FBI to Test Tons of Quarantined Letters at Washington-Area Site

The FBI, criticized for its sluggish response to the widening anthrax crisis, plans to begin testing hundreds of barrels of quarantined government mail today at a Washington-area facility in search of undetected anthrax-laden letters.

As health officials confirmed more traces of anthrax in New York and Washington on Sunday, investigators were hoping that the mail search could produce key leads in a probe that, so far, has yielded few clear breaks.

“We have an enormous amount of mail from Capitol Hill that has to be sorted and examined. We won’t know how significant any of it is until we go in there and see what we find,” an FBI official in Washington who asked not to be identified said Sunday.

Tons of undelivered government mail has remained stacked up--quarantined and unexamined since mid-October--as health and law enforcement officials have struggled to respond to the discovery of finely grained anthrax in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.).

FBI officials say their forensic testing of the mail has been hampered in part by concerns over health risks to investigators. The FBI only last week secured approval from federal health and environmental officials to set up a facility at an undisclosed site, where agents could begin analyzing potentially contaminated mail, a law enforcement official said.

Investigators, including several from the FBI’s hazardous response team, will begin poring over 280 barrels of mail gathered from a Washington sorting facility that handles items en route to Capitol Hill from the contaminated Brentwood facility that handled the Daschle letter.

Authorities expect to take either swab or air samples of batches of mail to get a preliminary anthrax reading, according to a senior law enforcement official in bioterrorism who asked not to be identified.

“We’ll go for the obvious first and see if anything turns up hot” and then try to pinpoint the source if there are positive results, the official said.

Investigators also will be looking at handwriting samples, return addresses and other indicators that might match anthrax-laden letters sent to Daschle, NBC and the New York Post. “They’ll be looking at everything they can to help identify who perpetrated this,” said another FBI official who asked not to be identified.

The mail examined by FBI investigators this week ultimately will be decontaminated, as has at least 30 tons of mail that passed through the Brentwood facility and was trucked to Lima, Ohio, for irradiation. FBI officials refused to say how they determined which mail to send to the Washington area for testing or whether they would examine other government mail quarantined at the Justice Department, the State Department and other federal agencies where trace amounts of anthrax were found in mail facilities.

Since the anthrax attacks surfaced a month ago, the discoveries have been concentrated in the East--in Florida, Washington and the New Jersey area, apparently spread via the mail in letters to public officials and media outlets. But detections have spread in recent days to Missouri and as far away as Pakistan and Germany. Four people--a tabloid editor in Florida, two postal workers in Washington and a hospital worker in New York--have died of inhalation anthrax, and dozens of others have been exposed to the bacteria.

One key question the FBI will seek to answer in this week’s search is whether the single letter to Daschle could have caused widespread exposure to several Capitol Hill employees through cross-contamination--or whether anthrax-laden letters remain undetected.

“There is certainly an argument . . . that it could have been one letter,” Deputy Postmaster General John Nolan said Sunday in an appearance on CNN.

Nolan stressed that there have been only three pieces of mail out of the billion handled by the postal service since Sept. 11 that have been confirmed as having carried anthrax. He said it is possible that most of the positive readings in postal facilities in Washington, New Jersey, New York and elsewhere ultimately could be traced to the Daschle letter.

A new detection was confirmed Sunday in New York City, as traces of anthrax were confirmed on a package containing a videotape that had been mailed from NBC to City Hall, according to Sandra Mullin, associate commissioner of the city’s Department of Health.

“This is not a new anthrax scare. This parcel was probably cross-contaminated by the letter sent to [NBC anchor] Tom Brokaw,” Mullin said, referring to the letter mailed to NBC Sept. 18 from Trenton, N.J., that was laced with anthrax.

The tape was received by the mayor’s chief of staff before the report of anthrax at NBC, and was sent out for testing as a precaution. The results, which came back Saturday evening, were positive, Mullin said.

The Health Department did anthrax sweeps at City Hall last month and results were negative. “The risk has passed. . . . Illnesses would have occurred by now,” Mullin said.

Meanwhile, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were at the Washington, D.C., Veterans Affairs Medical Center to investigate trace amounts of anthrax found in the mail room, according to Phil Budahn, a spokesman for the center.

The hospital had received mail from the Brentwood facility. Five mail handlers were put on the antibiotic Cipro on Oct. 25 as a precaution, as suggested by the CDC. “None of our employees or patients have come down with any symptoms,” Budahn said.

The positive reading for anthrax was found on only one of 22 swabs taken Wednesday from the mail room.

Budahn said the hospital has no reason to believe that either patients or employees have been exposed, but medical personnel are on the lookout for any signs. So far, the biggest job has been alleviating concerns of patients through one-on-one meetings.

The CDC also has started vaccinating some members of epidemiological teams for smallpox, a highly contagious and deadly disease. Last week, about 140 people were vaccinated, according to the Associated Press.

“We have increased the number of people we have who are capable, trained and ready to go out to investigate smallpox outbreaks should they occur,” Jeffrey Koplan, director of the CDC, told CNN.

Koplan said that the agency already had been gearing up to combat potential outbreaks of smallpox in the event of attacks by bioterrorists, but that preparations were expedited after Sept. 11.

“I don’t think there’s any real evidence yet that we’re at risk for smallpox,” David Kessler, former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, told CNN.

The United States stopped vaccinating for smallpox in 1972.

Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, in an appearance Sunday before a Roman Catholic group in Boston, did not talk specifically about the anthrax investigation. But the minister’s son painted the nation’s battle against terrorism in starkly moralistic tones.

“For Catholics and non-Catholics--Christians, Jews and Muslims--it is impossible not to see in the most stark terms the difference between the way of the saints and the way of the terrorists. It is the difference between those who have died to save the innocent and those who would die to destroy the innocent,” Ashcroft said.