The Case Of Dr. Hatfill - Suspect Or Pawn

by Dave Altimari, Jack Dolan, and David Lightman
The Hartford Courant
June 27, 2002

Former Army microbiologist Steven J. Hatfill is either a pawn in an FBI attempt to recharge its stalled anthrax investigation, or a potential suspect who holds critical clues to solving the case that has bedeviled the agency for the past nine months.

Those two interpretations of the FBI's high-profile search of Hatfill's residence circulated through the scientific and law enforcement communities Wednesday - one day after agents removed garbage bags full of evidence from a Frederick, Md., apartment complex, and, as TV news crews circled overhead, loaded them into a large rental truck .

"Their intent was clearly to put his name in the public eye. The only question is why," said a microbiologist who has been interviewed by the FBI.

"It was either strictly for show - a bone tossed to Congress and the media - or they want to put pressure on him by starting a public investigation to stimulate the stalled non-public investigation," said the microbiologist, who would speak only on condition of anonymity.

Wednesday, a dozen FBI agents searched a refrigerated mini-storage facility in downtown Ocala, Fla. The local NBC News affiliate reported that agents removed boxes from a locker rented by Hatfill. The scientist's parents owned a horse farm in Ocala until three years ago.

After its public show of investigative aggressiveness in Maryland Tuesday, and before the evidence had even been examined, bureau officials insisted the search of Hatfill's apartment hadn't produced anything significant.

The FBI also pointed out that Hatfill had agreed to the search and is not considered a suspect.

"I do not know what all of the results of the search were, but I can tell you there were no hazardous materials found in the apartment," said a law enforcement source.

"I don't know how much in advance he knew about the search, but he has been cooperating with us fully all along," the source said.

Neither Hatfill nor his Virginia attorney, Thomas C. Carter, could be reached for comment Wednesday.

Hatfill has told several media outlets that he has a letter from the FBI stating "he never has been and is not now" a suspect in the anthrax case. The FBI has declined to comment on whether such a letter exists.

If the FBI hoped criticism of its "Amerithrax" investigation would be muted by the Hatfill search, at least one senator who received an anthrax-laced letter last fall continued Wednesday to express displeasure with the pace and intensity of the probe.

"I have asked for another briefing by the FBI on the anthrax investigation," Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., said. "I don't know if one has actually been set yet. I hope it has, because I have a lot of questions."

Daschle and Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., received the two most potent anthrax-laden letters last October. They were part of a series of anthrax letter attacks that killed five people, including 94-year-old Ottilie Lundgren of Oxford. Thirteen more people were sickened. The two letters to Congress shut down the Hart Senate office building for several months.

A source close to Daschle called the search of Hatfill's apartment and the FBI's reluctance to share information frustrating.

"In light of yesterday's news, and in light of everything else that's going on, we feel we don't know where things stand," the source said.

Another source said Daschle is hoping for an FBI briefing as early as today.

Hatfill has bounced on and off the FBI's ever-changing list of potential suspects for the past several months. That his house was searched is not that unusual. FBI officials said they have conducted many searches during the investigation. But all of them, including an earlier search of Hatfill's house and car, were done quietly with no media attention.

For example, in December two agents visited the home of Joseph Farchaus, another former scientist at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick. The scientist now lives about 15 minutes outside Trenton, N.J., where several anthrax-contaminated letters were mailed. It is the heart of the FBI's target area. The last paper Farchaus published before leaving the infectious diseases institute concerned putting anthrax in aerosol form.

The agents asked questions, searched the man's home and later gave him a polygraph test, which he passed. His New York attorney, Donald Buchwald, said Wednesday the FBI has not contacted him since.

But the scrutiny of Hatfill appears to be intensifying. His background has several intriguing aspects - including medical school training in Africa and his connection to biological weapons training programs run by the CIA.

Hatfill graduated in 1984 from the Godfrey Huggins Medical School in Zimbabwe, which was known as Rhodesia until 1980.

Not far from the medical school in the nation's capital, Harare, is the upper-middle-class suburb of Greendale. The anthrax-laced letters to Daschle and Leahy each contained the same fictitious return address: 4th Grade, Greendale School, Franklin Park, N.J. There is no Greendale School in New Jersey. But there is a grade school by that name in the Harare suburb.

In the late 1970s, when Hatfill was in Rhodesia, an anthrax outbreak killed hundreds and sickened thousands of villagers. In 1993, an African news agency reported that a former officer from the white minority army's special forces claimed that the anthrax outbreak that killed 182 and sickened more than 10,000 people between 1978 and 1980 was launched by the army.

All of the fatalities, and all but a handful of those sickened, were black. Other members of the white government's army have denied that the outbreak was a deliberate attack, claiming it was part of a natural pattern of anthrax in the region.

On his college biography and his resume, Hatfill says he worked with the Rhodesian army and a group called the Selous Scouts during the time frame of the anthrax outbreak. The Selous Scouts were an elite unit of the white Rhodesian government's army that specialized in tracking and killing enemy units in the back country.

One former classmate, Mark Hanly, who is now a pathologist in Georgia, said he always doubted Hatfill's military claims.

Another classmate remembers Hatfill as a military enthusiast.

"He carried a lot of weapons around all the time, RPGs [rocket propelled grenades] and stuff like that. On the weekends he would go with the army and they would do special forces kind of stuff," said David Andrewes, a classmate who now lives in Massachusetts.

Like dozens of other current and former employees of labs known to have handled the strain of anthrax used in the mail attacks, Hatfill fits many aspects of a profile of the killer released by the FBI last November. That profile stated the FBI believed the culprit was a lone, disgruntled, former military scientist.

Hatfill has been immunized against anthrax and had access to the bacteria while he worked as a research fellow at the Fort Detrick lab in the late 1990s. He is also very comfortable working with extremely hazardous material. Hatfill studied the deadly Ebola virus in the Army's highest level "hot suite" during his stint at the Maryland lab.

Hatfill later became a member of UNSCOM, the United Nations-sponsored group that went into Iraq after the gulf war to look for that country's biological weapons stockpiles.

Another member of UNSCOM was David Franz, who later became the colonel in charge of the Fort Detrick infectious disease center. Hatfill worked at the center from 1997 to 1999 in the virology department. He has never claimed to have worked with anthrax, but in 1999 he was involved with a CIA-run course on chemical and biological weapons.

Hatfill is a protege of William Patrick, a former bioweapons expert at the Fort Detrick center when it ran an offensive biological weapons program in the late 1960s. Patrick has acknowledged helping scientists at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah make dry or "weaponized" anthrax a few years ago.

On his resume, Hatfill states he has "a working knowledge of the former U.S. and foreign BW [biological weapons] programs, wet and dry BW agents and large-scale production of bacterial, rickettsial, and viral BW pathogens and toxins."

The FBI's sudden focus on Hatfill comes shortly after its investigation appeared to be at a standstill. The agency recently announced that it wanted to interview and polygraph more than 200 current and former employees of the Fort Detrick center and Dugway, a process that will take several months.

In the meantime, congressional leaders have promised to hold a hearing on the anthrax investigation to try to get their questions answered.

© Copyright 2002

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