Stephen Hatfill
(under construction) A cautionary tale
- Rosenberg-CIA
- Lab-exit theory
- Prof Don Foster by David Freed
- Foster-Rosenberg-FBI
- Mr. Z
- Hatfill
- FBI names Hatfill
- The draining of the pond
Rosenberg-CIA
Deseret News, Apr 2002: (L)eading scientists — many fearful that an unsolved case will encourage other bioterrorists — are applying their deductive reasoning to the anthrax-laced letters that killed five people and spread a new level of fear about biological warfare.
Their theories are full of intrigue: A disgruntled scientist. A covert government project gone awry. An accomplice to the Sept. 11 hijackers who stayed behind to mail the letters after their planes hit the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Right-wing extremists stockpiling the deadly material in anticipation of a visit from the Internal Revenue Service.
BBC/Susan Watts, March 2002: A Newsnight investigation raised the possibility that there was a secret CIA project to investigate methods of sending anthrax through the mail which went madly out of control.
The shocking assertion is that a key member of the covert operation may have removed, refined and eventually posted weapons-grade anthrax which killed five people. .. But has the FBI found the whole case too hot to handle?
Prof Barbara Hatch Rosenberg: Some very expert field person would have been given this job and it would have been left to him to decide exactly how to carry it out. The result might have been a project gone badly awry if he decided to use it for his own purposes and target the media and the senate for his own motives as not intended by the govt project...but this is a possibility that I think needs to be considered.
BBC's Tim Franks, 19 Dec 2001: I'm told the FBI is now centring its investigations on just four or five laboratories that received anthrax from the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah.
The first person to push the theory that the terrorist is a government-related insider is the biological weapons expert, Professor Barbara Hatch Rosenberg.
Atlantic: Rosenberg .. (who) once served as a low-level bioweapons adviser to President Clinton .. (was) a passionate crusader against the use of bioweapons. (S)he was .. convinced that an American scientist was to blame for the anthrax attacks.
Rosenberg's investigations led her to Hatfill. (Hatfill says he believes Rosenberg was made aware of him by a former acquaintance, a defense contractor with whom Hatfill had clashed over a proposed counter-anthrax training program intended for the U.S. Marshals Service.) She wrote a paper she called “Possible Portrait of the Anthrax Perpetrator,” which was disseminated on the Internet.
Deseret News, Apr 22, 2002: (A) molecular biologist, (she) began the scientific sleuthing in Feburary (sic) when she posted an article on the Web site of the Federation of American Scientists, www.fas.org/bwc, (dead-link, unfortunately)
Rosenberg estimates that perhaps fewer than 40 people could be suspects.
She believes that the perpetrator is one of her own: a disgruntled American scientist.
Prof Rosenberg: He must be angry at some biodefense agency. He is driven to demonstrate, in a spectacular way, his capabilities and the government's inability to respond.
He is cocksure that he can get away with it. Does he know something that he believes to be sufficiently damaging to the United States to make him untouchable by the FBI?
BBC/Franks: The weaponised anthrax is made by a highly secret process belonging to the United States, and the material seems to fit that recipe. Their best lead at present is the contractor that worked for the CIA.
Lab-exit theory
Scott Becker, Dec 2001, Association of Public Health Laboratories head: There's security measures that need to be improved in labs across the country. Things as simple as locks on refrigerators, key cards for access into the facilities.
BBC Interviewer: (A) lot of listeners would be astonished to learn you get padlocks on stationery cupboards, but not necessarily, padlocks on refrigerators that have lethal organisms in them.
Prof Don Foster by David Freed
The Atlantic, David Freed, May 2010: Don Foster, a professor of English at Vassar College and a self-styled literary detective, who had achieved modest celebrity by examining punctuation and other linguistic fingerprints to identify Joe Klein, who was then a Newsweek columnist, as the author of the anonymously written 1996 political novel, Primary Colors.
Historic Mysteries: Foster was praised for his keen sleuthing skills. Don Foster also analyzed .. The Night Before Christmas and questioned if it was indeed written by the unanimously-accepted Clement Clarke Moore.
Foster first came to prominence in his graduate school work regarding the famous sonnets of Shakespeare. An early edition of the sonnets was dedicated to “Mr. W. H.”, and scholars have debated for centuries who this mysterious man could be.
Foster developed a theory that the dedication should actually read “Mr. W. S.” or even “Mr. W. Sh.” indicating Shakespeare himself.
Later, Don Foster stumbled onto what he proclaimed to be a lost poem of Shakespeare’s titled “A Funerall Elegye in memory of the late Vertuous Maister William Peeter.”
It wasn’t one of Shakespeare’s best poems, but if it was written by The Bard it would have been the first newly discovered work in more than 100 years. Immediately, some scholars believed that Foster was correct in his summation, and several anthologies included the “new” poem in their collections.
Historic Mysteries: Foster later came to the attention of law enforcement officials who requested his help in attempting to determine the authors of two crime-related documents. Foster approached these documents with in-depth analysis using both computers and his common sense. (including the Jon Benet Ramsay murder)
Prof Foster (letter to Patsy Ramsay, June 1997): I know you are innocent - know it, absolutely and unequivocally. I will stake my personal reputation on it. .. The near universal belief - a view encouraged by police behavior - is that you wrote the letter to protect this person who murdered your daughter. I find that impossible to believe.
(Ramsay lawyers declined Foster's offer to help.)
Prof Foster (to Boulder police, 1998): In my opinion, it is not possible that any individual except Patsy Ramsey wrote the ransom note.
Foster had since consulted with the FBI on investigations of the Unabomber and Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park bombing, among other cases.
Foster surmised that the killer was an American posing as an Islamic jihadist.
(A) limited number of American scientists would have had a working knowledge of anthrax.
One of those scientists, Foster concluded, was a man named Steven Hatfill, a medical doctor who had once worked at the Army’s elite Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), which had stocks of anthrax.
Prof Don Foster, (English) Vassar College February 2002: When I lined up Hatfill’s known movements with the postmark locations of reported biothreats, those hoax anthrax attacks appeared to trail him like a vapor cloud.
Atlantic/David Freed: Scouring the Internet, (Prof) Foster found an interview that Hatfill had given while working at the National Institutes of Health, in which he described how bubonic plague could be made with simple equipment and used in a bioterror attack.
Foster later tracked down an unpublished novel Hatfill had written, depicting a fictional bioterror attack on Washington.
He discovered that Hatfill had been in Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) during an anthrax outbreak there in the late 1970s, and that he’d attended medical school near a Rhodesian suburb called Greendale - the name of the invented school in the return address of the anthrax letters mailed to the Senate.
The deeper Foster dug, the more Hatfill looked to him like a viable suspect.
Foster says he met Rosenberg over lunch in April 2002,
Prof Don Foster: (We ) compared notes .. laid out the evidence, such as it was, hers and mine .. found that our evidence had led us in the same direction.
David Freed: Weeks dragged on* while he and Rosenberg tried to interest the FBI in their theories.
Don Foster: (T)he bureau remained stubbornly unwilling to listen. (2mths later) patience exhausted. Rosenberg met on Capitol Hill with Senate staff members Special Agent Van Harp, the senior FBI agent on what by then had been dubbed the “Amerithrax” investigation, was summoned to the meeting, along with other FBI officials.
* Luxury!
Foster-Rosenberg-FBI
Atlantic: Although Rosenberg would later deny ever having identified him publicly or privately, the specific details of her “Portrait” made it clear she had a particular suspect in mind: Steven Hatfill.
Foster says he met Rosenberg over lunch in April 2002, “compared notes,” and “found that our evidence had led us in the same direction.” Weeks dragged on while he and Rosenberg tried to interest the FBI in their theories, but the bureau remained “stubbornly unwilling to listen.” Two months later, her “patience exhausted,” Rosenberg, according to Foster, met on Capitol Hill with Senate staff members “and laid out the evidence, such as it was, hers and mine.” Special Agent Van Harp, the senior FBI agent on what by then had been dubbed the “Amerithrax” investigation, was summoned to the meeting, along with other FBI officials.
Rosenberg criticized the FBI for not being aggressive enough. “She thought we were wasting efforts and resources in a particular—or in several areas, and should focus more on who she concluded was responsible for it,” Harp would later testify.
Did she mention Dr. Hatfill’s name in her presentation?” Hatfill’s attorney, former federal prosecutor Thomas G. Connolly, asked Harp during a sworn deposition.
“That’s who she was talking about,” Harp testified.
Exactly a week after the Rosenberg meeting, the FBI carried out its first search of Hatfill’s apartment, with television news cameras broadcasting it live.
Mr. Z
Quotes are from Hatfill v New York Times case text.
Hatfill
Who is Steven Hatfill? The Prospect has spoken with dozens of biowarfare scientists, other government contractors who work in bio-defense, former medical school associates and colleagues, and sources close to the FBI investigation to get a clearer picture of the Maryland scientist.
Hatfill, who was employed as an Ebola researcher at USAMRIID from 1997 to 1999, has since worked as a government contractor who specializes in training U.S. Special Forces, embassy employees, emergency workers, and other government officials to respond to biological attacks. .. his colleagues say he is passionately devoted.
Hatfill had access to the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Frederick, Maryland, up until early March. As one of a handful of places in the country where scientists grow the most lethal germs in order to develop vaccines to defend against them, USAMRIID and its Utah cousin, Dugway Proving Grounds, have been at the center of the eight-month-old FBI investigation.
Last month, genetic analysis of the letter-anthrax suggested that it was indistinguishable from a strain developed at USAMRIID.
Hatfill belongs to a small pool of people who have access to and detailed knowledge of how to grow and weaponize the highly lethal, concentrated dry powder spores of anthrax that were sent in letters to media personalities and members of Congress last October. Specifically, by virtue of his government contracts, Hatfill had access to the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Frederick, Maryland, up until early March. As one of a handful of places in the country where scientists grow the most lethal germs in order to develop vaccines to defend against them, USAMRIID and its Utah cousin, Dugway Proving Grounds, have been at the center of the eight-month-old FBI investigation. Last month, genetic analysis of the letter-anthrax suggested that it was indistinguishable from a strain developed at USAMRIID.
WaPo/Marilyn W. Thompsom, 14 Sep 2003: Stan Bedlington had known (Hatfill) for several years. They were drinking buddies who'd both been involved in anti-terrorism efforts long before the World Trade Center crumbled.
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.
(T)hey 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.
Indeed, several of his associates have told the Prospect that Hatfill bragged of having been a double agent in South Africa.
WaPo: 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.
Guardian, Jun 2003: The man at the centre of the investigation into the post-9/11 anthrax attacks in the US faked a UK medical degree and membership of the Royal Society of Medicine, to fool his way into a job at America's highest security bio-defence installation.
Dr Steven Jay Hatfill was named last August by US Attorney General John Ashcroft as as the only 'person of interest' in the investigation and now lives under 24-hour surveillance by the FBI.
Hatfill, a former researcher at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland, denies he is the anthrax killer.
An investigation by the Observer, carried out with with New York-based current affairs magazine Seed, has discovered that the cancer specialist and bio-terror expert claimed he had a medical degree from Edinburgh on CVs used to apply for jobs in the US. He also said he was a Fellow of the prestigious Royal Society of Medicine. The Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh had no record of Hatfill qualifying as doctor in 1984, as claimed on his CV. His medical degree is from Zimbabwe, where he qualified in the same year.
Rosamund Snow, RSM spokeswoman, said : 'He is not on our books, nor has he applied to be.'
The investigation found that Hatfill had fabricated large portions of his CV, including claims of serving in the Rhodesian SAS and researching for Nasa's Solar System Exploration Division.
Guardian, Jun 2002: FBI agents investigating the anthrax attacks that killed five people have searched the Maryland home of a former US military scientist who commissioned a study into similar attacks three years ago. The study commissioned by Dr Hatfill describes placing 2.5 grams of bacillus globigii, an anthrax simulant, in a standard business envelope.
Two agents also spent several months in a Washington storage unit, poring over a mountain of forgotten videotape to locate footage of Hatfill's television appearance in 1998. In it, he discussed the likelihood of a biological attack, according to television host Armstrong Williams.
FBI names Hatfill
John Ashcroft, FBI, The Early Show, CBS Aug 6, 2002 (asked whether Hatfill was a suspect): Well, he's a person of interest. . . . I'm not prepared to say any more at this time other than the fact that he is an individual of interest.
The draining of the pond
http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/bioter/detect/antdetect_letters_a.htm