Assaad worked for eight years, from 1989-97, at the Army-run lab, where civilian and military scientists with top security clearances handle the most lethal biological agents known. Assaad's tenure at the lab was not a particularly happy one. He was ultimately dismissed from the lab in 1997, along with six other older scientists, when the lab announced it needed to downsize because of budget restrictions. But Assaad disputes that reason in his age discrimination suit, which is still pending. He shared with Salon copies of Army internal documents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by Assaad's attorney, that are from the Army's own investigation into allegations of racial discrimination brought by Assaad.
But he is not alone in his concerns about his former colleagues. Another scientist who worked at the lab at the time -- and who admits to having been part of a group in the lab that called itself the "Camel Club," organized as a kind of drinking club that on the side ridiculed the Egyptian-born Assaad -- said he also believes that the anthrax in the recent terror scare came from Fort Detrick's USAMRIID.
"As soon as it came out" about the anthrax letters, "the first thing that came to my mind was Fort Detrick," said the scientist, who requested anonymity and is now employed in academia. "I don't know how many labs are utilizing anthrax from Detrick. Detrick represents a repository of many organisms, and they would send it out to various other labs. A lot of people who were working on anthrax in this country got their anthrax from Fort Detrick."
The scientist also claimed that he understood DNA analysis being performed by a private lab in Rockville, Md., had already determined that the source of the anthrax in the letter sent to Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy was from Detrick. However, the private lab has told journalists that it will be another two weeks to a month before they publicly reveal their results.
According to interviews with Assaad and this scientist, along with additional Army investigative transcripts obtained by Salon, the Army's biowarfare research lab in the early 1990s was an organizational disaster area. A big problem at the lab, which apparently contributed to specimens going missing, was that after the Gulf War, USAMRIID decided to phase out work some scientists had been doing on projects that the Army lab no longer considered crucial to their core mission of researching vaccines against bioweapons. Many scientists who had been engaged in other projects, such as Lt. Col. Phil Zack, who had been researching the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), were eager to continue working on projects USAMRIID said they should stop. What followed, the documents reveal, were scientists sneaking into the Army biowarfare lab to work on pet projects after-hours and on weekends, former workers like Zack, who left in 1991, still being let in to do lab work, pressure applied to technicians to help out, documents going missing, and deliberate mislabeling of specimens among other efforts to hide unsanctioned lab work.
Lt. Col. Michael Langford, an Army scientist who became head of the USAMRIID experimental pathology division in February 1992, was interviewed by a USAMRIID investigator in the spring of 1992. The transcripts of that and other interviews reveal shocking lapses of security and resistance to oversight by USAMRIID lab scientists, including some of the same ones who engaged in harassment of Assaad.
"At the time I took over the Experimental Pathology branch on the 3rd of February [1992] it was obvious to me that there was little or no organization of that group and little or no accountability of many things," Langford told the Army investigator, Col. Thomas J. Taylor.
Langford describes walking in to work one morning and seeing a group of lab scientists and technicians huddled behind closed doors in the room that houses an electron microscope. What Langford concluded was that certain scientists were covertly working on projects at night and on weekends that had been ordered halted by their division chief. He further concluded that employees were desperately trying to find old specimens of biological agents, including anthrax, they could "re-label" to cover up specimens that had gone missing in the chaos of prohibited, after-hours lab work.
"I walked in and the lights were on, the scope was off, and they were intensely looking for these blocks [of anthrax]," Langford described. "What was indicated to me was that perhaps these specimens were bootleg so to speak, they were going to cover them with old specimens, and when the old specimens disappeared, they were going to take these old anthrax blocks and substitute them. Well, when those were unavailable then these new blocks [of anthrax] mysteriously disappeared. So of course the probability is high that there was a problem there."
Langford also described to the investigator strong resistance from his underlings and other scientists to his efforts to manage the group. Among those Langford considered management problems were Marian Rippy, a researcher in the experimental pathology division. (Zack and Rippy had also been reprimanded by the Army for harassing Assaad.) Langford said he considered a number of those on his staff to be "extremely difficult to deal with, would volunteer almost nothing, nearly almost always had to be given a written request to get a response, were very defiant, were very obstructive, and I also heard rumors that ... Marian [Rippy] had made comments to the people in that lab basically to undermine me, you know, when I was coming in there," according to Langford.
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