How did anthrax suspect Ivins keep security clearance?

Army microbiologist Bruce Ivins may or may not have been the anthrax killer. But FBI documents about his case released Wednesday raise another troubling question: Why did he retain security clearance and access to deadly pathogens, despite years of strange – sometimes disturbing – behavior?

It is possible Dr. Ivins's superiors were unaware that he had sought help for mental-health problems as early as 2000. And perhaps the FBI did not want to alert him to their suspicions by starting a formal clearance review.

It is also possible that family members and co-workers were reluctant to report his actions. Sometimes, people don't take the security clearance process as seriously as they should, says a lawyer who handles similar cases, even at a facility as sensitive as Ivins's workplace.

"It's an exceptional case. It could be that it just slipped through the cracks," says attorney Mark F. Riley, a retired Army intelligence officer.

Ivins's security clearance and access to labs at Fort Detrick's US Army Medical Institute of Infectious Diseases were not pulled until November 2007, according to Justice Department officials. Ivins committed suicide last week as the US government readied charges against him.

Yet the FBI had requested a sample from a flask of anthrax spores which Ivins held as early as 2002. In April 2004, after discovering that the samples Ivins submitted in fact had not come from the requested flask, RMR-1029, an FBI agent accompanied Ivins into a biocontainment suite at Fort Detrick to seize the flask.

Asked at an Aug. 6 press conference why Ivins was allowed to retain access to anthrax, Jeffrey Taylor, US attorney for the District of Columbia, said, "When the investigation began to focus on Dr. Ivins, the lab was notified of our concerns about him."

Portrait of a scientist

According to documents released Aug. 6, Ivins was having personal problems long before the FBI zeroed in on him – and even before the anthrax atttacks.

In e-mails from 2000 released by the government, Ivins described feeling disassociated from himself. He occasionally became dizzy, he said, and had a strange metallic taste in his mouth.

"Other times it's like I'm not only sitting at my desk doing work, I'm also a few feet away watching me do it," he wrote to an unidentified friend on April 3, 2000.

The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, appeared to affect him greatly. In December 2001, he send a co-worker some poetry he had composed.

"I'm a little dream-self, short and stout/I'm the other half of Bruce – when he lets me out," one poem began.

At the time Ivins was in therapy for his problems, according to the FBI. It is not clear whether he had been referred to therapy by the Army, or sought treatment on his own.

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