Agents claim Ivins mentally unstable, worried about vaccine
The Justice Department and the US Postal Service allege in documents released Wednesday that Bruce Ivins was motivated to mail deadly anthrax powder to select victims in the fall of 2001 because he feared the US government was not making progress in the development of a vaccine.
"With respect to motive, I'll point again to...the troubled nature of Dr. Ivins," Jeffrey Taylor, US Attorney for the District of Columbia, stated in a press conference on the FBI's Amerithrax investigation. "And a possible motive is his concern about the end of the vaccination program. [A]nd one theory is that, by launching these attacks, he creates a situation, a scenario where people all of a sudden realize the need to have this vaccine."
The Justice Department released three search warrants and support documents to the public Wednesday to spell out the evidence investigators believe pinpoint Ivins as the anthrax killer. The most recent search warrant, issued July 11 to the US Postal Inspection Service (USPIS), granted a postal inspector access to Ivins' office, wall lockers and laboratory space at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md.
At the time, Ivins was undergoing a psychiatric evaluation at Frederick Memorial Hospital after identifying himself as a suspect in the Amerithrax investigation during a group therapy session on July 9. According to an affidavit from USPIS, Ivins "said he was not going to face the death penalty, but instead had a plan to kill co-workers and other individuals who had wronged him."
The social worker in charge of the therapy session called the police, who took Ivins into custody for an evaluation. The FBI had last interviewed Ivins on June 9, according to the affidavit, and his lawyers had informed him he would be indicted on murder charges as the only suspect in the anthrax mailings.
The USPIS affidavit described a number of e-mail messages obtained from previous searches of Ivin's home and e-mail accounts as evidence of his possible motivation for mailing the lethal anthrax to media outlets and Congress. In an e-mail on June 29, 2000, Ivins wrote to a friend, "BioPort just tested its final lot of AVA [anthrax vaccine] in a potency test. If it doesn't come to pass, then there are no more lots to test, and the program will come to a halt. That's bad for everyone concerned, including us. I'm sure that blame will be spread around."
BioPort, now Emergent BioSolutions, was the only US contractor approved to work on anthrax vaccine intended for US military forces at the time.
In a later e-mail on Sept. 7, 2001, Ivins informed his unnamed friend that he has been put back on to the Army's Special Immunization Program after being suspended due to an incident in the previous spring, noting he has received anthrax and Yellow Fever vaccine shots.
"We are currently finishing up the last of the AVA, and when it is gone, there's nothing to replace it with. I don't know what will happen to the research programs and the hot suite work until we get a new lot. There are no approved lots currently at BioPort," Ivins wrote.
The 9/11 terrorist attacks may have jolted the anthrax attacker into action, investigators have speculated, and Ivins voiced concerns about terrorist threats in another e-mail on Sept. 26, 2001.
"I just heard tonight that Bin Laden terrorists for sure have anthrax and sarin gas," he wrote.
The FBI also expressed concern about Ivins' mental state, and the Army scientist consistently referred to his increasing feelings of paranoia and mental anguish in several years of e-mail letters unearthed by FBI agents.
Investigators also believe they know why Ivins would have mailed the anthrax letters from a mailbox in Princeton, NJ, making a seven-hour roundtrip from his house to drop the letters off. E-mail communications and Internet postings made by Ivins indicate he was obsessed with the college sorority Kappa Kappa Gamma, which has an office near the Princeton mailbox, the search warrant affidavits alleged.
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