several overseas that had people and facilities capable of preparing the anthrax powder,” Mueller answered. He said he would soon get back with an answer to Rep. Nadler’s follow-up about how his bureau cleared individual labs of suspicion.

In lieu of hard data, Mueller promised an independent review of the science with the aid of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). But at the Senate hearing the next day, he took heavy flak from politicos on both sides of the aisle who didn’t trust him or the lame duck Bush administration to be completely forthcoming about Amerithrax. Ranking GOP committee member Senator Arlen Specter, the one-time district attorney of Philadelphia, blamed the FBI director for the air of distrust that had prompted the hearings. “You can’t run a government on separation of power without good faith among the branches,” he said, “and you can’t pursue the matters to the courts to have them adjudicate disputes between the legislative and executive branches, but that’s what it’s come to.” Specter brought up past episodes of “unsatisfactory relations” between Congress and the bureau and then waved his trump card. “We’re not interlopers here, this is an oversight matter,” he chided.

Mueller sat facing the grim senator, his mouth set in the unpleasant half-smile of a man tasked with humoring the guy setting his trap. He noted the “extraordinary and justified public interest” in the investigation and announced the intention to set up an independent review of the Amerithrax conclusions by the National Academy of Sciences. Specter jumped, demanding that the Senate oversight committee be allowed to name scientists to the independent investigation. Mueller hedged, leaving it to the NAS to name panelists. Specter countered, “What’s there to consider, Director Mueller? I’m talking about the Judiciary Committee of the US Senate which has a constitutional responsibility.” Eric Nadler grinned—he liked the heat in the room. Coen remained stone-faced, his eyes narrow behind his stylish green glasses.

Then it was the turn of Senator Patrick Leahy, head of the committee and himself a target of one of the anthrax letters. Leahy spoke with gravitas in a gravelly, languid voice chiding the director for bureaucratic bamboozlement right out of Catch-22. Finally he dropped the detachment: “I have been very reluctant to even ask questions about this because my office and myself were put at risk because of a letter that was addressed to me and I realize we did not suffer like the families of those who had people die . . . I do not believe in any way, shape or manner that [Ivins] is the only person involved in this attack on Congress and the American people. I do not believe that at all. I believe there are others involved, either as accessories before or after the fact. I believe there are others who can be charged with murder.”

The chairman of the United States Senate Judiciary Committee was charging conspiracy and cover-up at the center of one of the FBI’s biggest cases ever—and it was broadcast live on C-SPAN. This was not Internet chatter, but a powerful challenge to powerful interests by an impeccable source. It was a fantastic and important story—but one that for whatever reasons, would be ignored by the media.

“Even cable,” noted Nadler.