Word: detrick
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Nobody just waltzes into the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. The lab, better known as USAMRIID, sits on the grounds of Fort Detrick, in rural Maryland, about an hour north of Washington, and before you can even get close to the mostly windowless concrete building, you have to get on the base itself. Employees must flash their badges, and visitors must show two forms of photo ID--and open their trunks and glove compartments--before guards will let them pass. To enter the lab itself, armed security guards, present around the clock, must wave you through...
...such scrutiny? Because USAMRIID handles the deadliest pathogens known to man, including Ebola, Marburg virus, Rift Valley fever--and, of course, anthrax. It was at Fort Detrick that the U.S. stockpile of biological weapons was manufactured in the 1960s, and at USAMRIID that research into deadly germs was concentrated for the next three decades...
...analysis she has prepared a profile of the killer far more detailed than anything the FBI has released. She thinks the killer is a middle-aged American who works for a CIA contractor in the Washington area but has had access in the past to the labs at Fort Detrick. She believes he or she has been vaccinated against anthrax and knows how to conceal forensic evidence. Says Rosenberg: "It's highly probable that the perpetrator is someone who was known in the lab, someone who was thought to be O.K." Based on the composition of the anthrax, she thinks...
...figuring out where the spores came from. That won't be easy. While new tests on letters received by Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy reveal a genetic fingerprint (called the Ames strain) that's traceable back to the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease at Fort Detrick, Maryland, officials point out there are as many as 12 private labs that receive military samples for research. Officials are also checking into an ongoing anthrax-development project at the Army's Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. While the possibility of an Army connection has raised a few eyebrows, investigators...
...center in northeast Washington--where all congressional mail is shipped. That very evening, Oct. 15, in a series of conference calls, officials from all federal agencies involved in the investigation--including the FBI, the Secret Service, U.S. Capitol Police, the Postal Inspection Service and the CDC--learned from Fort Detrick scientists what turned out to be the key facts: the Daschle letter contained "highly virulent" anthrax with a high "spore concentration," according to a participant in the briefings. And it was "aerosolized." The word "weaponized" was not used, but it didn't need to be, this official says...