access to a hot suite where Ba is stored, a researcher must have up-to-date vaccinations or personal protective equipment.
Law enforcement officials interviewed a number of biological experts with knowledge and training in the field of infectious diseases, including anthrax. According to these experts, Dr. Ivins was generally regarded by everyone in the anthrax community as one of the preeminent anthrax researchers in the country. His own writings support this conclusion. He told others that when he was creating RMR-1029, he felt he had to "clean up" several of the spore batches sent to him by the microbiologist from Dugway, who was another highly-regarded anthrax researcher. Dr. Ivins actually discarded a batch sent by Dugway because it did not meet his exacting standards, and he felt that he could not rehabilitate it. Another example of his expertise involved a commercial lab in the midwest with hundreds of scientists on its staff, but whose staff had to call Dr. Ivins for advice at times regarding anthrax issues because there was no one in-house who could answer their questions.
There were very few microbiologists in the fall of 2001 who were known to have created such pure, concentrated spores. Those who had this skill primarily conducted vaccine work, but some were also found in diagnostic research. A microbiologist at Dugway was capable of doing so, and he sent investigators a list of approximately 12 researchers whom he knew also might have the skill-set and access to necessary equipment. While this list was necessarily underinclusive, because he did not know all of the employees at each lab (e.g., a former USAMRIID scientist was not on the list, but when asked whether or not s/he thought s/he could create spores of the quality used in the mailing, s/he agreed that s/he could), it is illustrative of the very narrow universe of those with the highly-specialized skill required to create the mailing material. As Dr. Martin Hugh-Jones, another renowned anthrax expert, told the Wall Street Journal in December 2001, "We know this guy. One of us knows him."
Dr. Ivins seemed to try to downplay his skill-set in ways that were wholly inconsistent with reality. He repeatedly and adamantly denied that he could make spores of this quality. For example, shortly after the anthrax mailings, he told his post-doctoral fellowship advisor from the University of North Carolina that for the first time in his 20 years working at USAMRIID, he was actually scared because the letter spores were the purest and cleanest he had ever seen. He added that nothing he had ever made was as good. However, Dr. Ivins unwittingly contradicted himself in his laboratory notebook, where he described the RMR-1029 that he had created as: "RMR-1029: ≥99% refractile spores; < 1% vegetative cells; < 1% non-refractile spores;: 1% debris." (Laboratory notebook 1040, page 074, Attachment F.) This is evidence that he could, and did, create spores of the concentration and purity of the mailed spores, which he described as "99% refractile with no debris and some clumping" in a report dated March 12, 2002. In contrast, when the microbiologist from Dugway and this former USAMRIID scientist were asked, they readily agreed to having the ability to produce spores of this quality.
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