Anthrax Type That Killed May Have Reached Iraq Baghdad's Bid to Obtain Microbe Fuels Suspicions

By Colum Lynch Special to The Washington Post Sunday, November 25, 2001; Page A12

UNITED NATIONS -- In August 1988, two key figures in Iraq's secret germ warfare program attended a scientific conference in Winchester, England, to survey advances in the battle against the anthrax disease.

Professor Nassir Hindawiand a colleague, Abdul Rahman Thamer,attracted little attention at the gathering, which was sponsored by scientists from the British biodefense institute at Porton Down.

But U.N. inspectors who uncovered Iraq's secret biological weapons years later believe that the trip was part of a covert mission to identify foreign suppliers for Baghdad's biological weapons program and to obtain deadly anthrax microbes, including the Ames strain, a highly virulent anthrax bacteria found in letters sent to American targets.

Shortly after the visit, Baghdad's trade ministry telexed an order to Porton Down for samples of the Ames strain and at least two other varieties of anthrax microbes. But the British scientists were suspicious that Baghdad might be seeking to develop biological weapons. "There were requests for anthrax strains, and they were denied," said Porton Down spokeswoman Sue Ellison.

U.S. officials and former U.N. weapons experts have found no proof that the Iraqi scientists obtained the Ames strain from another supplier. But Iraq's attempt to obtain the Ames microbes has fueled suspicions among some U.S. and U.N. experts that Iraq may yet be linked to the series of biological attacks against the United States.

"We know that Iraq was very keen on obtaining that specific strain as well as others, and they were contacting many countries of the world," said retired Col. Richard Spertzel,a microbiologist and former head of biological inspection teams in Iraq for the United Nations. "The effort with which they [pursued] Porton Down would suggest that if they thought someone else had it, they would press for it. But we simply don't know."

Porton Down scientists obtained the Ames strain in the early 1980s from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Md. The deadly pathogen has been passed to an unknown number of scientists.

Iraq's unsuccessful attempt to secure the Ames bacteria from Britain represented a minor setback in its largely successful campaign in the mid-1980s to acquire ingredients for a massive covert biological weapons program.

Iraq sought materials from government and commercial labs in the United States, Europe and Africa.

"The Iraqis had set up this very secret and very sophisticated procurement system so that there would be no chance that outsiders could figure out what they were doing," said Raymond Zalinskas,a former U.N. inspector who is now senior scientist in residence at the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

In 1988, Iraqi scientists obtained from a private British business, Oxoid Ltd., and other suppliers, nearly 40 tons of medium to grow anthrax and botulinum bacterium for its biological weapons, according to former U.N. officials and a 1999 U.N. report.

Iraq also acquired at least two other forms of anthrax, the Sterne strain, commonly used in an animal vaccine, and the A-3 strain derived from Spanish sheep, from France's Institut Pasteur.

"There was absolutely no reason to refuse an order from Iraq in the 1980s," said Michael Haynes, a spokesman for Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch consumer goods giant that owned Oxoid until 1997. Haynes noted that Iraq at that time was not considered hostile to the West and was under no economic sanctions. "As far as we knew the growth medium would be used for genuine medical, humanitarian purposes," he said.

U.N. inspectors got their first glimpse at Iraq's offensive biological weapons program during an August 1991 U.N. inspection of Salman Pak, one of Iraq's premier biological weapons facilities.

Rihab Taha,the head of Iraq's germ warfare program, provided a team of U.N. biologists with several sealed glass vials containing freeze-dried anthrax spores. The vials included two variants of the Vollumstrain, which had been used in U.S. and British biological weapons programs.

The Iraqi scientist initially claimed that some of the anthrax spores were used in research but had never been weaponized. Baghdad also acknowledged that it had received Vollum and five other strains of anthrax bacterium from the American Type Culture Collection, a commercial germ bank now located near Manassas, Va.

Iraqi documents later obtained by the United Nations indicated that Baghdad subsequently filled more than 50 bombs and missile warheads with a liquid form of Vollum anthrax.

DNA analysis conducted on remnants of Iraq's Al-Hussein warheads at the Al-Nibai missile destruction site revealed traces of bacteria similar to the Vollum anthrax strain. "I can't say with one hundred percent certainty that they are identical," Spertzel said. "But they are consistent with Vollum."

The U.S. company also sold Iraq several strains of Clostridiumbotulinum, a poisonous toxin that paralyzes the muscles and lungs and kills by suffocation. Iraq acknowledged producing at least 19,000 liters of botulinum toxin, using more than half to fill at least 116 bombs and missile warheads.

Staff writer Joby Warrick contributed to this report.

-- Anonymous, November 25, 2001

Answers

Deadly Anthrax Strain Leaves a Muddy Trail

By Steve Fainaru and Joby Warrick Washington Post Staff Writers Sunday, November 25, 2001; Page A01

For more than a month, federal investigators have stalked the poisonous anthrax strain used in the recent terrorist attacks. The search has led to culture collections and research labs, to microbiologists and veterinarians, to anywhere and anyone who might have come in contact with the Ames strain.

But with each new case, the mysteries surrounding the distribution of Ames are only deepening. Once thought to be accessible to thousands of researchers, the strain now appears to have circulated in only a small universe of laboratories. One of its main distributors, according to scientists, was the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Md., which used Ames to test vaccines that could protect U.S. troops in case of a biological attack.

In following the trail, investigators have had to face the possibility that Ames may have slipped through an informal network of scientists to Iraq, which sought the strain from a British biodefense institute in 1988 but whose application was rejected because of concerns that it would be used to manufacture biological weapons.

Understanding the distribution of the Ames strain may be critical to the government's search for those behind the attacks that have killed five people, infected 13 others anddisrupted the federal government. In the latest case, that of a 94-year-old Connecticut woman who died Wednesday after contracting inhalation anthrax, federal investigators said DNA testing showed that the bacteria was indistinguishable from the strain that appeared in the attacks in Florida, Washington and New York.

Those attacks involved the Ames strain, a virulent anthrax bacteria named for the Iowa city where it was originally isolated, according to an Oct. 25 statement from Tom Ridge, the White House director of homeland security. But identifying the type of anthrax from among the 89 known genetic strains has done little to clear up confusion within the government and the scientific community over the history of the Ames strain, how many scientists had access to it and how it might have circulated.

When the attacks began, there was speculation that thousands of labs might have had access to Ames, but that number has been knocked down by anthrax experts. Philip C. Hanna,a microbiologist at the University of Michigan, said: "I'd put it on the scale between 10 and 24."

Paul Keim, who has done genetic mapping of anthrax strains at Northern Arizona Universityand is reportedly assisting the FBI with the investigation, said he was uncertain of the number of labs with Ames but described it as "a pretty small list" that he thought was "very discoverable."

Only a few facts have been clearly established. The strain of Bacillus anthracis that became known as Ames was first isolated decades ago from a diseased cow near Ames. A natural or "wild" strain, Ames was recognized relatively early for its virulence and for its ability to resist vaccines.

Scientists in America's biological weapons program chose a different strain, called Vollum 1B, as the lethal ingredient in U.S. anthrax weaponsin the 1950s and 1960s. But in the late 1970s, following the dismantling of the program by President Richard M. Nixon, Fort Detrick's microbiologists turned to the Ames strain to develop and test tougher anti-anthrax vaccines to protect against biological weapons being built in the Soviet Union.

"There was a whole new interest because of what the Soviets were doing," said Joseph V. Jemski, who ran animal experiments at Fort Detrick. "I remember we began working with three strains: One from Colorado, another from Texas -- and Ames."

Fort Detrick's work established Ames as something of a gold standard, a hardy strain that helps biologists gauge the effectiveness of potential vaccines and treatments. Soon, other researchers also became interested in Ames, and Army scientists would help them obtain it.

"We were all just doing science," said David R. Franz, a scientist at Fort Detrick in the early 1980s and now vice president of the Chemical & Biological Defense Division of the Southern Research Institute, recalling an era of scientific openness that followed the secretive days of the bioweapons program. "Our biowarfare era was over, and we were doing a lot of work with academia and studying the variant strains. Things just weren't as tight as they became" after new federal security guidelines on transfers went into effect in the late 1990s.

Biologists familiar with Ames identified USAMRIID as the strain's major distributor. "USAMRIID is the one that handled most of the distribution of this strain," said Keim. "Surely they would know" who received it.

Martin Hugh-Jones, an anthrax expert at Louisiana State University who maintains a global database of anthrax outbreaks for the World Health Organization, concurred that it was relatively simple in the past to obtain anthrax cultures from USAMRIID.

"They kept the stuff there, and if you needed a culture, you called up Art" -- Col. Arthur Friedlander, USAMRIID's senior military research scientist, Hugh-Jones said.

In some cases, the bacteria delivered to researchers were genetically altered to prevent their use as a weapon or make it less hazardous. Duke University researcher Ken Wilson, for example, said he obtained the Ames strain from USAMRIID in the early 1990s but only after the organism had been stripped of its ability to produce deadly toxins.

Other researchers received the bug in its virulent form. One such recipient was at Fort Detrick's British counterpart, the Chemical Defense Establishment at Porton Down, near Salisbury, England. Peter Turnbull, a former Porton Down microbiologist, said the institute also was testing vaccines that would protect troops against various anthrax strains.

British scientists in turn shared the Ames strain with other researchers. In the mid-1990s, Porton Down sent a packet containing Ames spores to Hugh-Jones, and also to a "very few" others, said Turnbull, who declined to name them.

"It wasn't random," said Turnbull. "We would know the other person's bona fides. It was not spread around promiscuously."

Investigators are now hoping that retracing the movement of Ames will help lead them to the person or group behind the anthrax mailings of September and October. Since mid-October, FBI agents have visited universities, pharmaceutical laboratories, hospitals and veterinary centers to find out who may have had access to the strain.

Some researchers, such as Louisiana State University's Hugh-Jones, have been subpoenaed and questioned for hours about the possibility that Ames spores might have been lost or stolen. Hugh-Jones said he has turned over laboratory documents to the FBI and insisted his lab kept the Ames strain under tight control.

"Nobody got it from us; it stopped with us," he said.

In fact, some anthrax experts believe that it may be impossible to learn exactly how many researchers have Ames. Genetic differences among anthrax strains are slight, and until the advent of genetic typing in recent years, the labeling of strains was often sloppy. It is possible that Ames bacteria ended up in many other laboratories, but under a different name. Perhaps the strain even reached Iraq, or another state with a biological weapons program, some scientists say.

"I don't think anyone had heard of [Ames] before we published our vaccine results" in the 1980s, Turnbull, the former Porton Down scientist, said. "There doesn't appear to be a history of the strain previous to this. Perhaps it existed as stock on a shelf somewhere. Someone isolates a strain -- we believe in this case it was from a cow from Ames, Iowa -- and it's labeled 'Iowa cow' and placed on a shelf somewhere."

Because of the imprecise labeling, some experts say that anthrax strains that were widely distributed should be analyzed to see if they match genetically the strain used in the attacks.

Of the seven strains sent to Iraq by the American Type Culture Collection in the late 1980s, for example, none was labeled "Ames." But Kimothy L. Smith, a member of Keim's genetic analysis team that reportedly has been helping the FBI investigation, said he did not believe that all the strains sent to Iraq had been studied and compared to known varieties.

"It's a tower of Babel when it comes to nomenclature," said one scientist familiar with the Iraqi shipments. "Much of what is out there in the biological world is not well identified."

Given Iraq's interest in obtaining the Ames strain -- and given the lax controls over pathogen movement in the past -- some experts are convinced that Baghdad has Ames. "The probability that they don't have the strain is near zero," said a microbiologist who has studied Ames.

But others are hopeful that the Ames microbes used in the attacks will turn up closer to home, leaving a clear trail to the perpetrators.

"Basically, if some guy's got this culture on his dirty clothes or on his bench top, he'll have some explaining to do," said Hugh-Jones. "It's like owning a pistol that was used in a homicide."

Staff researchers Alice Crites, Bobbye Pratt and Mary Lou White contributed to this report.

© 2001 The Washington Post Company

-- Anonymous, November 25, 2001