Anthrax Evidence Points to State Sponsor

Oct. 16 -- Some of America's top biological warfare scientists are edging closer to a conclusion they've resisted since receiving word of the first anthrax infection in Florida — that the recent germ attacks involved an expertise only a government could provide.

Richard Spertzel, who directed the U.N. Special Commission biological weapons inspectors in Iraq, says a second confirmed case of pulmonary anthrax in Florida has deepened his suspicion that the attacks had the support of a foreign government. According to this view, agents of a state-run biowarfare program, or rogue scientists from a nation with a biological arsenal, may have provided the perpetrators with advice, and possibly with the agent itself.

One indicator, Spertzel says, is particle size. Inducing pulmonary, or inhaled, anthrax requires 8,000 to 10,000 spores embedded in particles between one to five microns in diameter. That amount would fit on the period at the end of this sentence.

If the particles are smaller than one micron, they are exhaled. Larger than five microns, and chances are the particles will lodge in the nose, or be caught in cilia that line the trachea. These are very narrow parameters.

Although spores of these precise dimensions do occur in nature, the chances of digging them up from soil, their natural habitat, are slim. The chances of inhaling them while walking in the woods are not only slim; they're unheard of.

So a would-be anthrax terrorist wouldn't prospect for these spores; he'd grow them. The next step is making an aerosol. That's the hard part.

A Select Club

Bill Patrick, a scientist who used to make anthrax weapons for the United States, patented a secret process that involved freeze-drying the spores, milling the resulting anthrax "cake" to yield particles of the proper diameter, then coating them with a special mixture to dampen electrostatic charges that cause clumping. Patrick calls this making the particles "slippery."

It's these particles that "deliver" the spores. A good anthrax "munition" requires more know-how than he says he'd expect to find in a laboratory run by al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden's network, which U.S. officials believe was behind the Sept. 11 hijacking attacks.