Bruce E Ivins went to work each day in a high-security federal laboratory where he handled some of the world’s deadliest substances. But more than a year before the 2001 anthrax attacks, the scientist admitted to himself that he was losing his grasp on reality.

“Paranoid man works with deadly anthrax!!!” he wrote in one e-mail message in July 2000, predicting what a National Enquirer headline might read if he agreed to participate in a study on his work.

“I wish I could control the thoughts in my mind,” he added a month later in another message to a colleague. “It’s hard enough sometimes controlling my behaviour. When I am being eaten alive inside, I always try to put on a good front here at work and at home, so I don’t spread the pestilence.”

He continued, “I get incredible paranoid, delusional thoughts at times, and there’s nothing I can do until they go away.”

These e-mail messages and dozens of others are a central element in the case the Federal Bureau of Investigation laid out on Wednesday against the man they say is responsible for the anthrax attacks that killed five people and panicked the country. They provide glimpses into the personality of a man obsessed with a sorority that he first encountered while an undergraduate, asserting in an e-mail message that the women’s group was waging a “fatwah” against him.

Ivins composed poems— scripted to the nursery rhymes “Hickory Dickory Dock” and “I’m a Little Teapot— about having two personalities. And he went on what he called “mindless drives” to mail gifts and letters anonymously, the document said, and then “set back the odometer in his car” to fool his wife.

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