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Lethal Formula in Anthrax Mail Points to Labs of 3 Countries http://www.iht.com/articles/36971.html Rick Weiss and Dan Eggen Washington Post Service Friday, October 26, 2001 WASHINGTON The anthrax spores that contaminated the air in the office of the Senate majority leader, Thomas Daschle, had been treated with a chemical additive so sophisticated that only three countries are thought to have been capable of making it, sources said. The United States, the former Soviet Union and Iraq are the only three countries known to have developed the kind of additives that enable anthrax spores to remain suspended in the air, making them more easily inhaled and therefore more deadly, experts said Wednesday. Each of the countries used a different technique, suggesting that microscopic and chemical analyses may reveal more about the spores' provenance than did their genetic analysis, which is largely complete but reportedly has done little to narrow the field. . A government official with direct knowledge of the investigation said that the sum of the evidence in hand - involving not just the coatings, but also genetic analysis of the bacteria and other intelligence - suggested it was unlikely that the spores were originally produced in the former Soviet Union or Iraq. The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, declined to discuss the implications of that conclusion. . Even identifying the kind of coating may not solve the crucial question of who is perpetrating the terror, because little is known about how secure the stores of the three countries' stocks have been. . Nonetheless, the conclusion that the spores were produced with military quality differs considerably from public comments made recently by officials close to the investigation, who have said that the spores were not "weaponized" and were "garden variety." Those descriptions may be technically true, several experts said. But they obscure the basic and more important truth that the spores had been treated with a sophisticated process, meaning that the original source was almost certainly a state-sponsored laboratory. . The finding strongly suggests that the anthrax spores in the U.S. mail attacks were not produced in a university or makeshift laboratory or simply gathered from natural sources. But it does not answer the question of whether a state-sponsored laboratory supplied the anthrax to terrorists or lost control of stocks. . The presence of the additive was confirmed for the first time by a government source familiar with the studies, which are being conducted by scientists at the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Frederick, Maryland. Four other experts in anthrax weapons said they had no doubt that such an additive was present, based on the high dispersal rate from the letter to Mr. Daschle, a South Dakota Democrat. . "The evidence is patent on its face," said Alan Zelicoff, a scientist at Sandia National Laboratories' Center for National Security and Arms Control. "The amount of energy needed to disperse the spores by merely opening an envelope, was trivial, which is virtually diagnostic of achieving the appropriate coating." . Genetic testing of the spores found in Mr. Daschle's office, at NBC offices in New York and in Florida found that the three samples were indistinguishable. . The army studies on the spores used in the U.S. attacks involve examinations using conventional microscopes and scanning electron microscopes, along with complex chemical analyses. . Results of those tests have not been made public beyond a simple description of how small the spore particles were in the Daschle letter. That particle size is extremely small - a first requirement for making "weapons grade" anthrax spores for warfare or terrorism. But more than that is needed to get anthrax spores to drift easily in the air and spread widely without settling quickly to the ground. That is because tiny particles tend to have electrostatic charges. Those static electricity charges make the tiniest particles clump together into heavier ones, which then settle to the ground. . One of the primary goals of bioweapons engineers since the 1960s had been to figure out how to treat those tiny particles in ways that would neutralize the charges. Properly processed, the tiny particles will remain separated from one another and fly up and outward with virtually no effort. . In the United States, that problem was solved by Bill Patrick, who developed the process at Fort Detrick as part of the U.S. biological weapons program that ended in 1969. The process involved freeze-drying and chemical processing and was achieved without having to grow vast quantities of spores or mill them to terribly small dimensions, the experts said. . Spores were mass-produced at a Pine Bluff, Arkansas, facility, Mr. Patrick said. Production stocks were destroyed, but he said he did not know whether "seed stocks" from which new batches could be grown had also been destroyed. Under the terms of an international treaty banning biological weapons, to which the United States is a signatory, small amounts of biological weapons can be produced to conduct defensive research. . The Russian program required the production of much larger quantities of spores that were more heavily milled than the U.S. spores and used a different kind of freezing and coating process. . The Iraqi technique, uncovered by United Nations inspectors, was a process that involved drying spores in the presence of aluminum-based clays or silica powders, said Richard Spertzel, a member of the UN Special Commission team that was assigned to uncover and destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction after the Gulf War. -------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] with UNSUBSCRIBE COLEXT as the BODY of the message. Un archivo de colext puede encontrarse en: http://www.mail-archive.com/colext@talklist.com/ cortesia de Anibal Monsalve Salazar