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© St. Petersburg Times, published November 1, 2001
WASHINGTON -- Thousands of pieces of mail sanitized by radiation are being trucked back to Washington where investigators will check them one by one in a search for anthrax clues.
Since a letter containing anthrax was found in the office of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle on Oct. 15, tons of mail in the Capitol and federal offices have been impounded.
The mail was trucked to Lima, Ohio, where it was sanitized to prevent the spread of disease in case it had been contaminated by the Daschle letter -- or in case there were other contaminated letters.
Two postal workers in Washington's Brentwood facility where the Daschle letter was processed have died of anthrax, others have been sickened, and several mail rooms around the city have been found contaminated with anthrax spores.
Daschle said Wednesday: "In my view, all mail should be irradiated from here on out. The quicker we can acquire equipment to do that, the better."
The post office is purchasing machines that use electron beams to sanitize the mail, with the first expected to arrive in Washington sometime in November.
The machines are to be used, at least initially, for mail addressed to government agencies. Routine mail to individuals, such as bills, magazines and catalogs, is thought less likely to carry contamination.
The first truckload of the mail sent to Ohio returned to Washington on Tuesday, according to James Jarboe, FBI counterterrorism chief.
"We have the mail, we will go through it piece by piece to see if there is additional contamination," he said.
Postal Inspector Dan Mihalko said inspectors are looking for additional mail that may have contained anthrax.
That anthrax would have been neutralized by the electron sterilization, he said, but any such letters would still provide valuable evidence.
"That is a long process," he said. "They have to go through it by hand."
Mihalko said he didn't know what the schedule is for completing the process but once the inspectors finish with it, there is no reason it can't be returned to the Capitol for delivery.
On Tuesday, Jarboe was asked why this work wasn't done sooner. He said it took time to find an appropriate building large enough to handle the amount of mail. "We're doing it carefully," he said.
While officials can't rule out an undiscovered letter, many say that cross-contamination from the Daschle letter is the most likely cause of the other anthrax incidents in the Washington area.
Roy W. Geffen, the inspector in charge of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service's main forensic laboratory, said Wednesday that no evidence of another letter has been uncovered besides the three in New York and Washington.
Geffen's lab experts, who specialize in handwriting and fingerprint analysis, have been helping the FBI's own lab specialists in Washington to trace the letters. Postal inspectors have also arrested 16 people across the country in anthrax hoax cases and are investigating about a dozen others, Geffen said.
Contaminated mail is also suspected in two anthrax cases in Florida, but no letter has been found.
Asked how he could be sure that more contamination would not occur, Postmaster General John Potter said: "That's a dilemma we all have right now. We are working to identify targeted mail and keep it out of the mail system."