cryptogon.com

A 92-page report laid out the evidence against Ivins, including his equivocal answers when asked by a friend in a recorded conversation about whether he was the anthrax mailer.

“If I found out I was involved in some way,” Ivins said, not finishing the sentence. “I do not have any recollection of ever doing anything like that,” he said, adding, “I can tell you, I am not a killer at heart.”

But in a 2008 e-mail to a former colleague, one of many reflecting deep mental distress, Ivins wrote, “I can hurt, kill, and terrorize.” He added: “Go down low, low, low as you can go, then dig forever, and you’ll find me, my psyche.”

The report revealed the FBI’s theory that Ivins embedded in the anthrax notes a complex coded message, based on DNA biochemistry, alluding to two former colleagues, both women, with whom he was obsessed.

The report described how an FBI surveillance agent watched in 2007 as Ivins threw out an article and a book, Douglas Hofstadter’s “Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid,” that could betray his interest in codes, coming out of his house in Frederick, Md., at 1 a.m. in long underwear to make certain the garbage truck had taken his trash.

Whether the voluminous documentation will convince skeptics about Ivins’ guilt was uncertain. Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., a physicist who has criticized the FBI’s work, said the case should not have been closed.

“Arbitrarily closing the case on a Friday afternoon should not mean the end of this investigation,” Holt said, noting the National Academy of Sciences was still studying the agency’s scientific work. He said the FBI report laid out “barely a circumstantial case” that “would not, I think, stand up in court.”

Dropped into a mailbox in downtown Princeton, N.J., the anthrax letters were addressed to news-media organizations and two U.S. senators and contained notes with radical Islamist rhetoric that appeared to link them to the Sept. 11 attacks, which occurred a week before the first of the two mailings.

In the wake of Sept. 11, they set off a nationwide panic over random discoveries of white powder that people feared might be more anthrax. The real anthrax — a few teaspoons of fine powder — infected at least 22 people, including postal workers, and killed five.

The five who died: two postal workers in Washington, D.C., a New York City hospital worker, a Florida photo editor and a 94-year-old Connecticut woman who had no known contact with any of the poisoned letters.

Congressional offices and the Supreme Court were evacuated as a result of anthrax contamination, and the Postal Service spent hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up mail centers.

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The federal government increased spending on biodefense, with a total of nearly $60 billion since 2001, and rejuvenated the faltering military’s anthrax-vaccine program on which Ivins had worked for many years.

The investigation included more than 10,000 interviews on six continents, the report said. FBI investigators conducted preliminary investigations of 1,024 people and “in-depth investigations” of more than 400 people, examining those with possible financial motives, links to the drug and pesticide industries or a history of correspondence with the lawmakers targeted by the mailings.

In response to requests under the Freedom of Information Act, the bureau also posted on the Web more than 2,700 pages of interview notes and investigative documents to bolster its case.

Ivins, 62, was a microbiologist who had worked with anthrax for decades as part of the vaccine program at the Army’s biodefense laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md.

He took a fatal overdose of Tylenol in July 2008, after months of intense scrutiny by the FBI, which had placed a GPS device on his car, examined his trash and questioned his wife and two children.

Investigators discovered his penchant for taking long, aimless drives at night, sometimes mailing letters and packages from distant points under assumed names. They discovered his obsession with a sorority, Kappa Kappa Gamma, and with images of blindfolded women, hundreds of which were found on his computer, the report says.

Days after his suicide, Justice Department and FBI officials said they believed Ivins had carried out the anthrax attacks alone and they released search-warrant affidavits that included some of the evidence against him.

The affidavits included e-mails in which he confessed to paranoia and delusion; time records showing he had worked alone in the laboratory late at night before the anthrax mailings in September and October 2001; and genetic analysis tracing the mailed anthrax powder to a flask overseen by Ivins and stored in his lab.

Some of Ivins’ colleagues at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Frederick, including several supervisors who knew him well, publicly rejected the FBI’s conclusion. They said he was eccentric but incapable of such an act.

Skeptics also pointed to investigators’ long focus on Steven Hatfill, another former Army scientist whom the FBI pursued in 2002 and 2003, keeping him under constant surveillance.

In 2008, the government exonerated Hatfill and agreed to a settlement worth $4.6 million to resolve a lawsuit alleging his privacy rights had been violated.