WASHINGTON — After a month of searching intensely but unsuccessfully for the footprints of a foreign power, perplexed U.S. authorities are focusing greater attention on the possibility that the anthrax crisis may be the work of domestic extremists without ties to Islamic terrorists.
"You can't rule out the possibility of foreign involvement, but at this point there is no evidence pointing in that direction," one well-placed official said, noting that the search for such evidence has been exhaustive.
The shift of focus does not reflect any new leads in the United States but rather the lack of progress abroad. Interviews with investigators from U.S. intelligence agencies, the FBI and the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveal just how little they have learned in four intense weeks.
"We're feeling our way," Deputy Atty. Gen. Larry Thompson acknowledged late last week. "It is not a science. It's an art."
On the domestic front, investigators are looking at a wide range of possibilities, including that the anthrax might have originated in a university biomedical laboratory.
And the anthrax outbreak has posed such an unusual combination of law enforcement and scientific challenges that it has forged a rare partnership between the FBI and epidemiologists from the CDC, as well as with federal postal inspectors and state and local authorities.
"It was a willing response, it was a rapid response, and it was a creative response," Thompson declared in a speech last week.
So far, however, it apparently has also been an unsuccessful response.
Investigators have learned more about what doesn't work than about what does. Senior CDC officials acknowledge that they wasted time during the early stages of the crisis in Florida by using nasal swabs to test individuals for anthrax exposure.
Similarly, FBI officials have concluded that almost nothing of value has come from the massive effort to find the culprits by sending federal agents swarming through the Trenton, N.J., neighborhoods where several of the early anthrax letters were mailed.
Without abandoning the New Jersey inquiries, the bureau is focusing on possible domestic sources of anthrax bacteria as a way of locating the terrorists--or lone wolf.
"We're looking domestic," a Bush administration official said Saturday. "If it were international, we would have seen something in the [intelligence monitoring] traffic, and we've seen nothing. You can't rule it out completely, but there is no indication of it."
