Anthrax Case Suspect Has Often Voiced Interest in Germ Warfare

If Larry Wayne Harris is the anthrax-toting menace that the FBI makes him out to be, he certainly hasn’t been shy about it.

The full-bearded microbiologist has pursued a near-obsession with biological warfare for years now, telling anyone who would listen--bar mates, medical researchers, survivalists and fellow white supremacists--about what he once called the coming “biological Pearl Harbor.”

Harris, 46, even went straight to the military with his ideas last year, months before he and an alleged accomplice were arrested this week near Las Vegas in connection with an anthrax scare that sent tremors of concern from the Vegas Strip to the New York subways.

Harris called military officials in recent months at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, an Army research facility, about testing anthrax there, Army Capt. Scott Bertinetti said Friday.

“From what we understand, he inquired about testing something there, and he was turned down,” Bertinetti said. “We don’t accept individuals wanting to test stuff.”

The captain said it was uncertain what, if anything, officials at Dugway did after Harris contacted them.

It seems clear, however, that Harris was not asking out of idle curiosity: The FBI alleged in the criminal complaint filed Thursday that he and 47-year-old William J. Leavitt Jr., who was arrested with him, had eight to 10 black leather flight bags containing what agents believe was military-grade anthrax.

In the affidavit, the FBI quoted an informant as saying that Harris had bragged in a Las Vegas hotel room that he had enough anthrax to “wipe out the city” and had talked earlier about the prospect of releasing bubonic plague bacteria in the New York City subways.

Officials are still awaiting test results to determine whether the materials seized from the suspects’ car were anthrax.

The case broke when medical researcher Ronald Rockwell of Las Vegas went to federal authorities with a report that the two suspects had a stash of the deadly substance.

Rockwell, who was negotiating a contract to sell the pair medical testing equipment, said in an interview Friday that he was under the impression for months that Harris and Leavitt needed Rockwell’s equipment to determine whether it could destroy E. coli and other “small bacteria.”

He was shocked, he said, when he learned four days ago what they allegedly had in mind.

Over shrimp salad, Harris boasted: “I brought the surprise. I brought the real thing,” Rockwell recalled. “I said, ‘What do you mean?’ And Larry said, ‘I brought anthrax.’ I put my fork down. I said, ‘You’re kidding me.’

“I lost my appetite.” Rockwell said he went home in tears, fearful of the consequences should the anthrax not be contained in a safe place. He added that he went to the authorities the next day.

“I told the Federal Bureau of Investigation, ‘What I have here has to be in your hands. . . . This has to be looked into. If these guys have what they say they have, someone has to respond.’ It was totally absurd to have this [anthrax] in town.”

Rockwell wasn’t the only person Harris told about his biological pursuits.

In an interview last year with Ohio State University professor James Neff for an upcoming documentary, Harris described how he was able to obtain anthrax by locating a burial site in the Midwest for cows that had been infected with the disease more than 20 years ago, Neff said Friday. Harris explained how someone could create a deadly broth from the anthrax culture and spread it undetected from a low-flying airplane, the professor said.

“No smell, no taste, no kaboom,” Neff quoted him as saying.

Harris was an officer in the Aryan Nation, a white supremacist group, who peddled his self-published book on biological warfare protection at gatherings frequented by survivalists, militia members, tax protesters, gun owners and others who were interested in his views, said Neff and Michael Weber, an associate producer of the documentary.

“He has the knowledge and the experience to make biological weapons that could kill lots and lots of people,” Neff said. “He told me he would not use this in an offensive way. He said he wants to protect people. . . . But I think he wants to protect people like himself, like-minded people. He wants the chosen few to be protected with antibiotics, and if blacks or other minorities die in the process, he’s not going to lose any sleep.”

Weber said he was troubled by what he heard. “You listen to him for about five minutes, and you think this guy’s out of his mind. He’s talking about Iraqis and the plague and all this stuff, and then you listen to him some more and you realize he’s not a dope. He’s intelligent, he’s got real diplomas, and he’s handled these bacteriological agents and he’s still alive.

“You think the man, to some extent, knows what he’s doing,” Weber said.

*

Although Harris has usually spoken about using his biological research as a defense against attacks from abroad, his tone was far more aggressive and vitriolic in a November story in U.S. News and World Report on the threat of biological terrorism.

He told the magazine that unspecified friends would strike at the government with biochemical weapons if provoked. “If they arrest a bunch of our guys, they get a test tube in the mail,” he said. “How many cities are you willing to lose before you back off?”

Anti-government rhetoric is a main theme of the dozen or so men and women who meet every Thursday in a back room at Trader’s Cafe in Harris’ hometown of Lancaster, Ohio, said waitress Beth Amos. Until his arrest, Harris was often among them as they talked about “the government screwing people and all the cover-up,” she said.

Harris’ grandfather instilled in him a fear of plagues and epidemics, Harris said in July on an interview transmitted over an audio Internet program. Those fears were exacerbated in 1991, he has said, when a fellow student at Ohio State warned him of the damage her native Iraq could do to the United States through its biological and chemical weapons.

A microbiologist by training, Harris has said publicly that he worked with bacteria at a laboratory run by the CIA--or “the Company,” as he called it.

But officials say they have been unable to verify his claims of military or government employment. He was convicted of fraud last year for having lied about his credentials in order to get a mail-order sample of the bubonic plague bacteria in Ohio, and was placed on probation.

Bruce Carpenter, a Lancaster, Ohio, health official, said Harris lied in an attempt to get a zoning variance to set up a lab in his home.

*

Times staff writer Judy Pasternak in Lancaster, Ohio, and researcher John Beckham in Chicago contributed to this report.