Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a slight woman with short graying hair and deeply concerned hazel eyes, who works out of a small office at the State University of New York at Purchase, thinks she knows who was responsible for the anthrax attacks last October. Rosenberg is, to use the technical term, not chopped liver: she is a veteran molecular biologist and one of the world's leading experts on biological weapons. In 1998, she was one of a group of seven scientists who were invited to the White House to brief President Clinton on the subject. Yet her theory sounds like the plot of a conspiracy thriller, which is not usually true of experts' theories, especially on matters this grave.
On February 5th, Rosenberg posted an item on a Web site that she maintains for the Federation of American Scientists called "Commentary: Is the F.B.I. Dragging Its Feet?," in which she strongly implied that the F.B.I. was moving much more slowly in its anthrax investigation than it had any reason to. About the perpetrator she has in mind, she asked, "Does he know something that he believes is sufficiently damaging to the United States to make him untouchable by the F.B.I.?" It's important to note that, in addition to being an expert, Rosenberg has a political agenda: she is a committed campaigner for outside monitoring of biological-weapons laboratories. Although several local newspapers and the online magazine Salon ran articles on Rosenberg, it took a surprisingly long time—nearly three weeks—for her sensational Web posting to make an official impact, but on February 25th, after the Washington Times published a story that the F.B.I. had a prime suspect who sounded a lot like Rosenberg's, an array of top government officials, including Ari Fleischer, of the White House, and Robert Mueller III, of the F.B.I., were forced to address it—which is to say, deny it—publicly.
Here is Rosenberg's theory: All of the anthrax letters were sent by one person, a middle-aged man who had worked at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and who was familiar with the method of weaponizing anthrax devised by William Patrick III, the longtime head of bioweapons research at Fort Detrick. The perpetrator now works for a Washington-area subcontractor to the U.S. biological-weapons program. He is, as Rosenberg puts it, "not a normal person," and has a pattern of erratic behavior. She believes he received some kind of career setback after he left Fort Detrick that caused him to become "confused, upset, depressed, angry." He decided to retaliate with the anthrax attacks, with which, Rosenberg guesses, he meant to accomplish two things: first, "he's showing somebody how good he is" at producing and distributing weaponized anthrax, and thus proving that the career setback was unwarranted; and, second, he wanted to get the government to invest more in bioweapons research, which would mean a budget increase for his current employer.
During the summer of 2001, Rosenberg suspects, the perpetrator prepared his anthrax. When the September 11th attacks occurred, he saw a perfect opportunity to strike, and to cover his tracks. Before he mailed any of the anthrax letters, he sent an anonymous letter to the military police at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, that was meant to raise suspicions about Ayaad Assaad, an Egyptian-born scientist who was formerly a colleague of his at Fort Detrick and who now works at Quantico. For the same reason, the anthrax letters themselves sometimes included notes with crude Muslim slogans.
Rosenberg thinks the perpetrator wasn't trying to kill people—hence the enclosed announcements about what was in the letters, and the admonitions to take penicillin—but he wasn't concerned enough to avoid the risk altogether. He wound up murdering five people, and sowed fear and disruption among millions—all to prove a point to an internal audience, the tiny bioweapons community. In a more benign way, Rosenberg is trying to prove a point, too. The United States officially forswore biological-weapons development in 1969, and signed the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, along with many other nations. But Rosenberg believes that the American bioweapons program, which won't allow itself to be monitored, may not be in strict compliance with the convention. If the perpetrator of the anthrax attacks is who she thinks it is, that would put the American program in a bad light, and it would prove that she was right to demand that the program be monitored.
Is Rosenberg's theory right? At the very least, she is persuasive in arguing that sending the anthrax letters required not just access to the "Ames strain" of anthrax but also knowledge of the weaponization technique developed by Bill Patrick. If the government is saying that the perpetrator was probably an American, it's hard to imagine how it couldn't have been an American who worked in a government-supported bioweapons lab. Think back to the panicky month of October: would knowing that have made you less nervous, or more?
