April 7, 2002: Government Sources Claim Some Anthrax Used in 2001 Attacks Was Very Sophisticated and Hard to Produce

The envelope to the Patrick Leahy letter. [Source: FBI]Newsweek reports that “government sources” say a “secret new analysis shows anthrax found in a letter addressed to Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy was ground [or milled] to a microscopic fineness not achieved by US biological-weapons experts.” The letters to Leahy and Sen. Tom Daschle are believed to have contained a more sophisticated form of anthrax than those in the other letters. Newsweek says these two letter were “coated with a chemical compound unknown to experts who have worked in the field for years; the coating matches no known anthrax samples ever recovered from biological-weapons producers anywhere in the world, including Iraq and the former Soviet Union.” [Newsweek, 4/7/2002] The belief that these two anthrax letters used a very sophisticated form of anthrax is widespread by this time (see October 25-29, 2001). However, from 2006 onwards, the FBI will assert there was no coating or milling on any of the anthrax letters at all (see August 2006).