Page One Feature

Killer's Trail: Linguistic, Other Analyses Hint At Unabomber Type, Implying Long Search

By MARK SCHOOFS, G ARY FIELDS and JERRY MARKON
Staff Reporters of T HE WALL STREET J OURNAL

A reclusive, science-minded criminal who sends murder through the mail and frustrates investigators. That's the behavioral profile of the anthrax perpetrator released Friday by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

It's also strikingly similar to Theodore Kaczynski, the infamous "Unabomber" who killed or injured more than a dozen people with mail bombs.

If the FBI profile is right, it's not good news for the investigation. Catching Mr. Kaczynski took almost 18 years and a lucky break -- and investigators had more to go on. A similar lone wolf mailing anthrax would be "the FBI's worst nightmare," says Patrick Webb, a former agent who worked on the Unabomber case.

The FBI certainly isn't ruling out other possibilities, including al Qaeda, the original suspect. The anthrax in one letter was well enough milled and purified that some authorities believe it points to more than a lone scientist. Also remaining active is another line of inquiry: the mailings as the work of a domestic terrorist group such as a right-wing militia. Homeland-security director Tom Ridge reiterated on Friday that authorities don't know whether the mailer is domestic or foreign.

Yet mounting evidence has made the lone domestic terrorist the leading theory. The evidence ranges from exacting handwriting and linguistic analyses to test results on how the anthrax was prepared -- plus the fact that no suspected al Qaeda operatives have shown anthrax symptoms. "We're looking at the Unabomber case very closely -- how he did it, the mindset," says an FBI agent high up in the investigation. This agent says the anthrax team has begun studying how the bureau investigated that case.

What they'll find is sobering. Feeble, long-shot leads triggered thousands of interviews and hundreds of thousands of document reviews. Those leads all turned out to be "distractions" leading nowhere, says Mr. Webb. "But when you have nothing, you go with the distractions."

The big break in the Unabomber case came when Mr. Kaczynski sent a 35,000-word manifesto to the New York Times and the Washington Post. Reading it prompted Mr. Kaczynski's brother, as well as former students and others, to make the connection and tip the FBI on the Unabomber's identity.

Now, by going public with a profile and copies of the letters in the anthrax envelopes, the FBI hopes to shake loose the same kind of tip. "We ask the American public to ... reflect on whether someone of their acquaintance might fit the profile," the FBI said Friday. "The safety of the American people is at stake." Four have died of anthrax, and the bacteria have sickened at least 13 people so far.

The FBI says more than 4,000 agents and 3,000 support staffers are working on the twin probes of anthrax and the Sept. 11 attacks, by far the bureau's largest probe ever. Also investigating are the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and state and local police forces, among others. The FBI is offering a $1 million reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the mailer.

An anthrax tie to Sept. 11 was the leading theory after the bacteria surfaced at American Media Inc. early in October, killing one staffer at the Florida tabloid publishing firm and making another ill. The timing seemed too close to Sept. 11 to be a coincidence. Also, Florida was where some hijackers had lived and gone to flight school. And there was the curious connection that a real-estate agent who helped two hijackers find homes was married to the publisher of the tabloid involved, the Sun.

Then came anthrax-tainted letters to NBC anchor Tom Brokaw, the New York Post and Sen. Tom Daschle. Though they had postmarks from New Jersey, a state where some of the hijackers lived, the letters led investigators to lean away from al Qaeda.

For one thing, the M.O. didn't fit. "Al Qaeda is into mass casualties, not this junior-varsity, onesy-twosey terrorism," says a senior administration official. Agents also found that all the letters used the so-called Ames strain of anthrax, which originated in the U.S.

And, says one agent, "there were no martyrs." None of the detained suspects came down with anthrax symptoms, according to Sandra Carroll, a special agent and spokeswoman for the New Jersey FBI, nor did any of the hundreds of officers who had searched their apartments and belongings. The FBI won't say whether anyone in custody has been tested for anthrax antibodies, which would indicate exposure to either the bacteria or an anthrax vaccine.

Finally, several FBI agents and a high-ranking senator briefed on the investigation say that despite a massive computerized analysis, neither al Qaeda communications nor the money trail has led back to anthrax.

The three known anthrax letters provide some of the best clues. Whoever wrote them makes an S that looks like a 5, a G that looks like a 6 and an R that looks like an A. The writer begins the first line slightly to the left of those that follow. The spacing between lines is uniform, and on the envelopes, the lines all slant downward. Such traits indicate that "the person is familiar enough with English to have established unconscious habits," says Gideon Epstein, who worked as a document examiner for many years with the Army crime lab and the ATF, and founded the INS's forensic document laboratory. The letters, he adds, "point in the direction of someone who has lived here for a long time or is an American." But the FBI says the block letters may indicate the writer is not American.

While some have argued that the block printing suggests disguised writing, Mr. Epstein thinks the block writing is natural. He notes that many government forms require block letters. He says he has sometimes asked agents to go and find examples of block printing by suspects, such as writing on government or employer forms, and they usually have been able to.

The way the date on the letters is written, 09-11-01, also suggests an American writer. People in the Middle East and many other parts of the world put the day before the month.

Placing the Bismullah

Though the text mentions Allah, experts say it doesn't have the feel of an Arabic writer. The FBI won't comment on the linguistics, beyond saying that the style doesn't match al Qaeda letters in its files. But Richard Bulliet, an Islam expert at Columbia University, points to the line "Allah is great" at the end of the letters. He says "any pious Muslim" would put that at the top, in a blessing called the bismullah that is supposed to start all written documents.

The terse sentences are another hint, says Ayman El-Desouky, an Arabic scholar from Egypt who lectures at Harvard. "One sentence in Arabic could run for two pages," he says. Al Qaeda letters, he added, "tend to be written using a high register of classical Arabic, medieval basically." But the anthrax letters "just string certain slogans that are exactly what you would expect to hear as an American."

Robert K. Ressler, a former FBI profiler, agrees. "'Death to Israel. Praise Allah.' That sounds like somebody trying to sound like a terrorist," says Mr. Ressler, now director of Forensic Behavioral Services International, a Virginia firm that does law-enforcement consulting and training.

In contrast to the long Unabomber manifesto, the three anthrax letters, one a photocopy of another, have a total of just 39 words. Yet based on that scant text, other aspects of the case and interviews with past serial bombers, the FBI has cobbled together a behavioral profile. One element: It suspects that the misspelling of penicillin as "penacilin" was deliberate, an attempt to look dumb.

Far from dumb, the anthrax mailer clearly has some scientific knowledge. It might only be the knowledge of a lab technician or someone with "a strong interest in science," the FBI says. The addresses are written as they are on Web sites for all three recipients, suggesting the mailer has some computer proficiency.

If the sender is one person, investigators believe it is an adult male, based on similar crimes. They suspect he obtained the anthrax by working at a lab, possibly at night or on weekends. He may have set up his own lab at home, in a garage or basement, which would be an area he kept others away from. The FBI thinks a person could get the equipment needed to refine anthrax to the degree found in the Daschle letter for as little as $2,500.

While this makes it seem the anthrax sender could be an amateur, Clarence "C.J." Peters, a biological warfare expert who now heads the Center for Biodefense at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, says growing the anthrax is the easy part. The so-called Ames strain is known to be possessed by only a small number of laboratories, but graduate students "swap strains around quite readily, and the professor may not even know," Dr. Peters says. Indeed, the FBI now says that it has found 22,000 individuals or labs with access to anthrax, though it doesn't say how many had access to the Ames strain.

Dr. Peters says the harder task is figuring out how to make Anthrax float in the air so it can be inhaled. But the FBI now believes that the way the anthrax was processed indicates it may not have been made in a state-sponsored program. In the past week, according to a senior law-enforcement official, the FBI received final test results suggesting that the anthrax was grown in a liquid slurry form and then dried into a powder, perhaps by the simple method of a centrifuge machine. The powder was then milled, creating tiny particles ranging from one to six microns.

Though that is a sign of considerable scientific sophistication, the Daschle-letter particles -- contrary to what investigators initially suspected -- weren't coated with a substance such as silica to keep them from clumping. Such a substance was found in the powder, but it might have been added as a drying agent. While not ruling out state sponsorship, the senior law-enforcement official says that this new information points elsewhere.

Other bioterrorism experts warn against that conclusion. "A state-sponsored terrorist could use this technique, too," says Kenneth Alibek, a researcher who once was second in command of the Soviet Union's biological-weapons agency. The FBI is continuing tests in hopes of finding a chemical signature that might help identify who made the anthrax.

The FBI thinks the sender, who may tend to avoid people, has a good knowledge of Trenton, N.J., where the letters were postmarked. For the return address on the Daschle envelope, the mailer wrote "Greendale School" in Franklin Park, a Trenton suburb. While that school is fictitious, its name is similar to some nearby.

Law-enforcement agents say investigators have sharply narrowed down the postal routes where the letters might have been mailed. But they point out that the Unabomber rode a bus hundreds of miles to mail his bombs from San Francisco and Utah.

If the profile doesn't spur someone who knows the mailer to turn him in, agents will be roughly where they were with the Unabomber before his manifesto was published. "We had hundreds of clues," says Don Davis, who headed the Unabomber manhunt for the Postal Inspection Service, working with the FBI. For example, the Unabomber used Eugene O'Neill stamps, so investigators tracked down everyone who signed the visitors' list at the late playwright's home. It didn't help.

Also unavailing was DNA recovered from one mailing, Mr. Davis says. An agent in the current investigation says the anthrax envelopes don't bear DNA -- hardly surprising, since it would be hazardous to lick them. The letters are in prestamped envelopes with a stylized eagle.

Most striking, Unabomber investigators also had fragments of all the bombs that exploded plus a couple of intact ones found before they exploded. The Unabomber carefully assembled his devices and packed them in wooden boxes he fashioned himself. So agents had dozens of items to track.

With the last four bombs, "we even made mockups, packages that looked exactly like the bomb -- the same size, weight, handwriting, postage, address, everything," recalls Mr. Davis. "We interviewed several hundred postal workers and asked them, 'Do you remember picking up this box?'" One did, because she had broken a fingernail trying to lift it. "So we knew where he was on that day," says Mr. Davis. "We then pulled all the video cameras in the neighborhood and looked at all the video tapes."

They found nothing. And trying the same thing with an envelope such as the anthrax mailer used would be "much harder," Mr. Davis notes, because envelopes are far more common and less likely to be remembered.

'Call Nathan R'

When Mr. Kaczynski first wrote to the news media, about three years before he was captured, agents thought they had a gotten a break. Document examiners noticed what's called indented writing -- impressions made from a pen used on a piece of paper lying on top of the actual document. "It says 'Call Nathan R 7:00 pm Wed," recalls Mr. Webb, the former FBI agent. He and his colleagues decided to interview every Nathan R. in America between 25 and 50, focusing especially on those living in states where the Unabomber had been active. "Nathan Rosenbaum, Nathan Ross, whatever," he recalls. "We interviewed about 19,000, I think."

To no avail. The whole investigation "was an incredible amount of work," says William Kinane, a former FBI agent who supervised the first five years of it. "We had a giant database of people involved in similar crimes, people who had sent letters in the mail. Eventually, we had small squads involved in every facet, like the ingredients of the bombs, trying to find out where the parts were made and sold. We talked to thousands of people who had sold wire and the ingredients of the bombs. We had hundreds of people calling and giving us leads. We did profiles of the victims and their whole lives." But until the Unabomber's manifesto was published, says Mr. Kinane, "it all turned up negative."

One difficulty was figuring out Mr. Kaczynski's precise motives. The anthrax case has that problem, too, with tainted letters sent to recipients as diverse as a conservative-leaning daily paper and a leading Democratic senator. In a written press statement, the FBI says, "These targets are probably very important to the offender. They may have been the focus of previous expressions of contempt, which may have been communicated to others, or observed by others."

Anthrax was found in an additional 10 Senate offices, including those of Republicans Larry Craig of Idaho and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Democrats Dianne Feinstein of California, Bob Graham of Florida and Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut. Spores now have turned up in more than two dozen Washington mailrooms and offices. Much of the contamination is thought to be the result of cross-contamination by the letter to Mr. Daschle.

Investigators are pursuing the possibility that letters were sent to more government officials than Mr. Daschle. A key concern is the recent inhaled-anthrax infection of a worker at an off-site mailroom for the State Department. Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say such an infection would be very unlikely to occur simply from the Daschle letter.

Postal inspectors said Friday they believe the mailer sent other anthrax-laced letters that may be in the piles of mail quarantined because of the scare.

And that still leaves the mystery of Bronx hospital worker Kathy Nguyen, who died of inhalation anthrax and has no known tie to a tainted letter. In New York this weekend, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said it's possible investigators may never learn how she contracted it. Environmental tests are being conducted on parts of the subway as a precaution.

Meanwhile, the other theories about who mailed the anthrax -- domestic terrorist groups or people linked to the Sept. 11 attacks -- continue to get plenty of attention from investigators. The FBI has kept a close eye on antigovernment groups and their Internet sites, where suggestions were made to strike amid the chaos created by Sept. 11. It knows that members of a patriot group in Minnesota once planned to use ricin, a natural toxin made from beans, to kill government employees, and were successfully prosecuted in the 1990s.

But membership in far-right patriot groups has plummeted since the Oklahoma City bombing, and the groups are monitored more closely. The Dallas FBI, for example, meets every four to six months with patriot groups from as far away as South Carolina, and members have tipped it off about bombings that other militia groups were allegedly planning.

FBI agents say there could be terrorist groups espousing almost any cause, from environment to anarchism. "At no time should you narrow the focus to lean in a certain direction," says a senior law-enforcement official working on the case, "or you may not see something."

Investigators also continue to hunt for an al Qaeda link. Terrorist cells of two or three can operate furtively. Even if the anthrax mailer is working solo, he could be an al Qaeda member.

Atta's Hands

If so, it's likely he would have had contact with other al Qaeda operatives. So agents are focusing on the suspected ringleader of the Sept. 11 attacks, Mohammed Atta.

Mr. Atta was interested in crop-dusting planes, Attorney General John Ashcroft has said. And investigators found that Zacarias Moussaoui, a Moroccan jailed as a material witness, had downloaded crop-dusting manuals onto his computer. Investigators say they don't know whether Mr. Atta or others wanted to use such planes to deliver anthrax or possibly some other agent.

Investigators are also wondering why, sometime before Sept. 11, Mr. Atta visited a pharmacy in Delray Beach, Fla. Pharmacist Gregg Chatterton has said Mr. Atta and fellow hijacker Marwan al-Shehhi came in seeking treatment for reddened, burning hands. He says Mr. Atta was rude and evasive when asked what had happened to him.

FBI agents spent at least half of a 90-minute interview on Oct. 8 "grilling me about Atta's hands," Mr. Chatterton says. He says they didn't ask about anthrax, and to him "it did not look like Atta had cutaneous anthrax." But the FBI has subpoenaed the records of Mr. Chatterton's pharmacies and others nearby "looking for anyone who got an unusual amount of antibiotics," according to Mr. Chatterton. He says his records didn't show that Mr. Atta or Mr. al-Shehhi bought Cipro or any other antibiotics.

Then there is Mr. Atta's still-mysterious meeting last spring with a former Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague. Iraq has "weaponized" huge quantities of anthrax. So far, say a Western diplomat and a senior administration official, no evidence has been found linking the Prague meeting to anthrax. But another person familiar with the investigation says, "They are running the Atta thing out to the end."

If connections to al Qaeda terrorism aren't proved and tips don't come in from publicizing the profile, then agents will be left with the forensic evidence in the three letters. "We saw this with the Unabomber -- once you get beyond those things, what do you have?" says a former FBI agent who led the Unabomber task force. "That's what makes this so frightening."

-- Maureen Tkacik, David Cloud, Steve Stecklow contributed to this article.

Write to Mark Schoofs at mark.schoofs@wsj.com , Gary Fields at gary.fields@wsj.com and Jerry Markon at jerry.markon@wsj.com