Late Autumn 2007: FBI Pressures Family Members of Anthrax Attacks Suspect Ivins; Ivins Begins Drinking Heavily

Around late autumn 2007, FBI agents pressure the family of anthrax attacks suspect Bruce Ivins. According to an unnamed scientist colleague and friend of Ivins, agents show Ivins’s 24-year-old daughter pictures of the victims of the 2001 anthrax attacks (see October 5-November 21, 2001) and tell her, “Your father did this.” The agents also offer her brother the $2.5 million reward for solving the anthrax case and the sports car of his choice. Dr. W. Russell Byrne, a friend and former supervisor of Ivins, will later say he heard from other people who knew Ivins that investigators were going after Ivins’s daughter, but these conversations were short because people were afraid to talk. “The FBI had asked everybody to sign these nondisclosure things. They didn’t want to run afoul of the FBI.” [Associated Press, 8/5/2008] Bryne also says the FBI’s repeated discussions with Ivins’s daughter “was not an interview. It was a frank attempt at intimidation.” [Baltimore Sun, 8/5/2008]
Ivins Drinks and Struggles with Pressure - Perhaps as a result of this pressure, Ivins begins drinking heavily (a liter of vodka on some nights) and taking large doses of sleeping and anti-anxiety pills. His unnamed scientist friend later says that Ivins “was e-mailing me late at night with gobbledygook, ranting and raving” about what he called the “persecution” of his family. This friend also later says he is contacted by another colleague of Ivins who says that Ivins “has really gone down the tubes.” Another friend, Gerry Andrews, who worked with Ivins at USAMRIID for nine years, said that prior to this time Ivins drank so little that others teased him about being a teetotaler. Andrews had retired but kept in touch with Ivins until autumn 2007, when Ivins “kind of fell off the radar screen. I found out that there was some issues with his house being surveilled.”
Ivins Seeks Treatment - In March 2008, Ivins is found collapsed in his home. In April, he begins to seek treatment. He spends four weeks at a Maryland hospital for detoxification and rehabilitation, and begins attending therapy sessions with a counselor. In November 2007, Ivins is banned from working with dangerous toxins at USAMRIID, the US Army’s top biological laboratory, where he works (see November 1, 2007). But he will not be permanently barred from working there until July 2008, when he is hospitalized a second time (see July 10, 2008). [Washington Post, 8/6/2008]