2001 anthrax attacks

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Anthrax incidents

September 18

Mailed to ABC News (suspected), CBS News (suspected), NBC News, the New York Post, and AMI's National Enquirer (suspected)

October 9

Mailed to Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy

Investigation

Middle East accusations

US government focus

Steven Hatfill

Main article: Steven Hatfill

Bruce Ivins

Main article: Bruce Ivins

Pushback against findings

Perpetrators

9/11 hijackers

National security state

Related articles: Fort Detrick, Dugway Proving Ground, Battelle Memorial Institute, Ken Alibek, William C. Patrick III, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), Hadron Inc., Jerome Hauer

See also

References

External links

Early investigation

  • Cipro advice that came after 9/11 but before the anthrax attacks - reportedly originated from Jerome Hauer briefing the White House
    • Richard Cohen, "How Did I Get Iraq Wrong?", 2008/03/18: "The attacks were not entirely unexpected. I had been told soon after Sept. 11 to secure Cipro, the antidote to anthrax. The tip had come in a roundabout way from a high government official, and I immediately acted on it. I was carrying Cipro way before most people had ever heard of it."
  • 9/11 hijackers coming into contact with anthrax
    • South Florida Sun-Sentinel, "DOCTOR: HIJACKER TREATED FOR ANTHRAX", 2002/03/23: "One of the Sept. 11 hijackers was treated in June at Holy Cross Hospital in Fort Lauderdale for symptoms consistent with cutaneous anthrax, according to the doctor who treated him. Ahmed al-Haznawi and Ziad Jarrah identified themselves as pilots when they came into the hospital emergency room. Al-Haznawi had an ugly, dark lesion on his leg that he said he developed after bumping into a suitcase two months earlier. Dr. Christos Tsonas thought the injury was curious, but he cleaned it, prescribed an antibiotic for infection and sent the men away with hardly another thought. But after Sept. 11, when federal investigators found the medicine among al-Haznawi's possesions, Tsonas reviewed the case with investigators and arrived at a new diagnosis: that al-Haznawi's infection was consistent with cutaneous anthrax, which produces skin lesions like the one Tsonas treated. [...] Tsonas' assertion, first made to the FBI in October and never revealed publicly, has added another layer of mystery to the investigation of last fall's deadly anthrax attacks, which has yet to focus on a specific suspect. [...] [The Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies,] which interviewed Tsonas, concluded that the diagnosis of cutaneous anthrax was "the most probable and coherent interpretation of the data available. [...] in October, a pharmacist in Delray Beach said he had told the FBI that two of the hijackers, Mohamad Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, came into the pharmacy looking for something to treat irritations on Atta's hands. [...] Tsonas said he thinks the hijackers probably did have anthrax. "What were they doing looking at crop-dusters?" he asked, echoing fears that the hijackers may have wanted to spread lethal germs."
    • Connection with American Media Inc. (AMI)
      • Washington Post, "Sun Editor's Wife Found Rentals for 2 Hijackers", 2001/10/15: "Suspected hijackers Marwan Al-Shehhi and Hamza Alghamdi hired real estate agent Gloria Irish to help them find temporary housing, she said in an interview with The Washington Post in September. Her husband is Sun Editor in Chief Mike Irish. He works in the American Media Inc. building, which has been the focus of an intensive investigation since anthrax was discovered in the facility and three employees were found to have been exposed. [...] Neighbors at the two locations have said additional hijackers also visited or stayed in the apartments. [...] [Irish] said that early in the summer, Alghamdi and Al-Shehhi arrived at her Pelican Properties office in Delray Beach, north of Miami, and said they needed two apartments. Al-Shehhi, she said, did all the talking, and Alghamdi glared at her, making her uncomfortable. [...] Gloria Irish eventually found apartments for them -- Al-Shehhi in a gated community called the Hamlet and Alghamdi about four miles away in a large, tan stucco apartment complex in a community called the Delray Racquet Club, she said. The leases began in June and ran into August. [...] Mike Irish, who, records show, is a licensed airplane pilot, several years ago was a member of the Civil Air Patrol based at a small-plane airport in Lantana, just north of Delray Beach, an official there said. One of the hijackers, Mohamed Atta, reportedly rented a plane at that airport to practice flying for three days in August. Robert Stevens, 63, the Sun photo editor who died of anthrax Oct. 5, also lives in Lantana. But there is no indication whether Irish or Stevens ever crossed paths with Atta."
      • BioONE background - the firm that decontaminated the AMI offices after the attacks
        • Abrams family
          • South Florida Sun-Sentinel, "About Steven Abrams", 2013/06/26: "Steven L. Abrams is the first mayor of Palm Beach County. He previously served as chairman of the Board of County Commissioners. He was appointed to represent District 4 on the county commission in 2009 and was elected in 2010 without opposition to a full four-year term. Mayor Abrams has a lengthy record of public service. He is the former mayor of Boca Raton, elected in 2001 and re-elected in 2003 without opposition. In the 2005 election, Abrams received the most votes in city's history and was later named mayor emeritus when he stepped down in 2008 due to term limits. The Mayor also served five terms as a city council member in Boca Raton from 1989 to 1999 and was a member of the city's Planning and Zoning Board between 1987 and 1989. Abrams is a past president of the Palm Beach County League of Cities and a founding board member of the Florida League of Mayors. As mayor of Boca Raton, Abrams gained national exposure and local respect during the first bioterrorist attack in American history when anthrax was discovered at the AMI building in Boca Raton in 2001. He received the Distinguished Service Medal from the Israel National Police for his leadership during the ordeal and testified on national television on the government's response at the invitation of a United States Senate subcommittee. Abrams is a member of the Florida and District of Columbia Bars. Prior to moving to Florida, he served in the White House as law clerk to the counsel to President Reagan and current Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. While attending Harvard University, Abrams received the Philo Sherman Bennett Prize for the best government senior thesis and was graduated magna cum laude in 1980. He received his law degree from The George Washington University in 1985. In 2005, Everglades University awarded Abrams an honorary doctorate of humane letters. Mayor Abrams was born in Des Moines, Iowa and grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He and Debbie have been married for 30 years and have two children. Currently, Abrams serves as chairman of the South Florida Regional Transportation Authority and interim vice chairman of the Coastal Oceans Task Force. He also chairs the county's Broadband Committee; Child Care Facilities Board; Development Regulatory Commission; Environmental Control Board; Multi-Jurisdictional Issues Coordination Forum Executive Committee; and Value Adjustment Board. In addition, he sits on the boards of the Florida Association of Counties and the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts."
          • The Buzz Agency bio for Debbie Abrams: "An Atlanta native and graduate of Emory University, Debbie has made South Florida her home for the past 30+ years. She has served as Press Secretary for former Congressman Newt Gingrich; National Director of Media Relations for the Reagan-Bush ’84 re-election campaign; Acting Deputy Director of Communications for Bob Dole for President; and national television liaison for George H.W. Bush’s presidential convention. She also served as VP for Public Relations and Public Affairs for BioONE—the firm that decontaminated National Enquirer’s headquarters after the 2001 anthrax attacks. Debbie has also served as Senior Account Executive for The Ehlers Group, and was VP of Rubin Wealth Advisors in Boca Raton.

            Debbie is a past President of the Boca Raton Historical Society, a past President of the Junior League of Boca Raton, and a former member of the US Holocaust Museum Council, which was by Presidential Appointment. In recognition of her work in the community, she received the prestigious Junior League Woman Volunteer of the Year Award and was honored by the American Jewish Committee for her work in the community. Currently, she is co-chair of the Junior League’s sustainers.

            Debbie and her husband Steven L. Abrams, former Palm Beach County Commissioner and Mayor of Boca Raton, have two children, Margaret and Arthur, and a variety of neighborhood rabbits that Debbie tends to frequently feed."
          • Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler law firm - located in Fort Lauderdale FL; fell into scandal after partner Scott Rothstein was found to have run a billion-dollar Ponzi scheme; represented several Jeffrey Epstein victims, with future J. Stanley Pottinger partner / Virginia Giuffre attorney / Donald Trump defender Brad Edwards being one lawyer on those cases
            • Legal Junkies forum thread about the RRA scandal (pages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
            • WPEC, "Legal practice controversy prompts commissioner to leave law firm", 2009/11/02: "[...] County Commissioner Steve Abrams announced he's leaving the legal practice, because of the controversy. The firm is Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler. The man who headed the practice, and is now under suspicion, is Scott Rothstein. He is being linked to a set of phony investments, and court documents filed today in Broward County, allege some law firm funds cannot be accounted for. Rothstein's whereabouts are unknown. Commissioner Abrams, who was one of three lawyers at the Boca Raton satellite office, said he had no knowledge of what's being alleged. "It surprised everybody at the firm," said Abrams. [...] Abrams said leaving the practice is the right thing to do. [...] Also on the Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler legal roster was former Palm Beach County Circuit Judge William Berger. He was among lawyers at the firm representing victims of Palm Beach billionaire Jeffrey Epstein in civil lawsuits. The Rothstein law firm is also known for its political connections and contributions. CampaignMoney.com reports Rothstein sent $139,000 to mostly Republican candidates, plus a couple Democrats. The law firm, as a whole, was responsible for a half million in political contributions, according to the web site."
            • Miami Herald, "Several boxes related to Epstein case seized in Rothstein raid", 2009/11/17: "When the FBI and IRS raided lawyer Scott Rothstein's Fort Lauderdale firm earlier this month, they carted away documents related to civil lawsuits involving billionaire Jeffrey Epstein. Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler represented a few plaintiffs that alleged sexual abuse by Epstein. Rothstein tried to use the cases to lure investors. "Mr Rothstein told investors he had uncovered many more victims and were negotiating to settle those without having to file suits,'' said attorney William Scherer who represents investors who lost around $100 million. The cases were real -- but the settlements were a fiction. [...] William Berger, a former Palm Beach judge who was one of the lawyers at Rothstein's firm handling Epstein cases, said the first time he heard about Rothstein selling settlements was when he read about it in the paper. "Not one of my clients knew that, or consented to it or was even approached about it,'' he said." - note that Scherer was a Republican attorney who fought for George W. Bush in the 2000 election controversy and maintained close ties to the Broward County FL election office under ostensible Democrat Brenda Snipes
            • South Florida Sun-Sentinel, "Timeline: Key dates in the life of attorney Scott Rothstein", 2009/12/11 - notes that he was "Major supporter and fundraiser for the presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain and an early backer of Gov. Charlie Crist and Broward County Sheriff Al Lamberti" as well as "Partners with Republican operative Roger Stone"
            • Palm Beach Post, "Rothstein, Epstein scandals converge with sex offender claiming he was used in swindle", 2012/03/31: "Two of the biggest scandals to rock South Florida in recent years merged today when attorneys representing billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein filed a lawsuit claiming the part-time Palm Beach resident is the victim of accused swindler Scott Rothstein. Rothstein, who is accused of running a $1.2 billion Ponzi scheme from his Fort Lauderdale-based law firm, trumped up civil lawsuits against Epstein, according to the complaint filed in Palm Beach County Circuit Court. [...] The problem for investors, according to the lawsuit filed by West Palm Beach attorney Robert Critton, is that Epstein never agreed to settle the lawsuits filed on behalf of women who are identified only by pseudonyms, such as Jane Doe. [...] Attorneys who worked for Rothstein, including Bradley Edwards and former Palm Beach County Circuit Judge William Berger, handled the three lawsuits the firm filed. But, they said, those represent only a fraction of the young women who Epstein molested. [...] Such talk was part of a carefully orchestrated scheme to convince investors they stood to make millions by investing with Rothstein, Critton said. [...] Critton isn't the first to make allegations that Rothstein fabricated cases as a way to lure investors. Fort Lauderdale attorney William Scherer, who has filed a $100 million lawsuit against Rothstein on behalf of scores of investors, has made similar claims. In a 147-page lawsuit, Scherer also said Rothstein told an investor about the phony $200 million settlement offer from Epstein. "He would use . . . cases as bait for luring investors into fictional cases," Scherer was quoted as saying. "All of the cases he allegedly structured were fictional. I don't believe there was a real one.""
            • Forbes, "Rothstein Exposé Details Sex, Murder, and Corruption Behind Florida's Largest Ponzi Scheme", 2013/01/21
              • "Rothstein devoted equal attention to female companionship in addition to his second wife, Kim, including spending $50,000 - $60,000 per month on prostitutes and throwing cash at a seemingly endless supply of women. This included putting women up in apartments, sending them to law school, financing international trips, and even housing a stripper at the Ft. Lauderdale Ritz Carlton. Rothstein also used his penchant for always having women at his disposal (aided by the fact that he represented several local escort companies) to entice potential investors through rumored sex parties at various condos he kept throughout Ft. Lauderdale."
              • "Along with his cozy relationship with Ft. Lauderdale law enforcement, Rothstein used scheme proceeds to corrupt city officials, businessmen, and public businesses. He was widely suspected of having ties to organized crime, and is currently being kept in the Witness Protection Program after helping the FBI wrap up a major corruption sting shortly after his scheme collapsed. Indeed, at a December 2011 deposition, Justice Department lawyers prevented Rothstein from further expanding on these connections. It is widely believed that Rothstein's participation with federal authorities is aimed at securing a reduction of his 50-year prison sentence."
              • "Malkus also details several tragic deaths intertwined with Rothstein's scheme, including the violent death of RRA lawyer Melissa Britt Lewis who was found strangled to death in 2008. Rothstein had carried on an affair with Lewis, who he met while an adjunct professor at Nova Law School. After her graduation, she began working for Rothstein. But Lewis's death was one of several, including both Rothstein's former personal bodyguard and a former RRA attorney that each committed suicide shortly after the scheme's collapse. While never publicly suspected in any of the deaths (Lewis's estranged husband currently awaits trial), the tragedy hit home for Rothstein, who began surrounding himself with bodyguards and armed protection."
            • South Florida Sun-Sentinel, "Lawyers Rothstein, Rosenfeldt, Adler all behind bars and disbarred", 2015/01/05: "[...] since early Monday morning, all three name partners of the Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler firm are behind bars serving time for federal crimes. The trio have also been disbarred. The last to surrender, Stuart Rosenfeldt, 59, of Boca Raton, turned himself in around 8:30 a.m. Monday, officials at the U.S. Bureau of Prisons confirmed. Rosenfeldt is serving two years and nine months at the minimum security federal prison camp on Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Ala. Rosenfeldt, checked in as an inmate 3 1/2 hours before his deadline, authorities said. Scott Rothstein, 52, the criminal mastermind who pleaded guilty to running a $1.4 billion Ponzi scheme at the now-defunct Fort Lauderdale law firm, is serving a 50-year prison sentence after pleading guilty in June 2010. Federal officials will not reveal his prison location because he provided information about organized crime figures and is in the U.S. Bureau of Prisons' witness protection system. [...] Rosenfeldt admitted he arranged, with Rothstein, to have two former Broward Sheriff's deputies intimidate an escort and her boyfriend who were threatening to expose Rosenfeldt's sexual relationship with the woman. Rosenfeldt also admitted he committed check-kiting fraud, by floating checks between the law firm's bank accounts. And Rosenfeldt and Adler both admitted they made illegal political contributions, that were reimbursed by Rothstein and law firm funds, to get around campaign finance laws. Adler, 53, is serving 2 1/2 years at the minimum security federal prison camp in Pensacola with a May 30, 2016, release date."
            • Roger Stone involvement - TODO move to Stone's own page?
              • South Florida Business Journal, "Top political consultant forges ahead in Florida", 2008/01/14 (copy on the RRA website from 2008/09/05): "Even as he still makes news nationally, he has settled in as a consultant affiliated with Fort Lauderdale-based law firm Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler. [...] "I work for their clients," Stone said in a recent interview. "If they have an objective, they don't care if I'm a Republican, a Libertarian or a vegetarian." Exactly what Stone does for clients is not usually disclosed. It's a service that doesn't face courtroom scrutiny. But it centers on giving advice about options - legal, political or legislative - according to Rothstein. "I wanted the best political strategist and the best crisis PR guy in the business," Rothstein said. [...] Firm partner Stuart Rosenfeldt worked for Stone during the 1976 Reagan campaign. Years later, Rosenfeldt and Rothstein founded their law firm. The Stone alliance grew out of Rothstein's involvement with Republican Party fundraising for Gov. Charlie Crist. "We already had the consulting group, but it wasn't doing much. With Stone, we were able to put together a very powerful government relations and crisis public relations group," Rothstein said. [...] RRA has offices in New York and Tampa, and is opening one in London. But Stone and Rothstein are headquartered on the 16th floor of Las Olas City Centre, the biggest office tower in downtown Fort Lauderdale. Stone's office is a shrine to Nixon memorabilia, with a John F. Kennedy image as a nod to the other side. Rothstein has photos of himself with Crist, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Bill Richardson and Specter. On the record, both men say John McCain is their guy this year. [...] Rothstein said he is fully aware of Stone's reputation for playing dirty tricks, but believes he is ethical. [...] 2007: Stone has spent months denying he made a threatening phone call to the father of New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, despite indications the call originated from RRA's New York office."
              • Palm Beach Post, "“Surprised” Roger Stone says GOP moneyman Rothstein’s downfall hurts Democrat Sink", 2009/11/03: "Legendary Republican operative and Nixon acolyte Roger Stone, who was partners with politically connected attorney Scott Rothstein in a Fort Lauderdale-based consulting firm, says he was shocked to hear that Rothstein is accused of orchestrating a multimillion-dollar investment scheme. “I’m as surprised as anyone else. I still don’t have much information,” Stone said Monday. Stone and Rothstein formed a consulting biz called RRA Consulting that operated out of the Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler law offices. Though it’s still listed in state records as an active business, Stone said the partnership dissolved a few months ago. Stone, who lives in Miami, said he still rents office space from the law firm and visits about once a month."
              • Talking Points Memo, "Roger Stone: I Hired PI To Investigate Biz Partner And Accused Fraudster Scott Rothstein", 2009/11/03: "Roger Stone told TPMmuckraker in an interview today that he retained a private investigator last year to scrutinize the activities of Scott Rothstein, Stone’s onetime business partner who is now being accused of a $100 million fraud involving his south Florida law firm. And, Stone added, he broke with Rothstein earlier this year after Rothstein tried to censor criticism of his friend Gov. Charlie Crist on The Stone Zone, for which Rothstein’s law firm was providing web hosting. [...] Stone says the consulting business never had any clients and never opened a bank account. He was surprised to learn that RRA Consulting’s status is listed as “active” in state business records because, he says, he and Rothstein previously agreed to kill the firm." - it appears evident that Stone was lying to distance himself from Rothstein
              • Miami Herald, "High-ranking police officers guarded over Rothstein", 2009/11/14: "Political consultant and former Rothstein associate Roger Stone said he met [Lt. David] Benjamin and Col. Tom Wheeler of the Sheriff's Office at Rothstein's home last year. They were planning Lamberti's election campaign. Stone said he originally thought Rothstein's desire to be surrounded by officers was part of the trappings of wealth and power. Now he thinks Rothstein might have been threatened by investors. He called Rothstein's police connections "genius." "If you're surrounded by cops, no one will suspect you're a crook," said Stone."
              • Palm Beach Post, "Former Rothstein pal is set to be deposed", 2010/02/27: "Roger Stone, the colorful Republican political operative and one-time pal of jailed lawyer Scott Rothstein, has been sent a subpoena for a deposition in the bankruptcy case involving Rothstein's defunct law firm. What will Stone tell the lawyers at the March 17 deposition? ``Anybody stupid enough to give Scott Rothstein -- a man with no financial track record whatsoever -- billions of dollars in investments deserves to lose their money,' Stone said. [...] Stone had an office in the Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler law firm starting around 2006 because he was part of a Rothstein consulting business. Stone said he was paid $80,000 for political consulting he did for Rothstein, including generating media buzz about Gov. Charlie Crist -- a Rothstein buddy -- being on the shortlist for vice president. The relationship between Stone and Rothstein soured in part because Rothstein backed both sides in the Broward sheriff's race in 2008. ``You can't be on both sides,' Stone said."
              • South Florida Business Journal, "Roger Stone faces lawsuit in Rothstein case", 2011/09/22: "Notorious political consultant Roger Stone is the latest target of the trustee overseeing the bankruptcy of Ponzi schemer Scott Rothstein’s former law firm. [...] [Herbert] Stettin’s lawsuit alleges that Stone and his companies received $400,000 in professional fees that provided no benefit to RRA. According to the lawsuit, Stone personally received $216,633. Stone immediately fired back in statements sent to the press: “The lawsuit is without merit. I earned every penny I was paid by RRA for professional services which had value. I have rejected any offer to settle for a lesser amount.” In his statement, Stone also said he relishes the “opportunity to put Berger Singerman on trial,” referring to the law firm doing most of Settin’s work. “The biggest rip-off since the Rothstein Ponzi scheme is the massive legal fees being paid to Berger Singerman and … Herbert Stettin,” Stone said."
              • South Florida Business Journal, "What Roger Stone paid to settle Rothstein lawsuit", 2013/04/09: "Stone is paying only $18,000 to settle a lawsuit that sought $400,000, according to a proposed settlement filed Tuesday."
              • Twitter post by Kirby Sommers on 2022/05/27 containing photos of Stone with Rothstein and Stone's RRA business card - the card identifies "Roger J. Stone, Jr." as "Director of Public and Governmental Affairs" for the RRA, leaving no indication that Stone was separate from the firm itself
          • Mar-a-Lago membership
          • TODO: any connections to Hank Asher (who based some of his data mining companies in Boca Raton FL) or Jeffrey Epstein (who lived in nearby Palm Beach FL), both of whom had business ties with BioONE co-founder Rudy Giuliani?
      • Twitter thread by gumby4christ from 2021 about the possibility that the anthrax attacks served as cover for clearing out AMI's accumulated blackmail materials - the BioONE firm is potentially implicated
  • Ottilie Lundgren death
    • Washington Post, "Conn. Woman Dies of Anthrax", 2001/11/22
      • "Ottilie Lundgren, the widow of a prominent Connecticut attorney, was the fifth fatality in a wave of anthrax infections over the past seven weeks, most of them linked to bioterror attacks via contaminated letters sent to government and media offices."
      • "But Lundgren's case, like the anthrax death of New York hospital worker Kathy T. Nguyen on Oct. 31, has no easy explanation. Lundgren lived alone in a quiet corner of rural western Connecticut, largely housebound except for trips to church and the beauty parlor, accompanied by her niece.

        Federal and state officials said contaminated mail was a prime suspect, though Lundgren was unable to walk by herself to her streetside letter box and had to wait for a friend or relative to bring her mail."
      • "At first glance, possibilities for an early breakthrough appeared unlikely. U.S. Postal Inspection Service spokesman Dan Mihalko said the region's large mail-sorting facility at Wallingford, Conn., had been tested for spores within the past 10 days, with negative results."
      • "Lundgren's hillside neighborhood is in a development of comfortable, middle-class homes built in the 1960s. Residents say she moved there with her husband, Carl, an attorney, as one of the first homeowners in the area. Carl Lundgren died in 1977."
    • Hartford Courant, "The Story Of 'A Genteel Lady'", 2001/12/30 - goes into the background of Carl Lundgren
  • Iraq accusations - TODO fill out
    • ...
  • US government lab origin
    • ...
    • Bob Fitrakis, "Battelle exposed in anthrax biochemical conspiracy", 2002/01/14: "Mainstream news accounts have finally fingered Battelle Memorial Institute, the spooky Dr. Strangelove Institute in Columbus, as ground zero in our domestic military-industrial anthrax scare. With five people dead and eighteen ill, Battelle’s role in directing the Defense Department’s “joint vaccine acquisition program” is now coming under heavy scrutiny. Battelle, in partnership with Michigan-based Bioport, has a virtual monopoly on military anthrax vaccine production in the U.S.. [...] As I reported in the Columbus Alive immediately after the anthrax scare began, Battelle is involved in developing a new and stronger strain of anthrax at its West Jefferson, Ohio labs. [...] As I noted in the Alive, the former No. 2 man in the Soviet biochemical warfare operation, Kanatjan Alibekov (now going by the alias Ken Alibeck) is a classified consultant with both the CIA and Battelle. A 1998 New Yorker article pointed out the work between William C. Patrick III and Alibeck on the anthrax project. [...] The Baltimore Sun reported that the Ames strain was also being produced at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, but more importantly, Battelle directs that program as well. [...] “Hadron Advanced Biosystems Inc., Alibeck’s company, sports an unusual provenance for a biotechnical venture. No other company, doing any kind of work, can claim to be headed by a former No. 2 man in a vast program aimed at turning anthrax, plague, smallpox, tularemia and many other germs into weapons of war,” noted the [Washington Post on Oct. 29]."

Zack as a suspect

  • Salon, "Fort Detrick's anthrax mystery", 2002/01/26
    • "The day after hearing from the FBI, Assaad met with special agents J. Gregory Lelyegian and Mark Buie in the FBI's Washington field office, along with Assaad's attorney, Rosemary McDermott. They showed Assaad a detailed, unsigned, computer-typed letter with a startling accusation: that the 53-year-old Assaad, an Environmental Protection Agency scientist who filed an age discrimination suit against the U.S. Army for dismissing him from a biowarfare lab, might be a bioterrorist.

      "Dr. Assaad is a potential biological terrorist," the letter stated, according to Assaad and McDermott. The letter was received by the FBI in Quantico, Va., but Assaad did not learn from the FBI where it had been mailed from. "I have worked with Dr. Assaad," the letter continued, "and I heard him say that he has a vendetta against the U.S. government and that if anything happens to him, he told his sons to carry on."

      According to Assaad, "The letter-writer clearly knew my entire background, my training in both chemical and biological agents, my security clearance, what floor where I work now, that I have two sons, what train I take to work, and where I live."
    • "[...] Assaad used to work at the U.S. Army's Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), in Fort Detrick, Md., a biowarfare lab many critics believe might have been the source of the stolen anthrax. According to internal Army documents in Assaad's own possession (and first reported about in the Hartford Courant), 27 specimens, including anthrax, Ebola and the hantavirus were lost in the early 1990s from the lab. The documents paint a chaotic picture of a poorly managed lab."
    • "[...] [Assaad] is not alone in his concerns about his former colleagues. Another scientist who worked at the lab at the time -- and who admits to having been part of a group in the lab that called itself the "Camel Club," organized as a kind of drinking club that on the side ridiculed the Egyptian-born Assaad -- said he also believes that the anthrax in the recent terror scare came from Fort Detrick's USAMRIID."
    • "[...] A big problem at the lab, which apparently contributed to specimens going missing, was that after the Gulf War, USAMRIID decided to phase out work some scientists had been doing on projects that the Army lab no longer considered crucial to their core mission of researching vaccines against bioweapons. Many scientists who had been engaged in other projects, such as Lt. Col. Phil Zack, who had been researching the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), were eager to continue working on projects USAMRIID said they should stop. What followed, the documents reveal, were scientists sneaking into the Army biowarfare lab to work on pet projects after-hours and on weekends, former workers like Zack, who left in 1991, still being let in to do lab work, pressure applied to technicians to help out, documents going missing, and deliberate mislabeling of specimens among other efforts to hide unsanctioned lab work."
    • "In particular, Assaad, who is Egyptian-American, was the target of the group of USAMRIID scientists and lab technicians who called themselves the Camel Club. Among his antagonists were colleagues in Fort Detrick lab's experimental pathology division, Zack and Rippy."
    • "Before the investigation ended, both Zack and Rippy were reprimanded. Then Zack left USAMRIID in December 1991, first heading to the Army's Walter Reed Institute, then going to the private pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, and then to a company in Colorado acquired by St. Louis' Nexstar Financial Management. Several calls by Salon to his last known phone number and address in Boulder, Colo., went unreturned, and Nexstar says it no longer has any record of Zack. Rippy, who left USAMRIID shortly after Zack, in February 1992, worked for a while at Eli Lilly, but could not be located by Salon."
  • Ed Lake, "Dr. Philip M. Zack is a Catholic", 2008/07/13

Hatfill as a suspect

  • Hartford Courant, "THE CASE OF DR. HATFILL: SUSPECT OR PAWN", 2002/06/27
    • "Hatfill later became a member of UNSCOM, the United Nations-sponsored group that went into Iraq after the gulf war to look for that country's biological weapons stockpiles.

      Another member of UNSCOM was David Franz, who later became the colonel in charge of the Fort Detrick infectious disease center. Hatfill worked at the center from 1997 to 1999 in the virology department. He has never claimed to have worked with anthrax, but in 1999 he was involved with a CIA-run course on chemical and biological weapons."
    • "Hatfill is a protege of William Patrick, a former bioweapons expert at the Fort Detrick center when it ran an offensive biological weapons program in the late 1960s. Patrick has acknowledged helping scientists at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah make dry or "weaponized" anthrax a few years ago."
  • American Prospect, "Who is Steven Hatfill?", 2002/07/02
    • "There is something curious about Hatfill's claim, on his resume, to have worked concurrently with the U.S. Army Institute for Military Assistance in Fort Bragg and with the Rhodesian Special Air Squadron. Indeed, several of his associates have told the Prospect that Hatfill bragged of having been a double agent in South Africa -- which raises some intriguing questions. Was the U.S. military biowarfare program willing to hire and give sensitive security clearances to someone who had served in the apartheid-era South African military medical corps, and with white-led Rhodesian paramilitary units in Zimbabwe's civil war two decades earlier? Or did Hatfill serve in the Rhodesian SAS, and later in the South African military medical corps, at the behest of the U.S. government?"
    • "In January 1999, Hatfill went to work for Scientific Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a large defense contractor. As a specialist in biological defenses working on contract for various government agencies, Hatfill continued to have access to the Fort Detrick lab; the Army's chemical weapons defense testing facility in Edgewood, Maryland; Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah; and other government labs and military facilities depending on his assignments."
    • "While colleagues at SAIC say that Hatfill's clients adored him, some of them grew concerned about Hatfill this February, after The (Baltimore) Sun ran a story -- not mentioning Hatfill -- about a scientist who was seen taking biosafety cabinets from USAMRIID, at the same time that Hatfill lost his government-issued security clearance and consequently his job at SAIC. Why did he lose his clearance? One military official recounts the story he says Hatfill told him. In this telling, the difficulties began last summer, when Hatfill allegedly applied for a Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmentalized Information (TS/SCI) security clearance in order to bid for a top-secret contract with a government agency, perhaps the CIA.

      To qualify for this clearance, he was reportedly required to take a polygraph test. Hatfill allegedly told the military official that he failed the polygraph on questions concerning his activities in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). The people conducting the polygraph were amateurs, Hatfill allegedly complained to his interlocutor; they couldn't understand what Cold Warriors like himself had to do in Rhodesia. The military official recalls Hatfill as saying that his father-in-law had been killed by rebels in Rhodesia, and that he had consequently undertaken some actions that caused concern when he was given his polygraph test."
  • New York Times, "Anthrax? The F.B.I. Yawns" by Nicholas D. Kristof, 2002/07/02
    • "Almost everyone who has encountered the F.B.I. anthrax investigation is aghast at the bureau's lethargy. Some in the biodefense community think they know a likely culprit, whom I'll call Mr. Z. Although the bureau has polygraphed Mr. Z, searched his home twice and interviewed him four times, it has not placed him under surveillance or asked its outside handwriting expert to compare his writing to that on the anthrax letters.

      This is part of a larger pattern. Astonishingly, the F.B.I. allowed the destruction of anthrax stocks at Iowa State University, losing what might have been valuable genetic clues. Then it waited until December to open the intact anthrax envelope it found. The F.B.I. didn't obtain anthrax strains from various labs for comparison until March, and the testing is still not complete. The bureau did not systematically polygraph scientists at two suspect labs, Fort Detrick, Md., and Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, until a month ago."
    • "[...] People in the biodefense field first gave Mr. Z's name to the bureau as a suspect in October, and I wrote about him elliptically in a column on May 24."
    • "Do you know how many identities and passports Mr. Z has and are you monitoring his international travel? I have found at least one alias for him, and he has continued to travel abroad on government assignments, even to Central Asia."
    • "Have you searched the isolated residence that he had access to last fall? The F.B.I. has known about this building, and knows that Mr. Z gave Cipro to people who visited it. This property and many others are legally registered in the name of a friend of Mr. Z, but may be safe houses operated by American intelligence."
  • World Socialist Web Site, "US media silent on anthrax cover-up charge", 2002/07/05
  • Stephen P. Dresch (of Forensic Intelligence International LLC) writeup on Hatfill - details the claims from his CV
  • Mail & Guardian, "Murky past of a US bio-warrior" by Marléne Burger, 2002/08/15
    • "While working in the department of haematology at Stellenbosch University for three years during the late 1980s and early 1990s, Hatfill made no secret of his AWB links, using the Milnerton Shooting Association's shooting range in Table View, Cape Town, to train members of Aquila. When a colleague recognised Hatfill in a newspaper photograph of Terre'Blanche surrounded by his uniformed bodyguards, the photo was pinned up on a laboratory noticeboard, "where it remained for some time, and led to Hatfill boasting that he was Aquila's weapons trainer in the Western Cape".

      Another former colleague says Hatfill alienated a number of staff members in the radio biology laboratory, because "he always carried a 9mm pistol and constantly boasted about his military past" Female colleagues particularly disliked Hatfill `because he used to invite them to 'poke and puke' parties" ' According to Lothar Bohm, professor of oncology at Stellenbosch, Hatfill was unpopular because "he just did not respect other people's lives or their work or their needs in the lab. He was the kind of person who would go into the labs late at night and take pieces of equipment without asking."

      Edward Rybicki, associate professor in Cape Town University's microbiology department, said Hatfill would "talk about running around in the bush and throwing grenades in Zimbabwe ... boast about shooting up the ANC's offices"."
    • "[...] His CV is riddled with gaps, suggesting that he is either a liar or that his records have been fudged to hide clandestine activities and account for "missing" periods of time. Even his American military records were censored before being released to the media, and there is growing speculation that Hatfill was recruited by a covert US agency while an undergraduate at Southwestern College in Winfield, Kansas, in the early 1970s, and worked as a double agent throughout his service in crack units such as the Rhodesian Special Air Service and Selous Scouts, and while in South Africa."
    • "Hatfill emerged as the prime suspect behind the anthrax attacks when the FBI learned in June that he and a colleague, Joseph Soukup, commissioned a report in February 1999 from US bio terror expert William Patrick Ill on how a hypothetical anthrax attack could launched by mail, and how it would best be dealt with. At the time, Hatfill was working for an American defence contractor, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). Although the report uncannily mirrors the actual attacks following the events of September 11 last year, right down to the amount - 2,5g of anthrax that could placed in an envelope without causing it to bulge, and specifies the same number of spores and microscopic particle size as were found in letters sent to the US senators, it was turned over to investigators by SAIC at the time of the anthrax scare."
    • "[...] Hatfill worked as a virologist at Fort Detrick only from September to January 1999, but continued to have access to laboratories there and at another military bio war facility, Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah, until at least March this year. [...]"
    • "Just two months before the first anthrax victim died in Boca Raton, Florida, last October, Hatfill's security clearance was cancelled by the US Department of Defence. His employers, SAIC, were given no reason for the sudden withdrawal, and sacked Hatfill as a result. He told former colleagues that he had applied for a higher security rating in order to bid for a top secret government job, and was required to take a lie detector test, which he failed "on aspects of his earlier activities in Rhodesia." Hatfill allegedly complained that the polygraph was carried out by "amateurs" incapable of "understanding what Cold Warriors like himself had to do in Rhodesia"."
    • "Several of Hatfill's acquaintances said he had hinted over the years at having been involved in the world's worst recorded anthrax outbreak, which killed at least 180 of more than 10 500 human victims between 1978 and 1980 in the Rhodesian Tribal Trust Lands. The outbreak is believed to have been caused deliberately by Rhodesian security forces with the assistance of the late Professor Bob Symington, head of the anatomy department at the Godfrey Huggins School of Medicine in Harare and father of a crude but effective biowarfare programme launched against guerrilla fighters and confirmed in recent years by senior ex Rhodesian military officers.

      It was Symington who arranged for Hatfill to study medicine in Zimbabwe and served as his mentor."
    • "Although serving at the time as a signaller with US Special Forces, Hatfill went to Zimbabwe in 1976 after spending eight months as a `health assistant" at a Methodist mission hospital in Kapanga, Zaire. In October 1976 he married chief medical missionary Glenn Eschtruth's daughter, Caroline. In April 1977 a group of Cuban led mercenaries invaded the mission station from Angola, and while eight Americans were later evacuated unharmed, Eschtruth was executed and buried in a shallow grave. Although his marriage ended after less than two years and Hatfill did not even know his wife had given birth to a daughter, Kamin, until she herself had a son in 1996 and tracked her father down, he often told colleagues his father in law's brutal murder had "caused me to undertake some actions other people wouldn't understand". [...]"
  • Salon, "Bio-sleuth or crackpot?", 2002/08/31
    • "Rosenberg has critics in the scientific community as well. Among them are David Franz, former commander of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, and former U.N. biological weapons inspector to Iraq.

      Former UNSCOM bio-weapons inspector Dick Spertzel also disagrees with Rosenberg's assertion that the anthrax came from a U.S. scientist who probably has CIA ties. Spertzel has maintained the anthrax originated in Iraq, and recently defended Hatfill, saying the biologist "is being crucified."" - note that Hatfill worked for UNSCOM, the UN-sponsored group looking for bioweapons in Iraq after the Gulf War
  • From the Wilderness, "Combining Biological and Economic Warfare" by Michael C. Ruppert and Wayne Madsen, 2003/05/09 - details the likely involvement of Hatfill in the US Special Forces and Project Coast
  • Washington Post, "The Persuit of Steven Hatfill", 2003/09/14
    • "[Stan] Bedlington hadn't seen Hatfill for a while, but he still had vivid memories of him. They'd first met at a Baltimore bioterrorism conference. Bedlington, a retired CIA agent, had spent six years as a senior analyst with the CIA Counter-terrorism Center. Hatfill was working as a virology researcher at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, where he'd begun making a name for himself preaching the dangers of a bioterror attack.

      Soon they ran into each other again at Charley's Place in McLean, then a favorite hangout for the U.S. intelligence community. Agents and officials from the CIA and Pentagon mingled with private consultants and law enforcement agents. Most were cleared to handle classified information, but after long workdays and a few drinks, the conversation often veered to tales of dark intrigue and, occasionally, into drunken bluster.

      Hatfill, who first showed up there with men whom Bedlington recognized as bodyguards for Saudi Arabian Prince Bandar bin Sultan, had plenty of stories to tell.

      He bragged about being an ex-Green Beret. He walked with a slight limp and told people it was the result of being shot during combat. In a convincing British accent that he could turn on at will, he described parachute jumps and commando training he did under the direction of the British Special Air Service. He detailed his exploits as a member of the Selous Scouts, an elite counterinsurgency unit of Rhodesia's white supremacist army that became notorious for brutality during that country's civil war. He even recounted a devastating outbreak of anthrax poisoning in the Rhodesian bush in the late 1970s, an event later suspected to be part of an effort by the Selous Scouts to control guerrilla uprisings."
    • "[When Bedlington checked Hatfill's resume,] Hatfill, it said, had graduated in 1984 from a medical school in Harare, Zimbabwe, the former Rhodesia. Which had no particular significance to Bedlington, until he did a bit more research and learned the campus bordered a suburb called Greendale. A fairly ordinary name, except for one jaw-dropping coincidence: The fictional return address on two of the anthrax letters read "Greendale School.""
    • "Before he was dubbed "a person of interest" in the case, Hatfill had been part of a tight circle of U.S. government officials and consultants working to counter the global bioterror threat.

      He'd trained defense intelligence agents and soldiers in the elite Special Forces. He'd served as an adviser to the State Department's Diplomatic Security Service. He'd worked with the Pentagon, the CIA, even, ironically, with FBI agents, one of whom Hatfill recognized as a former student when his home was being searched."
    • "As they conducted interviews, sifted through tips and searched homes and laboratories, agents asked one question over and over: Who could have done this? Several people offered up the same name: Steven Jay Hatfill."
    • "At SAIC, Hatfill designed and taught bioterror preparedness courses, but his responsibilities also included "black," or classified, biowarfare projects. One of Hatfill's major roles was working with the Joint Special Operations Command, which handled U.S. military counterterrorism operations. At Fort Bragg, N.C., Hatfill led grueling training for Army commandos preparing for covert missions to find and destroy weapons of mass destruction, according to friends and former colleagues. He conducted counter-terrorism training for Defense Intelligence agents and did a "super job," says DIA spokesman Don Black.

      Hatfill designed programs and training equipment for Navy SEALs, and SAIC colleagues say he often sat at his desk designing mock bioterror training devices, including a backpack that could be used by enemies to spray germs on the battlefield. He trained CIA agents in counter-proliferation, and shuttled to U.S. embassies abroad to teach bioterrorism preparedness."
    • "The call of God brought Lena Eschtruth and her husband, Glenn, to a remote medical clinic in the Belgian Congo in 1960. Methodist missionaries from Michigan, they devoted their lives to ministering to patients who would "die in your arms for lack of medicine," she says.

      They'd been living there for 13 years when an "idealistic kid" named Steve Hatfill showed up unannounced on the clinic's doorstep, wanting to help.

      Hatfill had grown up in Mattoon, Ill., where his father was the president of an electrical supply company. The family also owned a thoroughbred horse farm in Ocala, Fla., and several Florida waterfront condominiums. At Mattoon High School, Hatfill wrestled, played tennis and belonged to the Latin club. After graduating in 1971, he enrolled at Southwestern College, a small Methodist-affiliated school in Winfield, Kan., and majored in biology, with plans to study medicine.

      Lena Eschtruth has no idea what prompted Hatfill, at 19, to leave college for eight months to work as a hospital assistant in a country beset by civil strife. She doesn't remember him being particularly religious. "Nobody sent him," she says. "I don't even know how he knew about us. But you don't kick a kid out. You know how it is: When you're young, you can set the world on fire."

      While he worked at the clinic, Hatfill fell in love with the Eschtruths' teenage daughter, Caroline, who was preparing to return to the United States to attend college. She and Hatfill were married in 1976. Six months later, in April 1977, the young couple received devastating news. Caroline's father had been seized by Soviet- and Cuban-backed mercenaries invading what was then called Zaire from Angola. For several tense weeks, no one knew Glenn Eschtruth's fate. Then his body was found in a shallow ditch."
    • "Hatfill's marriage soured quickly after his father-in-law's death. He accompanied Caroline to a funeral service in Michigan, and that was the last time Lena Eschtruth saw him. He and Caroline divorced in 1978. He had no contact with his only child -- a daughter named Kamin, who was born shortly before the divorce -- until several years ago, Caroline Eschtruth says. Through most of Kamin's childhood, Hatfill was living in Africa, where he'd returned after his divorce to become a physician.

      After receiving his medical degree, he continued his studies in South Africa, where he earned dual master's degrees in microbial genetics and radiobiology, completed his medical residency in hematology and pursued a PhD in molecular cell biology."
    • "In 1997, after a stint at the National Institutes of Health, Hatfill had won a government grant to work with Fort Detrick scientists, who studied Ebola, smallpox and other deadly viruses. He had access to the most restricted Biosafety Level 4 laboratories, where scientists handle viruses in biohazard suits tethered to air supplies, and to the less dangerous Level 3 labs, where experiments with anthrax and other bacteria are conducted inside the protection of safety cabinets."
    • "With public interest on the rise, Hatfill began giving bioterror lectures at think tanks and offering up sound bites to reporters. A photograph published in Insight magazine in 1998 showed Hatfill dressed in mock biohazard regalia, purportedly cooking germs in a kitchen. It may have been the same photo he'd shown to Stan Bedlington. In an accompanying article, Hatfill warned that the hoaxes "could be a form of testing for a future terrorist attack, perhaps next time using anthrax."

      Hatfill knew how to get people's attention. At a seminar in New York, he demonstrated one of his favorite bioterrorism scenarios: a terrorist using a wheelchair to sneak past White House security with a biological agent, says Jerome Hauer, then New York City's emergency preparedness director. Hauer was appalled. After the presentation, he says, he called Hatfill aside and told him he "had gone too far. It was too detailed, too specific to go into in a public forum." Hatfill listened, Hauer says, but shrugged it off."
    • "Hatfill entered the bioterror world's inner circle largely through a single connection: Bill Patrick, one of America's leading bioweaponeers and the holder of five classified patents for the weaponization of anthrax.

      Patrick had come to Fort Detrick in 1951 to help create a biological weapons arsenal. The program, authorized by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942, flourished until President Richard Nixon disbanded it in 1969 in response to humanitarian pressures. As a result, Patrick and a legion of other specialists were sidelined after devoting their lives to a program that they considered vital to national security."
    • "As he entered his seventies, Patrick told associates he wanted a protege to carry on his work. When he met Hatfill, he found an enthusiastic learner. "He was so gung-ho," Patrick, now 76, recalls fondly.

      The two struck up a friendship, "like father and son," says one bioterror expert who watched the ties develop. When Patrick's schedule was too full to attend a program or contribute to a study, he recommended Hatfill, who often did the work for free. Hatfill drove Patrick to consulting jobs at SAIC and traveled with him to professional conferences and classified briefings on the weaponization process. Hatfill was often a dinner guest at Patrick's home, where, Patrick says, he keeps the basic lab equipment needed to make bacteria into a finely ground powder. The legendary scientist's support helped Hatfill land his job at SAIC.

      Not long after he got there in 1999, Hatfill and SAIC Vice President Joseph Soukup hired Patrick to study the potential dangers of anthrax sent through the mail."
    • "Among the many intriguing statements on Steven Hatfill's resume was a striking claim that he had extensive knowledge of U.S. bioweapons production and working knowledge of both "wet and dry" biological agents. This placed him in exclusive company.

      Experts have estimated that no more than 50 to 100 Americans could claim such knowledge.

      Hatfill's claim was not questioned as he moved into increasingly sensitive roles, but it was generally assumed by his colleagues that he could have gotten such knowledge only through his relationship with Patrick."
    • "On Capitol Hill, weeks after the scare over the initial Daschle letter had abated, a second letter appeared in Daschle's office. This one had passed through irradiation equipment to kill anthrax spores, and the powdery material packed in the envelope tested benign.

      The most curious thing was the letter's postmark. It had been mailed in mid-November from London. The FBI knew that Hatfill had been in Swindon, England -- about 70 miles from London -- at that time for specialized training to become a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq. Agents determined through rental car receipts that he was the only trainee to hire a car, telling others that he planned to visit old friends. The FBI asked British police to help retrace his every move."
    • "Hatfill had frequently described himself as an ex-Green Beret. Military records show he did enlist in the Army in 1975 and entered the rigorous Special Forces Qualification Course at Fort Bragg in 1976. But he didn't last long there. After a few weeks, he was discharged from active duty and wound up in the Army National Guard."
    • "Hatfill, investigators learned, had obtained a prescription for the antibiotic Cipro, which could be used to fight anthrax infection, not long before the attacks. Agents also had gotten a positive identification from bloodhounds sniffing through Hatfill's apartment after smelling the decontaminated anthrax letters, law enforcement sources told reporters."
    • "The Cipro prescription was for a lingering sinus infection, Hatfill explained. He insisted that he had never worked with anthrax, and that his research at Fort Detrick had focused solely on viruses. The positive identification by the bloodhounds amounted to one dog's friendly reaction when Hatfill reached down to pet him." - unlikely that he never worked with anthrax, given his history in Rhodesia and close association with Bill Patrick
    • Investigators tracked Hatfill's Cipro prescription back to John Urbanetti, Richard Nixon's former personal physician. (Urbanetti, who knew Hatfill through bioterror courses, declined to be interviewed for this article.) [...]"
  • Dr. Glen Eschtruth background - very likely Hatfill's first case officer in Africa
    • ...
  • William C. Patrick III a.k.a. Bill Patrick background - worked with Battelle consultant Ken Alibek on anthrax
    • ...
  • Joseph Soukup (of Science Applications International Corporation) background
    • Forever Missed memorial page for Joseph Francis Soukup (1941 - 2013): "Joseph F. Soukup passed away in his Florida home on December 15, 2013 at the age of 72. Joseph leaves his son, Greg Soukup and daughter-in-law, Michelle, and three grandchildren Joseph (Joey), Brooke, and Evan of Chesterfield, Virginia; a brother, Michael Soukup and sister-in-law, Linda, and their children Evan and Jessica, of Blue Hill, Maine; a nephew, Mark Soukup and his wife Kimberly, of Lincoln, Massachusetts; and a niece, Rebecca Soukup Eiler and her husband David, of Norwich, Vermont; as well as cousins and many devoted friends.

      Joe was born and raised outside of Richmond, Virginia, the son of Joseph and Virginia Hawley Soukup. He was an active member of the Boy Scouts, and enjoyed fishing, boating, hunting and crabbing at the family cabin on the Chesapeake Bay.

      After graduating from Highland Springs High School in Highland Springs, Virginia, Joe earned a Certification in Electronics Technology at The Danville Technical Institute, VA. Joe earned a Bachelor of Science at the University of Richmond, where he received the Willie M. Reams Award for outstanding achievement and promise in advanced study in biology. Joe’s ambition and quest for knowledge took him further to complete his Ph.D. in Biomedical Science at Duke University.

      Upon completing his degree, Joe was hired by Science Applications International, Inc., (SAIC) where he served for 25 years until retiring as a Senior Vice President. Joe’s expertise and relentless dedication to his work in Biomedical Science left a lasting footprint within the company, one that has endured during the company’s restructuring.

      Joe was a man who took his personal and professional commitments seriously. Joe generously contributed to causes he believed in such as the NRA, the Veteran’s Administration and his local Police Department, where he served as a volunteer for several years."
  • Jerome Hauer connection - note that he allegedly told the White House to start taking Cipro shortly after 9/11; was involved in the Operation Dark Winter drill in June 2001 (see below) and helped establish NYC's Office of Emergency Management which was running the Tripod II drill on 9/11 (see below)
    • ...
  • Dr. John Urbanetti background - TODO: dig up more of his background, which is rather difficult to find
  • Vanity Fair, "The Message in the Anthrax" by Don Foster, 2003/10
  • Jeffrey M. Bale, "South Africa’s Project Coast: “Death Squads,” Covert State-Sponsored Poisonings, and the Dangers of CBW Proliferation", 2006 (Taylor & Francis Online page for the paper)
    • "There is also some evidence indicating that Stephen J. Hatfill, an American biological warfare expert whom the FBI designated as a “person of interest” in its investigation of the 2001 “anthrax letter” mailings in the United States, was involved in various Rhodesian intelligence or counterinsurgency operations. Although Hatfill’s activities in southern Africa have yet to be fully clarified, it is known that he worked for the Rhodesian police’s Special Branch and that he later obtained his medical degree from the University of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe.85 Some have hinted that he operated out of the Selous Scouts base at the Bindura Fort, from whence McGuinness facilitated the launching of “black operations,” including CW actions. At present, however, intimations that Hatfill may have been personally involved in the covert dissemination of CW or BW agents in southern Africa can only be characterized as unsubstantiated. Be that as it may, in 2002 the South African media reported that Hatfill had earlier helped to train the Aquila Brigade shock troops of Eugene Terre’Blanche’s right-wing Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB: Afrikaner Resistance Movement).86 During this period, he also claims to have received advanced medical training from various SAMS components, as well as to have been assigned to its 2 Medical Battalion Group."
    • "85. On his CV, Hatfill claimed that he served with C Squadron of the Rhodesian SAS, whereas in a note to his Missouri high school newspaper he indicated that he saw action with the Selous Scouts. Neither of these claims has been confirmed, and could be false given all the other information he apparently fabricated on his CV. Even so, at least one unnamed SADF veteran claims that Hatfill did in fact serve in the Selous Scouts, “mainly as an ‘operational medical orderly’,” and added that it was the Scouts who “decided he should study medicine because they felt he would serve them better as a field surgeon than as a medic.” 24 January 2003 email forwarded to the author by Stephen Dresch of Forensic Intelligence. Moreover, in the memoirs of Peter McAleese, a former member of the Rhodesian SAS, the author mentions that a “Steve Hartful”–undoubtedly Hatfill–worked for the Rhodesian police’s Special Branch, one of the forces that played a significant role in the covert Rhodesian CW program. Compare Hatfill CV, p. 3; and Peter McAleese, No Mean Soldier: The Story of the Ultimate Professional Soldier in the SAS and other Forces (London: Cassell & Co., 1993), pp. 163–4."
    • "86. See, e.g., Tony Weaver, “US anthrax suspect had links with AWB,” The Herald (1 July 2002); and Marléne Burger, “Murky past of a US bio-warrior,” Mail & Guardian (15 August 2002). For more on the AWB, see Kemp, Victory or Violence; and P. J. Kotzé and C. P. Beyers, Die opmars van die AWB (Morgenzon: Oranjewerkers Promosies, 1988). For the entire Afrikaner paramilitary right in South Africa, see Martin Schönteich and Henri Boshoff, ‘Volk’, Faith and Fatherland: The Security Threat Posed by the White Right (Pretoria: Institute for Security Studies, 2003)."
  • The Atlantic, "The Wrong Man", 2010/05
    • "Though Hatfill’s apartment in Frederick was less than a quarter mile from Ivins’s modest home on Military Road, and both men worked at Fort Detrick at the same time, Hatfill says the two never met. Hatfill was surprised when the FBI ultimately pinned the anthrax murders on a fellow American scientist.

      “I thought it would eventually be proven that al-Qaeda was behind the attacks,” he says."
  • Chapter 9 ("The WTC Collapse, Jerry Hauer, and the NYC Anthrax Connection") of Slingshot to the Juggernaut: Total Resistance to the Death Machine Means Complete Love of the Truth by Sander Hicks (2012)
  • Later activities in the Donald Trump / Steve Bannon (i.e. Council for National Policy) orbit
    • Media Matters, "Virologist tells Steve Bannon his coronavirus conspiracy theory theory is from “crackpot websites” and is a “load of crap”", 2020/02/14 - Hatfill discounts the idea of COVID-19 being engineered in a lab
    • Washington Post, "Trump’s election challenges distracted from covid response, White House adviser told colleagues", 2021/09/23
      • "Steven Hatfill, a virologist who advised White House trade director Peter Navarro and said he was intimately involved in the pandemic response, repeatedly described in the emails how “election stuff” took precedence over coronavirus, even as the outbreak surged to more than 250,000 new coronavirus cases per day in January.

        “Now with the elections so close, COVID is taking a back-seat, yet the disease is rearing it[s] ugly head again,” Hatfill wrote to an outside colleague in October 2020. Following the election, which was disputed by Trump, Hatfill wrote in another email that he personally “shifted over to the election fraud investigation in November.”

        In other emails obtained by the subcommittee, Hatfill further detailed his role in the White House’s election challenges, including traveling to Arizona in the wake of that state’s close election, passing along a “Plan B for Trump Legal Fight” and sharing debunked rumors of Joe Biden’s supposed family ties with a voting machine company.

        Asked in a Jan. 5, 2021, email by a George Washington University colleague why he was not “fixing the virus,” Hatfill blamed the election dispute, writing, “Because the election thing got out of control. I go where my team goes,” citing his own efforts to help challenge the outcome of the election in Nevada."
      • "By his own public account, Hatfill played a key role in the Trump administration’s pandemic response.

        “From 3 February 2020 through the post-inauguration transition period in 2021, I had the task of providing almost daily outside scientific considerations to the Executive Office of the President of the United States. This task entailed thousands of hours of unpaid work,” Hatfill wrote in an article published on his website this year.

        In emails to colleagues — sometimes sent through ProtonMail, an encrypted email service used by Hatfill, Navarro and other Trump officials — the virologist elaborated on his duties, including that he worked up to 18 hours per day, stationed at the White House.

        “They fly me around sometimes on private jets to sort s--- out. Seeing the good and the bad and what needs to be fixed,” Hatfill wrote in a June 2020 email."
      • "But the documents also illustrate how politics came to define Hatfill’s view on the pandemic.

        “States favorable to Trump have a lower COVID Case Fatality Rate than the ... states that do not,” Hatfill wrote in a Sept. 19, 2020, email to a White House official, using a slur for the states that were not Trump-friendly. He suggested that the information should be highlighted." - the slur is "Fucktard"
      • "In his emails, Hatfill repeatedly took aim at Anthony S. Fauci, the government’s top infectious-disease expert, and then-FDA Commissioner Steven Hahn, whom he blamed for opposing the widespread use of anti-malarial drugs.

        “I actually lost it and told Fauci he was full of crap a couple weeks ago,” Hatfill wrote in a Sept. 3, 2020 email."
      • "The scientist, listed as an adjunct assistant professor at George Washington University’s medical school, at times marveled at his turn of fortune, including his newfound proximity to Trump."
    • Media Matters, "Dr. Steven Hatfill pours cold water on Steve Bannon's conspiracy theories about Ukraine and biolabs", 2022/03/11 - dubious claim by Hatfill that Russia is the only nation with an advanced biological weapons program

Ivins as a suspect

  • Mirage Man: Bruce Ivins, the Anthrax Attacks, and America's Rush to War by David Willman (2011)
  • Background and early life
    • Frederick News-Post, obituary for Dr. Bruce Edwards Ivins, 2008/07/31: "Dr. Bruce Edwards Ivins, 62, of Frederick, died Tuesday, July 29, 2008, at Frederick Memorial Hospital. He was the husband of Diane Ivins, they were married for 33 years. Born April 22, 1946, in Lebanon, OH, he was the son of the late Thomas Randall and Mary Johnson Knight Ivins. Dr. Ivins was a scientist for 36 years, at USAMRIID at Fort Detrick.He was a member of the American Red Cross, Frederick County Chapter. He also was a parishioner at St. John's the Evangelist Roman Catholic Church, in Frederick where he was as a musician for many years for church services. Dr. Ivins was a wonderful father to his kids. In addition to his wife, he is survived by his son, Andy Ivins; his daughter, Amanda Ivins; and two brothers, Tom and C.W. Ivins. A memorial service will be held at 10 a.m. Saturday, August 9, at St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church, 118 E. Second Street, Frederick. Officiating will be the Rev. Richard J. Murphy."
    • Washington Post, "A Scientist's Quiet Life Took a Darker Turn", 2008/08/02 (pages 1, 2, 3)
      • "Ivins was born in 1946, the youngest of three sons who grew up in Lebanon, Ohio. His father owned a drugstore and was active in the local Rotary Club and Chamber of Commerce, while his mother stayed at home and volunteered in her sons' PTAs, according to his eldest brother. The family went regularly to Lebanon Presbyterian Church."
      • "When he applied to Fort Detrick in the late 1980s, he had "an impressive résumé," said John Ezzell, a former top scientist there who was part of a hiring committee that selected Ivins to work on the human anthrax vaccine. "We thought he worked out really well. He was a critical part of our vaccine studies." Ezzell said Ivins participated in numerous animal experiments testing how the vaccine protected against various types of anthrax exposure."
      • "Meryl Nass, a physician and leader in the vaccine opposition movement, met Ivins at a conference in the early 1990s, and they talked regularly over the next decade. She said Ivins told her he had a chronic blood disorder and feared that it might be linked to the anthrax vaccine booster shots he had to take to work in the Fort Detrick laboratory."
    • New York Times, "In Anthrax Scientist’s E-Mail, Hints of Delusions", 2008/08/06
      • "His anxiety could be traced, the documents suggest, at least in part to complications that cropped up with an anthrax vaccine project he was working on in the late 1990s, which drew complaints from some Defense Department personnel who claimed the vaccine, which was mandatory, made them severely ill." - this is most likely referring to the BioPort anthrax vaccine that is suspected to have given many soldiers "Gulf War Syndrome"
    • Waldo County VillageSoup, "Q & A: Meryl Nass", 2011/03/18
      • "BHT: So what was your connection to Ivins?

        MN: Well, Ivins was the main anthrax vaccine researcher at Fort Detrick, so I knew his work. But actually we had met at a conference on biological defense in 1991. We both attended this conference in Baltimore, I think it was three days, and we happened to sit next to each other. And we started talking, and we became friendly, and I told him about the research I was in the process of doing on Zimbabwe, and he sent me some materials that were relevant, and then later when I saw him at conferences, and was working on anthrax vaccine, he again would give me information that he thought was relevant, and we’d talk about our respective work. You know, I didn’t know him well, I just saw him at conferences, but we had known each other over a number of years."
    • Los Angeles Times, "The anthrax killings: A troubled mind", 2011/05/29
      • "Ivins grew up in Lebanon, Ohio, a small town 30 miles northeast of Cincinnati. His parents had planned the arrivals of their first two children, both sons, but by late 1945 the couple had no desire to add to the family. In conversations with a sister-in-law, Mary Ivins described how she tried to abort the unwanted third pregnancy:

        Over and over, she descended a series of steps by bouncing with a thud on her buttocks.

        Bruce Ivins, born April 22, 1946, would eventually hear the story himself."
      • "His parents were a study in opposites. Randall, a pharmacist, was unfailingly generous, chatty and averse to confrontation. Mary’s prim facade hid a penchant for violence.

        “Mom could explode,” recalled C.W. Ivins, Bruce’s middle brother. “She inflicted terror on all of us.”

        Randall, the amiable proprietor of Ivins Drugs, would sometimes arrive at work bearing the evidence of her latest eruption."
      • "When a 14-year-old classmate, Lana Neeley, arrived at the Ivins house on an errand for her mother, Bruce beckoned her to the basement to “see the gunpowder he’d just made.” She vowed never to set foot in the house again."
      • "By late 1978, Ivins, then 32, and his wife, Diane, had moved to suburban Maryland. But he remained fixated on Nancy Haigwood, a married UNC student studying for her doctorate in microbiology.

        Haigwood mentored younger members of Kappa Kappa Gamma at Chapel Hill, and Ivins resented that she had spurned his attempts to forge a friendship. She found him “cloyingly nice,” an oddball who craved constant attention."
      • "Near his new place of work, the Defense Department’s Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md., Ivins spilled out his feelings about Haigwood to a psychiatrist, Dr. Naomi Heller. He said he experienced Haigwood’s brush-off as a replay of his mother’s mockery of him during childhood.

        Ivins confided that he had thought through plans to kill Haigwood."
      • "In December 1980, Ivins, then 34, was hired as a civilian microbiologist at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Ft. Detrick, Md. Amid fresh suspicion that Soviet scientists were creating biological weapons, Ivins would be assigned to grow and purify anthrax and test whether the Army’s vaccine would protect military personnel and the public.

        Without any evaluation of Ivins’ psychiatric fitness, he was granted a “secret” level security clearance."
      • "At work, Ivins was thriving. He led research to develop an anthrax vaccine envisioned as superior to the existing one. Patent documents would list him as a co-inventor of this genetically engineered vaccine, putting him in line for career-crowning recognition if the product was a success — not to mention lucrative royalties if circumstances ever created a surge in demand.

        He resented that the Pentagon did not spend more to develop the product — and he grew angry when troubles surrounding the old vaccine threatened the entire program."
  • Right-wing ideology
    • Jewish Telegraphic Agency, "Ivins believed Jews were God’s chosen", 2008/08/04: "The Frederick (Md.) News Post republished letters from Bruce Ivins in the wake of his suicide last week. [...] In one letter he praises a rabbi for refusing to engage in dialogue with a controversial local Muslim cleric. “By blood and faith, Jews are God’s chosen, and have no need for ‘dialogue’ with any gentile,” Ivins wrote in 2006. Earlier letters suggest that he saw President Bush’s re-election as a victory for evangelicals. “You can get on board or get left behind, because that Christian Nation Express is pulling out of the station!” he wrote after the election."
    • Twin Cities Pioneer Press, "Anthrax return addresses may refer to Greendale Baptist Academy", 2008/08/07: "The significance of the address used in anthrax mailings to Capitol Hill in October 2001 — “4th GRADE, GREENDALE SCHOOL” — has long puzzled investigators. But suspect Bruce Ivins might have been referring to Greendale Baptist Academy in Greendale, Wis., a southern Milwaukee suburb, U.S. Postal inspector Thomas Dellafera said in a court filing unsealed Wednesday. Ivins was a member of the American Family Association, a conservative Christian ministry that pursued a high-profile 1999 lawsuit involving a fourth-grade student at the school, the affidavit noted. “What a strange twist,” said lawyer Steve Crampton, who represented the Tupelo, Miss.-based association in the case. [...] The association publicized the case in its monthly journal, which Ivins received at his Maryland home for years, according to the affidavit. Ivins and his wife donated money to the group one month after the article was published in October 1999, their first donation to the group in two years, it said. [...] “I don’t know how else he got Greendale’s name, and fourth grade, of course, was exactly what grade this boy was in,” Crampton said."
  • Mind control indicators
    • Washington Post, "A Scientist's Quiet Life Took a Darker Turn", 2008/08/02 (pages 1, 2, 3)
      • "Still, by spring, Ivins's life seemed to be falling apart. Police were first called to his house on March 19, when he was discovered unconscious and briefly admitted to a hospital. On July 10, they encountered Ivins again, this time after a counselor called from Fort Detrick to report that the scientist was a danger to himself, and was ranting about weapons and making death threats. He went peacefully with police to Frederick Memorial Hospital, where he was admitted to a psychiatric ward.

        He was later released voluntarily, but his erratic behavior prompted his therapist, Jean C. Duley, to seek a protective order. Duley wrote that Ivins "has a history dating to his graduate days of homicidal threats, actions, plans, threats & actions toward therapists." She quoted his psychiatrist, Dr. David Irwin, as calling him "homicidal, sociopathic, with clear intentions." Irwin could not be reached for comment."
    • New York Times, "In Anthrax Scientist’s E-Mail, Hints of Delusions", 2008/08/06
      • "“Paranoid man works with deadly anthrax!!!” he wrote in one e-mail message in July 2000, predicting what a National Enquirer headline might read if he agreed to participate in a study on his work."
      • "“I wish I could control the thoughts in my mind,” he added a month later in another message to a colleague. “It’s hard enough sometimes controlling my behavior. When I am being eaten alive inside, I always try to put on a good front here at work and at home, so I don’t spread the pestilence.”

        He continued, “I get incredible paranoid, delusional thoughts at times, and there’s nothing I can do until they go away.”"
      • "Dr. Ivins composed poems — scripted to the nursery rhymes “Hickory Dickory Dock” and “I’m a Little Teapot” — about having two personalities. And he went on what he called “mindless drives” to mail gifts and letters anonymously, the document said, and then “set back the odometer in his car” to fool his wife."
      • "A forensic psychiatrist consulted by the F.B.I. found that Dr. Ivins had been treated with antidepressants and anti-anxiety and antipsychotic medication, according to the documents."
      • "His e-mail messages provide a narrative of his paranoid episodes, dating to 2000. On June 27, 2000, Dr. Ivins wrote, “the depression episodes still come and go.” On July 4, 2000, he wrote, “The thinking now by the psychiatrist and counselor is that my symptoms may not be those of a depression or bipolar disorder, they may be that of a “ ‘Paranoid Personality Disorder.’ ” On July 23, 2000, he said, “Sometimes I think it’s all just too much.”

        And on March 4, 2001, he said of his psychiatrist, “He’s not that easy to talk to and doesn’t really pick up on my problems.”"
      • "By December 2001, Dr. Ivins began writing poems to himself about what he said were the “two people in one,” meaning “me+the person in my dreams.” In one, he wrote:
        I’m a little dream-self, short and stout.
        I’m the other half of Bruce — when he lets me out.
        When I get all steamed up, I don’t pout.
        I push Bruce aside, then I’m free to run about!"
    • WIRED, "Anthrax Redux: Did the Feds Nab the Wrong Guy?", 2011/03/24
      • "On March 31, 2005—after more than two dozen interviews—investigators decided to challenge Ivins more forcefully. [...] They told him they were copying his hard drive. He was concerned—he asked what the FBI does when they find something like child pornography on a computer."
      • "[...] On September 25, Ivins showed up at work with a black eye. He joked that he ran into something—his wife's fist. A month later, he talked about his new favorite cocktail, tequila and Ambien."
      • "[...] Dellafera asked Ivins: Are you worried about the searches? Yes, Ivins answered. I do things a "middle-aged man should not do." Then Ivins told him about a bag in his house filled with the women's clothes he liked to wear."
      • "[After his initial January 16, 2008 interview at the US attorney's office,] A second interview, on February 13, started along similar lines. Ivins described his fascination with bondage, beginning with blindfolding his teddy bears at age 5 or 6. [...]"
      • "On June 5, Ivins spoke on the phone with a friend. Ivins complained of waking up in his clothes, looking at the keys beside the bed, and thinking: "Oh shit, did I drive somewhere last night?" The friend asked Ivins if he might have committed some terrible act. Ivins didn't say no.

        Instead, Ivins told his friend, "I do not have any recollection of ever having done anything like [the anthrax attacks]. As a matter of fact, I have no clue how to, how to make a bioweapon, and I don't want to know." The friend suggested hypnosis as a recall tool. Ivins said, "What happens if I find something that, that is, like, buried deep, deep, deep ... if I found out I was involved in some way?""
    • Research Strategies Network, "Report of the Expert Behavioral Analysis Panel", 2011
    • Los Angeles Times, "The anthrax killings: A troubled mind", 2011/05/29
      • "His public self gave no hint of his private turmoil. Ivins appeared to lead a harmonious life: a successful scientist, married with two children and a home in a nice neighborhood. Yet over the years, he sought help from psychiatrists and counselors and was prescribed a battery of antidepressant and antipsychotic drugs.

        A psychiatrist who treated him in the late 1990s, Dr. David Irwin, confided to a therapist that Ivins was the “scariest” patient he had ever known."
      • "On July 18, 2000, Ivins told a mental health counselor that he had recently planned to poison his former assistant, Mara Linscott. In addition to having cyanide, he said that he had once obtained ammonium nitrate, to make a bomb.

        He saw himself, Ivins said, as an “avenging angel of death.”"
      • "On the evening of Wednesday, July 9, 2008, Ivins arrived at Comprehensive Counseling Associates in Frederick, Md., for his weekly group therapy session. He was noticeably agitated. FBI agents had by now questioned him at length, and his lawyers expected he could soon be charged with murder in connection with the anthrax mailings.

        When it was his turn to speak, Ivins, 62, said he was angry at the investigators and at the system that had dealt him this hand. He had a bulletproof vest and was going to obtain a new Glock handgun, he said. He had a list of people he was planning to kill.

        “I’m not going to go down for five capital murders,” he said. “I’m going to get them all.”

        The next day, police escorted Ivins out of Ft. Detrick, and he spent about two weeks at a psychiatric hospital near Baltimore before returning to his home in Frederick."
      • "At 1:47 a.m. on Sunday, July 27, an ambulance rushed Ivins from his home to the emergency room at Frederick Memorial Hospital. He was comatose. Blood tests indicated a massive overdose of Tylenol. A few hours after he was admitted, Ivins showed responsiveness to those around him.

        An intensive care nurse, Megan Shinabery, asked him: “Did you intentionally try to commit suicide?” Her handwritten notes reflect Ivins’ response: “pt nodded yes.”"
    • Daily Beast, "The Mirage Man by David Willman: Anthrax Attacker Bruce Ivins' Obsessions", 2011/06/02
      • "“Occasionally I get this tingling that goes down both arms,” he told Mara Linscott, on April 3, 2000, a year after she had left Fort Detrick to attend medical school. “At the same time I get a bit dizzy and get this unidentifiable ‘metallic’ taste in my mouth. (I’m not trying to be funny, Mara. It actually scares me a bit.) Other times it’s like I’m not only sitting at my desk doing work, I’m also a few feet away watching me do it. There’s nothing like living in both the first person singular AND the third person singular!”"
      • "Ivins fretted that he may have inherited whatever abnormality had driven his mother to be such a violent, haunting force. He confided that he was depressed and anxious, that he had impulses to seek revenge, and that he had an alternate personality. Psychiatrists had prescribed various drugs, including an antidepressant, Celexa, for his routine use. But by the spring of 2000, Ivins said he was worried he would not be able to resist the urge to do harm. As part of his care, in June 2000 Ivins submitted to weekly one-on-one talk therapy with a clinical counselor, Judith M. McLean, based at Comprehensive Counseling Associates in Frederick, an organization headed by Dr. Allan L. Levy, who had recently become Ivins’ psychiatrist."
      • "[On July 18, 2000 after discussing his attempt to poison Mara Linscott] McLean informed Ivins that she was duty bound to report to the authorities any homicidal threat. Given what she regarded as Ivins’ compulsive, vengeful state, McLean asked if he would be willing to submit to an evaluation by a psychiatrist. Ivins agreed to do so as soon as it could be arranged. Before he left that day, McLean persuaded him to sign a statement pledging not to harm anyone and to contact her immediately if he had further “homicidal thoughts.”

        McLean was trying to stay outwardly calm and nonjudgmental, yet she was afraid of what Ivins might do—to her or to someone else. She found him “creepy, scary, spooky,” and was determined to sound a warning. On the day Ivins revealed his poisoning plot, McLean’s supervisor, Dr. Levy, who was Ivins’ psychiatrist, was on vacation, so she called the psychiatrist who was covering for him, Dr. Orrin Palmer, who in turn phoned Ivins. McLean also called the Frederick police that night and spoke to an officer who said it sounded as if no crime had been committed. She got a similar response when she called a lawyer who represented the practice she worked for, Comprehensive Counseling.

        The next day, July 19, 2000, McLean reached Dr. David Irwin, who had once been Ivins’ psychiatrist, about performing the mental evaluation to which Ivins had agreed. Irwin said that Ivins had been like an “overstretched rubber band”—the “scariest” patient he had ever treated."
      • "Only once, Ivins said, had a Kappa representative contacted him. It was through a letter thanking him for his $150 donation to the sorority, which he made in memory of Caitlin Hammaren, the KKG member killed in April 2007 by the gunman at Virginia Tech.

        Within the previous year, Ivins had described in some detail his adversarial relationship with the sorority on a Web site called AboveTopSecret.com. “Kappas are noted for being lovely, highly intelligent campus leaders,” Ivins wrote under one of his pseudonyms, Goldenphoenix. “Unfortunately, they labeled me as an enemy decades ago, and I can only abide by their ‘Fatwah’ on me. I like individual Kappas enormously, and love being around them. I never choose an enemy, but they’ve been after me since the 1960s, and REALLY after me since the late 1970s. At one time in my life, I knew more about KKG than any non-Kappa that had ever lived.”"
    • Dr. Naomi Heller background - treated Ivins in 1978 to 1979; later referred Ivins to Dr. David Irwin when he again sought psychiatric help, as she was then retired
      • TODO fill in
    • Dr. David Irwin background - treated Ivins for a few months in 2000 regarding his homicidal ideation about Mara Linscott; subsequently recommended that Ivins transfer to the clinic of Dr. Allan Levy, as it was closer to him that Irwin's location in Montgomery County MD; in addition to his own practice, reportedly did work as a forensic psychiatrist for government agencies
      • TODO fill in
    • Judith McLean background - therapist at Comprehensive Counseling Associates (CCA) who treated Ivins in 2000 and reported him to the police for his talk about poisoning Mara Linscott; per her book Ascension Journey, claims to have been a medium, had extraterrestrial encounters in and beyond the "astral realms", exorcised evil spirits (e.g. one manifesting as multiple personality disorder) from her patients that sometimes then attached to her, done remote viewing, and performed "bilocation work" (i.e. astral projection) in both New York City and Afghanistan
      • TODO fill in
    • Dr. Allan Levy background - a Frederick MD psychiatrist who began seeing Ivins in regard to the Linscott matter; later was sanctioned and put on probation for one year in January 2017
      • TODO fill in
    • Dr. Orrin Palmer background - filled in as psychiatrist when Dr. Levy was out of town
      • TODO fill in
    • Jean Duley background - therapist at Comprehensive Counseling Associates (CCA) who treated Ivins in 2008 but later requested a protective order, helping form the prejudicial image of him in the public eye
      • TODO fill in
  • Exculpatory evidence for Ivins as a sole perpetrator
    • Marcy Wheeler, "Google Maps Says Maybe, Maybe Not", 2008/08/09 - notes how Ivins supposedly (according to the FBI) dropped off his anthrax letter on 2001/09/17 before the close of postal business that day, yet the letter is postmarked on 2001/09/18
    • New York Times, "Seeking Details, Lawmakers Cite Anthrax Doubts", 2008/09/06
      • "In April 2007, after the mailed anthrax was genetically linked to Dr. Ivins’s laboratory and after he was questioned about late-night work in the laboratory before the letters were mailed, prosecutors sent Dr. Ivins a formal letter saying he was “not a target” of the investigation. And only a week before Dr. Ivins died did agents first take a mouth swab to collect a DNA sample, officials said." - was there either some element protecting Ivins from scrutiny or a very late decision to make him the patsy?
      • "Skepticism toward the bureau’s case remains especially pronounced among Dr. Ivins’s former colleagues at the Army laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md.

        “Despite the F.B.I.’s scientific and circumstantial evidence, I and many of Dr. Ivins’s former colleagues don’t believe he did it and don’t believe the spore preparations were made at Detrick,” said Dr. Gerry Andrews, a microbiologist who worked at the Army laboratory for nine years and was Dr. Ivins’s boss for part of that time."
      • "Laboratory records obtained by The New York Times show that the anthrax supply labeled RMR-1029, which the F.B.I. linked to the attacks, was stored in 1997 not in Dr. Ivins’s laboratory, in Building 1425, but in the adjacent Building 1412. Former colleagues said that its storage in both buildings at different times from 1997 to 2001 might mean that the bureau’s estimate of 100 people with physical access to it was two or three times too low." - note that Building 1412 is where Steven Hatfill worked
      • "Some microbiologists question the time records documenting Dr. Ivins’s night hours, pointing out that one F.B.I. affidavit said he was in the secure part of the laboratory for exactly 2 hours and 15 minutes three nights in a row — an unlikely coincidence that they said raised questions about the accuracy of the records."
    • Washington Post, "Ivins case’s inconvenient issue: his polygraph" by Jeff Stein, 2011/02/15 (cited FBI document which is Part 10 of the Amerithrax vault files, which on the referenced p.199 also appears to show Ivins implicating Joseph Farchaus; prior FBI FOIA release listing from 2010)
    • WIRED, "Anthrax Redux: Did the Feds Nab the Wrong Guy?", 2011/03/24
      • "There are still unresolved scientific issues surrounding the case, she points out. RMR-1029 was a witches' brew of 35 different production runs. Maybe the mutants came from one or more of those original component batches and therefore showed up only on particular tests."
      • "The National Research Council report also casts doubt on whether the killer spores really were descendants of Ivins' RMR-1029 flask. The FBI resampled RMR-1029 a total of 30 different times, the report found. They could get all four telltale morphs on only 16 occasions."
      • "Then there's the problem of figuring out when Ivins could have grown the spores. In an email to colleagues on April 23, 2004—unrelated to the investigation and long before he became its prime suspect—Ivins estimated that it would take 60 hours to brew up 500 billion spores. Each anthrax letter contained up to four times that amount. This means that making enough spores for the mailings would have required between five and six months. It would have been nearly impossible for Ivins to do that much work without others noticing. It may be odd to rely on Ivins himself for these numbers, but his colleagues do not dispute his estimate. The National Research Council report does theorize that it could have been done more quickly, but its findings were inconclusive. "The time might vary from as little as two to three days to as much as several months," the report reads. [...]"
      • "This raises another significant problem with the case. USAMRIID veterans debate whether Ivins had access to the kind of gear required to dry and mill the spores. Even if he did, some argue, he wouldn't have known how to use it. Ivins' wet-spore experience didn't translate to dry stuff, Heine and others say."
      • "Montooth acknowledges that he isn't sure how Ivins would have done all that growing and drying. "But it almost doesn't matter," he says. Investigators know which days in September and October the envelopes were mailed. That was the actual murderous act. The anthrax could have been slowly assembled and processed for months or years before that. Ivins' alibis for those autumn days are virtually nonexistent." - interesting that this would indicate the anthrax attacks having been planned prior to 9/11, which seems unlikely
      • "There are still other problems with the case against Ivins. The killing spores were so volatile that they cross-contaminated piles and piles of mail. Yet spores were never found in Ivins' house or his car, and only a handful were discovered in his lab. [...]"
    • DXer, "The newly released lab notebook pages demonstrate Dr. Bruce Ivins was tending to dead animals on the nights it was alleged by the FBI he was preparing dry anthrax. In light of an Ivins theory being demolished by such astonishing evidence, GAO should ask why were investigators told Ivins’ time in the lab was “unjustified”? How will Dr. Pat Fellows, AUSA Rachel Lieber and AUSA Kenneth Kohl respond?", 2011/05/14
    • ProPublica, PBS Frontline, and McClatchy investigation (posted 2011/10/10 and aired 2011/10/11)
    • DXer, "Dr. Mara Linscott told the FBI that she needed to see her lab notebooks to refresh her recollection of details, but that checking on the animals would take approximately two hours and was usually a one-person job; the FBI provided the one publication on which she worked involving the former Zawahiri associate but she notes that USAMRIID was a military institution and thus not all of the projects would be published", 2011/11/27
    • Seattle Times, "Anthrax probe: Justice Department arguing against itself", 2012/01/27: "In the files of a recently settled Florida lawsuit, Justice Department civil attorneys contradicted their department’s conclusion Ivins was unquestionably the anthrax killer. The lawyers said the type of anthrax in Ivins’ lab was “radically different” from the deadly anthrax. They cited several witnesses who said Ivins was innocent, and they suggested a private laboratory in Ohio could have been involved in the attacks. [...] The documents were filed in a lawsuit over the October 2001 death of Robert Stevens, a Florida photo editor who was the first victim of the attacks. His survivors accused the government of negligence for experimenting with anthrax at Fort Detrick, Md., a case that lingered in court until the Justice Department quietly settled it in late November. [...] In their depositions, William Russell Byrne and Gerard Andrews, Ivins’ supervisors before and after the anthrax mailings, said they were virtually certain of his innocence. Byrne said Ivins didn’t have the technical skill to make the extremely fine powder and both said the Fort Detrick lab’s equipment could not have dried the anthrax so it could be turned into powder without contaminating parts of the facility. [...] Four days after their disputed filings, Justice Department civil lawyers tried to file a “notice of errata,” and soon made a number of corrections and clarifications. In September, the civil lawyers filed a sworn FBI declaration with nearly 60 points reaffirming Ivins’ guilt."
    • Paul Conant, "A new look: U.S. twisted facts to pin anthrax case on ailing scientist", 2014/11/08
      • "Letters with bogus anthrax were sent from St. Petersburg, Fla., a 50-minute drive from Sarasota, where the reputed hijackers paid visits to a mysterious Saudi family. The reputed hijackers trained at a flight school in Venice, Fl.

        Among the letters sent from St. Petersburg to news media was one to Judith Miller, a reporter for the New York Times, and another to Howard Troxler, a columnist for the St. Petersburg Times. Troxler, whose columns also appeared in the Tampa Bay Times, and Miller both opened their letters after the first anthrax case had become known. But a fuzzy St. Petersburg Times image appears to show a postmark date of Oct. 1, before attacks had become known.

        [...]

        In October 2011, Miller told a CNN caller, "Well, the letter was handwritten. And there was no return address. And there were misspellings. It was a threatening letter. And the Times has decided that I should only tell you that it contained a threat to the Sears Tower and to President Bush. It was a crude letter. That is all I can say.""
      • "A federal affidavit for a 2007 search of Ivins's property discusses the April 2004 search. It says nothing about the alleged blatant evasion by Ivins."
      • "Interestingly, the Post and NBC powders were quite crude. So the crude matter had silicon added, but silicon that would do no harm. One wonders if someone added silicon in an amateurish attempt to weaponize it, or whether someone added it to make it look as though semi-trained al Qaeda terrorists were responsible. Of course, one can come up with a scenario in which Ivins adds silicon in a devious ruse to fool investigators. According to the summary, Ivins's seemingly odd late hours in the lab began in August, weeks before Sept. 11 (and federal officials have never explicitly said that they believe Ivins began preparing attack powder before 9/11, though that is the logical conclusion of their scenario).

        After Sept. 11, the summary shows, Ivins's lab hours zoomed up and fell rapidly once all anthrax attacks were completed.

        Yet one wonders why Ivins didn't bother to add silicon to the new powder, and why he was no longer concerned with making the powder look crude (grown from agar plates, which would have been within al Qaeda's capability), but now went full-bore with a fermenter (assuming he somehow got his work place fermenter up and running)."
      • "In fact, Ivins only acknowledged being responsible for the flask, telling the FBI that the RMR-1029 flask had always been in building 1425, where he worked, but that vials of the material were held in building 1412 for use in animal experiments. However, after Ivins died, Adamovicz, his supervisor in 2001, produced a copy of an Army document showing that the RMR-1029 flask had been stored for a while in the late '90s in building 1412. Adamovicz told a court proceeding that the FBI "didn't want you to see" that receipt copy, which he testified he had found in his personal files.

        There is nothing unusual about Ivins's apparent forgetfulness or misperception, and, in fact, Adamovicz's document establishes that various people other than Ivins had access to RMR-1029 prior to the attacks. Those with access or portential access included Steven Hatfill, who was reportedly suspected of possibly obtaining waste anthrax from containers that were awaiting sterilization in an autoclave. Louise Pitt, who ran the animal experiments, and various animal handlers and others had direct access."
      • "[...] prodded by reporters, FBI scientist Majidi conceded that material identical to the RMR-1029 material had been located at Battelle Memorial Institute in Ohio. Battelle is a major CIA and defense contractor known to have worked on biological defense matters. Three biologists, citing the investigative summary, said the FBI made unwarranted assumptions that the attack anthrax could not have been made at Battelle while a buddy system was in force -- that is, the FBI assumed that only a single individual was involved -- and that Battelle and other laboratories were too far from New Jersey, where postmarks showed that the attack letters were mailed. The FBI reportedly checked commercial flight records and found nothing.

        [...]

        The scientists observed that among the eight laboratories that submitted a total of 63 samples with between one and three positive assay results were Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, the Naval Medical Research Center, Northern Arizona University, the Canadian Defense Research Establishment at Suffield, and a second sample from Battelle. Also, in December 2001, federal sources told the New York Times that Fort Detrick anthrax had been sent to the University of New Mexico."
      • "Though the Justice Department is unwilling to talk much about potential conspiracy, it seems as though FBI agents were not that naive. An anthrax scientist who worked at Battelle drew the FBI's interest in 2002 and quickly spiraled into alcoholism and death, relatives told the New York Times. Little is known about what caused Perry Mikesell to snap. He may have had remorse over recognition that his career choice was marked more by death than by life. Or, he may have felt shunned by fellow workers to the point that he was unable to cope. Or, Mikesell, who had worked alongside Ivins for years at Fort Detrick, may have felt remorse over complicity in treachery and anguish about the possibility of being tried for treason.

        Whether Mikesell's anguish -- so similar to that experienced by Ivins as his end drew near -- was deserved or not, it seems apparent that the FBI field agents were unconvinced by the buddy system records at Battelle, which does much classified work. Nor were they convinced by commercial flight records."
      • "Interestingly, Ivins told the FBI that he had worked on a national security case concerning anthrax "from Iraq," and had deliberately mislabeled it in order to conceal its national security status. It is not necessarily ridiculous to wonder whether Ivins was a go-to person in what he thought was a national security matter. (If so, however, Ivins apparently went to his death with his lips sealed.)

        The summary's contention that Hatfill had no access to the Ames 1029 substrain of attack anthrax is countered by testimony that Hatfill had worked largely in Building 1412 where the 1029 flask was stored for a time in the nineties and where vials of the 1029 substrain were used for animal experiments. Hatfill was at Fort Detrick until 1999, but the flask-1029 material was formulated sometime between 1997 and 1999."
      • "Another scientist, [Joseph] Farchaus, lived within 15 minutes of Princeton, where the attack letters were apparently mailed. Additionally, he reportedly had a relative who lived very close to an elderly Connecticut woman who died from anthrax. To stretch a point, the locales of Kendall Park and Monmouth Junction, which have a return address and a zip code that relate to the mailings, are both roughly 15-minute drives from Princeton."
  • Possible connections to or knowledge of a wider conspiracy
    • Washington Post, "A Scientist's Quiet Life Took a Darker Turn", 2008/08/02 (pages 1, 2, 3): "In fact, in early June 2003, when the FBI drained a pond in rural Maryland in search of clues to the perpetrator of the anthrax attacks, Ivins was one of the Red Cross volunteers who brought investigators coffee and donuts. Investigators, however, singled him out and asked him to leave "because he was somebody involved in the investigation," said Byrne, Ivins's former colleague and fellow parishioner." - the search was to find evidence implicating Steven Hatfill
    • Bob Coen, "The Fantasy Worlds of Bruce Ivins and the FBI", 2010/03/05: "Too busy fingering Ivins circumstantially, the FBI report fails to shed much light on how other US government labs and contractors who may have had access to the same genetic mutant Ames anthrax as Ivins escaped the Amerithrax net. But there are glimspes of this shadowy germ war complex buried within supporting documents.

      Can you find a note–apparently by Ivins –tucked deep inside the two-hundred and fifty-four pages of just-released FBI documents -implying that CIA contractor Battelle made weaponized anthrax spore powder from Ames strain anthrax sent by Ivins and then misled the FBI about its role in the affair?

      Prizes also to those who discover another diagram sketched by Ivins, that seems to show that the Ames strain of anthrax was sent to other top-secret labs including the U.S. Army’s Dugway Proving Ground in Utah and interestingly Porton Down in the U.K. We are especially intrigued by Ivins’ note’s reference to the low-profile Southern Research Institute, (Hint: Look for SORES–second arrow from top on right) a government-wired lab with a bad safety record for its anthrax research."
    • Perry Mikesell connection
    • Egyptian Islamic Jihad (through Dr. Tarek Hamouda and Dr. Tawfik Hamid) and al-Qaeda (through Dr. Ali Al-Timimi) links to US biolabs
      • DXer, "floor plan of suite at GMU’s Discovery Hall in 2001 with Ali Al-Timimi and leading anthrax scientists", 2010/02/07 - shows that in Discovery Hall at George Mason University (a public research university located in Fairfax VA), Ali Al-Timimi was located directly adjacent to Dr. Charles Bailey (former deputy commander of USAMRIID, head of biological threat assessment for the DIA, and Battelle consultant) and Ken Alibek; claims that Al-Timimi was at GMU as part of a program sponsored by American Type Culture Collection (ATCC), the same firm that provided biological weapons to Saddam Hussein in the 1980s and was later sought out by Larry Wayne Harris in 1995; further claims that Al-Timimi and Bailey both worked for SRA International in 1999; also claims that Al-Timimi used to be an assistant to White House deputy chief of staff Andrew Card (later the chief of staff under George W. Bush who handled GWB on the morning of 9/11) in the 1990s
        • Washington Post, "GMU Bioterrorism Center Unites Former Foes", 2002/02/14: "The first time scientists Ken Alibek and Charles Bailey met more than a decade ago, they were on opposite sides of the arms race. Alibek was working to develop biological weapons for the Soviet Union; Bailey was trying to develop defenses against such weapons for the U.S. Army. Now they're on the same side. Yesterday, George Mason University announced it is creating a new research center to host the pair's work on an array of efforts to counter the spread of biological terrorism. The Center for Biodefense, which will be based at GMU's Prince William County campus, will try to develop treatments for diseases such as anthrax and smallpox and study public health preparations for bioterrorist incidents."
        • The Atlantic, The Education of Ali Al-Timimi", 2006/06: "Back in the United States, Ali enrolled for a second bachelor’s, this one in computer science at the University of Maryland, while doing parallel studies in software programming at George Washington University, where his father and mother had obtained degrees. Within a few years his level of skills permitted him to hold a sequence of jobs with high-tech computer firms based in the Washington area. One of them was SRA International, a highly regarded company where Ali worked as a “bioinformatics software architect,” providing information technology to the government. Some of the jobs required that Ali obtain a high-level security clearance; one assignment was in response to a call from the White House, which provided him with a letter of commendation after his work was done. He later enrolled as a doctoral candidate at George Mason University, in northern Virginia, near where he then lived. The specialty he chose was computational biology, a new field that contained the promise of breaking fresh ground in medicine through the advanced use of computers."
      • DXer, "from DXer … documents related to interactions between Dr. Bruce Ivins and University of Michigan researchers", 2010/03/01 - says that back in 1998, Ivins provided anthrax to a DARPA project (for the development of a decontamination agent) being undertaken by Tarek Hamouda and James Baker in Ann Arbor MI; notes how Tarek Hamouda was lifelong friends with and attended Cairo Medical School at the same time as Tawfik Hamid (misspelled Tawfiq Hamid), and that Hamid claimed to have been recruited into Egyptian Islamic Jihad by Ayman al-Zawahiri (later the second-in-command of al-Qaeda) while on campus
      • Meryl Nass, "The Anthrax Attacks and the System That Perpetrated Them — Barry Kissin _on Guns & Butter", 2010/04/02 - has several comments by DXer filling in the aforementioned story, such as claiming that: the work Al-Timimi did at SRA International was classified Navy work; (CIA and EIJ double agent) Ali Mohamed recruited on the Cairo Medical School campus as well; Al-Timimi's father was an attorney at the Iraqi embassy; Al-Timimi was coordinating with nearby (in Falls Church VA) imam Anwar al-Awlaki; Hamouda and Baker did their DARPA work while at the University of Michigan; Hamouda's firm (ed. note: NanoBio) received a $50 million investment from venture capital firm Perseus LLC, headed by former ambassador (under Bill Clinton) and future State Department official (under Barack Obama) Richard Holbrooke
      • DXer, "when did Southern Research Institute (SRI) first obtain virulent Ames and from whom?", 2010/04/06 - says that Southern Research Institute (SRI) in Frederick MD was the subcontractor for Ken Alibek's company, Hadron Advanced Biosystems, to work with the virulent Ames strain; ties the work to a DARPA contract at the GMU Center for Biodefense that Alibek and Charles Bailey were working on; notes that former USAMRIID commander Dave Franz (ed. note: a UNSCOM member, commander during part of Steven Hatfill's tenure at USAMRIID, and opponent of the idea that the anthrax used in the attacks came from a US government lab), was vice president of SRI, having joined in 1998 right after leaving USAMRIID; also points out that Ivins' former lab assistant Pat Fellows departed USAMRIID in 2003 to head the BSL-3 lab at SRI, where she worked with the Ames strain; points out that Franz was a work colleague and good friend of John Ezzell, Fort Detrick's resident anthrax expert (ed. note: who was involved in the initial hiring of Ivins); further claims, based on an interview with Ezzell, that Ezzell had made dry powder anthrax at DARPA's request and given it to Johns Hopkins, while noting that Ivins claimed to have, in August 2000, used virulent Ames from RMR-1029 for a DARPA project and provided it to Johns Hopkins for examination
      • DXer, "Where is the missing anthrax made by Dr. Ivins’ lab assistants?", 2011/01/31 - identifies Mara Linscott and Pat Fellows as the two main lab assistants who made anthrax spores for Ivins; claims that John Ezzell told Ivins the vial of powder he gave him from the Johns Hopkins project came from Iraq; notes that, per fall 2006 reports on Al-Timimi, when his townhouse was raided in February 2003, authorities suspected he had something to do with the anthrax mailings
      • DXer, "documents that must be produced … questions that must be asked … meanwhile, on the CASE CLOSED blog, 178,000 clicks and 12,000 comments have produced not a single shred of credible evidence that Dr. Bruce Ivins made the attack anthrax or mailed the letters", 2011/06/16 - claims that Pat Fellows, who was thanked by Hamouda for technical assistance on his project with Ivins, was the main source portraying Ivins' nights at the lab as suspicious, in spite of his known nighttime work on animal studies that even continued through October
      • Note that Hamid later became a reformed jihadist, which included strong support for Israel and membership on the advisory board of the Intelligence Summit
    • TODO: Given their shared Islamophobia and overlapping tenures at USAMRIID, did Ivins know Philip Zack? And given their shared right-wing connections and overlapping tenures at USAMRIID, did Ivins know Steven Hatfill (this is explicitly denied by Hatfill)?
  • Other curiosities

Bioterrorism exercises

Global terror network

  • Project Coast (CBW program of apartheid South Africa) - run by the South African Defence Force (SADF) under the leadership of Dr. Wouter Basson; almost certainly was backed covertly by US intelligence, including through double agents like Steven Hatfill and Larry Ford
    • ...
    • Dr. Larry Ford case - worth asking if the attempted murder of his business partner James Patrick Riley (allegedly contracted by Ford) and subsequent alleged suicide of Ford himself were the opening salvo in the mysterious deaths of microbiologists around the time of the anthrax attacks (in Ford's case, a little over a year prior); interesting to note the Mormon background of Ford, which mirrors that of William Job Leavitt Jr., as does the fact that Leavitt and his partner Larry Harris were working with the anthrax that resulted in their arrest at a biological lab in Henderson NV, which is the location of an abandoned gold mine where Ford's business card was buried alongside directions for making anthrax
      • Crime Library, "The Mysterious Dr. Ford" by Rachel Bell (chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)
        • "Twenty-one more sealed canisters were discovered on Ford’s property. The canisters contained several thousand rounds of ammunition and a multitude of guns, including automatic rifles. According to an article by WorldNet Daily, anthrax containers were also found buried in Ford’s yard. Some 25 jars of unidentified substances were removed from inside Ford’s home." (Ch.2)
        • "Another unusual incident, this time directed against Ford, occurred during his earlier years at the university. According to the March 20, 2002, L.A. Times, Ford’s life was threatened by a hit-man in 1978. One evening near the UCLA campus parking garage, a man shot four bullets directly at Ford. Only one bullet hit Ford and was deflected by a Dictaphone he had been carrying in his breast pocket. The gun man was never found and the incident was downplayed by the doctor. In fact, Ford’s wife had never learned of the attempt on her husband’s life until he mentioned it to her two weeks prior to Riley being shot. It is also not clear how aware Riley was of the many bizarre circumstances surrounding Dr. Ford and his past." (Ch.3)
        • "Dr. Jerry Nilsson, a friend, fellow Mormon and former colleague of Ford’s, often accompanied him to South Africa. Ford and Nilsson had at one time shared an office together at UCLA and had co-authored several gynecological papers. Nilsson had been involved in many projects, some controversial, that had included Ford. In the late 1980’s, Nilsson attempted to organize with Ford and other doctors the creation of an infectious disease center in Los Angeles. The center was to have related facilities in Africa, Germany and other countries. However, the project fell through due to a lack of funding. Nilsson had been involved in other projects involving gold mining and hospital management, according to Salon.com. Investigators received information that Ford had buried anthrax in a gold mine. Nine months following Ford’s death on November 3, 2002, the New York Times reported that police found the doctor’s business card and directions for making chemical and biological weapons, including anthrax, in a gold mine in Nevada. It was unclear if the gold mine was related to the one Nilsson had been involved with. During the Ford investigation, Nilsson was named as one of the key suspects in the case, the L.A. Times claimed in July 2000.

          Dino D’Saachs, the strongest link between the doctor and Riley’s shooting, continued to deny that he drove the gunman to the shooting. Police found other evidence linking D’Saachs to Riley, following the discovery of the van. According to the Irvine World News, a manual about gun silencers and photos of Riley’s parking area marked with an “X” was found at his home. Investigators also linked D’Saachs to Nilsson as well as Ford, when it was discovered that the three men had been frequently seen at the Beverly Hills home of their mutual friend [and South African trade attaché] Gideon Bouwer. More than one year following the crime, D’Saachs was put on trial for conspiracy to commit murder. He was found guilty and sentenced to 26 years to life in prison, still refusing to identify Riley’s shooter.

          Gideon Bouwer frequently held parties at his Beverly Hills home. On July 17, 2000, the L.A. Times wrote that two FBI informants and acquaintances of Bouwer and Ford -- Peter Fitzpatrick and Tom Byron -- told investigators that Bouwer would often brag that Nilsson and Ford were supplying a high-ranking South African official with lethal bacteria to be used in warfare. The two informants also said that Bouwer would invite businessmen to his home in order to obtain military intelligence. On several occasions, the FBI had monitored Bouwer’s home, but was unable to find enough evidence to charge him." (Ch.6)
      • CBS 60 Minutes, "'Dr. Death' And His Accomplice", 2002/10/30
        • "The report also traces the mysterious connection between Dr. Basson and that California gynecologist. Dr. Basson tells Wallace that he did send money to an offshore bank account for Dr. Ford, but he insists it was payment for some AIDS work Dr. Ford was conducting. However, documents uncovered by the 60 MINUTES investigation indicate that some of the AIDS work done in South Africa in the 1980s was used as a cover for biowarfare research, under the auspices of the South African Medical Service, which oversaw Project Coast.

          A phrase from one of the AIDS document reads, "The acquisition of any relevant chemical and biological weapons literature from Dr. Ford." Dr. Basson bristles when Wallace confronts him with this document. "I have no knowledge of this document...that's not my document," Basson contends, "[It] has nothing to do with Project Coast.""
        • "Wallace asks Dr. Basson whether he had any help from the U.S. government in his endeavors. "No...I can't answer that question," he tells Wallace. But he may be helping other governments."
      • New York Times, "California Doctor's Suicide Leaves Many Troubling Mysteries Unsolved", 2002/11/03
        • "Then there were the suggestions that Dr. Ford was working for the C.I.A. Several people close to him -- including Dr. Hunter Hammill, a Baylor University professor who collaborated on papers with him -- say he sometimes told them so. Other people say they simply assumed it.

          ''We had heard that he had worked for the government, worked at Fort Detrick,'' said Dr. Daniel Knobel, a senior official in Project Coast. He was referring to the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Frederick, Md., where the government did biological weapons research."
        • "Detective Ray said that after three calls to bureau headquarters, the agent, Doug Baker, responded that Dr. Ford had worked for the C.I.A. and might have buried just about anything. Mr. Baker, speaking through an F.B.I. spokesman, denied this."
        • "After his death, Detective Ray said, the authorities learned that Dr. Ford had been a consultant to Project Coast, which has been accused of creating weapons for use against enemies of apartheid. They also discovered that he had held extreme racist views and had once told a girlfriend that to understand him, she should read ''The Turner Diaries,'' the anti-Semitic and white supremacist novel, popular among far-right groups, that was prosecutors say inspired the Oklahoma City bombing."
        • "In a recent interview in South Africa, Dr. Basson said he had invited Dr. Ford to lecture Project Coast scientists in 1987 because the program's Dr. Knobel had described Dr. Ford as an expert on chemical and biological weapons."
        • "After Dr. Ford's suicide, the police got tips that he had buried anthrax in a gold mine. They searched fruitlessly in California. Four months later, documents in a Nevada trash dump showed that Dr. Ford had been in touch with people involved in antitax and antigovernment groups. Some of them had tried to use bacteria to extract gold from dirt.

          In December 2000, investigators searched a derelict gold milling site outside Henderson, Nev. They found a separator funnel, a white liquid and Dr. Ford's business card. A federal agent said they also found directions for making chemical and biological weapons, including anthrax. But that was all. The site's proprietor had recently died of unrelated causes."
    • Mail & Guardian, "The return of Dr Death", 2009/09/11 - reviews the film Anthrax War by Bob Coen (2009)
      • "Asked about research on this alleged “black bomb”, Basson says with deadpan sarcasm: “That was great, ja, the most fun I’ve had in my life,” before launching into an explanation that what really happened was that South Africa had been asked to conduct research on a sperm vaccine by an unnamed country suffering a population explosion.

        This is revealing because in his limited evidence to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Basson denied there was a fertility project that formed part of Project Coast."
      • "In the movie Basson also admits to meeting Dr David Kelly “three or four times”.

        Kelly was the British chemical and biological warfare expert who “committed suicide” after being outed as the scientist who blew the whistle on then-prime minister Tony Blair’s “sexed-up” intelligence dossier on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction."
  • Thomas Leahy of Janesville WI
    • Seattle Times, "Bioterror suspects hard to find", 2001/10/29
      • "Thomas Leahy was about to be sentenced to prison. In the basement of his Janesville, Wis., home he had stored "boxes and boxes and boxes" of chemistry experiments. On his shelves he kept pickle jars and petri dishes, and he had learned to make ricin, one of the deadliest known toxins, mainly by studying his chemistry and math books and ordering castor beans, the source of the poison.

        He also was trying to cultivate anthrax, the deadly bacterium being used to terrorize parts of the country.

        Leahy toiled in his home wearing a white plastic gown and a gas mask. He developed an "enemies list." He warned his wife he was going to mail the ricin and maybe ricin-laced razor blades. He bragged to his stepson about his scheme to poison Lake Michigan."
      • "Leahy was originally sentenced to 12 years and seven months.

        But an appeals court cut the sentence in half. If not for the state prison sentence he received for wounding his stepson, Leahy — who proclaimed his devotion to Adolf Hitler and embraced the cause of Arab extremists — might be about to leave prison."
  • 23-page Paul Schultz dossier from Joe Calhoun (pages 2-5, 18-23)
    • 1996/10/28 memorandum by "Choctaw Joe" titled "Terrorist Threat Against NYC" (p.21-23)
      • "This memorandum is to summarize the pertinent information discussed in our telephone conversation of the afternoon of October 25. It is in response to your inquiry regarding the threat against the city of New York and what cult/criminal organization with ultra-right militia ties is capable of launching biological and chemical warfare to fulfill that threat.

        SOURCE OF THREAT. It is our belief that the international criminal infrastructure generally known as "White Eagle" is the most likely candidate to launch such a threat. The White Eagle underground has been growing rapidly in power and influence throughout the United States since the early 1990s and, according to our sources, is closely allied with the Iranians and the Russian mafia in promoting active measures of a high-order terrorist and revolutionary nature against the people and the government of the United States. [...]"
      • "TARGET POPULATIONS AND TERRORIST MODE OF OPERATIONS. Our sources indicate that the "uprising" will target large and mid-size cities primarily on the West Coast and East Coast as well as major federal centers in the Midwest such as Denver and Kansas City. Terrorist actions will include bombings, assassinations, and selected use of chemical and biological agents against presumed "enemies of the New Order." "Superbugs", including strains of botulism, typhoid, and anthrax, secretly developed by the Soviets during the Cold War and currently under the control of radical regimes in the Middle East, may be injected by field operatives into food and water supplies as well as used in covert assassination weaponry such as poisoned needles and stick pins. Field operatives have already been trained within certain domestic secret societies, particularly so-called "satanist" or "Mansonist" groups, to carry out the operation."
    • 1997/03/31 investigative memorandum by "CJ" titled "“The Star Chamber” and White Eagle Underground in Texas Gulf Area" (p.18-20)
      • "The “cult” in question [that abused Nick Schultz] is apparently the same as a secretive group known to military and domestic intelligence officials as “The Star Chamber.” The Star Chamber is the decision-making cadre of the White Eagle Underground and consists of high-level rogue intelligence agents from the CIA, the Army, and the Air Force as well as foreign terrorist operatives, particularly from Germany and Russia. [...]"
      • "Because the children describe repeatedly having seen stockpiles of advanced weapons, including planes and helicopters, as well as having heard boasts of “blowing up the world”, it is likely that the WEU under the command of the Star Chamber is planning major assaults on government facilities. Threats of such a nature against military bases were reported in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on 26 February, 1997. [...]"
  • William Job Leavitt Jr. and Larry Wayne Harris anthrax plot in February 1998
    • Baltimore Sun, "FBI foils anthrax plot in U.S. White supremacist, lab owner arrested by FBI in Nevada; Vials, car taken for testing; Bacillus to be used as terror weapon, say federal charges", 1998/02/20: "In a lightning operation involving scores of agents, the FBI arrested two men outside Las Vegas and charged them with obtaining deadly anthrax microbes for use as a terrorist weapon, authorities said yesterday. One suspect, Larry Wayne Harris, 46, of Lancaster, Ohio, is a microbiologist and white supremacist who is on probation from a 1995 case in which he fraudulently obtained bubonic plague bacteria. He boasted last summer of plans to spread deadly biological toxins in the New York City subway, according to an FBI document. The other suspect, William Job Leavitt Jr., 47, of Logandale, Nev., owns microbiology labs in Nevada and Germany and is listed in corporate documents as vice president of a Silver Spring health foundation. Acting on a tip received Wednesday, FBI agents less than 12 hours later swooped down on the two men outside a lab in Henderson, 20 miles southeast of Las Vegas, and seized 40 Petrie dishes and a white cooler. They also seized a beige Mercedes-Benz automobile, sealed it with plastic and took it to a nearby Air Force base for examination. [...] In the 1995 case, Harris obtained the plague microbes from the American Type Culture Collection, a nonprofit Rockville firm that supplies microorganisms to researchers around the world. He was arrested with three vials of freeze-dried bubonic plague bacteria in the glove compartment of his car. [...] According to an FBI affidavit, Harris admits to being a lieutenant colonel in the Aryan Nation, a white supremacist hate group. Last summer, the affidavit says, he told an unnamed organization that he planned to place a "globe" filled with bubonic plague toxin in a New York subway station, where it would be smashed by a passing train and spread through the tunnel network. Harris allegedly bragged that that attack would kill hundreds of thousands of people and ruin the U.S. economy, the affidavit said. In November, Harris told U.S. News and World Report that if his friends were provoked, they would strike at government officials with biochemical weapons. [...] Harris also told the magazine that he cultured anthrax, but he denied he wanted to hurt anyone. He is author of a self-published book titled "Bacteriological Warfare: A Major Threat to North America," which has been described as a how-to manual for biological terrorism. [...] The current investigation began Wednesday, when a cancer researcher called agents at the Las Vegas FBI office and told them Harris and Leavitt had asked to use the scientist's lab equipment to test the anthrax bacillus. The researcher, whom the FBI did not name yesterday, said Leavitt claimed to have "military-grade" anthrax in flight bags in the trunk of his car. On Wednesday night, agents tailed Leavitt and Harris from Room 921 of the Gold Coast Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas to a meeting with the researcher at a restaurant, the FBI said. The two suspects were joined by a third man, who was not identified by authorities. [...] Corporate records list Leavitt as vice president of Mankind Research Foundation Inc., with a Silver Spring address. A telephone answering machine message at that address says the premises also house the Foundation for Blood Irradiation, and state records list another six corporations, including Lozanov Learning Institute Inc. and the Society for Application of Free Energy Inc. Mankind Research and Lozanov Learning Institute are both headed by Carl Schleicher, an inventor and entrepreneur who last year led an unsuccessful effort to convert a former Nike missile base in New Jersey as housing for the mentally ill and recovering substance abusers, the Bergen Record reported." - note that the plan to spread a plague through the NYC subway mirrors a 1966 government experiment on the spread of "harmless" anthrax through the NYC subway, which Bill Patrick reportedly oversaw; note as well that Mankind Research Foundation is a rumored MKUltra front and employed Dr. Richard Alan Miller who was a faculty advisor to reported Ted Bundy victim Donna Gail Manson in her college project on the occult
    • Cincinnati Enquirer, "Ohio man charged in anthrax plot", 1998/02/20 (pages 1, 6): "Mr. Leavitt, who has no criminal record, owns a microbiology lab in rural Logandale, about 60 miles north of Las Vegas, and another in Frankfurt, Germany, according to an affidavit prepared by FBI Special Agent John H. Hawken. The affidavit said the informant first met Mr. Harris at a Denver science convention last August, and met Mr. Leavitt about six weeks ago. The three were working on a project to test a device to supposedly "deactivate" viruses and bacteria, the affidavit says. The men also had contacted the source "some time ago" about testing E.coli and Bacillus subtilis bacteria, and on Tuesday told the source they had other organisms to test, including Bacillus licheniformis and Bacillus anthracis, the FBI said. The FBI confirmed the informant's claims to be a research scientist, specializing in cancer research. The source had two felony convictions for conspiracy to commit extortion in 1981 and 1982, but the FBI said there was no deal cut for his cooperation. FBI agents spent Thursday night searching the home Mr. Harris shares with his wife, Carol. The white frame home, with its electronic fence and Dobermans in the back yard, is in a residential neighborhood about 30 miles southeast of Columbus."
    • Washington Post, "VIALS SEIZED IN LAS VEGAS ARE TESTED FOR ANTHRAX", 1998/02/21: "Army experts conducted tests today on several vials of a substance that FBI agents said is deadly anthrax seized from a local businessman and a self-styled germ warfare expert with links to the white supremacist movement. [...] The substance was being tested at the Army's Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md., the FBI said in Washington. Harris, 46, is a microbiology graduate of Ohio State University and a former well tester whose anti-Semitic and anti-black ardor as a member of the white supremacist groups Aryan Nation and Christian Identity Church evolved sometime in 1993 into an obsession with what he believed to be the certainty of global annihilation from biological warfare. By his own account, related in a series of taped interviews he gave to a Christian and family values television station here the day before his arrest Wednesday night, Harris's entry into the fringe of free-lance biological warfare research began when he met an Iraqi student at Ohio State who told him that Iraq was planning to unleash deadly biological agents in the United States in retaliation for its defeat in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The videotapes of the interview with KKJK-TV's Ted Gunderson, a retired FBI agent who hosts a show that explores various conspiracy theories, were seized by FBI agents yesterday. But Doc McKay, the station's general manager, stated in an interview that Harris had said the Iraqi student told him that hundreds of Iraqi women had infiltrated the United States carrying vials of anthrax and other biological warfare agents in their body cavities."
    • Baltimore Sun, "Maybe anthrax plot wasn't a plot at all Man who tipped FBI was in odd business deal with suspects", 1998/02/21: "[Ronald G.] Rockwell had the rights to a cure-all gizmo called the AZ-58 Ray Tube Frequency Instrument Prototype. Leavitt spent long nights in his home lab laboring to devise treatments for multiple sclerosis and AIDs and dreamed of ending drug addiction with herbs, acupuncture and subliminal messages. Even Harris took time out from racism and religious extremism to sell medical devices called "colloidal silver generators," said to produce a disease-fighting silver concoction, according to journalists who interviewed him last year. The scheme that brought them together, according to several people they told of the plans, went like this: Rockwell would sell the ray tube to Leavitt for $2 million, with a possible $18 million more to follow. Harris would help test the miracle machine on anthrax and maybe other organisms in Nevada. If the AZ-58 worked, Leavitt would mass-produce it in Germany and market it in Europe, far from the pesky oversight of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. At least that's what Rockwell and Leavitt said on Lou Epton's talk show on KXNT-AM in Las Vegas on Feb. 13. "As we speak, cultures are being prepared -- anthrax or something like it," Rockwell said, according to Epton. The FBI's criminal complaint identifies the source of the tip that led to the anthrax seizure as "a research scientist specializing in cancer research." The document noted that he had two felony convictions for conspiracy to commit extortion in 1981 and 1982, but it said he was providing information "simply as a citizen performing his civic duty." Lawyers for Leavitt said yesterday that the source was Rockwell, and they questioned whether his motive was so selfless. Kirby Wells, an attorney who helped Leavitt negotiate to purchase the ray tube, said Rockwell was supposed to deliver the machine Wednesday night for testing. He may have called the FBI, Wells said, because he feared the ray tube wouldn't work. [...] Leavitt had collaborated with Carl Schleicher, a Silver Spring, Md., inventor and entrepreneur, on several unorthodox projects. A few years ago, they sought to perfect a basement sealant as a barrier against radon gas. More recently, they considered purchasing a bankrupt hotel in the desert near Palm Springs, Calif., as a drug rehabilitation center. "He's a very religious guy," Schleicher said. "Very honorable. I had no reason to think otherwise." But the two parted ways last year."
    • Chicago Tribune, "PAIR CHARGED WITH HOLDING ANTHRAX LINKED BY BIOLOGY", 1998/02/22: "Leavitt is described by friends as a model citizen--a former member of the Logandale, Nev., Town Board, a president of the Rotary Club, a bishop of his Mormon congregation, a man who took troubled foster children into his home. Harris, by contrast, is a convicted felon with ties to hate-purveying white supremacist organizations who lived in a Lancaster, Ohio, house surrounded by barbed-wire fencing and a pack of 16 Doberman pinschers. Yet for all their differences, the men shared a passion for microbiology, and both were drawn to the unorthodox fringes of scientific research. A few months after they happened to meet at a scientific convention, the two were arrested at a suburban Las Vegas medical center and charged with possessing deadly biological toxins. [...] Though Leavitt claims to have studied medicine and engineering at the University of Southern California and done graduate research in medicine at Harvard University, his main source of income comes from two fire prevention companies he operates from his home. In recent years, however, he devoted more and more time and money to his hobby, medical research. [...] "At our 25th high school reunion five years ago, he told me about a device that would take the blood out of a patient through a line. He talked about treating (the blood) using ozone and then pumping it back into the body," said Martin Kravitz, a Las Vegas lawyer who attended Valley High School in Las Vegas with Leavitt. [...] A.C. Robison, a Logandale resident and political consultant who has known Leavitt for nine years, said: "My impression is he was working on a cure for multiple sclerosis. He's not an excitable guy. But he felt it had some potential. [...] The beige Mercedes he and Harris were using when they were arrested Wednesday is registered to Gary Gerwin of Palm Springs, Calif. Clark McCartney, a former landlord of Gerwin's, said Gerwin died in February 1996. He bequeathed his car to Leavitt out of gratitude for treating him for a blood disorder, McCartney said. [...] Leavitt has been involved heavily in the community life in Logandale, a town about 60 miles northeast of Las Vegas, where people who knew him said they could not believe he would be a terrorist. [...] Harris has been described in practically opposite terms as Leavitt. One neighbor, an elderly woman who asked not to be identified, said she "was scared to death" of Harris. As part of a documentary about the anti-government movement, Harris was interviewed for nearly two hours last June. At that time, Harris said he had obtained anthrax by locating a burial site for cows infected with the bacteria more than 20 years ago, according to James Neff, who conducted the interview and is now a journalism professor at Ohio State University. [...] A microbiologist who studied at Ohio State University, Harris was arrested in May 1995, after a Rockville, Md., depository mailed vials of freeze-dried, inactive bubonic plague bacteria to his home. [...] A police search of his home at the time of the case uncovered blasting caps, hand grenade trigger mechanisms and other similar devices, according to documents on file at the Lancaster courthouse. Authorities also found a document displayed on Harris' wall indicating that he was a lieutenant in the Church of Jesus Christ of Aryan Nations, a white supremacist group. [...] The introduction to his book says he was moved to do his research by an Iraqi woman he met at Ohio State. Harris says the woman told him that Iraq and other countries were pursuing a germ warfare program and that attacks on America using plague and anthrax were anticipated for the Atlanta Olympic Games. Harris was so alarmed by her comments that he called various federal agencies, one of which suggested he write his own biological civil defense manual if he was so worried that the U.S. did not have a program. Harris did just that." - ed. note: did the carcasses of cattle infected with anthrax originate from the cattle mutilations during the 1970s?
    • Las Vegas Sun, "One man released after anthrax turns out to be harmless veterinary vaccine", 1998/02/22: "William Job Leavitt, Jr., a key figure in the Las Vegas anthrax scare, was released from jail Saturday night on his own recognizance. His release, which occurred about 5:50 p.m., came six hours after the FBI disclosed the substance seized at a Green Valley clinic this week from him and a second defendant, Larry Wayne Harris, was a "harmless veterinary vaccine." At a noon news conference, Bobby Siller, special agent in charge of the Las Vegas FBI office, told a crush of local and national reporters that tests on the substance revealed it wasn't the deadly form of anthrax authorities had feared it was earlier in the week. After his release, Leavitt, a 47-year-old microbiologist and former Mormon bishop from Overton, held a news conference on the steps of the Clark County Detention Center. His voice shaking, and with his lawyers, Lamond Mills and Kirby Wells, at his side, Leavitt thanked his family and friends for their support during his more than 48 hours in jail. [...] Both of Leavitt's lawyers again cast doubt on the FBI's chief source in the case, Ronald G. Rockwell, a medical researcher the FBI acknowledge has two extortion convictions. "He is far from a credible witness," said Mills, who contended Rockwell was trying to sell Leavitt equipment that could test a miracle vaccine for anthrax. Mills said that Rockwell wanted money up front in the deal and when he didn't get it, he made up some "outlandish" allegations against his client. Mills said he has been told there are 18 lawsuits, mostly relating to alleged fraud, filed against Rockwell. [...] A woman who answered the door at Rockwell's residence said late this afternoon that he had no comment. The residence, 2821 Merritt Ave., also is the address of Rockwell Scientific Research. Brett Marshall, a spokesman and friend of Rockwell said Mills is wrong in indicating Rockwell was the subject of 18 lawsuits. Marshall said Rockwell actually filed the suits. Rockwell, he said still was standing by his story that Leavitt and Harris had told him they had anthrax."
    • Las Vegas Sun, "Investigation into Leavitt’s connection with Harris continues", 1998/02/23: "Meanwhile, rumors about Leavitt have begun to surface in national and international news. After Leavitt's attorney said his client had conducted medical research associated with the University of Heidelberg, it was reported on German television that investigators there have launched an investigation into his work, according to John Goetz, a reporter on "Panorama," a German news program. In the United States, media outlets also are turning up interesting tidbits. The Salt Lake City Tribune reported Sunday that Leavitt is a distant cousin of Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt." - note that Mike Leavitt later ended up Secretary of Health and Human Services under George W. Bush from 2005 to 2009 (succeeding former Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson), during which time he (drawing inspiration from the World Health Organization) focused on avian influenza as the biggest threat to American security
    • Chicago Tribune, "ALL CHARGES DISMISSED AGAINST 2 IN ANTHRAX CASE", 1998/02/24: "A federal judge on Monday cleared two men of all charges stemming from their involvement in an anthrax scare in Las Vegas last week but ordered one man--a microbiologist with ties to white supremacy groups--to remain in jail to face a new charge of violating his Ohio probation. The charges that Larry Wayne Harris and William Job Leavitt possessed anthrax for use in a weapon of mass destruction were dropped after authorities determined over the weekend that the material the FBI confiscated from the two men was harmless anthrax vaccine. Leavitt was freed, but Harris was ordered to remain in jail after Ohio officials filed charges that he violated his probation when authorities said they found biological agents at Harris' home in Lancaster, Ohio, during a search that followed his arrest in Nevada. [...] Last Wednesday morning the agency was tipped off that Harris reportedly had boasted about having enough anthrax to wipe out Las Vegas; after 12 hours of conducting surveillance and background checks of Harris and Leavitt, the FBI swooped in and arrested the two men. [...] In Columbus, Ohio, U.S. Magistrate Judge Mark Abel issued an arrest warrant for Harris after his probation officer filed a report asserting that Harris violated his probation on an April 1995 wire fraud conviction. Harris was sentenced to 18 months probation for misrepresenting himself as a CIA agent in a scheme to obtain bubonic plague from a Maryland laboratory through the mail. Harris could face 5 years in prison from a probation violation. [...] Leavitt has said he holds no grudges against the FBI. "He understands the FBI had a job to do and he doesn't hold any ill will against them for what they did," said his lawyer, Kirby Wells."
    • Las Vegas Sun, "Leavitt brings notoriety to small town", 1998/02/24: "Some Overton residents appeared to handle the influx of FBI agents in unmarked cars and media in vans and satellite trucks to this town 50 miles northeast of Las Vegas with a sense of humor, while others were visibly angry. As the media stood across the street from Leavitt's house and labs on Moapa Valley Boulevard, many residents throughout the weekend honked at reporters or yelled, "Get outta here," "Go home" and "Mind your own business." A few used obscene gestures."
    • Leavitt background
      • Deseret News, "Utahns victimized in insurance scam", 2003/04/05: "It would seem to have been an investment tailor-made for members of the LDS Church: A $1.6 trillion off-shore trust created by descendants of church founder Joseph Smith, guarantees of 100-percent annual returns on investments for 99 years, and sales meetings punctuated by expressions of faith and prayer. But the FBI says it was a scam, one that stretched coast to coast and swindled people of all faiths of $50 million. [...] The Deseret News has learned that Utahns were victimized in the elaborate scheme, and one Utah County man apparently worked for the bogus company, called Good Samaritan Insurance Co. They have not yet been charged, but the man — as well as his father — are both suspects under federal scrutiny, the FBI confirmed. [...] A joint investigation by the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service and the California Department of Insurance resulted in indictments last month against eight San Diego-area men, who are now charged with wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to launder money. Those charged include John Franklin Harrell, Kenneth Lorenzo Kempton, Kenneth Eugene Hodgell, Morris Sankary, William Job Leavitt Jr., Jack Reitz, J. Paul Anderson and Juan Gregorio Fuentes. The mastermind behind the scheme, the FBI says, is Harrell, 69, who has no connection whatsoever to the LDS Church. Harrell used an intoxicating concoction of religion, conspiracy theories and anti-government rhetoric to swindle investors while creating a "cult-like investment fraud and money laundering criminal enterprise," the FBI said."
      • Moapa Valley Progress, "OBITUARY: Mary “Betty” Leavitt", 2012/07/18: "Betty Leavitt passed away July 9, 2012 in Las Vegas, Nevada, a week before her 93rd birthday. She was born July 21, 1919. She is survived by her son, William Job Leavitt, Jr. and his wife Valerie Claire Leavitt. [...] Betty spent most of her growing up years in Dos Palos, California where her father was a greatly respected farmer and rancher. Her father also managed the Wiser Ranch in Moapa, Nevada prior to her birth. She graduated as Valedictorian of her high school class. She met William Job Leavitt, Sr. during World War II while working at a military base in California. Soon after their meeting William left for Harvard University at the request of the military. Upon his graduation from Harvard Business School, Bill and Betty were married in Christ Church on Harvard Square August 10, 1942. Following their marriage they were stationed at many different locations including The Pentagon in Washington DC. It was at this time, after approximately 9 years of trying to have a child that their only child, William Job Leavitt, Jr. was born. They went on to serve in other locations; including The Panama Canal Zone, and San Antonio, Texas at Randolph Air Force Base.. They were transferred to Las Vegas, Nevada for Bill to serve as Wing Comptroller at Nellis Air Force Base in 1955. Lieutenant Colonel Leavitt had a massive heart attack at the age of 42 and was forced to retire from the Air Force due to physical disability in 1958. Bill and Betty then went into the real estate business in the Las Vegas area opening Pyramid Realty. After Bill’s death in 1968, Betty continued in real estate and helped organize the Professional Standards Committee of the Board of Realtors. She ultimately helped draft many of the guidelines and standards used today in the real estate industry. She continued to work in real estate as a broker for many years until her retirement. [...] She was recently baptized a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and was looking forward to going through the Las Vegas Temple."
    • Harris background
      • The Times (Streator IL), "Man orders bubonic plague through mail", 1995/05/16: "A man used his company's state certification to obtain three vials of bubonic plague bacteria, police say. Superior Labs of Dublin fired Larry Wayne Harris on Monday from his job as a well and septic tank inspector, saying he was not authorized to obtain any cultures. Harris was charged Friday with receiving stolen property. Prosecutors said he lied about owning a laboratory when he ordered the freeze-dried cultures of yersinia pestis bacteria, which cause bubonic plague. Police said they found a membership certificate in Harris' Lancaster home for the Aryan Nations, a white supremacist group. Superior Labs, which tests food and water for bacterial and chemical contaminants, said another reason for Harris' dismissal was his "radical beliefs.""
      • Springfield News-Sun, "Man with plague vials linked to white supremacist group", 1995/05/16: "WBNS-TV said Larry Wayne Harris, 43, of Lancaster, has been on the National Alliance’s member list for five years. The group's leader is William Pierce of Mill Point, W.Va. Pierce wrote The Turner Diaries, a book that reportedly influenced McVeigh. [...] WBNS-TV also reported that the Secret Service questioned Harris in 1993 because he allegedly made perceived threats toward President Clinton during a presidential trip to Columbus. [...] Harris earlier said he is a member of the Chrisitan Identity group based in Hayden Lake, Idaho. [...] Harris was charged Friday with receiving stolen property for allegedly lying about owning a laboratory so he could obtain the vials, Fairfield County Prosecutor David Landefeld said. He was freed after posting bond. The vials contain freeze-dried cultures of yersinia pestis, the bacteria that causes bubonic plague, which killed one-fourth of the European population in the 1300s. In their current form, the vials pose a relatively low risk to the public, said Kenneth Gage, chief of the plague section of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Fort Collins, Colo. [...] Harris ordered the bacteria on May 5 from the American Type Culture Collection, said Frank Simione, vice president of the nonprofit culture depository in Rockville, Md. Harris provided what was believed to be a certificate from the American Society for Microbiologists and a letter indicating he owned an animal microbiology laboratory certified by the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, Simione said."
      • The Daily News Leader (Staunton VA), "Next dominant terrorism fear: biochemical weapons", 1997/03/30: "A month after the Oklahoma City tragedy, white supremacist Aryan Nation member Larry Wayne Harris was arrested in central Ohio for receiving three vials of freeze-dried bubonic plague bacteria through the mail — the same bacteria that decimated much of Europe in the Middle Ages. It was amazingly simple. Harris, police said, had ordered the plague germs from the American Type Culture Collection in Rockville, Md., merely by sending $240 and using a letterhead from a food-testing lab where he worked. He negotiated a plea under which he would spend six months in jail, but a federal judge rejected it. Harris goes to trial in April. Meanwhile, the free-on-bond Harris — whose lawyer says no longer holds Aryan Nation beliefs — has written and published "Bacteriological Warfare: A Major Threat to North America." Harris, 44, offers it for sale at $28.50 at survivalist trade shows, and says citizens can use it to survive biological weapons. But the Southern Poverty Law Center's Klan Watch — in its most recent intelligence report — called the book an effective do-it-yourself manual for mass destruction through biological terrorism.""
      • Lancaster Eagle Gazette, "Harris case is example of system's woes", 1997/04/24 - editorial calling for "obviously guilty" defendants' rights to be more restricted in light of (among other cases) how long Harris's case took
      • Lancaster Eagle-Gazette, "Jury convicts Carroll man shot by state trooper", 1997/08/09: "A jury has convicted a Carroll man shot by a state trooper after he pointed a rifle at the trooper during a traffic stop last November near this southwestern Ohio town. After 6½ hours of deliberation Thursday, a Warren County Common Pleas Court convicted Stephen Wharf, 23, of aggravated robbery, failure to comply with an order of a police officer, having illegal possession of a weapon and receiving stolen property. The jury acquitted Wharf of felonious assault on a police officer. [...] Wharf's attorney, Thomas Eagle of Franklin, said Wharf had a death wish, based on the conspiracy and biological warfare propaganda that was swirling in his head. [...] Eagle, contending that Wharf was insane, said his exposure to people such as white supremacist Larry Wayne Harris of Lancaster and his message of doom helped put his client over the edge. Harris was convicted of wire fraud in federal court in Columbus earlier this year and placed on probation for 18 months for illegally obtaining three vials of the bacteria that causes bubonic plague. Called as a defense witness Tuesday, Harris, 46, talked about how Iranian terrorists are poised to start biological warfare in the United States."
      • Cincinnati Enquirer, "Ohio man charged in anthrax plot", 1998/02/20 (pages 1, 6): "Last summer the microbiologist testified in Warren County that he had trained Iraqis in biological warfare in the 1980s, a claim the FBI was unable to confirm Thursday. [...] Mr. Harris explained many of his beliefs when he testified last summer at the Warren County trial of his friend Stephen Michael Wharf. [...] Mr. Harris testified he attended church with Mr. Wharf and shared Aryan Nation literature with him. He also said he taught Mr. Wharf how to defend himself in case of biological warfare, which the two believed would fulfill a biblical prophecy of a plague released upon the land. [...] Mr. Harris graduated from Ashland University in north-central Ohio in December 1987 with a bachelor of science degree in comprehensive science, spokesman Sam Renfroe said. He also attended Ohio State University from 1972 to 1976 but did not get a degree then, spokeswoman Ruth Gerstner said. He returned and completed an associate of arts degree in 1985. He also took continuing education classes between 1985 and 1991, she said. Mr. Harris told the Warren County jury his study and work in biological warfare had come at Aberdeen Proving Ground and Fort Detrick, both in Maryland, and at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. Fort Detrick referred calls about Mr. Harris to FBI headquarters, where representatives said they had no information on Mr. Harris' work history. The other two bases could not confirm that he had worked there. [...] [After his April 24, 1997 guilty plea in the 1995 case,] Mr. Harris was sentenced to 18 months of probation and 200 hours of community service. He also was ordered not to misrepresent his credentials in any forum or publication in particular, "the defendant is prohibited from claiming association with the Central Intelligence Agency.""
      • Des Moines Register, "Suspect: Ames was target for anthrax attack", 1998/02/21: "A man charged in Nevada with possessing anthrax created a local stir last year when he claimed that an attack using the germ warfare agent had been planned in Ames. [...] Harris told the Ames Tribune in March that Iraqi terrorists planned the Ames attack. "You had a nice little clandestine operation that took place in your area," Harris told the newspaper. "According to my sources at Langley (headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency) you had a loose-cannon situation." Harris said that terrorists passing themselves off as Iowa State University students planned to spread anthrax in Ames, killing thousands. At the last minute, federal authorities apprehended them, he claimed. [...] As "proof that the Ames scheme existed, Harris faxed the Tribune photographs of what he described as confiscated anthrax distribution equipment. He also sent the newspaper his "notes" about the Ames situation. Riddled with misspellings, the notes said that white United Nations vehicles had been seen around town and that there was an "unholy alliance" suppressing the story, Local, state and federal authorities denied his claims. Harris, in his 1997 Interview, said that didn't surprise him." - interesting given that the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks was the Ames strain, named after the Ames IA return address for USDA's National Veterinary Services Laboratories that was on the package sent to USAMRIID at Fort Detrick
  • William Joseph Krar in New Hampshire
    • Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Vol. 60 No. 6, "Homegrown Terror" by Michael Reynolds, 2004/11-12 (SAGE Journals page)
      • "On April 10, 2003, a team of federal agents armed with a search warrant entered a storage unit in a small Texas town and were stunned to find a homemade hydrogen cyanide device–a green metal military ammo box containing 800 grams of pure sodium cyanide and two glass vials of hydrochloric acid. The improvised weapon was the product of 62-year-old William Joseph Krar, an accomplished gunsmith, weapons dealer, and militia activist from New Hampshire who had moved his operations to east central Texas just 18 months earlier.

        [...]

        Krar's cyanide apparatus was only the most dramatic component of an extraordinary arsenal Krar and his common-law wife, Judith Bruey, had stashed in their Texas storage facility.

        Along with the sodium cyanide, hydrochloric acid, acetic acid, and glacial acetic acid, Krar and Bruey's armory included nearly 100 assorted firearms, three machine guns, silencers, 500,000 rounds of ammunition, 60 functional pipe bombs, a remote-controlled briefcase device ready for explosive insertion, a homemade landmine, grenades, 67 pounds of Kinepak solid binary explosives (ammonium nitrate), 66 tubes of Kinepak binary liquid explosives (nitromethane), military detonators, trip wire, electric and non-electric blasting caps, and cases of military atropine syringes.2"
      • "Exactly when Krar was drawn into the American radical-right constellation of illegal weapons dealing, shadowy paramilitaries, white nationalism, and anti-Semitic global conspiracies is unknown. According to some who knew him at the time, Krar was active in the movement by the mid-1980s. In 1984 he was dealing guns without a federal firearms license under the name of International Development Corporation (IDC) America, listed at his home address in Bedford, New Hampshire. Krar continued using IDC America as the front for his gun dealing for the next 18 years.

        From 1984 to 1985, Krar was ostensibly working as a sales representative for a home-building distributorship in the nearby town of Hooksett, near Manchester. But a co-worker recalls Krar as a highly secretive man who always had a pistol at his side and stacks of Soldier of Fortune in his office–and who had almost no knowledge or experience of the construction business.

        In an interview, this fellow employee remembered Krar and another colleague disappearing for weeks at a time, heading off to Costa Rica and other locations in Central America, even though the building supply company had no dealings beyond New England. Krar's mysterious travel activities and gun dealing occurred at the height of the Reagan administration's “private sector” paramilitary and weapons operations in support of the contras.5

        It was also in 1985 that Krar was arrested by New Hampshire state police and charged with impersonating a police officer. He entered a no-contest plea, paid a fine, and was released. Three years later, in 1988, the building supply company where Krar worked went out of business following a fire that destroyed its building. That same year, Krar stopped filing federal income taxes and effectively dropped out of the system." - note that Hooskett NH (where he worked) is 24 minutes away from Londonderry NH, and Bedford NH (where he lived) is even closer at 18 minutes away, suggesting a possible overlap with the drug trafficking activities of Ken Hajjar
      • "Following the arrest of Timothy McVeigh, Sean Patrick Bottoms and his brother Brian became outraged by media coverage of the Oklahoma City bomber and plotted to kidnap or kill Nashville television newscaster John Siegenthaler, now with MSNBC.6

        After an informant tipped law enforcement to the plot, the Bottoms brothers fled to east Texas, where they were arrested on April 30, 1995. During a search of the brothers' residences, FBI and ATF agents found pipe bombs, large amounts of explosives, illegal weapons, thousands of rounds of ammunition, and a business card for “William J. Kaar” of IDC America. When questioned, Sean Bottoms told agents that “William Kaar” was in fact William J. Krar. Bottoms said he had lived in Manchester in late 1994 and early 1995 and had used Krar's IDC address on his driver's license.

        After his indictment on explosives charges, Bottoms said that Krar, using the alias “Bill Franco,” was active in the militia movement and that Krar said he had known about the Oklahoma City bombing before it happened. Krar had also said there were more attacks to come."
      • "In a separate but simultaneous FBI-ATF investigation in Boston, Krar was under scrutiny for his role in a militia with “strong/violent anti-government views.” According to an FBI affidavit, a federal law enforcement source advised that Krar was a “white supremacist due to the anti-Semitic and anti-black literature” seen at his IDC America business in Manchester, where Krar hosted militia meetings. The source went on to say that Krar was “a good source of covert weaponry for white supremacist and anti-government militia groups.”

        Bruey, who was president of Krar's IDC operation at the time, told an undercover federal agent of her hatred of “U.S. government policies toward its citizens” and that she believed the government was afraid “military surplus would end up in the hands of citizens rejecting their government.”

        Despite this report and evidence from the Bottoms case that Krar was illegally selling firearms without a federal license, Krar and Bruey were left free to soldier on until they ran afoul of federal agents in 2001.7"
      • "According to an FBI affidavit, Gionet said that Krar told her “the U.S. government was corrupt” and that he “hated [it] and all of the cops.” Krar went on to say he “hated Americans because they are ‘money-hungry grubs.’” He also told Gionet he had several businesses in Costa Rica and offered to set her up with some “financial investments” down there. On September 11, 2001, Krar told Gionet that he knew the attacks in New York and Washington were going to happen and that there would be more in Los Angeles or Manchester. Gionet immediately reported this conversation to the local police, who notified the FBI." - curious that Krar appeared to have foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks; could the investments down in Costa Rica be related to that country's wealthy resident Jonathan Curshen, a business associate of lead Russian mobster Semion Mogilevich and Steve Bannon partner Andy Badolato, who allegedly hosted secret meetings down in Costa Rica with the so-called Michael Milken group on Wall Street that was tied to the 9/11 terrorists (see The Miscreants’ Global Bust-Out by Mark Mitchell (2011) for more information)
      • "Having drawn the ATF's attention in June, Bruey and Krar moved their operations to Flint, Texas, in October 2001. A young woman, Dawn Philbrick, who had become Krar's lover, accompanied them. Bruey rented two units at Noonday Storage, opened a mail drop at Mail Boxes Etc., and rented a secluded rural house. Krar was soon back at work in one of the storage units fabricating explosive devices and silencers and converting assault rifles to machine guns. He was also fabricating hundreds of magazines and receivers for Bushmaster Firearms in Maine, manufacturer of the civilian models of the AR-15 assault rifle, one of whose weapons was used by John Mohammed and Lee Malvo, the D.C. sniper team. Krar had done similar work for Bushmaster since at least 1998." - note that Bushmaster's dealers (such as Bull's Eye Shooter Supply of Tacoma WA) seem to have had an affinity for providing guns to covert operations, like the 1997 North Hollywood shootout, 1999 Los Angeles Jewish Community Center shooting, and the DC sniper killings
  • White supremacist groups deliberately spreading COVID-19

Microbiologist deaths

  • From the Wilderness, "A Career In Microbiology Can Be Harmful To Your Health" by Michael Davidson and Michael C. Ruppert, 2002/02/14 (updated 2002/02/28)
    • "There is another intriguing connection between three of the five American scientists that have died. Wiley, Schwartz, and Benito Que worked for medical research facilities that received grants from Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). HHMI funds a tremendous number of research programs at schools, hospitals and research facilities, and has long been alleged to be conducting "black ops" biomedical research for intelligence organizations, including the CIA.

      Long-time biowarfare investigator Patricia Doyle, Ph.D. reports that there is a history of people connected to HHMI being murdered. In 1994, Jose Trias met with a friend in Houston, Texas and was planning to go public with his personal knowledge of HHMI "front door" grants being diverted to "back door" black ops bioresearch. The next day, Trias and his wife were found dead in their Chevy Chase, Md. home. Chevy Chase is where HHMI is headquartered. Police described the killings as a professional hit. Tsunao Saitoh, who formerly worked at an HHMI-funded lab at Columbia University, was shot to death on May 7, 1996 while sitting in his car outside his home in La Jolla, Calif. Police also described this as a professional hit."
  • From the Wilderness, "New Developments in 9-11 Biowar Legislation -- MEHPA Draws Criticism, More Microbiologists Dying" by Michael Davidson, 2002/04/04
  • The Globe and Mail, "Scientists' deaths are under the microscope", 2002/05/04: "It's a tale only the best conspiracy theorist could dream up. Eleven microbiologists mysteriously dead over the span of just five months. Some of them world leaders in developing weapons-grade biological plagues. Others the best in figuring out how to stop millions from dying because of biological weapons. Still others, experts in the theory of bioterrorism. Throw in a few Russian defectors, a few nervy U.S. biotech companies, a deranged assassin or two, a bit of Elvis, a couple of Satanists, a subtle hint of espionage, a big whack of imagination, and the plot is complete, if a bit reminiscent of James Bond."
  • Benito Que - on 2001/11/12 in Miami FL (beaten to death but ruled natural causes)
    • ...
  • Don Wiley - on 2001/11/15 in Memphis TN (ruled an accidental fall off the Hernando de Soto Bridge)
    • Boston Magazine, "What Happened to Don Wiley?", 2006/05/15
      • "Outside Vidalia, Louisiana, on December 20, a crane operator at the Murray Hydroelectric Plant pulling logs out of the Mississippi, 340 river miles from Memphis, spotted a body in the water. “It popped up among the logs,” explains Jimmy Darden, an investigator with the sheriff’s office. Investigators pulled the body onto a boat, soaked shirt and pants still clinging to its lifeless limbs, and one retrieved a wallet from a pocket. Darden saw Wiley’s name and hometown, called police in Cambridge, and got bounced first to Harvard, then to Memphis. “Everybody was real hush-hush,” Darden says. “They all were like, ‘We’ll call you right back.'” He also talked with the FBI and later learned that Wiley’s background working with viruses had triggered speculation he’d been snatched by terrorists. “They thought maybe he’d been kidnapped, I guess because of his research background,” Darden says."
      • "He shipped the body to Memphis, to Dr. O. C. Smith, Shelby County medical examiner. “This case,” Smith says about Don Wiley, “got the presidential treatment.”

        Nevertheless, he adds, he anticipated skepticism about his ruling that Wiley’s death was an accident. “The conspiracy theorists, the kooks, and armchair quarterbacks were going to come out.”

        One even wrote to the local newspaper, saying: “The public should be outraged that they are considered stupid enough to believe a person would stop on this heavily traveled bridge to examine a small dent and fall over a tall railing into the river.”

        Smith says that’s what happened. And he’s sticking to it."
      • "The 911 call came at 3:47 a.m. on November 16. A trucker crossing from Tennessee into Arkansas reported an abandoned car on the Hernando DeSoto Bridge. Four 911 calls followed in the next 15 minutes, a flurry that helped investigators conclude Wiley hadn’t stopped hours earlier and sat around. Whatever happened, happened quickly." - interesting to note that Wiley was heading towards West Memphis AK
      • "Detectives questioned Wiley’s family again and tracked down scientists who, like Wiley, had been in Memphis for the annual meeting of the Scientific Advisory Board of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Police talked to his first wife, his grown children from that marriage, his colleagues at Harvard, and the bartender at the Peabody Hotel where Wiley and a group had spent the evening of November 15 listening to the piano player sprinkle ragtime into the air. They learned some valuable details, including how Wiley was in high spirits that night and had two drinks before switching to Perrier because he was planning to drive to his father’s 20 minutes north of Memphis later. One thing police did not find was a witness who saw Wiley leave. The bartender guessed he left by 12:30 a.m.

        From there until 4 a.m., the tracks dried up. His credit cards weren’t used. Cops flashed his picture at the blues bars along Beale Street to strollers, bartenders, waitresses, trolley drivers, street sweepers, even prostitutes. They took his picture to truck stops, hoping to find the trucker who called 911. They held a news conference to hold up photographs of Wiley’s face. They checked with Avis for the mileage on the car when Wiley rented it to see if he had driven long distances. (He hadn’t.) They were stumped over why he had been on the bridge at all, especially at 4 a.m., since it was in the opposite direction of his father’s house. In the end they speculated he was tired, maybe mildly intoxicated, and made a wrong turn at a confusing split."
      • "The body’s injuries had a distinct pattern — 22 fractures on the right side, 15 on the left — indicating it had landed on its right side. The spine had four breaks. The skull was fractured. The breastbone was cracked at the spot of that missing third button. Smith calculated the fall lasted 2.9 seconds. “He didn’t jump cleanly off the bridge, feet first,” Smith says. “This was consistent with a fall.”

        A friend of Wiley’s suggests he went to the railing to vomit. “What happened next I can’t imagine,” the friend says. But he also says: “It’s hard for me to imagine a wind gust from an 18-wheeler” caused the professor’s death.

        Or did a mysterious ailment (Smith says Wiley had a seizure disorder) cause a seizure? Wiley never had his illness diagnosed and took no medication. “He could control a minor episode,” Smith says. A major episode could impair his ability to drive."
    • ...
  • Valdimir Pasechnik - on 2001/11/21 in Wiltshire, England (allegedly from a stroke)
    • From the FTW article: "In recent years [William C.] Patrick [III] has worked with Kanatjan Alibekov. Now known by the Americanized "Ken Alibek", he defected to the US in 1992. Before defecting, Alibek was the no. 2 man in the FSU's biowarfare program. His boss was Vladimir Pasechnik."
    • ...
  • Robert Schwartz - on 2001/12/08 in Leesburg VA (murdered by a group of occultists at the behest of his daughter Clara Schwartz)
    • Washington Post, "Daughter Gets 48 Years In Slaying of Her Father", 2003/02/11: "Clara Jane Schwartz, a former college student obsessed by vampires, assassins and magic, was sentenced yesterday to 48 years in prison for persuading a friend to kill her father, a respected Loudoun County scientist. Schwartz, 20, was at James Madison University on Dec. 8, 2001, when Robert M. Schwartz was stabbed with a 27-inch sword as he sat down to dinner in his remote Leesburg farmhouse. But she had "set in motion a series of events that led to the terrible death," Loudoun Circuit Judge Thomas D. Horne said before imposing the sentence. [...] Clara Schwartz had long had a troubled relationship with her father, a noted expert on DNA sequencing, and complained that he poisoned her food, yanked her hair and disapproved of her clothes and friends, according to court testimony. Eventually, prosecutors said, Clara Schwartz's anger turned to hatred, and she sought out two young men to kill him. Ultimately, she persuaded one of them -- Kyle Hulbert -- to do it, according to testimony. Clara Schwartz met Hulbert, 19, who had a long history of mental illness, at a local Renaissance festival in fall 2001. The pair were drawn together by a shared fascination with witchcraft and the occult, and Hulbert, who fancied himself a warrior, quickly dubbed himself Clara Schwartz's protector, prosecutors said. On a rainy Saturday night, Hulbert and two friends, Michael Pfohl, 22, and Katherine Inglis, 20, drove to Robert Schwartz's fieldstone farmhouse, authorities said. Hulbert, of Millersville, who is awaiting trial on a murder charge, later told police that he went inside alone, confronted Schwartz about the alleged abuse and slashed and stabbed him with a sword, according to court documents. [...] During her October trial, Clara Schwartz's former boyfriend testified that in summer 2001 they engaged in a fantasy role-playing game called "Underworld," in which Schwartz's character, "Lord Chaos," asked his character, an assassin, to kill her father. Clara Schwartz's uncle, Christopher Schwartz, one of a few family members supporting her, testified that his niece had been troubled for years. He said a hyperthyroid condition caused her to be confused and paranoid. "She was a good person, but she had these demons," Christopher Schwartz said."
    • I'd Kill For You by M. William Phelps (2015)
    • Child abuse allegations against Robert Schwartz
      • From p.??? of I'd Kill For You - the argument advanced therein for Clara framing her father is problematic in multiple ways; first, it is logically inconsistent, since the author's observation that Robert used a laptop that was accessible to family members is used to dispute the idea that he would download child pornography onto it, yet he does not also acknowledge that this might lead to Robert frequently deleting any child porn that he downloaded and therefore explain the limited timeframe in which images were found; second, it is impossible for Clara to have planted anything on his laptop 30 minutes before the murder because she was at James Madison University in Harrisonburg VA, about 2 hours away from Leesburg, at the time of the murder (unless she was using a remote access tool, but in the early Internet days when they probably relied on dial-up, it is unlikely that this would have been both reliable and undetectable):

            The other extremely important fact about this evidence smearing the victim of a homicide that was brought up by the defense became the dates in which the alleged files were created. That one photo, for example, the one depicting the girl with the braid, was created and last accessed (meaning looked at and downloaded) on the day Schwartz was murdered, December 8, about thirty minutes before Kyle knocked on the door. The earliest any of those photos was downloaded and viewed was December 5, 2001. That was three days before Schwartz was murdered, Spitler testified under cross-examination by the state. No pornographic images were saved to that laptop earlier than December 5 of that year. Schwartz had images on that computer’s hard drive—family photos and other common photographs—dating back to 1997.
            One might think that with pornography, it’s not something an offender simply decides to do on one particular day, but it happens over a period of time. It’s an obsession, really, that one cannot control.

        MICHELLE SCHWARTZ THEN came in for the state sometime after Spitler and testified that Clara had access to that same laptop computer and that it was not password protected. She said Clara was home a lot. The computer was always on the table or on Schwartz’s desk. It would have been easy for Clara to hop onto it and begin surfing the Internet.
            What’s more, the first time, Michelle said, that Clara ever mentioned anything to her about their dad hurting or poisoning her was right before that interview with police on December 20, 2001—the same one Michelle sat in on.
            Perhaps the bigger question (of which no one brought up): Would Schwartz, if he was downloading child porn, leave a laptop, unprotected by a password, on the kitchen table—a computer that the family often used?
            “Had she ever complained to you about physical or sexual abuse by anyone?” Basham asked Michelle.
            “No, sir, she did not.”
            Had Clara Schwartz gone to such a length to cover herself as to download child porn onto her father’s computer?
            The prosecution never presented evidence of such a claim, but it would appear that someone besides Dr. Schwartz downloaded those images to the computer. It was either that or Dr. Schwartz had a secret he had kept hidden for those three days before he was murdered.
         
    • Kyle Hulbert background
  • Nguyen Van Set - on 2001/12/10 in Geelong, Australia (allegedly due to nitrogen overexposure in a lab accident)
    • ...
  • Victor Korshunov - on 2002/02/08 in Moscow, Russia (murdered by blunt-force trauma to the head)
    • ...
  • Ian Langford - on 2002/02/11 in Norwich, England (allegedly dead from an accidental fall)
    • ...
  • Tanya Holzmayer and Guyang "Matthew" Huang - on 2002/02/27 in San Francisco CA (Holzmayer reportedly shot by Huang who then shot himself)
    • ...
  • David Wynn-Williams - on 2002/03/24 in Cambridge, England (crushed between two colliding cars)
    • ...
  • Steven Mostow - on 2002/03/24 in Douglas County CO (died in a small plane crash)
    • ...
  • David Kelly - on 2003/07/17 in Oxfordshire, England (allegedly committed suicide by painkillers and slitting his wrists)
    • Jim Rarey, "THE MURDER OF DAVID KELLY" (part 1), 2003/10/14 - highlights the suspicious role of Thames Valley Police (TVP) Detective Constable Graham Peter Coe, who was inexplicably the first officer on the scene despite not being officially assigned to the case (in fact, he arrived half an hour before any officers assigned to the search did), found Kelly on his back despite the volunteers who initially found Kelly describing him as propped up against a tree, and denied the existence of a third man with him despite five witnesses attesting to it
    • Jim Rarey, "THE MURDER OF DAVID KELLY" (part 2), 2003/10/19
      • "In 1984 Dr. Kelly was invited by the Ministry of Defense (MoD) to take the position of chief microbiologist at its secret facility at Porton Down. Kelly had been working in the NERC Institute of Virology in Oxford. He brought a number of scientists with him from there to Porton Down.

        At the Hutton inquiry, Brian Jones testified as to Kelly's involvement, with the highest security clearance, in analyzing top-secret information regarding biological weapons of the U.K. and other governments. Jones was director of a department on the Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS). That involvement, beginning in 1987, presumably continued until his death and through his several other jobs as weapons "inspector" in Russia and (for UNSCOM) in Iraq.

        It was before and during Kelly's tenure at Porton Down that it became involved with South Africa's bioweapon program named Project Coast. A cardiologist named Wouter Basson who was the personal physician of South African Prime Minister Botha headed the project." - note that in an interview for the Anthrax War documentary, Basson acknowledges having met Kelly
      • "In 1989, Vladimir Pasechnik, head of the Soviet bioweapons program at its Biopreparat facility, defected to the U.K. His revelations of Soviet activity created a diplomatic uproar over violations of the 1972 treaty banning such activity that had been pushed and signed by the U.K., U.S. and USSR.

        Dr. Kelly and Christopher Davis of the U.K and U.S. microbiology experts debriefed Pasechnik. Davis, who comes out of MoD Intelligence, was at the time an employee of Veridian Corp., which has an interesting history.

        According to mind control researcher David Hoffman, in 1946 Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory was founded including the "Fund for the Study of Human Ecology." The "fund" was a CIA financing conduit for mind control experiments by émigré Nazi scientists and others under the direction of CIA doctors Sidney Gotttlieb, Ewen Cameron and Louis Jolyn West. Gottlieb, of course was the director of the CIA's infamous MK-ULTRA mind control program.

        Cornell was later absorbed into Calspan Advanced Technology Center in Buffalo , NY . The company continued experiments in mind control and artificial intelligence. In 1997 Calspan was in turn absorbed by Veridian Corp. Veridian (Calspan) is deeply involved in artificial intelligence. In August of this year giant defense contractor General Dynamics acquired Veridian-Calspan.

        Here is a strange "coincidence." After Timothy McVeigh left the army, he joined the Army National Guard in Buffalo . He landed a job with Burns International Security and was assigned to guard the premises of (you guessed it) Calspan. McVeigh had told friends the army had implanted a microchip in him during the Gulf war. (We now know that a number of soldiers were implanted with microchips explained as an experiment to keep track of their locations during battle.) The CIA doctors at Calspan were experimenting with merging brain cells with microchips."
      • "Pasechnik was put to work at Porton Down where he remained until set up with his own company. Three weeks after the mailed anthrax attacks in the U.S. , He died, "apparently" of a stroke. Strangely, the death was announced by Christopher Davis. His death began a string of mysterious deaths and obvious murders of world-class microbiologists, which continues to this day. Dr. Kelly's death is one of those but not the latest.

        One of the most disturbing deaths is that of Harvard scientist Don C. Wiley. Wiley was one of America's preeminent researchers into infectious diseases and HIV in particular. After years of meticulous research, Wiley had just scored a breakthrough by identifying the properties of the HIV virus that make it infectious and how it avoids destruction by the antigens in the human immune system.

        [...]

        The dark side of the discovery, as Wiley himself discussed, is that the same information could be used to change relatively benign viruses into killers. **(See footnote on this author's three-part series on "Anthrax, GOCO's and Designer Germs.")"
      • "In 1991, a team of U.S. and U.K scientists, including Kelly and Davis, made a trip to the USSR to inspect Biopreparat facilities at four locations. Their host was deputy chief of the program, Kanatjan Alibekov, who would later "defect" to the U.S. and change his name to Ken Alibek. Kelly made several inspection trips to Russia."
      • "Judith Miller of the New York Times (NYT) exchanged numerous e-mails with Kelly. The Pulitzer Prize winner is a long-time member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and through her articles in the paper the most prominent of those warning of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

        The second "confidant" of Kelly's was Olivia Bosch, a senior research fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA). The RIIA, also known as Chatham House, is the U.K counterpart of the CFR. Both organizations were set up by the financial elite to work for a one-world government. Both wield inordinate influence on the governments in their respective countries. Kelly had recently joined the RIIA.

        The third woman is a real-life Mata Hari. Mai Pederson met Kelly in Iraq where her cover was as a translator. She is a U.S. Army intelligence agent. Mai was instrumental in Kelly's conversion to the Baha'i faith."
      • "The first inspection trip was dramatized in a Frontline production in 1998 entitled "Plague War" shown on PBS in the U.S. and BBC in the U.K. Its main theme was that only Russia had violated the 1972 treaty but the U.S. and U.K. had abated their programs. Co-author of the script for the program was Tom Mangold, a sometime author and until very recently a BBC employee (propagandist?). Mangold was one of the earliest writers to proclaim Kelly's death as a suicide and has written articles "explaining" why Kelly killed himself. He bills himself as a "best friend" of Kelly but had to admit to the Hutton inquiry that his contacts with Kelly had been relatively few and mostly by e-mail."
      • "When Alibek defected to the U.S. in 1992 he underwent extensive debriefing by, among others, Davis and William Patrick ("father" of the U.S. bioweapons program and a CIA consultant). He was then rewarded with a job at BMI and became a CIA consultant. He is currently president of a subsidiary of Hadron, the defense contractor that peddled the PROMIS software to various governments (with a backdoor in the software) that resulted in an intelligence bonanza for the U.S.

        According to author Gordon Thomas, Kelly maintained close communications with Alibek, Patrick and other scientists in the U.S. Thomas reports that Kelly had contacts only weeks before two of the scientists died violent deaths. One was Dr. Don Wiley."
    • Jim Rarey, "DAVID KELLY AND VICTORIA'S SECRET", 2003/11/12 - mentions how Kelly was discussing, with Oneworld Publications commissioning editor Victoria Roddam, the prospect of publishing a book that would cover "the ethics of biological warfare", "the involvement of corporations in biological warfare", "the role of the pharmaceutical and biotech industries in biowarfare as well as prevention and containment", "the connection between Russia and Iraq with WMD", "the proliferation in the arms trade as well a look into the Royal United Services Institute-Whitehall", and "the rules of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA)"
    • New Yorker, "The David Kelly Affair", 2003/12/08
    • Rowena Thursby, "'David Kelly Murdered' Says British Lawyer", 2004/02/25 - note that the lawyer in question is Michael Shrimpton, a self-proclaimed intelligence operative (claiming involvement with MI6, the CIA, Mossad, Chinese intelligence, and more) who has dubiously labeled Israel as good guys (Rowena Thursby, "Michael Shrimpton/Alex Jones Interview Transcript", 2004/02/26), advocated for the parents of Madeleine McCann, been a speaker at the Intelligence Summit (The Intelligence Summit 2006 speaker page for Michael Shrimpton - his planned speech pushes the narrative that Iraq was behind al-Qaeda operations, much like Delmart Vreeland would later do) which is run by pro-Israel/neoconservative US intelligence officer John Loftus and has received major financial support from Russian oligarch Michael Cherney (Tampa Bay Times, "Intelligence conference draws criticism", 2007/03/06) (the involvement of a Russian oligarch paralleling Delmart Vreeland yet again), and later been arrested on child pornography charges (another Delmart Vreeland parallel) for which Shrimpton claimed he was framed
    • Tom Mangold, "Do you remember what happened to David Kelly?", 2017/01/30

Other curiosities

  • Genetically-targeted bioweapons
    • From the Wilderness, "Unholy Grail: The Quest for Genetic Weapons" by Kellia Ramares, 2003/03/04,11 (parts I, II) (copy of both parts)
  • HIV/AIDS origin and spread
  • United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) background - has employed numerous people from Western intelligence connected to biological warfare, including Steven Hatfill, David Franz (who later became the commander of USAMRIID at Fort Detrick when Hatfill worked there, and disputed the notion of the 2001 anthrax coming from a US government scientist like Hatfill), Dick Spertzel (who similarly defended Hatfill as "being crucified" and promoted the idea that the 2001 anthrax came from Iraq), David Kelly, and Scott Ritter (later going on record disputing the Iraq WMD narrative and becoming a prominent anti-war voice during the George W. Bush administration before getting caught in a child molestation sting)
  • 1991 anthrax poisoning of Mena drug trafficking investigator Russell Welch
  • COVID-19 origin and spread
    • EcoHealth Alliance projects - TODO add links
      • ...
    • Event 201 exercise - run by the same Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins University that ran Dark Winter
      • ...
  • Brian Shaffer disappearance - in 2006 from Columbus OH
    • The Lantern, "Is Brian Shaffer alive?", 2009/04/12: "Brian Shaffer has been missing since April 1, 2006. He was last seen on surveillance video outside the Ugly Tuna Saloona on the South Campus Gateway at 1:55 that morning. One of the last people to see Shaffer that night was William “Clint” Florence, one of Shaffer’s best friends. Attorney Neil Rosenberg represents Florence, who has refused at least two requests to take polygraph tests during the investigation of Shaffer’s disappearance. [...] Private investigator Don Corbett, who has worked on the case for free for the Shaffer family, said Florence refused his request to take a polygraph as recently as last September. [...] In the e-mail he sent to Corbett on Sept. 22, 2008, Rosenberg said: “If Brian is alive, which is what I’m led to believe after speaking with the detective involved, then it is Brian, and not Clint who is causing his family pain and hardship. Brian should come forward and end this.” Rosenberg said last week in a phone interview that as far as he is concerned the case is closed, and he declined to comment about the investigation or the e-mail he sent to Corbett. [...] Florence, 32, works for the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the Vanderbilt University Medical School, where he is a postdoctoral fellow, according to a Vanderbilt Web site. Corbett said he doesn’t know which detective Rosenberg was referring to in the e-mail. However, he believes it is one of three men at Columbus Police: detective Andre Edwards of the Physical Child Abuse Section, Sgt. John Hurst of the Physical Abuse Section and Deputy Chief Antone Lanata of the Investigative Subdivision. [...] not everyone who knew Brian or who had seen him the night he went missing was asked to take a polygraph. The last time Shaffer was seen on surveillance video outside the Ugly Tuna Saloona he was with two women, Brightan Zatko and Amber Ruic. Ruic said in a phone interview Friday that she was never asked to take a polygraph. Brian’s brother, Derek, is the last surviving member of the immediate family. His father, Randy, died on Sept. 14, 2008, when a tree limb fell on him outside his house during a windstorm. Derek’s mother died of cancer three weeks before Brian went missing. [...] “As soon as the detective started getting involved, that’s when he [Florence] pretty much had no contact with anybody,” Derek Shaffer said. “I’ve always thought he definitely knows something – just won’t come forward with it. “If Brian did take off somewhere, if that is the case, we just always had a strong feeling that Clint would possibly know that.”"
    • nerdmoot comments on Reddit in 2018 about their suspicion that Shaffer was recruited into intelligence
      • "I’m not a conspiracy theorist type but I truly believe he was recruited by the CIA or NSA or even more secretive blackops group. I know for a fact that these agencies recruit students right on campus."
      • "I’m kind of old. I graduated in the early-mid 90s. I had a friend (yep I know what you’ll say, but it’s true) who was American-Chinese student that was able to speak with a very specific Mandarin accent that the CIA wanted. After graduating he pretty much disappeared for 3 years and eventually came back to get a law degree from OSU. All he would ever say is that his job required him to make a lot of phone calls. CIA Documentation naming OSU as a recruitment school"
    • Note that Ohio State University, which Shaffer attended as a medical student, has had Les Wexner and Walden O'Dell as trustees (both incidentally being trustees during the time when Shaffer was a student there)
    • Clint Florence background
      • Apollo bio of William Florence - graduate student at Ohio State University from 2002 to 2007; post-doctoral fellow at Vanderbilt University Medical Center from 2007 to 2009; Senior Science and Technology Manager for Vaccines at the Translational Medical Division of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) from 2010 to 2014; Technical Director at Texas A&M University from 2014 to 2015; Non-Clinical Advisor for the Joint Project Manager-Medical Countermeasure Systems Office (JPM-MCS) at the Tauri Group from 2015 to present; Program Officer at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) from 2020 to present
  • Cattle mutilations during the 1970s - TODO fill out more information
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