Vials reported missing and feds swarm in
Previously: At a time when the government was on alert for bioterrorism attacks, Texas Tech University researcher Dr. Thomas Butler was working with federal officials to confirm the effectiveness of an antibiotic against plague. On Jan. 11, 2003, Butler discovered that 30 vials of plague bacteria from his laboratory were missing.
The day was almost over when the astonishing phone call came in to the Lubbock FBI office.
It was Tuesday, Jan. 14, 2003, around 5 p.m. Shannon Fish, a young agent fresh from the FBI Academy, couldn't believe what Sgt. Billy Lang of the Texas Tech University police department was saying.
Thirty vials of plague were missing, possibly stolen, from a researcher's lab.
“Are you kidding?” Fish asked. “No,” Lang said. “This is for real.”
Fish paged the Lubbock office's terrorism specialist, agent Mike Orndorff, who was on his way home. They both headed for the Texas Tech campus.
Dr. Thomas Butler arrived at the Tech police department about 40 minutes later, escorted by a campus cop. The agents were unaware that Butler's infectious disease research had helped save millions of lives, or that he was one of the world's foremost plague experts, among only a handful of American doctors who'd treated the victims of the ancient killer and seen its terrible handiwork up close.
All the FBI men knew was that Butler was some kind of scientist, and that the plague bacteria had disappeared from his lab. To the agents, he was a witness, and perhaps the victim of a crime with huge implications for homeland security.
Orndorff, a former Lubbock cop, took the lead. He began asking Butler some basic questions: Why did he have plague bacteria? Who had access to his lab? Was he certain it was missing and not just misplaced?
Butler told the agents his research involved testing the effectiveness of antibiotics against the plague – work that he'd been doing in collaboration with the Army, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He'd gotten the samples from the African country of Tanzania, where plague outbreaks still occurred.
He'd searched his lab most of the weekend after noticing that 30 bacteria-filled glass vials weren't in the rack where they were supposed to be. He reported the disappearance Monday morning to the lab safety officer at Tech's Health Sciences Center, where Butler ran the infectious disease division.
“Someone must have known what they were looking for, because they left these empty slants behind,” Butler told his boss, Dr. Donald Wesson, chairman of the internal medicine department, when Wesson stopped by Butler's lab earlier that Tuesday afternoon.
“Slants” were what researchers called the bullet-shaped vials. Whoever had taken the 30 plague slants from their rack had left eight others filled only with nutrient gel. The difference between the plague slants and the gel slants was subtle; you'd have to know what you were looking for to tell which ones contained plague bacteria.
“People steal things out of my lab all the time,” he remarked, reminding Wesson of an expensive balance scale that had been taken several years earlier. Even after Butler bolted its replacement to the counter, someone swiped that one, too.
Wesson didn't see much additional evidence to support a theft. Still, he was alarmed and said he thought they should notify outside authorities.
Butler disagreed. Someone could have taken the vials by mistake, or moved them without thinking. Why sound a red alert when it might be premature? He suggested to Wesson – and again in a tense meeting with medical school dean Dr. Richard Homan later Tuesday afternoon – that the university handle the investigation internally.
Absolutely not, Homan insisted, his face flushing red. Based on what Butler was telling them, Homan thought someone might already have converted the plague bacteria to a weaponized form and was readying an attack. Wesson agreed. They called the police.
If they feared a bioterror incident, though, neither of the medical school officials let it curtail their plans that Tuesday evening. Wesson went to a Bible study class. Homan took his wife and daughter out to dinner at Chili's.
Butler, meanwhile, was closeted at the emergency command post set up in the Lubbock Police Department's basement, answering the increasingly worried FBI agents' questions. He seemed calm – too calm, some in the room were beginning to think. Thirty vials of live plague bacteria had vanished without a trace, and this guy wasn't even breaking a sweat?
The subtle uptick in suspicion was lost on Butler. He was in bed by 9 o'clock most nights. He didn't watch “Law and Order” or “NYPD Blue,” didn't know anything about the rhythms and routines of the interrogation room.
To those who knew him best, that calm demeanor was just the way Butler dealt with stress. He pulled back, kept up a cool, detached facade, no matter what was going on inside. It wasn't his nature to wave his arms or shout.
Once, years ago, when he'd taken the family to visit his parents in North Carolina, his two young sons were fooling around in a barn and covered themselves with fertilizer. Butler's wife, Elisabeth, frantically rushed them to the bathtub, convinced they'd been poisoned. The scientist just sat there reading the paper.
Butler's apparent calmness didn't mean he wasn't worried about the missing vials – he was. But he thought it far more likely that a thief, not a terrorist, had taken the bacteria.
That wasn't the direction the FBI was headed at all.
Uncertainty adds to FBI fears
About 10 minutes into Orndorff's interview with Butler, Resident Agent Miles Burden, the supervisor of the Lubbock office, stuck his head in the room to interrupt. His bosses in Washington needed information. The FBI director and the president would have to be briefed about the developing incident.
Right now, Burden needed to know how dangerous the material in the missing vials was, and whether it could be turned into a weapon.
In its current form, the bacteria wasn't much of a public threat, Butler answered. There was only a tiny amount, and without fleas as a vector – the way the germ usually was transmitted in outbreaks – plague simply didn't spread easily from person to person.
For a terrorist to cause mass casualties, you'd first have to grow many gallons of the bacteria, carefully dry it, then grind the material into a microfine powder that would spread on the wind or through ventilation ducts.
It wasn't his field, but Butler guessed weaponization would take several days.
To the agents, that meant a terrorist already might have had enough time to prepare a large-scale attack.
Something wasn't right, thought Burden, a veteran of the Pan Am Flight 103 and Oklahoma City bombing investigations. The scientist's tone of voice didn't match the bombshell of an answer he'd just given. It was like Butler was reciting the ingredients on a cereal box, the agent said to himself.
If anything, though, Butler had overstated the risk his missing vials posed.
First, someone who wanted to get plague bacteria didn't have to steal it from a lab. They could just set a few traps in the fields outside Lubbock, or anywhere else in the Southwest, where plague had infested the prairie dog population for decades.
Second, the weaponization process was far more difficult than Butler had described. In the nearly 30 years that the U.S. government ran an offensive biowarfare program, its scientists had never been able to turn plague into a viable weapon. Never.
During the bulk-growing phase, mutations neutered the germs' potency. By the time government scientists had cooked up 2,500 gallons of bacteria in a fermenter, you could practically wash with the stuff. The complex freeze-drying process caused the same problem.
Soviet bioweaponeers eventually overcame those obstacles, brewing a 20-ton stockpile of weaponized plague for the Kremlin's arsenals, but not without significant effort, expertise and expense.
The bottom line, as congressional investigators concluded in 1999, was this: without access to sophisticated government labs and equipment, terrorists faced “extraordinary challenges” to make a germ weapon that would cause mass casualties.
So even in the unlikely event that al-Qaida operatives had targeted Butler's obscure lab, they hadn't gotten away with something that posed an imminent threat.
But there was no stopping the fuse Butler had helped light.
The proximity to Sept. 11 and the unsolved anthrax mailings of late 2001 ruled out anything less than an all-out response to the still-unfolding events in Texas. Sixty FBI agents and dozens of other lawmen were racing to Lubbock. In Washington, the bureau's hazardous materials and weapons of mass destruction units went on high alert.
The feds couldn't afford to appear timid or slow, especially given the government's poor record of preparedness for past bioweapon threats.
Exhibit A was the strange case of Ohio's Larry Wayne Harris.
Unfettered movement of germ samples ends
In 1995, the microbiologist and white supremacy and militia sympathizer ordered three vials of plague bacteria from a Maryland commercial lab, which promptly mailed them to him.
Later, lab personnel grew suspicious and called police, who raided Harris' home near Columbus and found the plague vials stuffed in the glove box of his car. Harris said he feared germ warfare attacks. He claimed he needed the samples for his research on plague antidotes.
When authorities tried to prosecute Harris, all they could charge him with was using a fake letterhead to place his plague order. Remarkably, there were no federal laws preventing individuals from possessing human pathogens like plague and fiddling with them in homemade labs.
Members of Congress also were shocked to learn that those who moved potentially deadly biological “select agents” from place to place didn't have to report the transfers.
Researchers were known to swap the stuff at scientific meetings. Flying back from fieldwork, they packed petri dishes and test tubes of it in their suitcases or carried it in their clothing. Sometimes they taped samples to their bodies to keep the germs at their preferred temperature.
There was even a humorous name for the technique – traveling “VIP,” or “vials in pocket.”
No one meant to be cavalier. The researchers genuinely believed that personally transporting samples was the safest way to go. It kept the material out of the hands of careless or nefarious shippers, and – contrary to public perception – posed little risk to fellow passengers.
Veteran scientists did it. Dr. Donald Henderson, leader of the World Health Organization medical team that wiped out smallpox in the 1960s and '70s, often put sealed containers of the virus in his luggage. During a raging storm, Bill Patrick, chief of product development in the old U.S. bioweapons program at Fort Detrick, Maryland, collected a sample of what was thought to be a potent pneumonia and hand-carried it back to the Army lab for study. It turned out to be Legionnaire's disease.
Early in his medical career, Tom Butler had often gone the VIP route, too. As a young Navy doctor working with plague victims in Vietnam in 1970, he'd even gotten official approval. The Navy designated him a “biological courier,” authorizing him to hand-carry tissue samples on military or commercial aircraft.
But that was a lifetime ago. Butler had stopped doing field research with plague in 1980. By the time Congress voted in 1996 to regulate the transfer of select agents – effectively closing the VIP loophole in the wake of the Larry Wayne Harris debacle – Butler wasn't paying much attention to the changing laws.
Government supervision was about to get even tougher – once again, after a bioterror scare exposed a major loophole.
Weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, someone mailed envelopes of weapons-grade anthrax to several members of Congress, NBC anchor Tom Brokaw and the National Enquirer. As the FBI scrambled to find the culprit, agents discovered there was no national list of which labs had supplies of anthrax, or any other select agent.
The 1996 anti-terrorism law had only required registration for labs that shipped deadly germs, not for the 200 or more that merely possessed them. At the time, scientists had warned a sympathetic Congress that too much regulation would stymie their research.
Now, the FBI was taking heat from lawmakers for the consequences of Congress' own decision. Why couldn't the bureau say where the anthrax came from, senators demanded of the FBI's top counterterrorism official in a brutal hearing Nov. 6, 2001.
Some in Congress were actually considering stripping the FBI of its authority to investigate domestic terrorism cases.
The talk eventually died down, and Congress in 2002 further stiffened bioterror laws to require that any lab with select agents register with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But the FBI wouldn't forget the lesson.
Butler back in game, oblivious to new rules
Butler's re-entry to field research after a nearly two-decade hiatus was like popping out of a time warp. He was the same gung-ho researcher who had plied the jungles of Vietnam for plague in the 1970s, traveling “VIP.” But the world was very different.
An FDA medical officer called Butler a “valuable resource” and a “unique asset.” He had done what Army and government doctors couldn't do – get boots on the ground in a foreign country and produce results.
He was on the government's team. What he hadn't done was keep up with the government's vastly toughened rules.
There was a copy of the new federal regulations in his thick lab safety manual, but he hadn't read it, even though the university had sent a memo advising all researchers to do so.
Big medical schools had compliance officers to police their scientists' paperwork. Across the state, the University of Texas Medical Branch's biodefense center had a lawyer on the payroll full-time to keep its researchers out of hot water.
At Texas Tech, Tom Butler was mostly on his own. And he hadn't been getting along with some of his university bosses, either.
The long-running and, by now, toxic feud stemmed from his research project that tested new drugs for patients with life-threatening infections. When a seemingly large percentage of the patients died, the university's medical ethics panel briefly suspended the research in 2001.
Butler provided information that satisfied the panel's immediate concerns. An FDA review determined the deaths were from infection, not the drugs the patients were getting.
But Barbara Pence, the university's associate vice president for research, wasn't satisfied. She ordered additional reviews of Butler's research methods and lab finances. In response, he fired off a grievance against Pence, claiming harassment.
That explains why, during the Tuesday night interview, Butler named Pence and the top two officials on the ethics panel when FBI Agent Orndorff asked him to identify anyone who might want to sabotage his reputation or his work.
So as the agents wrapped up their initial session with Butler around 7:30 p.m. and took a break for pizza, here's where things stood:
Tom Butler believed he was being a cooperative witness, an expert adviser, but he hadn't volunteered – nor had he been asked – everything about his acquisition of the plague samples or his problems at Texas Tech.
Agents Orndorff and Burden were getting vaguely bad vibes about Butler, but had nothing solid to pin them on. They believed it possible, even likely, that weaponized plague was loose out there, somewhere in the gathering dark.
Lawmen were pouring in from across the state. The hotlines between Texas and Washington were buzzing as officials plotted what to do.
And boarding the last flight out of Dallas for Lubbock was a determined-looking man carrying a small, hardened valise, a man who was about to crack the plague case wide open.
Tuesday: Terrorists are no longer the leading suspects.
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter: email@example.com, 216-999-4842
© 2006 The Plain Dealer. Used with permission.
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