In the case of the JFK assassination, some people at the very top of the CIA, Justice Department and White House staff knew that there were continuing efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro. Soon after the investigation of Lee Harvey Oswald’s and Jack Ruby’s associations and activities began, alarming possibilities arose that digging around in those areas too energetically might scoop the anti-Castro efforts up onto the surface of public attention. For that reason, the informed people at the very tops of those US institutions cooperated skillfully to close some key doors and to conclude the investigation for the public. (Read Gus Russo’s book “Live by the Sword”, published in 1998, the best book about the JFK assassination.)
If this anthrax case were a perfect historical parallel, then we might suppose that the USA itself was secretly using anthrax in an offensive manner, a dilemma that paralyzed our investigation of these anthrax mailings. I don’t think that was the situation at all.
The dilemma for top US officials might be much more mundane. Perhaps those officials were aware from the beginning that the personnel and practices within this field — where many individuals have access to extremely dangerous substances — are thoroughly polluted by reliability problems.
Is it really legally possible any more to yank an employee’s security clearance because that employee seems to be addicted to alcohol, drugs, spending or gambling, seems to have extraordinary sexual problems, seems to advocate extreme political opinions, even seems to be a radical Moslem? When the FBI turned to the leadership of the biological-weapons programs with the suspicion that a lone-nut employee might be the culprit, there might have been an embarrassing surfeit of suspects.
Hatfill was simply the suspect who was pointed to most quickly by the most coworkers. Hatfill had been involved in some secret business in Rhodesia and made a lot of loud and provocative pronouncements about racial differences, legal compliance, inadequate political attention to anthrax threats and other issues. He was the most obvious loose cannon in the ranks.
Apparently there was an eagerness to gamble that the culprit in the ranks — if indeed the culprit was in the ranks — indeed was Hatfill. The gambling method was to leak the suspicions about Hatfill systematically to reporters in order to unnerve Hatfield into making a mistake or confessing.
This gamble failed disasterously, but one positive result was that the US Government subsequently managed to complete a secret operation without revelations in the mass media (a unique event during our lifetimes — today’s young people eventually will tell it to their amazed grandchildren and great-grandchildren). Because’s Hatfill’s lawyers subpoenaed the testimony and documents of government officials and of journalists, the leaking stopped for the rest of the investigation, during which the quieter, brooding wierdos in the research ranks were investigated too.
