WASHINGTON — As federal authorities pursued the wrong suspect in the deadly anthrax mailings of 2001, they ignored or overlooked a series of early clues that pointed to Army scientist Bruce E. Ivins, a review of investigative records by the Los Angeles Times shows.
Law enforcement documents unsealed by a federal judge last week, along with other materials reviewed by The Times, show that within a few months of the mailings, FBI leaders were positioned to know important details spotlighting Ivins, who killed himself last month and has now been identified as the government's prime suspect.
The information available to investigators in those early months included:
* Security records generated by swipes of magnetized plastic access cards revealing that Ivins -- alone among the handful of anthrax researchers at Ft. Detrick, Md. -- had spent hours in a fortified "hot suite" during late nights and weekends leading up to and surrounding the mailings. The research suite is protected by a maze of controls designed to prevent the escape of deadly biological agents.
* Genetic analysis by outside scientists published in May 2002 reporting that anthrax powder recovered from the mailings most likely came from Ft. Detrick or was grown from a sample that originated there.
"I would have felt very confident at the time that the top place to look was at Ft. Detrick," said Jonathan A. Eisen, a UC Davis biologist and former colleague of the scientists at the Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville, Md.
* Ivins, recruited to assist the FBI, had failed in February 2002 to provide an anthrax sample, known as RMR-1029, as requested by a bureau agent. The FBI did not obtain the RMR-1029 from within the Ft. Detrick laboratory complex where Ivins worked until two years later, when an agent took possession of a flask holding that material.
* An Army report revealing that Ivins had not told his Army superiors in December 2001 about a possible anthrax spill around his workstation that he had privately cleaned up. In sworn statements to an Army investigator in May 2002, Ivins conceded that he should have reported the matter immediately. His omission occurred when the FBI was beginning to question scientists who had worked at Ft. Detrick.
Yet even when Ivins told the Army that he had erred, FBI officials continued to rely on him for scientific assistance in their investigation of the mailings. And for several more years, FBI supervisors ordered agents to stay locked on a different target, Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, a former Army researcher who had never handled anthrax.
