The lesson: don't brag

The New York Times has an article by Scott Shane about Bruce Edward Ivins and anthrax:

Inside the Army laboratory at Fort Detrick, the government’s brain for biological defense, Bruce Edwards Ivins paused to memorialize his moment in the spotlight as the anthrax panic of 2001 reached its peak. Dr. Ivins titled his e-mail message “In the lab” and attached photographs: the gaunt microbiologist bending over Petri dishes of anthrax, and colonies of the deadly bacteria, white commas against blood-red nutrient. Outside, on that morning of 14 November 2001, five people were dead or dying, a dozen more were sick and fearful thousands were flooding emergency rooms. The postal system was crippled; senators and Supreme Court justices had fled contaminated offices. And the Federal Bureau of Investigation was struggling with a microbe for a murder weapon and a crime scene that stretched from New York to Florida.
But Dr. Ivins was chipper— the anonymous scientist finally at the center of great events. “Hi, all,” he began his e-mail message. “We were taking some photos today of blood agar cultures of the now infamous ‘Ames’ strain of Bacillus anthracis. Here are a few.” He sent the message to those who ordinarily received his corny jokes and dour news commentaries: his wife and two teenage children, former colleagues and high school classmates. He even included an FBI agent working on the case.
Dr. Ivins, who had helped develop an anthrax vaccine to protect American troops, had spent his career waiting for a biological attack. Suddenly he was advising the FBI and regaling friends with scary descriptions of the deadly powder, his expertise in demand. One recipient of his e-mail message, however, a graduate-school colleague, looked at the photograph of Dr. Ivins and leapt to a shocking conclusion. “I read that e-mail, and I thought, he did it,” the fellow scientist, Nancy Haigwood, said in a recent interview.
Nearly seven years and many millions of dollars later, after an investigation that included both path-breaking science and costly bungling, the FBI concluded that Dr. Haigwood had been right: the anthrax killer had been at the investigators’ side all along. Prosecutors said they believed they had the evidence to prove that Dr. Ivins alone carried out the attacks, but their assertions immediately met with skepticism among some scientists, lawmakers and co-workers of Dr. Ivins.
With the FBI preparing to close the case, The New York Times has taken the deepest look so far at the investigation, speaking to dozens of Dr. Ivins’s colleagues and friends, reading hundreds of his e-mail messages, interviewing former bureau investigators and anthrax experts, reviewing court records, and obtaining, for the first time, police reports on his suicide in July, including a lengthy recorded interview with his wife. That examination found that unless new evidence were to surface, the enormous public investment in the case would appear to have yielded nothing more persuasive than a strong hunch, based on a pattern of damning circumstances, that Dr. Ivins was the perpetrator.
Focused for years on the wrong man, the bureau missed ample clues that Dr. Ivins deserved a closer look. Only after a change of leadership, nearly five years after the attacks, did the bureau more fully look into Dr. Ivins’s activities. That delay, and his death, may have put a more definitive outcome out of reach. Brad Garrett, a respected FBI veteran who helped early in the case before his retirement, said logic and evidence point to Dr. Ivins as the most likely perpetrator. “Does that absolutely prove he did it? No,” Mr. Garrett said. With no confession and no trial, he said, “you’re going to be left not getting over the top of the mountain.”
The Times review found that the FBI had disproved the assertion, widespread among scientists who believe Dr. Ivins was innocent, that the anthrax might have come from military and intelligence research programs in Utah or Ohio. By 2004, secret scientific testing established that the mailed anthrax had been grown somewhere near Fort Detrick. And anthrax specialists who have not spoken out previously said that, contrary to some skeptics’ claims, Dr. Ivins had the equipment and expertise to make the powder in his laboratory.

Rico says there are seven pages of details; click the post title to go read them. Suffice it to say that this wasn't the FBI's finest moment...