    FBI Closes in on Anthrax Terrorist

    Prime Suspect is a Zionist
    by
    Hector Carreon
    La Voz de Aztlan
    2/26/2002

    Jewish microbiologist Dr. Philip M. Zack may be behind the deadly
    anthrax contaminated letters that were mailed to NBC's Tom Brokaw,
    Senator Tom Daschle and others, according to FBI sources. In a
    rapidly unravelling investigation by the FBI, it appears that the
    "Arab- hating-Jew" was behind a vile conspiracy to frame a colleague
    who was born in Egypt and who worked, along with Dr. Zack, at the
    U.S. Army's Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases in
    Fort Detrick, Md.

    La Voz de Aztlan has maintained from the beginning that the anthrax-
    laced letters seemed contrived and were purposely written to make
    them appear that they were coming from someone in the Islamic World.
    New information just released by the FBI confirms our suspicions. On
    October 9, 2001 we published "Anthrax Terrorists may be Zionists" in
    which we outlined the reasons for our suspicions and in addition
    reported on a letter we received with a yellowish powder. On October
    24, 2001 we published an editorial "Anthrax Letter Messages Seem
    Contrived" in which we commented on our theory concerning the origin
    of the letters. We also published pictures of the three actual
    letters and envelopes. We have now compared the handwriting on these
    letters to the one we received and it looks suspiciously the same. We
    are not handwriting experts and have made the decision to publish the
    envelope and letter we received so that our readership can see for
    themselves. Our local police department never came to pick up the
    envelope and letter and we still have them in a double zip-lock
    plastic bag. The letter and envelope addressed to La Voz de Aztlan
    are published at http://www.aztlan.net/letterbiochem.htm

    The case against Dr. Phillip M. Zack began unravelling when Egyptian-
    born scientist Dr. Ayaad Assaad, now a U.S. citizen, was called in by
    the FBI for an interview on October 2, 2001. The FBI had received an
    unsigned letter falsely accusing Dr. Assaad of being responsible for
    mailing the anthrax tainted letters. The letter stated, among other
    things, "Dr. Assaad is a potential biological terrorist," and "I have
    worked with Dr. Assaad, and I heard him say that he has a vendetta
    against the U.S. government and that if anything happens to him, he
    told his sons to carry on." Rosemary A. McDermott, attorney for Dr.
    Assaad, stated that here is a very close connection between the
    person who sent that letter and the person who sent the anthrax. Ms.
    McDermott said "The person who wrote that letter knew intimate
    details of my client's life and his professional history, and about
    the Fort Detrick operation. I don't think that is a coincidence." The
    Fort Detrick biochemical research laboratory has maintained stores of
    weapons-grade anthrax that is commonly known as the Ames strain of
    Bacillus anthracis.

    The anonymous letter falsely accusing Dr. Assaad was was sent a
    little after the September 11 terrorist attacks but before anyone
    knew about the anthrax-laced letters. On October 5, 2001, about 10
    days after the anonymous letter was mailed, Robert Stevens, Photo
    Editor of The Sun in Florida, became the first of five individuals to
    die from an anthrax infection.

    The racist and bigoted attacks on Dr. Ayaad Assaad by Zionist Philip
    Zack and others started while he worked at the Army's bioweapons lab
    at Fort Detrick in Maryland during the 1990's. This is when a vicious
    racist vendetta was launched against the scientist of Arab descent. A
    group of coworkers led by then Army Lt. Col. Philip Zack began a
    hateful campaign to harass and get Dr. Assaad fired from his duties.
    The Zionists apparently wanted to get rid of anyone that could
    uncover their sinister plans which consisted in stealing "weapons
    grade anthrax" and other deadly viruses used in biological weapons.
    The conspirators had the support of the lab's former commander. Among
    other things, the bigots wrote and passed around a very crude poem
    denigrating Arab Americans, an obscene rubber camel and constantly
    poked fun at Dr. Assaad's use of the English language. In 1991 Dr.
    Assaad discovered the eight-page poem in his mailbox. The poem was
    lewd and mocked Dr. Assaad. The poem also referred to the rubber
    camel that was passed around. It was outfitted with all manner of
    sexually explicit appendages. The poem in part read: ``In Assaad's
    honor we created this beast; it represents life lower than yeast.''
    The bigots noted that the rubber camel will be given each week ``to
    who did the least.''

    It appears that the conspirators created an extremely toxic workplace
    on purpose in order to take control of the laboratory. The lab became
    very dysfunctional and hostile to the few "good" scientists that
    worked there which included Dr. Assaad. Dr. Assaad said ``This person
    knew in advance what was going to happen and created a suitable,
    well-fitted scapegoat for this action. You do not need to be a Nobel
    laureate to put two and two together.'' Dr. Assaad said he reported
    everything to his supervisor, Col. David R. Franz, but that Colonel
    Franz ``kicked me out of his office and slammed the door in my face,
    because he didn't want to talk about it.'' Dr. Assaad was eventually
    dismissed by Colonel Franz as were two other scientists of Arab
    descent.

    The evidence against the racist Zionist bigot Dr. Philip "Mengele"
    Zack is very strong. Lab specimens of anthrax spores, Ebola virus and
    other pathogens disappeared from the Army's biological warfare
    research facility in the early 1990s during the very same period that
    the conspirators were harassing Dr. Assaad. An 1992 inquiry into the
    disappearance of the deadly pathogens found evidence that someone was
    secretly entering the laboratory late at night to conduct
    unauthorized research involving anthrax. A numerical counter on a
    piece of lab equipment had been rolled back to hide work done by the
    mystery researcher. A lab scientist, Dr. Mary Beth Downs, told
    investigators that she had come to work several times in 1992 to find
    that someone had been in the lab at odd hours to use the electron
    microscope to conduct some clandestine research. Dr. Downs reported
    in a memo that whoever was using the microscope was "either in a big
    hurry or didn't know what they were doing." Documents from the
    inquiry show that one unauthorized person who was observed entering
    the laboratory at night was Lt. Col. Philip Zack who at the time no
    longer worked at Fort Detrick. A surveillance camera recorded Lt.
    Col. Zack being let in at 8:40 P.M. on January 23, 1992, by another
    conspirator by the name Dr. Marian Rippy. Dr. Philip M. Zack has not
    been arrested.

    http://aztlan.net/zack.htm

    -------------------------------------------------------------------

    September 19, 2005

    Covering the Tracks of the Anthrax Attacks
    What, where, why -- who?

    by Justin Raimondo

    Four years ago today, letters containing anthrax were postmarked from
    Trenton, N.J., to five major American media outlets, including ABC
    News, NBC News, CBS News, the New York Post, and AMI Media, a
    publisher of supermarket tabloids. Thus began a series of attacks over
    several weeks that terrorized the nation, infected 22 people, killed
    five  and played a key role in amplifying the post-9/11 hysteria and
    paranoia that took the nation on a course set for war.

    Three weeks after the first mailings, two letters containing highly
    weaponized anthrax  far more deadly than the relatively crude
    concoction contained in the first letters  showed up in the offices
    of two Democratic senators, Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. The Capitol
    emptied, most members of Congress fled Washington, and the country
    already jumpy as a result of the 9/11 terrorist attacks  was
    practically prostrate with fear.

    Remember how the War Party used these attacks to stoke up sentiment
    for attacking Iraq? Andrew Sullivan declared:

    "At this point, it seems to me that a refusal to extend the war to
    Iraq is not even an option. We have to extend it to Iraq. It is by far
    the most likely source of this weapon; it is clearly willing to use
    such weapons in the future; and no war against terrorism of this kind
    can be won without dealing decisively with the Iraqi threat. We no
    longer have any choice in the matter. Slowly, incrementally, a Rubicon
    has been crossed. The terrorists have launched a biological weapon
    against the United States. They have therefore made biological warfare
    thinkable and thus repeatable. We once had a doctrine that such a
    Rubicon would be answered with a nuclear response. We backed down on
    that threat in the Gulf War but Saddam didn't dare use biological
    weapons then. Someone has dared to use them now. Our response must be
    as grave as this new threat."

    Nuke 'em!, said Andy  without a single iota of evidence that Iraq was
    involved. But who needs evidence? That's soooo September 10th.
    Everything's changed, we were told: we don't require evidence, not
    anymore. All we need are vaguely portentous phrases, such as "a
    Rubicon has been crossed." We can make up the rest as we go along

    Over at the Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol was gleefully rubbing his
    hands together and cackling that the administration seemed finally to
    have signed on to the neocon prescription for taking the "war on
    terrorism" beyond Afghanistan, to Iraq:

    "Has the administration come around thanks to repeated efforts at
    persuasion by The Weekly Standard (and a few other hawks)? Perhaps.
    But a likelier explanation is that they have come to believe we'll
    have to take the war beyond Afghanistan  to Iraq and other state
    sponsors of terror  because they've found evidence of support by
    'other states' for very recent and sinister bin Laden-related
    activities.

    "What if the anthrax cases in Florida are an act of terrorism? What if
    the presence of the anthrax spores there is connected to the fact that
    a few of the September 11 terrorists, led by Mohammed Atta, lived
    within a few miles? What if Atta  or some other bin Laden operative
    had access to anthrax from the terrorist-sponsoring country that we
    know has a long record of developing anthrax as a biological weapon,
    Iraq?"

    Unlike the more emotive Sullivan  for whom evidence of an Iraq
    connection would only be an unnecessary drag on his breathy
    imprecations  the cool-headed Kristol came up with a scenario meant
    to convince the reader that such a connection was at least possible.
    It involved the now famous  and decidedlydisproved  meeting between
    Mohammed Atta and an alleged Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague.
    Although the Czech police denied it, the myth persisted, and grew: not
    only did Atta plan the 9/11 terrorist attacks in collaboration with
    Iraqi intelligence on his trip to Prague, he also  according to
    Kristol and James "World War IV" Woolsey  hatched the anthrax plot.
    However, given that this mythical meeting, conducted in the course of
    six busy hours, was alleged to have taken place at the Prague airport,
    and was conducted within range of security cameras, one wonders if
    passing vials of anthrax under such circumstances might have proven
    somewhat problematic.

    Oh well, the War Party didn't need especially logical arguments in
    stoking the fires of American rage: the smoke had yet to lift from
    downtown Manhattan, and the victims of the Twin Towers and Pentagon
    attacks were still being counted. As anthrax panic gripped the nation,
    the White House was preparing to extend the war to "other countries"
    a prospect Kristol & Co. found thrilling. If the administration
    wouldn't bow to the bellicose blandishments of the Weekly Standard,
    then perhaps they would bend before the amplified fear of terrorism
    raised by the anthrax attacks.

    And so they did.

    In retrospect, outrage and fear generated by the anthrax attacks were
    essential elements of the propaganda campaign designed to link Iraq to
    terrorism in the U.S. and drag us into war. The attacks were so
    propitious in this regard that one might be forgiven for wondering if
    the perpetrators had this as their intention. Certainly they took
    great pains to convey the impression that the postal pestilence was
    authored by angry Arabs of one sort or another.

    Also, in retrospect, the investigation into the anthrax mystery seems
    remarkably botched, a kind of pre-Katrina premonition of a dangerous
    even criminal  incompetence. The authorities quickly seized on one
    Steven J. Hatfill, a government scientist and a somewhat hapless
    figure, against whom not a single shred of solid evidence could be
    marshaled. Yet Hatfill was branded a "person of interest" and
    relentlessly harassed by government agents, who  in collaboration
    with a certainNew York Times columnist  destroyed his reputation.
    U.S. government agents followed him everywhere, made his life a
    misery, and refuse to this day to either apologize or offer some small
    compensation to a man whose life they have ruined.

    It is interesting that the U.S. government was all too eager to follow
    the path suggested by journalists such as Nicholas Kristof, one of
    Hatfill's earliest and most relentless nemeses, while studiously
    ignoring the clues provided by others. The Hartford Courant ran a
    series of articles by Dave Altimari, Lynne Tuohy, and Jack Dolan that
    not only pointed in the direction of the possible perpetrators, but
    named names and implied a political-ideological motive behind the
    crime.

    The anthrax strain has been positively identified as being of the Ames
    variety, of the sort stored at USAMRIID, the U.S. government
    biological weapons facility at Fort Detrick, Md., and a few other such
    labs. Soon after the anthrax attacks, the Courantexposed the weird
    problems besetting the Ft. Detrick facility, which had apparently been
    missing large quantities of biological toxins, including not only
    anthrax but also hanta virus, Ebola virus, and other lethal pathogens.
    These mysterious disappearances apparently occurred:

    "During a turbulent period of labor complaints and recriminations
    among rival scientists there, documents from an internal Army inquiry
    show. The 1992 inquiry also found evidence that someone was secretly
    entering a lab late at night to conduct unauthorized research,
    apparently involving anthrax. A numerical counter on a piece of lab
    equipment had been rolled back to hide work done by the mystery
    researcher, who left the misspelled label 'antrax' in the machine's
    electronic memory, according to the documents obtained by The
    Courant."

    This "mystery researcher" may have been someone at the very center of
    that "turbulent period," one Philip Zack. Zack and a group of
    personnel at Ft. Detrick had been systematically harassing an Egyptian
    co-worker, Dr. Ayaad Assaad. The Courant reports:

    "Documents from the inquiry show that one unauthorized person who was
    observed entering the lab building at night was Langford's
    predecessor, Lt. Col. Philip Zack, who at the time no longer worked at
    Fort Detrick. A surveillance camera recorded Zack being let in at 8:40
    p.m. on Jan. 23, 1992, apparently by Dr. Marian Rippy, a lab
    pathologist and close friend of Zack's, according to a report filed by
    a security guard."

    The harassment of Assaad, detailed here, took on bizarrely juvenile
    forms: an obscene poem, a rubber camel delivered to his mailbox, a
    constant stream of racist anti-Arab remarks such as one might find
    posted these days on Little Green Footballs. Court documents reveal a
    harrowing experience of cruel and relentless persecution carried out
    by a small clique, including Zack, who called themselves the "camel
    club."

    While the anthrax letters received enormous publicity, one mailed
    missive that might provide a key clue to the identity of the
    perpetrators has received very little: an anonymous letter, sent in
    late September before the anthrax drama unfolded, to the military
    police at the Marine base in Quantico, Va., accused Dr. Assaad of
    being behind a terrorist plot to unleash biological horrors in
    American cities. The author revealed a detailed knowledge of Dr.
    Assaad's career at USAMRIID and claimed to have formerly worked with
    him.

    Assaad was interrogated by the FBI on Oct. 3, then let go after the
    letter was determined to be a hoax. When the effects of the anthrax
    attacks began to make themselves known, the full horror of what had
    happened began to dawn on Assaad  but not, apparently, on the
    authorities. Says Assaad: "My theory is, whoever this person is knew
    in advance what was going to happen (and created) a suitable,
    well-fitted scapegoat for this action." The odd timing of the letter
    sent after the anthrax letters were mailed, but before their deadly
    contents were known  certainly seems to point in this direction. The
    Courant reports FBI spokesman Chris Murray saying "the FBI is not
    tracking the source of the anonymous letter, despite its curious
    timing, coming a matter of days before the existence of anthrax-laced
    mail became known." Instead of following the trail of this important
    clue, investigators went off on a tangent with the Hatfill angle,
    which proved [.pdf] to be a dead end.

    An Egyptian scientist, albeit one who is an American citizen and had
    lived in this country for quite some time, had been set up as the
    scapegoat for the crime  before knowledge of the mailed anthrax was
    generally known. This same scientist had been the object of a hate
    campaign generated by virulently anti-Arab co-workers at Ft. Detrick,
    at least one of whom was videotaped surreptitiously entering the lab
    at night (after he had been dismissed from his position and was not
    authorized to enter in any event).

    Whoever wrote the poison pen letter denouncing Dr. Assaad as a
    potential terrorist in all likelihood knows something about the
    origins of the anthrax attack. In this context, the crudeness of the
    messages accompanying the anthrax  "death to America" and "death to
    Israel"  seems like an obvious effort to divert attention away from
    the real authors of a crime that goes unsolved to this day.

    Just as the Bush administration was looking for an excuse  any excuse
     to take out after Iraq, the anthrax horror reared its head and
    silenced any remaining opposition to the war plans of this
    administration, at least momentarily. It all seems like such a
    terribly convenient coincidence. In retrospect, it was as much a part
    of the vortex of fearmongering that sucked us into war as tales of
    Iraqi WMD palmed off by Ahmed Chalabi's "heroes in error" and the
    extravagant effusions of Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice. No, I am
    not suggesting that the U.S. government or the Bush administration
    carried out these attacks: yet whoever did surely had in mind making
    it easier for the War Party to unleash mass death and destruction in
    the Middle East, a veritable wave of hate that would carry us to
    Baghdad and beyond.

    Why isn't Congress investigating this? Where is the probe into the
    "intelligence failure" that managed to target and destroy an innocent
    person while pulling investigators away from evidence pointing in a
    more plausible direction? Whoever pulled off the anthrax attacks is
    still out there, waiting for the right moment to strike. This is a
    case that must be solved  because there's more where that came from.

    http://www.antiwar.com/justin/

    [Note: Justin Raimondo has been in the forefront of exposing the
    hate-motivated injustices that Drs. Assaad and Hatfill have faced.
    Check www.antiwar.com for previous intriguing and revealing columns in
    which he dissects especially the attempted frame-up of an
    Egyptian-American scientist by, it appears, a hateful, bigoted Jewish
    colleague.]

    ---------------------------------------------------------------------

    Anthrax Missing From Army Lab
    January 20, 2002
    By JACK DOLAN And DAVE ALTIMARI, Courant Staff Writers

    Lab specimens of anthrax spores, Ebola virus and other pathogens
    disappeared from the Army's biological warfare research facility in the
    early 1990s, during a turbulent period of labor complaints and
    recriminations among rival scientists there, documents from an internal
    Army inquiry show.

    The 1992 inquiry also found evidence that someone was secretly entering
    a lab late at night to conduct unauthorized research, apparently
    involving anthrax. A numerical counter on a piece of lab equipment had
    been rolled back to hide work done by the mystery researcher, who left
    the misspelled label "antrax" in the machine's electronic memory,
    according to the documents obtained by The Courant.

    Experts disagree on whether the lost specimens pose a danger. An Army
    spokesperson said they do not because they would have been effectively
    killed by chemicals in preparation for microscopic study. A prominent
    molecular biologist said, however, that resilient anthrax spores could
    possibly be retrieved from a treated specimen.

    In addition, a scientist who once worked at the Army facility said that
    because of poor inventory controls, it is possible some of the specimens
    disappeared while still viable, before being treated.

    Not in dispute is what the incidents say about disorganization and lack
    of security in some quarters of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute
    of Infectious Diseases - known as USAMRIID - at Fort Detrick, Md., in
    the 1990s. Fort Detrick is believed to be the original source of the
    Ames strain of anthrax used in the mail attacks last fall, and
    investigators have questioned people there and at a handful of other
    government labs and contractors.

    It is unclear whether Ames was among the strains of anthrax in the 27
    sets of specimens reported missing at Fort Detrick after an inventory in
    1992. The Army spokesperson, Caree Vander-Linden, said that at least
    some of the lost anthrax was not Ames. But a former lab technician who
    worked with some of the anthrax that was later reported missing said all
    he ever handled was the Ames strain.

    Meanwhile, one of the 27 sets of specimens has been found and is still
    in the lab; an Army spokesperson said it may have been in use when the
    inventory was taken. The fate of the rest, some containing samples no
    larger than a pencil point, remains unclear. In addition to anthrax and
    Ebola, the specimens included hanta virus, simian AIDS virus and two
    that were labeled "unknown" - an Army euphemism for classified research
    whose subject was secret.

    A former commander of the lab said in an interview he did not believe
    any of the missing specimens were ever found. Vander-Linden said last
    week that in addition to the one complete specimen set, some samples
    from several others were later located, but she could not provide a
    fuller accounting because of incomplete records regarding the disposal
    of specimens.

    "In January of 2002, it's hard to say how many of those were missing in
    February of 1991," said Vander-Linden, adding that it's likely some were
    simply thrown out with the trash.

    Discoveries of lost specimens and unauthorized research coincided with
    an Army inquiry into allegations of "improper conduct" at Fort Detrick's
    experimental pathology branch in 1992. The inquiry did not substantiate
    the specific charges of mismanagement by a handful of officers.

    But a review of hundreds of pages of interview transcripts, signed
    statements and internal memos related to the inquiry portrays a climate
    charged with bitter personal rivalries over credit for research, as well
    as allegations of sexual and ethnic harassment. The recriminations and
    unhappiness ultimately became a factor in the departures of at least
    five frustrated Fort Detrick scientists.

    In interviews with The Courant last month, two of the former scientists
    said that as recently as 1997, when they left, controls at Fort Detrick
    were so lax it wouldn't have been hard for someone with security
    clearance for its handful of labs to smuggle out biological specimens.

    Lost Samples

    The 27 specimens were reported missing in February 1992, after a new
    officer, Lt. Col. Michael Langford, took command of what was viewed by
    Fort Detrick brass as a dysfunctional pathology lab. Langford, who no
    longer works at Fort Detrick, said he ordered an inventory after he
    recognized there was "little or no organization" and "little or no
    accountability" in the lab.

    "I knew we had to basically tighten up what I thought was a very lax and
    unorganized system," he said in an interview last week.

    A factor in Langford's decision to order an inventory was his suspicion
    - never proven - that someone in the lab had been tampering with records
    of specimens to conceal unauthorized research. As he explained later to
    Army investigators, he asked a lab technician, Charles Brown, to "make a
    list of everything that was missing."

    "It turned out that there was quite a bit of stuff that was unaccounted
    for, which only verifies that there needs to be some kind of
    accountability down there," Langford told investigators, according to a
    transcript of his April 1992 interview.

    Brown - whose inventory was limited to specimens logged into the lab
    during the 1991 calendar year - detailed his findings in a two-page memo
    to Langford, in which he lamented the loss of the items "due to their
    immediate and future value to the pathology division and USAMRIID."

    Many of the specimens were tiny samples of tissue taken from the dead
    bodies of lab animals infected with deadly diseases during vaccine
    research. Standard procedure for the pathology lab would be to soak the
    samples in a formaldehyde-like fixative and embed them in a hard resin
    or paraffin, in preparation for study under an electron microscope.

    Some samples, particularly viruses, are also irradiated with gamma rays
    before they are handled by the pathology lab.

    Whether all of the lost samples went through this treatment process is
    unclear. Vander-Linden said the samples had to have been rendered inert
    if they were being worked on in the pathology lab.

    But Dr. Ayaad Assaad, a former Fort Detrick scientist who had extensive
    dealings with the lab, said that because some samples were received at
    the lab while still alive - with the expectation they would be treated
    before being worked on - it is possible some became missing before
    treatment. A phony "log slip" could then have been entered into the lab
    computer, making it appear they had been processed and logged.

    In fact, Army investigators appear to have wondered if some of the
    anthrax specimens reported missing had ever really been logged in. When
    an investigator produced a log slip and asked Langford if "these exist
    or [are they] just made up on a data entry form," Langford replied that
    he didn't know.

    Assuming a specimen was chemically treated and embedded for microscopic
    study, Vander-Linden and several scientists interviewed said it would be
    impossible to recover a viable pathogen from them. Brown, who did the
    inventory for Langford and has since left Fort Detrick, said in an
    interview that the specimens he worked on in the lab "were completely
    inert."

    "You could spread them on a sandwich," he said.

    But Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a molecular biologist at the State
    University of New York who is investigating the recent anthrax attacks
    for the Federation of American Scientists, said she would not rule out
    the possibility that anthrax in spore form could survive the
    chemical-fixative process.

    "You'd have to grind it up and hope that some of the spores survived,"
    Rosenberg said. "It would be a mess.

    "It seems to me that it would be an unnecessarily difficult task.
    Anybody who had access to those labs could probably get something more
    useful."

    Rosenberg's analysis of the anthrax attacks, which has been widely
    reported, concludes that the culprit is probably a government insider,
    possibly someone from Fort Detrick. The Army facility manufactured
    anthrax before biological weapons were banned in 1969, and it has
    experimented with the Ames strain for defensive research since the early
    1980s.

    Vander-Linden said that one of the two sets of anthrax specimens listed
    as missing at Fort Detrick was the Vollum strain, which was used in the
    early days of the U.S. biological weapons program. It was not clear what
    the type of anthrax in the other missing specimen was.

    Eric Oldenberg, a soldier and pathology lab technician who left Fort
    Detrick and is now a police detective in Phoenix, said in an interview
    that Ames was the only anthrax strain he worked with in the lab.

    Late-Night Research

    More troubling to Langford than the missing specimens was what
    investigators called "surreptitious" work being done in the pathology
    lab late at night and on weekends.

    Dr. Mary Beth Downs told investigators that she had come to work several
    times in January and February of 1992 to find that someone had been in
    the lab at odd hours, clumsily using the sophisticated electron
    microscope to conduct some kind of off-the-books research.

    After one weekend in February, Downs discovered that someone had been in
    the lab using the microscope to take photos of slides, and apparently
    had forgotten to reset a feature on the microscope that imprints each
    photo with a label. After taking a few pictures of her own slides that
    morning, Downs was surprised to see "Antrax 005" emblazoned on her
    negatives.

    Downs also noted that an automatic counter on the camera, like an
    odometer on a car, had been rolled back to hide the fact that pictures
    had been taken over the weekend. She wrote of her findings in a memo to
    Langford, noting that whoever was using the microscope was "either in a
    big hurry or didn't know what they were doing."

    It is unclear if the Army ever got to the bottom of the incident, and
    some lab insiders believed concerns about it were overblown. Brown said
    many Army officers did not understand the scientific process, which he
    said doesn't always follow a 9-to-5 schedule.

    "People all over the base knew that they could come in at anytime and
    get on the microscope," Brown said. "If you had security clearance, the
    guard isn't going to ask you if you are qualified to use the equipment.
    I'm sure people used it often without our knowledge."

    Documents from the inquiry show that one unauthorized person who was
    observed entering the lab building at night was Langford's predecessor,
    Lt. Col. Philip Zack, who at the time no longer worked at Fort Detrick.
    A surveillance camera recorded Zack being let in at 8:40 p.m. on Jan.
    23, 1992, apparently by Dr. Marian Rippy, a lab pathologist and close
    friend of Zack's, according to a report filed by a security guard.

    Zack could not be reached for comment. In an interview this week, Rippy
    said that she doesn't remember letting Zack in, but that he occasionally
    stopped by after he was transferred off the base.

    "After he left, he had no [authorized] access to the building. Other
    people let him in," she said. "He knew a lot of people there and he was
    still part of the military. I can tell you, there was no suspicious
    stuff going on there with specimens."

    Zack left Fort Detrick in December 1991, after a controversy over
    allegations of unprofessional behavior by Zack, Rippy, Brown and others
    who worked in the pathology division. They had formed a clique that was
    accused of harassing the Egyptian-born Assaad, who later sued the Army,
    claiming discrimination.

    Assaad said he had believed the harassment was behind him until last
    October, until after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

    He said that is when the FBI contacted him, saying someone had mailed an
    anonymous letter - a few days before the existence of anthrax-laced mail
    became known - naming Assaad as a potential bioterrorist. FBI agents
    decided the note was a hoax after interviewing Assaad.

    But Assaad said he believes the note's timing makes the author a suspect
    in the anthrax attacks, and he is convinced that details of his work
    contained in the letter mean the author must be a former Fort Detrick
    colleague.

    Brown said that he doesn't know who sent the letter, but that Assaad's
    nationality and expertise in biological agents made him an obvious
    subject of concern after Sept. 11.