After I returned home that evening, I sat at my desk to ponder the day’s tragic news. I still couldn’t believe that Bruce was dead.
From prior experience with other highly charged events, I had a good sense of what sparked media interest. I worried that once word of Bruce’s death got out, all hell would break loose, and the media would descend on the institute. I fired off an email to the commander, saying we should get Caree, our public affairs officer, working on potential responses to media queries.
The next two days were quiet. I walked around the somber hallways commiserating with people, allowing them to vent, and trying to do my part to hold the institute together. Bruce’s “home,” in the Bacteriology Division, especially, was in mourning. On July 31, two days after Bruce’s death, I spoke with several personnel in the division’s front office. With teary, red eyes, the division secretary shared that Bruce had told her that the FBI harassment would end only “when I’m dead.” In retrospect that was clearly a cry for help.
We frequently spoke of the “USAMRIID family,” built by generations of workers who had spent their entire careers there. The sorrow of the Bacteriology Division’s personnel was emblematic of the pall that crept over the entire institute. Many had felt suspicion and anger with the FBI investigation and especially the investigation of Bruce. They believed that the course of events had not needed to take such a tragic turn, and that the army should have backed up one of its own scientists. For most the idea that Bruce, our “quirky uncle” who wore rainbow-colored suspenders, would do something as heinous as sending the anthrax letters was inconceivable.
Someone must have leaked Bruce’s death to the press—either the FBI or someone within the institute—because several colleagues received early-morning phone calls the next two days, on July 30 and 31, from news outlets. Hank Heine recalls a midnight call from the Los Angeles Times: “You work with Bruce Ivins. The Justice Department is going to announce that he is the anthrax mailer. Do you have any comments?” He responded, “I talked to the grand jury, and I can’t make any comments,” and hung up. Sensing a gathering storm, the next morning a group from Bacteriology met at Nallin Pond, a picturesque area on Fort Detrick nearby USAMRIID with rolling green hills, weeping willows, picnic tables, and an old barn. They wanted to get out of the institute to a place where they could be by themselves, talk privately, and avoid inviting unwanted scrutiny. They were also concerned that they didn’t know who was listening or what was bugged. “We wanted to get ahead of it because we knew what was coming,” Hank says. They knew Bruce would be “thrown under the bus, because he was dead,” but they didn’t want the media reports to dictate Bruce’s memory, and they wanted to ensure that he would be treated like any other colleague who had died tragically.
“We had relied on each other for years,” Pat Worsham said, “with no help from the outside. Nobody else supported us; nobody gave us moral support. We went to the people who had carried us through all along, and that was each other.” The group planned memorial services for Bruce, on and off Fort Detrick. “There were people who gave little testimonials and we reminisced, and we laughed, and we cried,” she recalled.
David Willman, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter from the Los Angeles Times covering the anthrax investigation, had scheduled a visit to USAMRIID for August 7. That visit never happened. Instead, he broke the story about Bruce’s suicide on August 1.
The wave of media interest came crashing down even more heavily than I had predicted. The day after the story broke, a feeding frenzy vaulted the story to the front page of the Washington Post and other newspapers across the country. It would continue relentlessly for more days than any other USAMRIID news event I had experienced.
We issued a press release. In addition, Caree asked me whether we should release a photo of Bruce, because news outlets were asking for one. We debated the benefits and the downside of doing so, but decided to release a photo of Bruce wearing a formal jacket and tie with a boutonnière. I thought his lopsided, tentative smile and sad eyes in the photo ironically fitting for the occasion. Numerous other photos eventually made it into the newspapers: images of Bruce as a Red Cross volunteer, receiving an award for his research, and juggling.
I caught up with a frazzled institute commander at the end of the day. He wasn’t getting much support from the army higher-ups, who seemed to be distancing themselves; however, he did receive a nice note from the army surgeon general, who expressed condolences and concern for the well-being of the Ivins family.
I had to leave town on August 2 for a previously scheduled trip. I felt guilty leaving after this bombshell had dropped, but the commander encouraged me to go anyway. Before I left, we discussed the possibility of submitting a memo of formal protest to the army surgeon general about the way the investigation had treated our personnel and the FBI’s methods used to “squeeze” Bruce.
While I was out of town, I watched the news feeds in the evening, and the news content at that time appeared balanced, noting why Bruce was under suspicion, but also included his scientific achievements and endearing quirks. The institute held a memorial service at Fort Detrick for friends and colleagues on base, attended by hundreds. Afterward a couple of colleagues were toasting Bruce’s memory at a bar, when the anthrax story appeared on TV. They were all shouting at the TV, which upset some people around them, and one of the bacteriology group nearly got into a fight.
I returned the following Saturday, August 9, 2008, in time to attend a second, larger memorial service for Bruce at his church in downtown Frederick, Maryland. The bright sun cast shadows across the cobblestone sidewalks as I walked briskly down the narrow streets to St. John the Evangelist Roman Catholic Church. Three days earlier the FBI had named Bruce as the anthrax letter mailer. They cited his access to the presumed anthrax source (Flask RMR-1029), his knowledge of spore-growing techniques, long hours spent in the lab around the time of the attacks in 2001, a presumed attempt to throw the FBI off his trail based on an incorrect sample he submitted to them, and a history of psychological problems and odd behaviors. So I wasn’t surprised to see a group of reporters camped out across the street from the church, with some speaking into microphones in front of camera tripods.
The large chapel was packed. I squeezed into a pew near the front just before the service began. One by one Bruce’s colleagues, friends, and family came to the pulpit to speak. Bret Purcell, a Bacteriology coworker, summarized Bruce’s scientific achievements, and Pat Worsham, Bacteriology Division chief, provided more personal anecdotes about his endearing quirks, pranks, and comedic moments.1
Genuine love, sadness, and a chorus of sniffles surrounded me in the chapel, as friends, colleagues, and family members dabbed their eyes. I thought to myself, This doesn’t seem like the funeral of a murderer. The reception afterward had a touching display of Bruce’s family photos from various stages of his life and a complete bibliography of his scientific publications.
Pat Worsham met a man at the reception who claimed to be a fellow parishioner but then started peppering her with questions. When she noticed him writing down her answers, she realized he was a reporter. She berated him, telling him that he needed to leave immediately or she would call someone to escort him out. He was not the only mole in the crowd, because I recognized many quotations from the service in the press the next day.
The institute had been in the FBI’s crosshairs for seven years, but the naming of Bruce as the anthrax perpetrator brought the most heat thus far. The commander and a DoD undersecretary had discussed a potential strategy to counter some of the bad press. Two days after the funeral, at our routine Monday-morning headquarters meeting, the commander informed us that the secretary of the army had visited him the week prior, while I was away. During that meeting the commander had raised his concerns and counterarguments about the FBI’s case, including objecting to the treatment of our personnel and Bruce’s family during the investigation. The secretary told him forcefully that the army would make no objection to the FBI case and would focus its efforts on moving forward. The army preferred to emphasize the changes that had already been implemented to USAMRIID’s program.
The commander told us, “I probably made my one mistake [as a commander].” The next one would cost him his job. That bothered me, but I was not surprised. I had been around long enough to know that the army would protect its interests and try to move on. The Pentagon expends enough energy regularly dodging alligators. The last thing the leadership would want was finger-pointing between different branches of government (Defense and Justice), but the FBI investigation was the mother of all public relations nightmares. It was probably good that I had missed the meeting with the secretary. I might have pressed the point and become the sacrificial lamb.
USAMRIID has numerous visiting congressmen and senators, who swing by regularly in limos or helicopters to watch laboratory personnel working in space suits, because they read about it in The Hot Zone. It all makes for a good “dog and pony” show. On August 15 the army surgeon general and Fort Detrick’s commanding general visited USAMRIID together, but for a significantly different purpose. The surgeon general had “walked the halls” before as our prior commanding general. Even so the frequency of his visits during this period was unprecedented. In my ten years associated with USAMRIID at the time, I had seen only one surgeon general visit for a few minutes. The visit by the secretary of the army and the army surgeon general in quick succession demonstrated how serious the Pentagon considered the Ivins affair.
The institute held a series of town-hall meetings, so the two generals could address the entire workforce. The surgeon general opened by expressing condolences for the loss of Bruce and the tainting of the institute. He likened the events surrounding the anthrax letters and suspicion cast on USAMRIID to the institute’s “own 9/11.” Similar to what happened to the country after 9/11, we couldn’t go back to the previous state of affairs.
He demonstrated amazing perception and empathy, recognizing the institute’s profound loss of one of its own, even while acknowledging the FBI’s grave accusations against Bruce.
Then he spoke about the future. The army would do what it knows best: it would set up a defensive perimeter to protect the institute. The Pentagon would form a task force, led by a two-star general, to develop new policies for managing the bioweapon agents in our inventory. This task force would serve as the “tip of the spear” for anything related to the anthrax attacks, including dealing with the press.
Although the visiting generals tried to reassure the assembled USAMRIID workforce, anyone who has dealt with the army bureaucracy knows that when they hear, “We’re from the army and we’re here to help,” it is time to duck for cover.
The mood in the audience reflected concern that our already-diminished autonomy to do science would be restricted further. The army would get into all aspects of our business—down to everyone’s underwear brand name, size, and color. We were assured that the task force would need our help to reform our threat agent policies, but the staff greeted this notion with significant skepticism. We anticipated further “punishment” on the horizon.
We had reason to be skeptical. We had heard the same after 9/11 and the anthrax attacks, when many policies changed. So the army could have chosen a different tack to trumpet the significant changes we had made already over the previous seven years. Instead it decided to do one better. The task force issued numerous new policies that would further burden the already-reeling institute. As virology technician Dianne Negley complained, people “who didn’t understand science, who didn’t know how to work on this stuff put new regulations on that were not for our best safety. . . . You’re causing the possibility of another accident. You’re increasing it instead of decreasing it.”
Four days later I received a short-notice request from our commanding general’s headquarters office across Fort Detrick to bring everyone there immediately who had been involved in Bruce’s laboratory clearance. I made a couple of quick phone calls and emails to pull the relevant people together. Before the meeting we sat down and drafted key points about the differences in how we conducted operations before versus after 9/11.
We learned that the general had been “asked” (I suspected ordered) by the Pentagon’s task force to do an interview with a reporter from USA Today who planned to write a negative editorial about the institute. I was surprised, and wondered, Wasn’t that the task force’s job, to provide top cover with the press?
A group of us, including the USAMRIID commander; Bret Purcell, the general’s chief of staff; the public affairs officers from USAMRIID and from the general’s staff; and me, met with the general to help prepare him for his interview. I had concerns about the interview because I had witnessed how a prior commander was mishandled by the press.
At the end of the meeting, I told the general, “I am afraid this is a set-up.”
He tilted his head and with a resigned shrug responded, “Welcome to my world.”
After the meeting I cornered the two public affairs officers in the hallway and asked why the task force had changed its ground rules. And why was the task force so anxious now to respond to the press, when it had not done so previously? They didn’t know, but they said they would bring up my concerns with the general.
As we left the building, I shared with my colleagues my concerns that I feared the Pentagon wanted a military face associated with the crisis, and it might be setting the general up for a fall.
Fortunately, the interview went well. USA Today printed a counter-editorial by our general, which was far better than any of us could have hoped for. I am happy to report that my fears weren’t realized.
A year and a half after Bruce’s death, the FBI formally closed the anthrax case with the conclusion that Bruce Ivins was the sole perpetrator of the anthrax attacks.
To this day his closest colleagues believe Bruce was innocent—a convenient patsy in a high-profile case that the FBI was under tremendous pressure to solve. Had the FBI decided that Bruce was the killer and ignored any evidence that did not fit with its hypothesis, rather than try to understand and explain the pieces that didn’t fit? Although Bruce conducted significant research on anthrax and the anthrax vaccine during his thirty-six-year career (eighteen of those years at USAMRIID), some of the nation’s top biodefense experts have questioned whether he had the skill set to create the form of anthrax found in the letters. Hank Heine asserts, “First and foremost, despite what everybody says, he actually didn’t have the knowledge to produce the material the way it was in those envelopes.” Jeff Adamovicz claims that the spores in the letters “contain[ed] high levels of silica and tin” and cites a 2011 scientific paper by anthrax experts that pointed to “a high degree of manufacturing skill, contrary to reassurances that the attack germs were unsophisticated,” although others thought that the tin could have been a random contaminant.2 Jeff suggests that the FBI “supposedly tried to re-create the spores using equipment Bruce had access to, using the time frame in which they speculated he did it, and they couldn’t re-create that material.” The FBI never explained the origin of another organism found in one of the letters, Bacillus subtilis niger. The agency couldn’t locate it in his laboratory or in RMR-1029. Furthermore, Jeff notes, they “found no physical evidence, despite extensive searches of his home, his cars, his mailboxes, his laboratory.”
Graduating from a liquid slurry to the dried powder in the letters would be a significant engineering leap for a microbiologist. It takes more than just putting it in a dryer to prevent clumping and binding to other particles in the environment, and the average Joe would be hard pressed to do so in his bathtub or garage. What is more, the spores in the letter were exponentially smaller—and therefore more concentrated per given amount—than anything created by the U.S. or Soviet bioweapons programs over decades. The dryer that Bruce was presumed to have used, a lyophilizer kept in a nearby hallway, was broken. Pat Worsham doesn’t believe it was physically possible to generate the spores inside USAMRIID. She explains, “The lyophilizer we had in the Division at the time was on the cold side; it was extremely heavy. If he [Bruce] was going to take that in containment he would’ve had to get help to put it in the airlock and get it out and run a decon, which we did not do ourselves, and take it back out.” Hank says, even if it had worked and Bruce had pulled it into the lab, “it has no filter on it, and in the process of drying those spores down, it would have sucked spores into the whole instrument and . . . some of them would have gotten blown back out through the vacuum source,” causing a massive contamination. The FBI “tore it all apart and looked for anthrax DNA and they found nothing,” Jeff concludes.
Hank also argues that although the FBI claimed Bruce was working long hours in the lab immediately after 9/11, Bruce commonly worked long and late hours, and everyone knew that was his normal pattern. Furthermore, right after 9/11 Fort Detrick went under Threatcon Delta. Full lockdown. It was hard to get on base. Hank was stuck overseas for a week. “Bruce, living right there, could walk up and get in and was doing everyone’s animal checks,” for their experiments, including his own. “Bruce was kinda taking care of everybody’s stuff. When did Bruce have time to grow up and harvest anthrax, turning anthrax into powder?” Hank asks.
Hank believes it would have taken Bruce nine months or more to produce the number of spores in the letters, not the few weeks around 9/11 when the FBI presumed he did. Using basic algebra he argues that to fill about 2 grams of anthrax powder in each letter at a concentration of 1012 spores per gram, and multiplied by 5 letters would require 1013 (10 trillion) spores. “The yield for a spore run is 108 (100 million) under the best of conditions.” That is multiple orders of magnitude to scale up—a difference of 100,000 times, which translates to 100 to 200 liters of anthrax fermenting. Such a large-scale operation would be hard to hide from coworkers and avoid contaminating the lab. Pat Worsham says, “The fact that some of those morphs were in RMR-1029 I think is a clue, but it is not proof that it came from here because a lot of spores in that prep came from Dugway [Proving Ground].3 And they were running fermenters [at Dugway]. And I have not seen those kinds of morphs in our spore preparations. . . . We worked with flasks, so that’s small volume, relatively, compared to fermenter runs. That’s why we got Dugway to make spores for us, because it was hard to make enough.”
Despite the FBI’s conclusions, and the portrait painted by the FBI and in the media of Bruce as a gun-toting, homicidal sociopath who cross-dressed and obsessed about a woman’s sorority, Bruce’s coworkers held a very different view of the man. Hank says the final piece is Bruce himself. He was a devout Catholic. Even if Bruce came up with some strange justification to do this to give the country a wake-up call or for some other reason, Hank says, “As soon as he realized that people actually died as a result of it, I don’t think he could have lived with himself, let alone sit there and hang out with everybody for eight more years. That’s the Bruce I knew and know.” Jeff Adamovicz agrees: “I don’t think he had the moral fortitude to do it. I think you have to have a certain amount of hatred in your personality to pull something like this off, and I don’t think he had that. He volunteered for the Red Cross; he juggled; he sang at church choir. . . . He wasn’t an aggressive person.”
Paul F. Kemp, Bruce’s attorney, called the investigation “an orchestrated dance of carefully worded statements, heaps of innuendo, and a staggering lack of real evidence” that appeared to have been successful in its objective.4 Bruce Ivins is dead, so we will never know his side of the story, which has left his colleagues frustrated that there was no trial, where both perspectives might have been heard.
Some have said that because Bruce committed suicide, he must have been guilty, but it isn’t hard to see what could have driven Bruce to suicide. His downward spiral took many turns, as piece by piece his connection to his livelihood and coworkers unraveled. He faced legal bills in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. And after he had worked thirty-plus years for the government on defenses against anthrax, the FBI planned to seek the death penalty. All this could seem like the ultimate betrayal and might easily push someone on the edge over the edge.
One of the bedrocks of the U.S. democracy, that someone is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, seems to have been ignored. As one colleague noted, there is “no such thing as guilty by suicide.”
Sadly, this story has no happy ending. Twenty-two individuals became infected with anthrax from tainted letters, and five of them died. Dr. Stephen Hatfill, the FBI’s first “person of interest,” was eventually exonerated. Although he received a $5.8 million settlement, his life and career had been shattered. Dr. Bruce Ivins died from his own hand.
After his death four of his colleagues, all anthrax experts, wrote a tribute to Bruce in the scientific journal Microbe.5 In addition to citing his long history of scientific accomplishments, they noted that he was “an enthusiastic teacher, coworker, and mentor to his technicians, students, and colleagues . . . a skilled poet, songwriter, and musician; a dedicated volunteer. . . . His colleagues and friends will remember him not only for his dedication to his work, but also for his humor, curiosity, and great generosity.”
Getting those four scientific rivals to agree on anything was an accomplishment in and of itself.
Since Bruce’s death, the handling of the anthrax case has been questioned by several government authorities and other agencies. Senator Patrick Leahy expressed skepticism that Ivins acted alone when hearing testimony from FBI Director Robert Mueller in committee hearings. A National Academy of Science committee concluded that it was “impossible to reach any definitive conclusion about the origins of the anthrax in the letters, based solely on the available scientific evidence.” The report also challenged the FBI and the U.S. Justice Department’s conclusion that a single-spore batch of anthrax maintained by Ivins in his laboratory at Fort Detrick was the parent material for the spores in the anthrax letters. Even different branches of the Justice Department appeared to have trouble deciding what to believe, as its own civil attorneys “contradicted their own department’s conclusion that Ivins was unquestionably the anthrax killer” when filing their motions to defend the government against a civil case brought by the family of the first victim (Robert Stevens).6 The case was settled out of court.
The scientific debate will continue; however, vindication for Bruce Ivins seems far off, although in a bizarre twist, a former FBI agent who led the anthrax investigation for four years, is suing his former agency, stating there is “a staggering amount of exculpatory evidence” that the FBI has yet to reveal. He accuses the FBI of trying “to railroad the prosecution” and bolster its claim of Ivins’s guilt after his death.7
Dr. Vahid Majidi, chief scientist for the FBI’s anthrax investigation, wrote a book titled A Spore on the Grassy Knoll: An Insider’s Account of the 2001 Anthrax Mailings, which implies that Bruce’s innocence or guilt will not be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. It will remain, like the Kennedy assassination, shrouded in “what ifs” and potential conspiracy theories for decades. Only God knows the truth about what happened and whether Bruce Ivins really perpetrated the anthrax attacks. Unfortunately, the negative impact of the investigation on the institute continues to this day. Some scientists, fed up with the regulations that the army and other agencies ratcheted up in the aftermath, voted with their feet.
The army has routine requirements for employees to watch training videos on espionage and terrorism defense. To add insult to injury, alongside a host of spies who had sold out to the Russians or other foreign countries, one year the videos included Bruce Ivins as an example of suspicious characters to be on the lookout for. Many colleagues were outraged when they saw it.
Not everyone believes as strongly as Bruce’s colleagues Hank Heine, Jeff Adamovicz, and Pat Worsham that Bruce could not have sent the letters. Some are more equivocal, stating that they “didn’t know then and don’t know now,” whether Bruce could have done it. There may be others in the institute who agree with the FBI’s conclusion, but they have been less vocal. However, eleven years after his death, several of his closest colleagues remain defiant.
Pat Worsham says now, “I think we were bitter. I think we still are bitter, angry, that it went down the way it did. I think that the FBI knew how hard they’d been pushing him, that he had psychological issues, and they were hitting all the buttons that they could possibly hit.”
Hank Heine says, “I’ll go to my grave believing Bruce had nothing to do with it.”
If you walk down the narrow hallway next to the Bacteriology Division offices at USAMRIID today, you will pass a locked glass case on the wall for displaying awards received by division members. There are only three awards currently in the display case. The one defiantly at dead center is a medal and certificate for “Exceptional Civilian Service” to the government. The name on the award: Bruce Ivins.