For anthrax suspects, FBI hunt had high costs

Personal, work lives affected

Asif Kazi was one of three Pakistanis investigated by the FBI in 2001. All three were later cleared of wrongdoing. (Jessica Kourkounis/ The New York Times)

NEW YORK - When Perry Mikesell, a microbiologist in Ohio, came under suspicion as the anthrax attacker, he began drinking heavily, family members say, and soon died. After a doctor in New York drew the interest of the FBI, his marriage fell apart and his practice suffered, his lawyer says. And after two Pakistani brothers in Pennsylvania were briefly under scrutiny, they eventually had to leave the country to find work.

The FBI's path to Bruce E. Ivins, the Army scientist who committed suicide late last month as federal officials moved closer to indicting him for the 2001 anthrax letter attacks, was long and tortuous.

Before the investigators settled on Ivins - and his defenders still say the FBI hounded an innocent man to death - they had focused on Steven J. Hatfill, another Army researcher, for several years.

But along the way, scores of others - terrorists, foreigners, academic researchers, biowarfare specialists, and an elite group of Army scientists working behind high fences and barbed wire - drew the interest of the investigators. For some of them the cost was high: lost jobs, canceled visas, broken marriages, frayed friendships.

At the Army biodefense laboratory in Frederick, Md., where Ivins worked, the inquiry became a murder mystery, the cast composed of top scientists eyeing one another warily over vials of lethal pathogens.

"It was not pleasant," recalled Jeffrey J. Adamovicz, a former official there. "There was a general sense of paranoia that they were going to get somebody no matter what."

Some critics fault the FBI's investigation as ignorant, incompetent, and worse. Representative Rush D. Holt, Democrat of New Jersey, who was a Princeton University physicist, said the disclosures linking Ivins to the crime notwithstanding, the inquiry was "poorly handled" and "resulted in a trail of embarrassment and personal tragedy."

The bureau's defenders, though, say it did what was necessary to track down a dangerous killer.

"You do the best you can, and it's not always pretty," said Robert M. Blitzer, a former director of the FBI's section on domestic terrorism. "Here, you have a bunch of people dead and several diminished, and you're charged with solving the crime. You try not to step on people's toes, but sometimes it happens."

Over seven years, the anthrax investigators conducted nearly 100 searches and more than 9,000 interviews in the most complex criminal case in bureau history.

They hunted an attacker who, in September and October 2001, had mailed anthrax-laden envelopes that killed five people, sickened 17 others, and threw the nation into a panic.

Early on, with more zeal than solid information, agents turned on three Pakistani-born city officials in Chester, Pa.

One, Irshad Shaikh, was the health commissioner; his brother, Masood Shaikh, ran the lead-abatement program. The third, Asif Kazi, was an accountant in the finance department.

Kazi was sitting in his City Hall office one day in November 2001 when FBI agents burst in and began a barrage of questions.

"It was really scary," Kazi recalled in an interview last week. "It was: 'What do you think of 9/11? What do know about anthrax?' "

Across town, an agent pointed a gun through an open window at Kazi's home while others knocked down the front door as his wife was cooking in the kitchen.

At the Shaikh brothers' house, agents in bioprotection suits began hunting for germ-making equipment and carted away computers.

None of the three men had ever worked with anthrax. But for days, they were on national television as footage of the searches ran on a video loop and news announcers wondered aloud whether they were the killers.

The men were cleared after it turned out that a disgruntled employee had sought revenge by calling in a bogus tip.

But for all three, trouble followed. The Shaikhs' path to citizenship was disrupted, their visas ran out, and both had to find work abroad, Kazi said.

Kazi, already a citizen, was searched and interrogated for as long as two hours every time he traveled back from visiting his brother in Canada.

Only about a year ago was his name removed from a watch list, allowing him to travel freely.

When Kazi heard that Ivins was said to be the culprit in the attacks, he had only one request.

"We'd just like our names cleared," Kazi said. "There's no problem for people who know us. But out in the community, someone might still think, 'Maybe these guys were guilty.' "