As an FBI investigation increasingly focused on him as a suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks, Fort Detrick scientist Bruce E. Ivins enjoyed a security clearance that allowed him to work in the facility's most dangerous laboratories, to handle deadly biological agents, and to take part in broad discussions about the Pentagon's defenses against germ warfare.
On July 10, the day he was taken to a hospital for psychiatric evaluation, for example, Ivins spent part of the afternoon at a sensitive briefing on a new bubonic plague vaccine under development at the Army's elite biological weapons testing center, according to a former colleague who talked with him there.
Records that have surfaced since Ivins committed suicide last week show that Fort Detrick officials abruptly barred him from the base July 10, based on what a counselor called his deteriorating emotional condition. Until then, his security clearance gave him access to some of the most secure areas at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, or USAMRIID. Months earlier, Ivins had become one of a handful of scientists regarded by federal investigators as the lead suspects in the unsolved killing of five people by mailed letters containing anthrax.
Ivins himself had questioned the effectiveness of the fort's security procedures in interviews with reporters as long as six years ago. At the time of the anthrax attacks, only senior managers at USAMRIID were routinely required to obtain top-secret-level security clearances. Most scientists of Ivins's rank would be required to undergo a background check and would be cleared to see classified documents on a need-to-know basis, according to a former senior official at the lab.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/03/AR2008080301819.html?hpid=moreheadlinesCuriouser and curiouser.
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