A victimology assessment revealed few themes of commonality among the targeted victims. Three of the five known targeted victims were media/press entities: Tom Brokaw/NBC, the New York Post, and the National Enquirer/AMI. The remaining two targeted victims were United States Senators. Senators Daschle and Leahy and Tom Brokaw all were middle-aged white males who held positions of leadership in their respective fields at the time of the attacks. Investigators focused on identifying every publication and Internet website containing the exact mailing address and nine-digit zip code used on two of the four envelopes that were recovered, but no clear links were established to any persons with access to laboratories containing the anthrax pathogen, or to other potential perpetrators identified over the course of this investigation.
Once the anthrax used in the attacks was positively identified as the Ames strain, Task Force investigators set out to identify every laboratory, both domestically and internationally, that possessed the Ames strain prior to the letter attacks. Although the CDC provided a listing of all laboratories registered to work with Bacillus anthracis, there was no guarantee that the resulting list would be complete. Investigators therefore created their own list based on CDC Select Agent transfer records documenting every transfer of anthrax between 1997 and 2001, and based on anthrax inventory records that were subpoenaed from over 100 Bio Safety Level 3 (“BSL-3”) laboratories in the United States. These records were supplemented by information culled from FBI interviews of scientists working at each of these labs, and through FBI reviews of relevant scientific publications mentioning the Ames strain. In the end, 15 domestic laboratories and three foreign laboratories were identified as repositories of Ames-strain anthrax at the time of the letter attacks. Electronic and paper access records collected from each of those laboratories were then compiled. Task Force agents were able to identify to a reasonable degree of certainty every person who had access to the containment suites at each of these labs (and the Ames strain anthrax maintained at these labs) at any time prior to the date of the 2001 attacks.
- 5. Assessing individual suspects
Armed with this information, the Amerithrax Task Force focused its investigation on certain individuals based on the following criteria: (1) access to the Ames strain of anthrax; (2) knowledge of Bacillus anthracis production protocols; (3) laboratory experience and capabilities related to microbiology; (4) allegations of wrongdoing; and (5) motivation to perpetrate the attacks. Based on this suspicion metric, certain individuals were scrutinized even further to determine their whereabouts during the windows of opportunity for the mailings, their handwriting characteristics (for comparison to the printing on the attack letters/envelopes), and to determine to what extent they had protected themselves from anthrax infection at the time of the mailings. This process led to the identification of hundreds of individuals who satisfied one or more of the above criteria, and each one was thoroughly and discretely investigated for any possible nexus to the anthrax mailings. In the four years before genetic analysis permitted the Task Force to begin to focus its investigation on RMR-1029, the list of individuals who received
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