Riddle Of The Spores

The more a government emphasises its commitment to defence, the less it seems to care about the survival ofits people. Perhaps it is because its attention may be focused on more distant prospects: the establishmentand maintenance of empire, for example, or the dynastic succession of its leaders. Whatever the explanationfor the neglect of their security may be, the people of America have discovered that casual is the precursorof casualty.

But while we should be asking what George Bush and his cabinet knew and failed to respond to beforeSeptember 11, we should also be exploring another, related, question: what do they know now and yet stillrefuse to act upon? Another way of asking the question is this: whatever happened to the anthraxinvestigation?

After five letters containing anthrax spores had been posted, in the autumn, to addresses in the UnitedStates, the Federal Bureau of Investigation promised that it would examine "every bit of information[and] every bit of evidence". But now the investigation appears to have stalled. Microbiologists in theUS are beginning to wonder aloud whether the FBI's problem is not that it knows too little, but that it knowstoo much.

Reducing the number of suspects would not, one might have imagined, have been too much to ask of thebiggest domestic detective agency on earth. While some of the anthrax the terrorist sent was spoiled duringdelivery, one sample appears to have come through intact. The letter received by Senator Tom Daschle containedone trillion anthrax spores per gram: a concentration which only a very few US government scientists, using asecret and strictly controlled technique, know how to achieve. It must, moreover, have been developed in aprofessional laboratory, containing rare and sophisticated "weaponisation" equipment. There is onlya tiny number of facilities - all of them in the US - in which it could have been produced.

The anthrax the terrorist sent belongs to the "Ames" strain of the bacterium, which was extractedfrom an infected cow in Texas in 1981. In December, the Washington Post reported that genetic tests showedthat the variety used by the terrorist was a sub-strain cultivated by scientists at the US army's medicalresearch institute for infectious diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland. That finding was publiclyconfirmed two weeks ago, when the test results were published in the journal Science. New Scientist magazinenotes that the anthrax the terrorist used appears to have emerged from Fort Detrick only recently, as theresearchers found that samples which have been separated from each other for three years acquire"substantial genetic differences".

The Ames strain was distributed by USAMRIID to around 20 other laboratories in the US. Of these, accordingto research conducted by Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, who runs the Federation of American Scientists' biologicalweapons monitoring programme, only four possess the equipment and expertise required for the weaponisation ofthe anthrax sent to Senator Daschle. Three of them are US military laboratories, the fourth is a governmentcontractor. While security in all these places has been lax, the terrorist could not have stolen all theanthrax (around 10 grams) which found its way into the postal system. He must have used the equipment tomanufacture it.

Barbara Hatch Rosenberg has produced a profile of the likely perpetrator. He is an American working withinthe US biodefense industry, with a doctoral degree in the relevant branch of microbiology. He is skilled andexperienced at handling the weapon without contaminating his surroundings. He has full security clearance andaccess to classified information. He is among the tiny number of Americans who had received anthraxvaccinations before September 2001. Only a handful of people fit this description. Rosenberg has told theinternet magazine Salon.com that three senior scientists have identified the same man - a former USAMRIIDscientist - as the likely suspect. She, and they, have told the FBI, but it seems that all the bureau has donein response is to denounce her.

Instead, it has launched the kind of "investigation" which might have been appropriate for theunwitnessed hit and run killing of a person with no known enemies. Rather than homing in on the likelysuspects, in other words, it appears to have cast a net full of holes over the entire population.

In January, three months after the first anthrax attack and at least a month after it knew that thesub-strain used by the attacker came from Fort Detrick, the FBI announced a reward of $2.5m for informationleading to his capture. It circulated 500,000 fliers, and sent letters to all 40,000 members of the AmericanSociety for Microbiology, asking them whether they knew someone who might have done it.

Yet, while it trawled the empty waters, the bureau failed to cast its hook into the only ponds in which theperpetrator could have been lurking. In February, the Wall Street Journal revealed that the FBI had yet tosubpoena the personnel records of the labs which had been working with the Ames strain. Four months after theinvestigation began, in other words, it had not bothered to find out who had been working in the places fromwhich the anthrax must have come. It was not until March, after Barbara Hatch Rosenberg had released herfindings, that the bureau started asking laboratories for samples of their anthrax and the records relating tothem.

To date, it appears to have analysed only those specimens which already happened to be in the hands of itsresearchers or which had been offered, without compulsion, by laboratories. A fortnight ago, the New YorkTimes reported that "government experts investigating the anthrax strikes are still at sea". The FBIclaimed that the problem "is a lack of advisers skilled in the subtleties of germ weapons".

Last week, I phoned the FBI. Why, I asked, when the evidence was so abundant, did the trail appear to havegone cold? "The investigation is continuing," the spokesman replied. "Has it gone cold becauseit has led you to a government office?" I asked. He put down the phone.

Had he stayed on the line, I would have asked him about a few other offences the FBI might wish toconsider. The army's development of weaponised anthrax, for example, directly contravenes both the biologicalweapons convention and domestic law. So does its plan to test live microbes in "aerosol chambers" atthe Edgewood Chemical Biological Center, also in Maryland. So does its development of a genetically modifiedfungus for attacking coca crops in Colombia, and GM bacteria for destroying materials belonging to enemyforces. These, as the research group Project Sunshine has discovered, appear to be just a tiny sample of theillegal offensive biological research programmes which the US government has secretly funded. Severalprominent scientists have suggested that the FBI's investigation is being pursued with less than the rigour wemight have expected because the federal authorities have something to hide.

The FBI has dismissed them as conspiracy theorists. But there is surely a point after which incompetencebecomes an insufficient explanation for failure.

(George Monbiot is Honorary Professor at theDepartment of Politics in Keele and Visiting Professor at the Department of Environmental Science at theUniversity of East London and the author of CaptiveState: the corporate takeover of Britain, and the investigative travel books Poisoned Arrows,Amazon Watershed and No Man's Land. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian, UK)