Saturday, August 10, 2002

Anthrax Inquiry Draws Protest From Scientist's Lawyers
Dr. Hatfill was born in St. Louis and grew up in Illinois. In 1975, he graduated from Southwestern College, in Winfield, Kan., where he studied biology and took time off to work in Zaire on rural health care.

After that, his career is the subject of some dispute. Résumés he has produced at various times assert that he served with the Army Special Forces after college, from June 1975 to June 1977, but an Army spokesman says he "was never part of the Special Forces."

He moved to Rhodesia, joining the military there in 1978 and saying he had "combat experience" during the guerrilla war against white rule. In 1979 and 1980, while he was in Rhodesia, thousands of black tribesmen became infected with anthrax. Some analysts call it the first modern case of germ warfare. Dr. Hatfill has never been linked to the outbreaks.

He remained in Rhodesia after blacks won majority rule and the country was renamed Zimbabwe, graduating in 1984 from the Godfred Huggins School of Medicine in Salisbury, now Harare, with the British equivalent of an M.D. degree, his résumé says. One fact about his time in Zimbabwe later caught the eye of investigators: he lived near a neighborhood called Greendale, and a nonexistent "Greendale School" was the return address on the anthrax envelopes sent to Senators Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont last fall.

After leaving Zimbabwe, Dr. Hatfill practiced medicine in South Africa. At times he has listed on his résumé a Ph.D. in molecular cell biology from Rhodes University in South Africa. But Stephen Fourie, the university's registrar said, "Rhodes did not, repeat, did not award a Ph.D. to Hatfill."

As a medical doctor, Dr. Hatfill published more than a dozen scientific papers, many on his African research. One tracked untreated disease in rural Zimbabwe. Others focused on leukemia, H.I.V. and the Ebola virus.

He moved to England in 1994, according to his résumés, working at an Oxford University hospital as a clinical research scientist. At least one of his résumés says he was a member of the Royal Society of Medicine, but a spokeswoman for the society said it had no records of his ever being a member.

Dr. Hatfill returned to the United States in 1995, when he went to work for the National Institutes of Health. From September 1997 to September 1999, he worked at the Army's biodefense laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md., home of the nation's abandoned program to make germ weapons.

In this time, he became a protégé of an expert on germ warfare, William C. Patrick III. In the 1950's and 1960's, Mr. Patrick made germ weapons for the American military and, after the program was shut down, became a private consultant. In this period, Dr. Hatfill would say on a résumé, he gained "a working knowledge" of wet and dry biological warfare agents, their chemical additives, spray disseminators and designs for germ weapons.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/10/national/10HATF.html?pagewanted=all&position=top

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