U.S. Scientists Get Threatening Letters

In a carefully choreographed protest that one watchdog organization compared to the tactics of the Unabomber, dozens of U.S. scientists received letters Tuesday containing razor blades and a strongly worded warning urging them to halt their research on primates.

“You have been targeted and you have until autumn of 2000 to release all your primate captives and get out of the vivisection industry,” read the four-line missive mailed from Las Vegas with no return address. “If you do not heed our warning, your violence will be turned back on you.”

No injuries were reported, but by Tuesday afternoon the FBI had classified the London-based Justice Department, which carried out the action, as the most dangerous group of animal activists in operation.

The letters with razors were received by seven researchers at Harvard, three at UC Davis, six at Emory University in Atlanta, four at the University of Wisconsin and four in Oregon.

The researchers were among 83 scientists at those schools, as well as UC San Francisco, Stanford University, the University of Washington, Tulane University in New Orleans and elsewhere, who were named in an Internet declaration posted by the British group.

Ken Warner, a special agent in the FBI’s Boston office, said the threats fell into the category of “animal enterprise terrorism.” The letters--in hand-addressed envelopes with Oct. 22 postmarks--are viewed as extortion and as acts of domestic terrorism, he said. Along with local law enforcement groups, the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force is coordinating an inquiry, he said.

The nature of the protest, in which individuals were named as direct targets, differentiates it from other acts of violence or vandalism aimed at buildings, Warner said. “It does seem as though most of these acts in recent times have been more anonymous,” he said.

In that respect, said Lynn O’Connell, vice president of Americans for Medical Progress in Alexandria, Va., this latest move by animal welfare activists “is reminiscent of the Unabomber--it really is.” Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, is serving a life sentence for a reign of violence aimed largely at university researchers that claimed three lives and injured 23 others.

The Justice Department, a small, relatively new group, announced its plans to mail the booby-trapped letters in an e-mail sent Monday to an assortment of research organizations, university police, law enforcement officials and others.

Officials at Harvard’s New England Primate Research Center said they had not heard of the Justice Department until the warning was posted on a Web site of the Animal Liberation Front. “Animal abusers beware,” the site cautions.

The long-established, underground Animal Liberation Front last week took credit for firebombing four vans of a Rhode Island fur store. Over the weekend, the group’s members broke into a research facility at Western Washington University and “liberated” dozens of animals.

Unlike the Animal Liberation Front, the smaller, newer Justice Department has become known in Britain and Canada for threatening acts of violence against individuals. One protest in Britain involved letters containing razor blades that were supposedly dipped in rat poison. In August, the group sent similar letters to fur farmers in the United States and Canada.

Many of the researchers in this country who received the latest threats from the group use primates to conduct research on HIV, AIDS, cancer and other diseases.

“Obviously they don’t think they’ll ever get AIDS,” O’Connell, whose foundation is funded by the pharmaceutical industry, said of the Justice Department protesters.

The primate research is viewed as “absolutely essential” for vaccine work in many diseases, said Don Gibbons, a spokesman for the Harvard Medical School.

Protesters regularly gather outside Harvard’s primate center, he said, adding that new surveillance equipment was installed recently in the wake of increased activity by such groups.

Gibbons would not identify the researchers at Harvard who received the letters containing razor blades. Although concerned about potential violence, the scientists are taking the events in stride, he said.

“They are hoping that this is a one-time event, because they view their research as sufficiently important to society that it must go forward,” he said. “And they fully intend to do so.”