In Anthrax Probe, Questions of Skill, Motive Some Terrorism Specialists Suspect an Angry Loner With Scientific Knowledge
By Peter Slevin Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, November 5, 2001; Page A05
Analysts who monitor militias and political movements on America's far right doubt that any known domestic group was capable of launching the deadly anthrax that has left four people dead and at least 12 others sickened.
"American groups on the right tend to be small and poorly organized," said Mark Pitcavage, who directs fact-finding for the Anti-Defamation League. "If it turns out to be a domestic extremist source, the odds are more likely it would be an individual or a small group of individuals, rather than an organization."
Senior officials at the FBI and CIA have told reporters privately that they believe the anthrax bacteria likely came from a U.S. source. That contention, challenged by others who suspect an overseas conspiracy, leaves open a very large question: Who in the United States had the skill and the motivation to wield a germ as a weapon?
Some terrorism specialists outside law enforcement lean toward the example of Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who built intricate bombs in his Montana hideaway and escaped detection for years. They theorize that an angry loner with the requisite scientific expertise may have decided to piggyback on the horror of the Sept. 11 attacks.
"Any terrorist worth the name would realize it was a good time to strike," said Harvard lecturer Jessica Stern. "Right-wing domestic extremists want to undermine American citizens' faith in the government. They want to prove to the American people that the government isn't serving their interests."
Investigators are searching for a pattern in the attacks, aware that the extreme right has long held much of the national media in contempt. Letters containing anthrax bacteria reached the highest-ranking Democrat in Washington and the New York offices of NBC, ABC and CBS, as well as the New York Post and a Florida-based tabloid, the Sun.
FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said Friday that the bureau is not tilting either way in its suspicions. In recent days, high-ranking bureau and CIA officials have said the composition of the anthrax-laden powder and the "totality" of the evidence convinced them the conspiracy originated in the United States, either among American militants or foreign-born opponents of the United States and Israel.
With little evidence in hand, federal authorities are still considering the possibility the attack was undertaken by a militant Islamic cell or individual connected to, or inspired by, the Sept. 11 plotters. Inside and outside the government, some suspect Iraqi sponsorship.
A remote possibility is a collaborative effort. U.S. monitoring groups cite increased contacts between Middle Eastern radicals and some Americans on the far right. Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center protested a planned meeting this year in Beirut between neo-Nazis and members of militant Islamic organizations. The gathering was shifted to Jordan, he said, and later canceled.
"It's a long, long way from rubbing elbows and giving hateful speeches to acting out or inspiring others to act out," Cooper said. "But those connections are there."
The leaders of some of America's most prominent extremist organizations cheered the carnage wrought by the Sept. 11 suicide hijackers, thrilled by what they considered a successful assault on the U.S. government and Jewish influence. The Bush administration has attributed the suicide hijackings to the al Qaeda network sponsored by Osama bin Laden.
"I wish our members had half as much testicular fortitude," said Billy Roper of the National Alliance, a white supremacist group.
"Please be advised that the time for all Aryans to attack is now, not later. Our opportunity may never be the same," wrote Paul R. Mullet, Minnesota leader of the Aryan Nations, according to hate-group monitors at the Southern Poverty Law Center. "Current events in Jew York City have caused me to activate my unit."
American Nazi Party Chairman Rocky Suhayda wrote admiringly of the Middle Eastern terrorists, the law center said. He called it a "disgrace" that so few white Americans were willing to do the same: "If we were one-tenth as serious, we just might start getting somewhere."
Players on the radical right have talked about biological and chemical warfare since the early 1990s, said the law center's Mark Potok, but little evidence indicates that they have developed such weapons.
Two white supremacists have been connected with anthrax, but not to an attack. Larry Wayne Harris, a microbiologist and former member of the Aryan Nations, obtained three vials of bubonic plague germs through the mail. The next year, the FBI found legal veterinary anthrax vaccine in the trunk of his car.
Alexander James Curtis, imprisoned this year after being convicted of harassing four San Diego civic leaders, published an Internet newsletter in June 2000 that included a story titled "Biology for Aryans." The article described the lethal properties of botulism toxins, as well as anthrax and "typhoid culture," reports the Anti-Defamation League's Web site.
"Even with relatively small-scale attacks," the Nationalist Observer article says, biological warfare is "virtually DESIGNED to cause the populace to lose all confidence in and allegiance to their own governments."
In the late 1990s, a Wisconsin man with no known political agenda told his sister he was preparing a deadly airborne bacteria that could be sent through the mail to kill his enemies. Thomas C. Leary made deadly poisons, including ricin, in his basement, according to federal court records. He pleaded guilty to possessing a toxin for use as a weapon and is serving a six-year prison sentence.
It remains a matter of professional dispute whether a lone terrorist or a small cell of terrorists could accumulate the bacteria, the equipment and the expertise to create and disseminate an effective anthrax powder, particularly the high-quality concoction contained in an Oct. 9 letter to Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.).
The amount used so far could probably be hidden in a small jar. Dozens of poorly secured laboratories in the United States possess anthrax cultures. A skilled scientist likely could develop a supply of microbes through careful work, but follow-up steps would be harder.
"You'll hear people say this is something any random PhD could do," said Alan Zelicoff, a senior scientist at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico. "Yes, they could grow up anthrax or plague, but I don't think they'd have the wherewithal or training to do the physical engineering to make the spores aerosolize."
The most substantial pieces of evidence made public are the three letters laden with anthrax spores mailed from Trenton, N.J., to Daschle and two New York news organizations. The letters contain just 39 words in mostly three-word sentences. The grammar is imperfect and the word "penicillin" is misspelled, leading some forensic examiners to conclude they were written by a non-native English speaker.
Document analyst Gideon Epstein says he believes that the author has considerable experience in writing English -- enough to develop unconscious habits in the formation of letters and the spacing of words and lines. He sees "a certain amount of naturalness" in the block lettering.
Another document examiner, Gerald Brown, suspects from the phrasing and the placement of thoughts that the author is "homegrown." The most prominent parts of the letters are the numbers 09-11-01, and the first reference is to penicillin or anthrax, not to a political goal. The Daschle letter asks, "Are you afraid?"
The letters include widely known slogans that reveal little, but linguists have said the letters' final line, "Allah is great," sounds awkward. Tayeb El-Hibri, a Near Eastern studies professor at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, said an Islamic author would not have mixed two languages: "It struck me as unusual because Muslims would usually say, 'Allahu Akhbar,' or 'God is great.' It doesn't coincide."
The letters to the New York media were postmarked Sept. 18, just a week after the attacks on New York and the Pentagon. Could a domestic terrorist with no ties to the earlier conspiracy have launched an anthrax attack so soon?
"There's no information to build a theory on. You can only guess at possible scenarios," said former CIA terrorism analyst Stanley Bedlington, who discounted the idea that a known U.S. extremist group unleashed the anthrax attack. "We need a break."
Staff writers Ceci Connolly and Rick Weiss contributed to this report.