Plague germs, Aryan Nations — profile of suspect in anthrax plot

Thursday, Feb. 19, 1998 | 8:36 a.m.

"He scares me," an Ohio neighbor said of Larry Wayne Harris, who sat Thursday in a cell here, charged with possessing the fearsome germ warfare agent anthrax.

FBI agents were scared too, when they arrested Harris and a companion. They had the men's Mercedes wrapped in plastic and spirited off to a secure Air Force base for testing.

Harris, according to a sketchy FBI account, once told an unspecified group about plans to plant a "globe" of bubonic plague toxins on the New York subway tracks in an attack calculated to kill hundreds of thousands of people and ruin the economy.

The motive for the alleged scheme isn't spelled out in an FBI affidavit filed here. Nor does the government say what it thinks Harris, 46, and William Job Leavitt Jr., 47, were doing here with vials of a substance believed to be anthrax.

Harris' statements about the subway sabotage allegedly were made in the summer of 1997, two years after he was arrested in Ohio with three vials of bubonic plague toxins in the glove compartment of his car.

He pleaded guilty in 1995 to mail fraud for using his company's letterhead to order the germs from a biological supply house in Maryland and was put on 18 months probation.

Harris maintained at the time that he never intended to hurt anybody, that he wanted the bacteria for research on his book, the self-published "Bacteriological Warfare: A Major Threat to North America."

The book is cast as instructions on how to survive a biological attack. The Klanwatch project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors extremist groups, contends it amounts to manual for biological terrorism.

"I am a scientist. I am absolutely of no harm to anyone. I never, never intended to hurt anyone," he said at the time.

The FBI affidavit, based on testimony of an anonymous doctor who turned the men in, says Harris and Leavitt approached him about a project to test an electronic device intended to deactivate viruses and bacteria.

In a 1997 interview for a TV documentary, Harris claimed he got anthrax spores by sinking a long metal probe into a 20-year-old burial site for cows infected with the disease. Harris claimed he successfully cultured the spores in his lab, but refused to say if he possessed anthrax, said James Neff, who conducted the interview.

Neff, Kiplinger Professor of Journalism at Ohio State University, collaborated on the never-aired documentary with Oregon Public Broadcasting; parts of their tape were aired on ABC Thursday.

According to Neff, Harris described how someone could create a deadly broth from the anthrax culture, put it in a pressurized paint sprayer and then spread the deadly germs from a low-flying airplane like a crop duster. It would kill at least 100,000, Harris said, and be undetectable.

"No smell, no taste, no kaboom," he quoted Harris as saying.

The FBI affidavit says Harris claimed to be a lieutenant colonel in the Idaho-based white supremacist group Aryan Nations. The group's leader, Richard Butler, at first denied a connection, then said Harris was a member from the early 1990s until 1995.

"He scares me, especially for his racist remarks and because he's been involved in some far-right groups," said Verna Linehan, 50, who lives a few houses away from Harris in Lancaster, 30 miles southeast of Columbus.

In another odd twist to his story, Harris was called as a witness last summer in the trial of an Ohio man charged with assaulting a police officer who pulled him over driving a car stuffed with two guns, 400 rounds of ammunition and alleged bomb ingredients.

Defendant Stephen Wharf, then 23, pleaded innocent by reason of insanity and his lawyer contended Harris' message of hate helped push Wharf over the edge.

In his testimony, Harris talked about how Iranian terrorists are poised to start biological warfare in the United States.