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Additive Made Spores Deadlier
The ongoing USAMRIID studies on the spores used in the U.S. attacks involve examinations using conventional microscopes and scanning electron microscopes, along with complex chemical analyses that are difficult to conduct even when the bacteria in question are not dangerous. The analyses are far more difficult in this case, experts said, because anthrax spores must be studied in specially sealed laboratory enclosures to ensure that they do not escape.
Additive Made Spores Deadlier
3 Nations Known to Be Able to Make Sophisticated Coating
By Rick Weiss and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, October 25, 2001; Page A01
The anthrax spores that contaminated the air in Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle's office had been treated with a chemical additive so sophisticated that only three nations are thought to have been capable of making it, sources said yesterday.
The United States, the former Soviet Union and Iraq are the only three nations known to have developed the kind of additives that enable anthrax spores to remain suspended in the air, making them more easily inhaled and therefore more deadly, experts said yesterday. Each nation used a different technique, suggesting that ongoing microscopic and chemical analyses may reveal more about the spores' provenance than did their genetic analysis, which is largely complete but reportedly has done little to narrow the field.
A government official with direct knowledge of the investigation said yesterday that the totality of the evidence in hand suggests that it is unlikely that the spores were originally produced in the former Soviet Union or Iraq.
Even identifying the kind of coating may not solve the crucial question of who is perpetrating the terror, because little is known about how secure the stores of the three countries' stocks have been during the past few years.
Nonetheless, the conclusion that the spores were produced with military quality differs considerably from public comments made recently by officials close to the investigation, who have said the spores were not "weaponized" and were "garden variety." Those descriptions may be technically true, depending on how one defines those terms, several experts said. But they obscure the basic and more important truth that the spores were treated with a sophisticated process, meaning the original source was almost certainly a state-sponsored laboratory.
The finding strongly suggests that the anthrax spores in the U.S. mail attacks were not produced in a university or makeshift laboratory or simply gathered from natural sources. But it does not answer the question of whether a state-sponsored laboratory supplied the anthrax spores directly to terrorists or simply lost control of some stocks in recent years.
The presence of the high-grade additive was confirmed for the first time yesterday by a government source familiar with the ongoing studies, which are being conducted by scientists at the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in Frederick. Four other experts in anthrax weapons said they had no doubt that such an additive was present based on the high dispersal rate from the letter to Daschle (D-S.D.).
"The evidence is patent on its face," said Alan Zelicoff, a senior scientist at Sandia National Laboratories' Center for National Security and Arms Control. "The amount of energy needed to disperse the spores [by merely opening an envelope] was trivial, which is virtually diagnostic of achieving the appropriate coating."
David Franz, formerly of USAMRIID and now at the Southern Research Institute in Birmingham, said, "In order for a formulation to do what the one in Daschle's office appears to have done -- be easily airborne -- it would require special treatment."
Genetic testing of the spores found in Daschle's office, at NBC offices in New York and in Florida found that the three samples were indistinguishable.
The ongoing USAMRIID studies on the spores used in the U.S. attacks involve examinations using conventional microscopes and scanning electron microscopes, along with complex chemical analyses that are difficult to conduct even when the bacteria in question are not dangerous. The analyses are far more difficult in this case, experts said, because anthrax spores must be studied in specially sealed laboratory enclosures to ensure that they do not escape.
Results of those tests have not been made public beyond a simple description of how small the spore particles were in the Daschle letter. That particle size, 1 1/2 to 3 microns in diameter, said Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), is extremely small -- a first requirement for making "weapons grade" anthrax spores for warfare or terrorism.
But more than that is needed to get anthrax spores to drift easily in the air and spread widely without settling quickly to the ground. That is because tiny particles tend to have electrostatic charges -- the static electricity that can cause hair to extend skyward when it is rubbed against a balloon. Those charges make the tiniest particles clump together into heavier ones, which then settle to the ground.
One of the primary goals of bioweapons engineers since the 1960s was to figure out how to treat those tiny particles in ways that would neutralize the problematic charges. Properly processed, the tiny particles will remain separated from one another and fly up and outward with virtually no effort. An imperceptible wisp of a breeze can send them across a room.
In the United States, that problem was solved by Bill Patrick, who developed the process at Fort Detrick as part of the U.S. biological weapons program that ended in 1969. The process is protected by at least five secret patents held by Patrick. It involved freeze drying and chemical processing and was achieved without having to grow vast quantities of spores or mill them to terribly small dimensions, Patrick and other experts said.
Spores were mass-produced at a Pine Bluff, Ark., facility, Patrick said. Production stocks were destroyed, but he said he did not know whether "seed stocks" from which new batches could be grown had also been destroyed. Under the terms of an international treaty banning biological weapons, to which the United States is a signatory, small amounts of biological weapons can be produced to conduct defensive research.
The Russian program, which has been described in detail by Ken Alibek, who ran it for many years before moving to the United States to do biological research, required the production of much larger quantities of spores that were more heavily milled than the U.S. spores and used a different kind of freezing and coating process.
The Iraqi technique, uncovered by U.N. inspectors, was a novel one-step process that involved drying spores in the presence of aluminum-based clays or silica powders, said Richard Spertzel, who was part of the U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM) team that was to uncover and destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program after the Gulf War. UNSCOM was ultimately frustrated in its attempt to account for all of Iraq's biological weapons.
"If [U.S. investigators] can get a clue as to how the material in the Daschle letter was prepared, that might narrow the field," Spertzel said. "It may not pinpoint it, but it may narrow it."
White House officials and some lawmakers have said they suspect a connection between the anthrax letters and the al Qaeda terrorist organization, whose leader, Osama bin Laden, has been blamed for the Sept. 11 terror attacks on New York and Washington.
President Bush suggested again yesterday that it is his working assumption that al Qaeda is involved. "I have no direct evidence, but there are some links" between Sept. 11 and the anthrax mailings, Bush said in a speech in Anne Arundel County. "Both series of actions are motivated by evil and hate. Both series of actions are meant to disrupt Americans' way of life. Both series of actions are an attack on our homeland. And both series of actions will not stand."
FBI investigators say they have no evidence connecting the anthrax cases with the bin Laden network, although they are operating under the presumption that there could be a link. The three letters recovered include references to Allah and vows of death to Israel and the United States, but many investigators suspect the language is purposeful misdirection.
Some within the administration and on Capitol Hill have also pointed a finger at Iraq, and some officials have expressed a desire to punish Iraq if it were found to have been involved.
Also yesterday, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said authorities continue to receive a high number of terrorist threats after the Sept. 11 assaults, and he warned that more attacks are a "distinct possibility."
"I must tell you that the threat level remains very high," Mueller said at a meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Washington. "More attempts and possible attacks are a distinct possibility. This possibility requires all of us to continue walking the fine line of staying alert on the one hand without causing undo alarm on the other hand."
Staff writers Eric Pianin and Mike Allen contributed to this report.
© 2001 The Washington Post Company
3 Nations Known to Be Able to Make Sophisticated Coating
By Rick Weiss and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, October 25, 2001; Page A01
The anthrax spores that contaminated the air in Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle's office had been treated with a chemical additive so sophisticated that only three nations are thought to have been capable of making it, sources said yesterday.
The United States, the former Soviet Union and Iraq are the only three nations known to have developed the kind of additives that enable anthrax spores to remain suspended in the air, making them more easily inhaled and therefore more deadly, experts said yesterday. Each nation used a different technique, suggesting that ongoing microscopic and chemical analyses may reveal more about the spores' provenance than did their genetic analysis, which is largely complete but reportedly has done little to narrow the field.
A government official with direct knowledge of the investigation said yesterday that the totality of the evidence in hand suggests that it is unlikely that the spores were originally produced in the former Soviet Union or Iraq.
Even identifying the kind of coating may not solve the crucial question of who is perpetrating the terror, because little is known about how secure the stores of the three countries' stocks have been during the past few years.
Nonetheless, the conclusion that the spores were produced with military quality differs considerably from public comments made recently by officials close to the investigation, who have said the spores were not "weaponized" and were "garden variety." Those descriptions may be technically true, depending on how one defines those terms, several experts said. But they obscure the basic and more important truth that the spores were treated with a sophisticated process, meaning the original source was almost certainly a state-sponsored laboratory.
The finding strongly suggests that the anthrax spores in the U.S. mail attacks were not produced in a university or makeshift laboratory or simply gathered from natural sources. But it does not answer the question of whether a state-sponsored laboratory supplied the anthrax spores directly to terrorists or simply lost control of some stocks in recent years.
The presence of the high-grade additive was confirmed for the first time yesterday by a government source familiar with the ongoing studies, which are being conducted by scientists at the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in Frederick. Four other experts in anthrax weapons said they had no doubt that such an additive was present based on the high dispersal rate from the letter to Daschle (D-S.D.).
"The evidence is patent on its face," said Alan Zelicoff, a senior scientist at Sandia National Laboratories' Center for National Security and Arms Control. "The amount of energy needed to disperse the spores [by merely opening an envelope] was trivial, which is virtually diagnostic of achieving the appropriate coating."
David Franz, formerly of USAMRIID and now at the Southern Research Institute in Birmingham, said, "In order for a formulation to do what the one in Daschle's office appears to have done -- be easily airborne -- it would require special treatment."
Genetic testing of the spores found in Daschle's office, at NBC offices in New York and in Florida found that the three samples were indistinguishable.
The ongoing USAMRIID studies on the spores used in the U.S. attacks involve examinations using conventional microscopes and scanning electron microscopes, along with complex chemical analyses that are difficult to conduct even when the bacteria in question are not dangerous. The analyses are far more difficult in this case, experts said, because anthrax spores must be studied in specially sealed laboratory enclosures to ensure that they do not escape.
Results of those tests have not been made public beyond a simple description of how small the spore particles were in the Daschle letter. That particle size, 1 1/2 to 3 microns in diameter, said Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), is extremely small -- a first requirement for making "weapons grade" anthrax spores for warfare or terrorism.
But more than that is needed to get anthrax spores to drift easily in the air and spread widely without settling quickly to the ground. That is because tiny particles tend to have electrostatic charges -- the static electricity that can cause hair to extend skyward when it is rubbed against a balloon. Those charges make the tiniest particles clump together into heavier ones, which then settle to the ground.
One of the primary goals of bioweapons engineers since the 1960s was to figure out how to treat those tiny particles in ways that would neutralize the problematic charges. Properly processed, the tiny particles will remain separated from one another and fly up and outward with virtually no effort. An imperceptible wisp of a breeze can send them across a room.
In the United States, that problem was solved by Bill Patrick, who developed the process at Fort Detrick as part of the U.S. biological weapons program that ended in 1969. The process is protected by at least five secret patents held by Patrick. It involved freeze drying and chemical processing and was achieved without having to grow vast quantities of spores or mill them to terribly small dimensions, Patrick and other experts said.
Spores were mass-produced at a Pine Bluff, Ark., facility, Patrick said. Production stocks were destroyed, but he said he did not know whether "seed stocks" from which new batches could be grown had also been destroyed. Under the terms of an international treaty banning biological weapons, to which the United States is a signatory, small amounts of biological weapons can be produced to conduct defensive research.
The Russian program, which has been described in detail by Ken Alibek, who ran it for many years before moving to the United States to do biological research, required the production of much larger quantities of spores that were more heavily milled than the U.S. spores and used a different kind of freezing and coating process.
The Iraqi technique, uncovered by U.N. inspectors, was a novel one-step process that involved drying spores in the presence of aluminum-based clays or silica powders, said Richard Spertzel, who was part of the U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM) team that was to uncover and destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program after the Gulf War. UNSCOM was ultimately frustrated in its attempt to account for all of Iraq's biological weapons.
"If [U.S. investigators] can get a clue as to how the material in the Daschle letter was prepared, that might narrow the field," Spertzel said. "It may not pinpoint it, but it may narrow it."
White House officials and some lawmakers have said they suspect a connection between the anthrax letters and the al Qaeda terrorist organization, whose leader, Osama bin Laden, has been blamed for the Sept. 11 terror attacks on New York and Washington.
President Bush suggested again yesterday that it is his working assumption that al Qaeda is involved. "I have no direct evidence, but there are some links" between Sept. 11 and the anthrax mailings, Bush said in a speech in Anne Arundel County. "Both series of actions are motivated by evil and hate. Both series of actions are meant to disrupt Americans' way of life. Both series of actions are an attack on our homeland. And both series of actions will not stand."
FBI investigators say they have no evidence connecting the anthrax cases with the bin Laden network, although they are operating under the presumption that there could be a link. The three letters recovered include references to Allah and vows of death to Israel and the United States, but many investigators suspect the language is purposeful misdirection.
Some within the administration and on Capitol Hill have also pointed a finger at Iraq, and some officials have expressed a desire to punish Iraq if it were found to have been involved.
Also yesterday, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said authorities continue to receive a high number of terrorist threats after the Sept. 11 assaults, and he warned that more attacks are a "distinct possibility."
"I must tell you that the threat level remains very high," Mueller said at a meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Washington. "More attempts and possible attacks are a distinct possibility. This possibility requires all of us to continue walking the fine line of staying alert on the one hand without causing undo alarm on the other hand."
Staff writers Eric Pianin and Mike Allen contributed to this report.
© 2001 The Washington Post Company
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of anthrax that was not antibiotic resistant?
I have a suspicion that these may have been some sort of test material from
the Russian or Iraqi bio weapons program. For example if you where going to
test a delivery mechanism you would use anthrax that responded to
antibiotics incase things went wrong.
Luckily for us the thief that stole the spores grabbed a batch that wasn't full
weapons grade?
Advances in this field are well-developed and well-documented, from the use of zeolites in drying to charge neutralization and anti-static methods, in fields ranging from semiconductor technology to powder-coating to textile treatment. As for the anthrax itself, this can easily be cultured in relative safety (and from a very tiny initial amount) using techniques very similar to that of yogurt production. The agent is then purified by washing it in commonly known solvents to separate it from the culture medium, and milled as necessary to achieve the desired particle size. Modern milling media and ordinary techniques are routinely used to produce even sub-micron particles, while the size range for "weaponization" is between 2 and 4 microns.
The production know-how is thus within the grasp of any astute chem major - or anyone motivated to educate himself.
The techniques involved in "weaponizing" an anthrax culture are not especially difficult to implement, and the chemicals and equipment are readily available - one can even find suitable equipment in the laboratory equipment listings on E-Bay. A reasonable cost estimate for setting up a professional pilot plant would be in the range of $2500-$5000 - well within the ability of almost anyone.
Since the anthrax in question is not a resistant strain, there is no need for highly sophisticated containment. A simple glove box with a means for after-process decontamination would be the only thing required to limit area contamination. Personal protection could be achieved by self-administering a broad spectrum antibiotic such as Cipro. Gulf War veterans who received vaccinations (and many others in government) would of course already be immune.
The "anthrax scare" has all the earmarks of a campaign to spread mass hysteria, but not to actually cause more than minimal harm. This is not to dismiss the tragedy of those who have succumbed to inhalational anthrax, but merely to point out that many other bacteriological agents could have been used with far deadlier results.
I have to ask who benefits from this sustained public panic, since the goal apparently is not to actually kill many thousands of innocent people but rather to frighten everyone to death. I must also ask why the targets of these attacks were those in the best position to trumpet the news to the world, and to do so to the extent that everything else of perhaps more important news value has been eclipsed.