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Terror in an Envelope
Is a threat "imminent" if it arrives in a Capitol mailroom?
Wednesday, February 4, 2004 12:01 a.m.
Terror returned in an envelope to Capitol Hill this week, with the discovery of what appears to be the chemical agent ricin. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said yesterday that the white powder found late Monday in a Senate office building tested positive for the deadly toxin. Further tests will determine how potent the poison is, but already it is a reminder of how vulnerable we are to terrorist attack. The White House also apparently received a similar letter in recent weeks.
Like the anthrax in the letters to Congress of two years ago, ricin has long been on the list of the likeliest chemical and biological threats. It's a relatively easy-to-make, highly lethal chemical that can kill by being injected, inhaled or ingested. A speck the size of a grain of salt is all it takes to destroy one life. There is no antidote. Fortunately, no one in the Senate exposed to the ricin seems to have yet fallen sick--a sign the Centers for Disease Control says is reassuring because symptoms usually start appearing right away.
The urgent question is who sent this and why. Ricin is common enough that it could be any number of culprits, foreign or domestic. As a terror agent, ricin was a Cold War favorite. In a scene worthy of a Ludlum thriller, a Bulgarian dissident was murdered in 1978 after being attacked in London by a man with an umbrella fitted with a poison ricin pellet. In the 1980s, Iraq is believed to have used ricin in its war against Iran.
The chemical has also made frequent appearances in the post-September 11 world. Former Iraq weapons inspector David Kay mentioned it last week in his report on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. Saddam, he said, was actively trying to weaponize ricin right up until the U.S. invasion in March. Ricin also turned up in a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda was clearly experimenting with the chemical--as it was with anthrax--though there is no evidence that it succeeded in weaponizing either substance.
There have also been several ricin scares in Europe of late. In Britain last year, six men of North African descent were charged with conspiring to develop a chemical weapon after police found traces of ricin in a London apartment. Nine people are under arrest in France in connection with an investigation into ricin found in a Paris train station last March.
Here at home, the ricin found in the Senate office building recalls the anthrax attacks just after 9/11. Five Americans died and a Senate office building was so badly contaminated that it took three months to clean it up. A New Jersey postal center that processed anthrax letters is still being decontaminated. More than two years later the source of those anthrax letters remains unknown, and we hope that failure informs the FBI and law enforcement search for the ricin culprits. Above all, this will require a different mindset.
In the anthrax case, the FBI has been fixated from the start on its theory that the letter writer was a domestic nut with no ties to any terrorist group. Specifically, its probe has focused on Dr. Steven Hatfill, a former government scientist and bioweapons expert. The agency has gone as far as to drain an entire pond in the Washington, D.C., area in search of what it hoped was evidence implicating Dr. Hatfill. The doctor maintains his innocence, and the feds have brought no charges.
The lesson here is to cast a wider net, and not foreclose other theories of the case. Foreign sources or their U.S. agents shouldn't be ruled out prematurely. All the more so because the main goal here has to be long-term security not merely cracking a single case. The links between ricin and Iraq and Afghanistan certainly deserve deeper examination. It's hardly a leap of imagination to think that al Qaeda or other terrorist organizations are looking to strike the U.S. once again.
The ricin letters are also a reminder that the threat of terror remains clear and present. There's been a lot of talk lately that the failure to discover any stockpiles of WMD in Iraq proves that the terror threat isn't "imminent" and that we can return to our pre-9/11 way of countering it. Is ricin's arrival in a Senate mailroom imminent enough?
Is a threat "imminent" if it arrives in a Capitol mailroom?
Wednesday, February 4, 2004 12:01 a.m.
Terror returned in an envelope to Capitol Hill this week, with the discovery of what appears to be the chemical agent ricin. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said yesterday that the white powder found late Monday in a Senate office building tested positive for the deadly toxin. Further tests will determine how potent the poison is, but already it is a reminder of how vulnerable we are to terrorist attack. The White House also apparently received a similar letter in recent weeks.
Like the anthrax in the letters to Congress of two years ago, ricin has long been on the list of the likeliest chemical and biological threats. It's a relatively easy-to-make, highly lethal chemical that can kill by being injected, inhaled or ingested. A speck the size of a grain of salt is all it takes to destroy one life. There is no antidote. Fortunately, no one in the Senate exposed to the ricin seems to have yet fallen sick--a sign the Centers for Disease Control says is reassuring because symptoms usually start appearing right away.
The urgent question is who sent this and why. Ricin is common enough that it could be any number of culprits, foreign or domestic. As a terror agent, ricin was a Cold War favorite. In a scene worthy of a Ludlum thriller, a Bulgarian dissident was murdered in 1978 after being attacked in London by a man with an umbrella fitted with a poison ricin pellet. In the 1980s, Iraq is believed to have used ricin in its war against Iran.
The chemical has also made frequent appearances in the post-September 11 world. Former Iraq weapons inspector David Kay mentioned it last week in his report on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. Saddam, he said, was actively trying to weaponize ricin right up until the U.S. invasion in March. Ricin also turned up in a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda was clearly experimenting with the chemical--as it was with anthrax--though there is no evidence that it succeeded in weaponizing either substance.
There have also been several ricin scares in Europe of late. In Britain last year, six men of North African descent were charged with conspiring to develop a chemical weapon after police found traces of ricin in a London apartment. Nine people are under arrest in France in connection with an investigation into ricin found in a Paris train station last March.
Here at home, the ricin found in the Senate office building recalls the anthrax attacks just after 9/11. Five Americans died and a Senate office building was so badly contaminated that it took three months to clean it up. A New Jersey postal center that processed anthrax letters is still being decontaminated. More than two years later the source of those anthrax letters remains unknown, and we hope that failure informs the FBI and law enforcement search for the ricin culprits. Above all, this will require a different mindset.
In the anthrax case, the FBI has been fixated from the start on its theory that the letter writer was a domestic nut with no ties to any terrorist group. Specifically, its probe has focused on Dr. Steven Hatfill, a former government scientist and bioweapons expert. The agency has gone as far as to drain an entire pond in the Washington, D.C., area in search of what it hoped was evidence implicating Dr. Hatfill. The doctor maintains his innocence, and the feds have brought no charges.
The lesson here is to cast a wider net, and not foreclose other theories of the case. Foreign sources or their U.S. agents shouldn't be ruled out prematurely. All the more so because the main goal here has to be long-term security not merely cracking a single case. The links between ricin and Iraq and Afghanistan certainly deserve deeper examination. It's hardly a leap of imagination to think that al Qaeda or other terrorist organizations are looking to strike the U.S. once again.
The ricin letters are also a reminder that the threat of terror remains clear and present. There's been a lot of talk lately that the failure to discover any stockpiles of WMD in Iraq proves that the terror threat isn't "imminent" and that we can return to our pre-9/11 way of countering it. Is ricin's arrival in a Senate mailroom imminent enough?