Not the FBI's proudest moment

The FBI's investigation of the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks was the most complex and important in the bureau's history. Immense resources were invested in the search for the perpetrator, whose actions killed five people, sickened 17 others, sowed panic in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and caused taxpayers to spend extraordinary sums on a crash program to protect the nation against the danger of biological terrorism.

Yet for all that, the "Amerithrax" investigation, as the FBI dubbed the case, dragged on for seven years and, until quite recently, got nowhere. If Bruce E. Ivins, the Ft. Detrick, Md., microbiologist who died in an apparent suicide last week, was indeed the perpetrator, the prime suspect was directly under the FBI's nose for years, practically sporting a scarlet "A" on his forehead. If he was not the perpetrator, as many of his fellow scientists at Ft. Detrick are insisting, we're back at square one.

The investigation is sure to be scrutinized in depth by Congress, but its difficulties cannot be understood without a sense of the institutional context in which it began. The anthrax attacks came before the bureau at a moment when it was still quivering from a string of breathtaking debacles. On its website, the FBI celebrates its "top 10 moments." These are not among them.

First, in September 2000, came the culmination of the Wen Ho Lee espionage case. All the charges against the Taiwan-born scientist, who had been accused of stealing the crown jewels of American nuclear secrets and passing them to China, were dropped that month, except one minor charge. An official Justice Department postmortem of the FBI's investigation called it "deeply and fundamentally flawed" in "virtually every material respect." It "suffered from neglect, faulty judgment, bad personnel choices, inept investigation and the inadequate supervision of that inept investigation," among other things.

That grave embarrassment was followed only months later by the stunning revelation, in February 2001, that Robert P. Hanssen, the FBI agent in charge of Soviet/Russian counterintelligence, was a Russian mole. As far back as 1990, Hanssen's brother-in-law, himself an FBI agent, had informed his superiors that Hanssen had a lot of unexplained extra cash on hand and of his belief that his in-law was spying for Moscow. At that juncture, the FBI could easily have apprehended Hanssen with some basic sleuthing. Instead, it did nothing except continue to promote him.