David Willman’s “The Mirage Man: Bruce Ivins, the Anthrax Attacks, and America’s Rush to War”

Three years ago this month, I was sitting across from Charles Ivins, the elder brother of Army scientist Bruce Ivins — the man the FBI says was behind the 2001 anthrax attacks. Those attacks, which came in two waves just weeks after 9/11, were the first biological assault ever directed against this country. A handful of politicians and media outlets received envelopes in the mail that contained deadly anthrax spores. In all, five people died from breathing in the anthrax, and 17 others were sickened. When I met with Charles Ivins, it was just hours after a memorial service for his brother, who had committed suicide before the FBI could charge him in the case.

To hear Ivins’s family and colleagues tell it, the socially awkward, geeky scientist took his own life because the FBI had been hounding him for months. A strain of the anthrax known as RMR-1029 and linked to the 2001 anthrax mailings had been connected directly to Bruce.

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(Bantam) - ‘The Mirage Man: Bruce Ivins, the Anthrax Attacks, and America's Rush to War’ by David Willman. Bantam. 448 pp. $27

Charles was sure that his brother couldn’t possibly have been responsible. “Bruce was compassionate and considerate,” he assured me. “He didn’t do it.” But as we talked, it became clear that he’d never seen the evidence the FBI had amassed against his brother. I had been reporting on the case for NPR, and I handed him what I had from the FBI and watched him read.

Ivins and his wife, Nita, wordlessly passed pages of the affidavits to each other. They pointed to passages, exchanged glances and seemed to fill in the redactions with names and dates and faces they knew. Eventually, darkness crept into Charles’s expression. “I’m stunned now, I am just totally stunned,” he said. While he was careful not to say he thought his brother was the anthrax killer, the evidence had clearly planted seeds of doubt.

David Willman’s new book, “The Mirage Man,” is meant to spark the same reaction in those who didn’t know Bruce Ivins and can’t fill in the blanks. Willman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Los Angeles Times reporter, provides the first behind-the-scenes account of one of the most far-reaching investigations in the history of the FBI, and shows how circumstantial evidence and innuendo added to the expensive and ultimately unsatisfying conclusion of the case.

The FBI identified the anthrax strain and traced it back to a U.S. Army lab in Maryland fairly early in the investigation. Working on tips, they zeroed in on a somewhat bombastic physician-researcher named Stephen Hatfill who had worked in the same lab as Ivins.

Under normal circumstances, Hatfill might well have been excluded as a suspect because he worked with viruses such as Ebola, not bacteria such as anthrax. He also hadn’t had access to the lab for more than two years before the attacks. Still, with the FBI under intense pressure to crack this case in the wake of its 9/11 failures, leaders at the bureau couldn’t shake their conviction that Hatfill was involved.

Willman writes that the FBI felt it had an unassailable source: a team of bloodhounds from Southern California. They had been trained specifically to sniff out RMR-1029. One four-footed sleuth named TinkerBelle had “alerted” on Hatfill, his apartment and his girlfriend numerous times.