| VANITY
FAIR - OCTOBER 2003
THE
MESSAGE IN THE ANTHRAX
After fingering Joe Klein for
Primary Colors and helping snare the alleged Atlanta Olympics bomber, the
author, a professor of English at Vassar, was asked to analyze the 2001
anthrax letters. Frustrated with the F.B.I.”s anthrax task force, he unseals
his investigation of a most intriguing -- and disturbing -- suspect.
BY DON FOSTER
In the spring of 1998, an officer
at the Dugway Proving Ground, in Utah, called the veteran biowarrior William
C. Patrick III to ask for his help. The army wanted to convert some of
its deadly anthrax into a dry powder, but, in Patrick’s words, “didn’t
have a freeze-dryer, didn’t have a spray dryer, no drying capability at
all.” The Soviets hadn’t let the 1972 biological-and-toxinweapons convention
stop them from producing 4,500 metric tons of anthrax per year. But when
the Americans signed it, they put Bill Patrick out to pasture and then
seemingly forgot the art, developed by Patrick in 1959, of weaponizing
Bacillus anthracis without milling. Now Patrick had to re-educate
the army’s top microbiologists, showing them how to freeze-dry a slurry
of anthrax simulant; how to purify it to a trillion spores per gram in
a centrifuge; and how to remove the electrostatic charge, to prevent clumping.
On one visit to Dugway, Patrick said he had employed the less sophisticated
method of acetone extraction to produce a pound of dry anthrax in a single
day -- enough to kill thousands of people. (Patrick now says that he misspoke
when he claimed to have produced the pound of anthrax.)
For nearly two decades -- until
Richard Nixon shut down America’s offensive bioweapons program in 1969
-- Bill Patrick worked in secret government laboratories, designing and
testing germ agents. His skull and- crossbones calling card describes him
as a “Biological Warfare Consultant.” An old-school warrior, Patrick,
77, looks like a big teddy bear, but he continually slips into talk of
mass destruction. When lecturing on biodefense, he speaks of “beautiful
bomblets” and of how many people the U.S. could kill in good weather with
a dry bioweapons agent “especially in the Middle East.”
On February 19, 1999, Patrick
briefed two dozen officers at Maxwell Air Force Base, in Montgomery, Alabama,
on his recent visits to Dugway: “The principles of biological warfare that
we discovered 35 to 40 years ago have not changed.” Patrick held up a sealed
vial containing eight grams of highly refined powder. “Now you’re very
fortunate today,” he said, “that I’ve carried in my suitcase here a sample
of anthrax. The only requirement I have is that you don’t drop it.”
His audience tittered nervously as the bottle passed from hand to hand.
”I want to bring several things
to your attention,” said Patrick. “Look how easily that powder flows. It
is composed of three to five microns, the particle size that gets down
into your lungs and causes the infection.” Then he came clean. It was not
really anthrax but rather Bacillus globigii, or B.g., the army’s anthrax
simulant of choice. “Now if you think I’m stupid enough to release anthrax
in that powdered form,” Patrick said with a grin, “you’re giving me too
much credit.”
Patrick”s B.g. sample was purified
to a trillion spores per gram -- near the theoretical limit -- and better
than anything ever produced by Iraq, South Africa, or the Soviet Union.
An untrained eye could not differentiate it from the anthrax powder that
Patrick had produced in 1959. The purpose of the exercise at Dugway, however,
was defensive: to prepare our nation for a bioterror attack.
In April 1999, Patrick told Fox
News that in two years there will be an attack with a sophisticated agent
manufactured overseas. His prediction was not far off the mark.
By October 12, 2001, the press
was reporting that Bob Stevens, the 63-year old tabloid photo editor at
American Media Inc. in Boca Raton, Florida, who had mysteriously succumbed
to inhalational anthrax on October 5, had been infected at work.(Inhalational
anthrax comes from breathing in spores, and is far deadlier than the cutaneous
form of the disease, which is usually contracted through cuts and scratches
in the skin.) Spores were found throughout the A.M.I. building, with
hot spots in the mailroom and on the victim’s keyboard.
That day I got a call from supervisory
special agent James R. Fitzgerald, a top F.B.I. profiler and threat-assessment
expert. He said that anthrax had been discovered at NBC, and that he might
be sending me some documents.
For my first 10 years as a professor
of English literature at Vassar College, I got no closer to real-life tragedy
than Titus Andronicus. Today, much of my time off campus is taken up by
police detectives, F.B.I. agents, and district attorneys. My home phone
number is unlisted, and my unexpected mail must be X-rayed or discarded.
On the shelves of my office, the Great Books have been displaced by the
writings of hoaxers, terrorists, kidnappers, the D.C. sniper, the anthrax
killer.
It all began in January 1996,
when Random House published Primary Colors, “by Anonymous.” The editors
of New York magazine asked me to figure out who had written it by applying
the same methods I had always used for assigning authorship to ancient
poems and anonymous plays. Relying mostly on old-fashioned linguistic analysis,
I concluded that “Anonymous” was the Newsweek columnist Joe Klein” who
promptly announced on national TV that I was wrong.
Literary scholars look at punctuation,
spelling, word usage, regionalisms, slang, grammar, sentence construction,
document formatting, topical allusions, ideology, borrowed source material
-- but most of our ascribed attributions are for writers like Shakespeare,
Pope, or Wordsworth. A dead poet cannot stand up and say, as Joe Klein
did, “It’s not me. I didn’t do it. This is silly.”
Five months later, when Klein
finally admitted that he had written Primary Colors after all, lawyers
and law-enforcement agencies were quick to see a real-world application
for the kind of work that I and other scholars perform. I never dreamed
that my correct answer would lead me from fiction to Quantico, or to the
Montana cabin where the Unabomber scrawled his manifesto, or to the Boulder
Police Department to help with the Jon Benet Ramsey homicide investigation,
or to Boston’s Irish Mafia, or to Centennial Olympic Park and the so-called
Army of God bombings, much less to deadly anthrax at the heart of our own
biodefense establishment.
Every day, crimes are committed
that involve unsigned or forged documents. When confronted with a “questioned
document,” most police detectives seek out experts to analyze the physical
evidence. It took Primary Colors for law-enforcement agencies to realize
how much can be learned from the writing itself. A first-rate special agent
in charge, such as Woody Enderson of the Southeast Bomb Task Force, can
turn an investigation around by getting expert help with the linguistic
evidence. Following the Centennial Olympic Park bombing at the 1996
Summer Games in Atlanta, traditional profiling techniques had at first
focused investigative attention on Richard Jewell, who was innocent. Enderson’s
task force gathered the Army of God letters from other bombings, along
with envelopes, school papers, a grocery list, even marginal annotations
in a Bible -- linguistic evidence that helped direct attention to Eric
Robert Rudolph. He was arrested on May 31, 2003, after five years on the
lam.
The main obstacle to the investigation
of anonymous writing is simply that there is so much of it. Take the epidemic
of hoax anthrax letters. Since April 1997 (the first recorded incidence
of a major mailed anthrax hoax), law-enforcement agencies have responded
to countless chemical and biological hoaxes -- an estimated 10,000 of them
in October 2001 alone, following the news of Bob Stevens’s infection. Most
mailed biothreats contain harmless household powder and an anonymous message
from the offender. Police and F.B.I. officials have established a routine
for this entire class of documents: Confiscate both the letter and the
envelope from the recipient without allowing any copies to be retained.
Test the powder to confirm that it is nontoxic. Announce to the press
that “the incident will be investigated as a serious crime.” Then place
the documents in what’s known as a zero file and never look at them again.
Unfortunately, when that same
strategy is applied to the questioned documents in a case as important
as the 2001 anthrax murders, critical evidence may be overlooked. Everyone
saw reproductions of the New Jersey anthrax letters calling for “DEATH
TO AMERICA DEATH TO ISRAEL.” More information has been gleaned from those
brief letters than you may suppose. But many of the questioned documents
pertinent to the anthrax case have been zero-filed. That is why I
have decided finally to speak out.
On the phone that day, S.S.A.
Fitzgerald told me that Erin O’Connor, an NBC aide, had been diagnosed
with cutaneous anthrax 17 days after opening a powder-filled letter addressed
to NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw. The letter, postmarked on September 20 in
St. Petersburg, Florida, began:
“THE UNTHINKABEL” [The
Ns are backward Cyrillic Ns in the original]
SAMPLE OF HOW IT WILL LOOK
Brief but ominous, the handwritten
note threatened bioterror attacks on New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and
Washington, D.C.
I found the text curious for a
number of reasons. First, the quotation marks were done Russian-style,
with the opening quotes below the line, and the document’s backward N’s
resembled the letter I in Russia’s Cyrillic alphabet. But a bilingual Russian
would be unlikely to confuse English and Cyrillic characters. This appeared
to be someone’s attempt to make his writing look Russian, or at least foreign.
The same went for the block letters, which Russian adults don’t use.
The Brokaw letter matched two
other biothreat letters, also from St. Petersburg, mailed 15 days later
-- same writing, same backward N’s and Russian quotes, same threats of
imminent bioterror. One was sent to New York Times reporter Judith Miller,
a co-author of Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War, and
the other to Howard Troxler, a columnist for the St. Petersburg Times.
Troxler opened his powder-packed letter on Tuesday, October 9. Miller opened
hers at her office on Friday the 12th”the same day the NBC infection was
diagnosed.
“THE UNTHINKABEL” looked like
a deliberate misspelling, but why had it been placed in quotation marks”
Turning to the Internet, I found announcements for a disaster-management
conference to be held in Orlando called “It Could Happen to You -- Preparing
for the Unthinkable” and featuring talks on bioterror readiness.
The St. Petersburg letters, with their arrows and lists and dashes, vaguely
resembled a slide from a Power- Point presentation, a common feature at
scientific conferences. Then, too, Howard Troxler’s surname -- in the letter
proper, though not on the envelope -- was spelled “TOXLER.” Could the error
have been in-advertent, I wondered, a reflexive misspelling by someone
used to writing such words as “toxic,” “toxicity,” “toxins,” “toxicology,”
“toxoid?“
Linking bioterror to 9/11, the
Florida letter writer warned of the destruction of Tampa Bay’s Sunshine
Skyway Bridge and Chicago’s Sears Tower. Those threats were not credible
-- terrorists do not send advance notice of their targets -- but the powder
seemed to be “THE REAL THING,” as the sender phrased it. One NBC aide was
infected, and a man in Florida was dead.
On balance, the St. Petersburg
letters looked to me to be the work of a scientist. The linguistic evidence
and choice of targets pointed to an offender interested in biodefense:
9/11, he seemed to be saying, could be the prologue to something worse
-- a sweeping epidemic of biological terrorism, for which our nation stood
unprepared.
It soon came out, however, that
the F.B.I. had recovered the wrong threatening letter. Laboratory analysis
indicated that the white substance enclosed in the three St. Petersburg
biothreats was nontoxic. Erin O’Connor must have been infected from another
source. A fresh search of segregated NBC mail turned up a second letter,
one with anthrax traces, likewise addressed to Tom Brokaw but written by
someone else and postmarked on September 18 in Trenton. The letter read:
09-11-01
THIS IS NEXT
TAKE PENACILIN NOW
DEATH TO AMERICA
DEATH TO ISRAEL
ALLAH IS GREAT
Here, then, were two powder-filled
biothreats addressed to the same news anchor, two days and 1,000 miles
apart. Neither writer could have known of the other unless they were in
cahoots. But the powder in the New Jersey Brokaw letter was indeed the
real thing. America, still reeling from September 11, was under attack
by biological terrorists. On Monday, October 15, a taped-up envelope ostensibly
sent by schoolchildren was delivered to the office of then Senate majority
leader Tom Daschle in Washington, D.C. When it was opened, a cloud of powder
burst into the air. This letter read:
09-11-01
YOU CAN NOT STOP US.
WE HAVE THIS ANTHRAX.
YOU DIE NOW.
ARE YOU AFRAID?
DEATH TO AMERICA.
DEATH TO ISRAEL.
ALLAH IS GREAT.
Powder samples from both the Brokaw
and Daschle letters were couriered to Fort Detrick, headquarters of the
U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID),
in Frederick, Maryland. The USAMRIID scientists were alarmed by what they
discovered. It was the same stuff that had killed Bob Stevens, the tabloid
photo editor, in Florida: the Ames strain, used in the U.S. biodefense
program. The distribution of Ames, regulated by USAMRIID, was limited to
about a dozen labs under tight security controls. Moreover, the anthrax
had been weaponized, refined to its most lethal particle size of one to
three microns. Most astonishing was its purity: the powder had been concentrated
to a trillion spores per gram.
Speaking to the press on Tuesday
afternoon, October 16, Senator Daschle described the dry anthrax sent to
his office as “very potent.” Dr. Richard Spertzel, the former chief bio-inspector
for the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) search for weapons of
mass destruction in Iraq, went a step further. Describing the powder as
“weapons grade,” Spertzel told ABC that he knew of fewer than five experts
in the United States with the capability to produce such material.
While East Coast postal workers
expressed alarm, commanders at Fort Detrick objected to the term “weaponized.”
The F.B.I. and USAMRIID convened for an emergency interagency conference
call. They agreed upon the terms “professionally done” and “energetic.”
Government spokespersons were instructed to use these words, not “weaponized,”
to describe the anthrax contained in the New Jersey letters. On Wednesday,
a somber Senator Daschle sponsored a news conference. At his side stood
Fort Detrick’s commander, Major General John Parker, who called the Daschle
powder “a garden variety” anthrax “sensitive to all antibiotics.”
Two weeks later, appearing before
the Senate’s Governmental Affairs Committee, Parker testified that the
terms “professionally done” and “energetic” were chosen “as more appropriate
descriptions in lieu of any real familiarity with weaponized materials.”
Parker seemed unaware that the army for the past decade has conducted extensive
biodefense research on weaponized materials, both at USAMRIID and at the
Dugway Proving Ground, and has even pushed to duplicate a hybrid anthrax
produced by the old Soviet program. But by the time Parker explained
his choice of words to the Senate committee, two Washington postal workers,
Joseph Curseen Jr. and Thomas Morris Jr., who had credited reports that
mail handlers were not at risk, had died, and several others were critically
ill.
When the F.B.I. first approached
me about this case, I was perfectly willing to believe that the anthrax
was “garden variety” and that it had been sent by Muslim extremists. In
fact, I was puzzled at first that the government was so quick to announce
that this was probably a case of domestic, not foreign, terrorism. But
as I analyzed the letters from New Jersey, I did see some red “flags” or,
rather, red-white-and-blue ones.
The Brokaw and Daschle letters
were dated “09-11-01.” Most Americans write their dates in that order --
month, day, year -- while most of the rest of the world writes the date
in day-month-year sequence. Might the offender be American? Maybe, maybe
not. All who come to this country, including terrorists, learn from the
moment they fill in their I.N.S. port-of-entry cards that American practice
calls for the form MM-DD-YY. But why write the date at all? And why
that date?
The New Jersey Brokaw letter was
postmarked September 18 and the Daschle letter October 9. Neither letter
was stamped on September 11. This offender wanted the authorities to explore
a connection between the anthrax attacks and 9/11. But when an offender
gives you unnecessary information that tells you what to think, you probably
want to think twice.
The return address on the Daschle
letter supplied more extraneous information: “FRANKLIN PARK, NJ 08852.”
From an online search I learned that there is a Franklin Park in New Jersey,
22 miles north of Trenton, where the letters were postmarked. But the Zip
Code, 08852, corresponds to another New Jersey town, Monmouth Junction.
The three communities run parallel to I-95. Clearly, the offender knew
something about New Jersey, and with all of those dropped geographic clues,
he surely knew that the authorities would look for him there. I had a hunch
he’d turn up somewhere else, though probably within driving distance.
The Daschle letter -- which was
identical to a letter sent to Senator Patrick Leahy that remained undiscovered
until November 16, 2001 -- had this return address: “4TH GRADE, GREENDALE
SCHOOL.” The fictional school address was designed to make the envelope
look harmless, and fourth graders in this country do indeed write letters
to their elected representatives, often as a class project. Is that a piece
of cultural information that would be known and referenced by an al-Qaeda
cell?
Since there is no such school
in New Jersey, I searched for Greendale schools elsewhere and found several,
two of which, in Canada, had made headlines the year before, one for an
arson fire and the other for a case of child molestation. A third Greendale
School, in Maryland, had made news in 1973 in connection with forced desegregation.
I made a note of it. It’s not uncommon for the writers of criminal threats
to draw on their own experience and reading.
On Tuesday, October 23, I appeared
on ABC’s Good Morning America to offer a few observations. Were we supposed
to believe that this “professionally made” anthrax powder was packaged
and mailed by someone who thought penicillin would be the antibiotic of
choice, and who didn’t even know how to spell it? That “penacilin” was
the offender’s way of saying, “Look, I don’t know much about antibiotics.
I don’t even know how to spell “penicillin.” So don’t start thinking that
I’m an American scientist. I’m just a semi-literate foreign fanatic.”
Five days earlier, Johanna Huden,
an assistant for the New York Post editorial page, was diagnosed with cutaneous
anthrax. Searching a bag of segregated mail at the Post’s editorial
office in Manhattan, F.B.I. agents discovered a letter identical to the
New Jersey Brokaw letter. The powder tested positive. That same week in
New York, a staffer at CBS and the infant son of an ABC News producer were
diagnosed with cutaneous infections, but no contaminated letters were recovered.
A Florida tabloid, ABC, CBS, NBC,
the Post, the U.S. Senate. Well-taped envelopes with a note inside warning
the recipient to seek medical treatment because Muslim bioterrorists were
on the loose. None of this added up to an al- Qaeda operation, but neither
did it look like the work of a random serial killer. Somebody was trying
to deliver a message -- a message that kept getting lost in the shuffle.
I tried to imagine the culprit’s
point of view, based on my hypothesis that an American scientist might
be responsible: September 11: America is under attack. John Doe, American
biowarrior, knows that if the enemy escalates from airplanes to anthrax
we’re in trouble. There is too little spent on biodefense, and the F.D.A.
has halted production of the BioPort anthrax vaccine. It might take a dose
of the real thing to put the nation on high alert and straighten out our
government’s priorities. Taped envelope seals will prevent the powder
from escaping before the letters reach their destination. And the enclosed
message will ensure that all recipients are given the antibiotic Cipro
in time to prevent fatalities. America’s leading biowarriors -- including,
perhaps, John Doe himself -- will receive the kind of recognition and respect
they have long deserved.
Within days of the 9/11 attack,
the F.B.I. announces that several of the hijackers had been based in Delray
Beach, Florida. Wasting no time, John Doe takes his cue: the nation’s
first anthrax attack will take place in Palm Beach County. The authorities
will associate the anthrax attack with that Delray terror cell. An Internet
search supplies John Doe with an apt target: American Media Inc., a publisher
of supermarket tabloids. When the letter arrives, the police will be called,
and the powder tested. When they discover it is the real thing, biodefense
will become the nation’s top concern.
Out goes the first Florida letter,
to A.M.I. Oddly, nothing happens. To John Doe, it seems as if his
anthrax letter has been discarded without being opened. Meanwhile, the
F.B.I. has learned that some of the remaining hijackers were based in New
Jersey. John Doe prepares a fresh salvo. His targets this time will include
NBC and the New York Post, possibly ABC and CBS. On September 18,
from New Jersey, John Doe mails a new batch of anthrax letters, this time
with a more explicit message: “DEATH TO AMERICA. DEATH TO ISRAEL. ALLAH
IS GREAT.”
Surely, one of those letters will
be opened. John Doe watches the news from September 18 through October
1. Still nothing. Then, on October 4, comes the grim news that a
photo editor at American Media Inc. in Boca Raton has been diagnosed with
inhalational anthrax. So the letter was opened after all, and not credited.
It’s too late now to save the victim. On October 5, Bob Stevens dies. John
Doe has now killed a man, and the nation has not heard the wake-up call
because the authorities think Stevens, an outdoorsman, may have gotten
the disease “naturally.” John Doe waits a few more days, hoping that
one of his September 18 letters will be opened. Not one scores a hit.
The offender is now in the uncomfortable
position of having to warn the nation not only about the al-Qaeda threat
but also about his own unnoticed handiwork. On October 9, he mails letters
to two liberal U.S. senators, adding about a gram of his best material
to each envelope, his deadliest payload yet. This time, the whole nation
will sit up straight. The two senators will be put on Cipro, and no one
else will get hurt.
On October 12, John Doe’s NBC
letter of September 18 is discovered. Finally, all Americans will understand
our vulnerability to biological terrorism. Unfortunately, the post-office
sorting machines were a little too rough on the envelopes. A lot more people
than John Doe ever intended are about to get sick.
On October 31, 2001, Fort Detrick’s
commander was on Capitol Hill speaking to a congressional committee about
“energetic” anthrax hours after Kathy Nguyen, 61, a South Bronx hospital
worker, died from inhalational anthrax. Swabs were taken from her home,
her workplace, and her mailbox, but not a single spore was discovered.
I sent an e-mail to a friend in
the F.B.I.’s New York field office. Forensics are not my department, I
wrote, but has the Amerithrax Task Force assigned to the investigation
taken swabs from garbage dumpsters? If Nguyen dropped her trash into a
Dumpster that already contained anthrax discarded by the offender, or,
possibly, an anthrax-laced letter discarded by ABC, CBS, NBC, or the Post,
then might those spores have spread into the air in sufficient quantity
to be inhaled?
My source wrote back to say that
“they think Nguyen got a real snout full of anthrax.” The task force hoped
that this latest fatality would lead them straight to the killer. Perhaps
there was a person or location that could account for her exposure to airborne
anthrax. “They are still looking for that secret place,” my source wrote.
In the end, though, Kathy Nguyen’s death was written off as an insoluble
mystery.
In November, some of the West’s
top biowarriors converged on Swindon, England, for an advanced training
course for the United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection
Commission. One of the big names on hand for the conference was Steven
J. Hatfill, a former USAMRIID virologist and a protégé of
Bill Patrick’s. Those who completed the course and were certified would
have a chance to join the search for Saddam’s bioweapons in Iraq. While
the 12-day course was under way, someone sent another biothreat letter,
postmarked in November in London, to Senator Daschle. When the powder proved
nontoxic, the letter was filed away and escaped further scrutiny.
Ninety-four-year-old Ottilie Lundgren
of Oxford, Connecticut, succumbed to anthrax on November 21, making her
the fifth fatality. The infection was believed to have come from a cross-contaminated
letter. If you have a compromised immune system, it takes only a few spores
for B. anthracis to begin its silent work inside your body. Lundgren had
simply been unlucky. An estimated 85 million pieces of mail were
processed by the Washington, D.C., and New Jersey postal facilities while
the
Daschle and Leahy letters were
in the system; it's surprising how few of us got sick.
By the time the F.B.I. showed
up in Connecticut to investigate the Lundgren case, the press was hungry
for news, but the Amerithrax Task Force was saying little about its search
for the killer. After an F.B.I. agent mentioned something about “the Camel
Club,” Dave Altimari and Jack Dolan of the Hartford Courant searched online
legal archives for the phrase. They found a lawsuit, not yet resolved,
involving Dr. Ayaad Assaad, an Arab-American scientist who worked at USAMRIID
until he was laid off in 1997. Dolan and Altimari gave Assaad’s attorney
a call and got an earful.
An American citizen since 1981,
the Egyptian-born Assaad, 54, is grateful to his adopted country and proud
of the ricin vaccine that he developed during his eight years as a civilian
research scientist for the U.S. Army. But after Assaad transferred to USAMRIID,
in 1989, he claimed in his lawsuit, several white, American-born pathologists
founded “the Camel Club,” whose purpose was to harass and humiliate him.
Assaad says he experienced continued
harassment until his unexpected layoff in March 1997. Given 60 days to
vacate, Assaad packed up on May 9, 1997, said goodbye to his colleagues,
and headed for the door. He says he was stopped by USAMRIID guards who,
with a superior’s help, rummaged through his belongings in a vain search
for stolen army property. (The U.S. Army denies that Assaad was discriminated
against or wrongfully dismissed. The case is currently in appeals court.)
New USAMRIID hires that year,
following Assaad’s departure, included Steven J. Hatfill, a recruit from
the National Institutes of Health. Hatfill was a concept man with a detailed
vision for building mobile germ labs. Assaad, meanwhile, took a job with
the Environmental Protection Agency, where he now works as a toxicologist
testing pesticides.
Assaad told Dolan and Altimari
that he was at home in Frederick, Maryland, on October 2, 2001, when he
received a call from Agent Gregory Leylegian of the F.B.I., summoning him
to a meeting the next morning. It was the same day American Media’s Bob
Stevens entered J.F.K. Medical Center in Atlantis, Florida.
Assaad and his attorney, Rosemary
McDermott, arrived at the Washington, D.C., field office at 10 A.M. They
were met by Agents Leylegian and Mark Buie, who explained that an anonymous
letter had been mailed to the “Town of Quantico Police,” identifying Assaad
as a fanatic with the will and means to launch a bioterror attack on the
United States. Buie read the one-page, single-spaced, computer-generated
212-word letter aloud. Assaad, who holds a Ph.D. in physiology from Iowa
State University in Ames and is married to a Nebraskan, was shocked by
the letter's depiction of him as a potential terrorist.
Agent Buie asked what the letter
writer might have meant by “further terrorist activity.” “Put it this way,”
McDermott said, “Dr. Assaad is suing the army for discrimination and wrongful
dismissal. Some people are pretty upset with him about that.” Buie and
Leylegian had no reason to think that a bioterror attack was imminent.
The Quantico letter was postmarked September 21, a day after the Florida
Brokaw letter and three days after the New Jersey Brokaw letter that contained
the real thing, but those documents had not yet come to light.
Dr. Assaad wondered what he would
do if the government revoked his citizenship or if he could no longer work
at the Environmental Protection Agency. When Assaad left USAMRIID in 1997,
he thought his ordeal was over. Now, four years later, he stood accused
as a traitor to his country, a corrupter of his sons, a dangerous psychopath,
a bioterrorist.
It was now December 2001, yet
Dolan and Altimari’s Hartford Courant story was the first I had heard of
the Quantico letter. S.S.A. Fitzgerald had not heard of it, either.
In fact, there were quite a few critical documents that Fitzgerald had
not yet seen. What, I wondered, has the anthrax task force been doing”
Hoping that the Quantico letter might lead, if not to the killer, at least
to a suspect, I offered to examine the document. My photocopy arrived by
FedEx not from the task force but from F.B.I. headquarters in Washington.
Searching through documents by some 40 USAMRIID employees, I found writings
by a female officer that looked like a perfect match. I wrote a detailed
report on the evidence, but the anthrax task force declined to follow through:
the Quantico letter had already been declared a hoax and zero-filed as
part of the 9/11 investigation.
When Assaad’s attorney sought,
under the Freedom of Information Act, to obtain a copy, the Justice Department
denied her request: releasing the document “could reasonably be expected
to constitute an unwarranted invasion of the personal privacy of third
parties” and “disclose the identities of confidential sources.”
Six months after the first deadly
powder-bearing letter was mailed, five months after my initial call from
the F.B.I., I still had only the four anthrax letters and envelopes, the
three biothreats mailed nearly simultaneously from St. Petersburg, and
the Quantico letter. The F.B.I. hadn’t identified a suspect and had only
the anthrax itself by which to search for the offender. Barring further
incidents, we would have to look for other extant writings by the anthrax
killer. But where does one even begin looking?
Because the New Jersey and Florida
letters seemed related and possibly collaborative, I searched for stories
of past so-called hoaxes -- and uncovered a trail of seemingly related
biothreat incidents, several of which exhibited language and writing strategies
similar to those of the New Jersey and Florida documents. The earliest
incident occurred in April 1997. Signing himself “The Counter Holocaust
Lobbyists of Hillel” -- phraseology borrowed from the Holocaust denier
Ernst Zündel -- someone sent a petri dish to the Washington, D.C.,
headquarters of the Jewish organization B’nai B’rith. The dish, broken
in the mail, contained Bacillus cereus, or B.c., an anthrax simulant used
for biodefense research. A hazardous materials team was called in. Whole
city blocks were evacuated. But the writing was not examined, the document
was zerofiled, and no arrest was made. Net cost to taxpayers: $2 million.
It was while looking for information
on the B’nai B’rith incident that I found a Washington Times interview
with Steven Hatfill, then a virologist with the N.I.H., who was said to
have “thought carefully about bioterrorism.” The Times paraphrased Dr.
Hatfill”s explanation of the “four levels” of possible biological attack:
The first is
the B’nai B’rith variety, in which no real organisms are used. (“Hello.
This is Abdul. We have put anthrax in the food at Throckmorton Middle School.”
In fact, Abdul hasn’t.) We empty public buildings for bomb threats, how
about for anthrax threats” After all, sooner or later, one might be real.
The second
level consists in the release of real bacteria, but without the intention
of infecting many people. Probably only a few people would get it, and
perhaps none would die.
The third level
consists in trying to get a lot of people sick, and maybe dead. Anthrax
spores put into the ventilation system of a movie theater would do the
trick. The result would be horrendous panic even if only 100 people got
sick or died. ...
The fourth
level consists of a self-sustaining, unstoppable epidemic.
How hard, really,
would it be to carry out a bio-attack? Not very, Hatfill said. Culturing
bacteria is easy and almost universally understood.
I searched the Internet for a
Throckmorton school and found nothing of interest outside Throckmorton,
Texas, except for the Throckmorton Plant Sciences Center at Kansas State
University, where courses are taught on agricultural pathogens. Could there
be a connection, I wondered, between the “Throckmorton Middle School” scenario
and the anthrax killer’s “Greendale School?”
Searching further, I learned that
the B’nai B’rith episode occurred a few months after mysterious gas incidents
at Washington National Airport (now Reagan National) and Baltimore- Washington
International Airport. On both occasions, passengers were overcome with
noxious fumes not publicly identified by investigators. Ten months later,
people again fell ill at Washington National and had to be hospitalized
after reporting fumes. In January 1998, after the third airport incident
in a year, The Washington Times’ magazine, Insight, published a second
interview with Hatfill, who said, “These types of incidents could be a
form of testing for a possible future terrorist attack -- perhaps next
time using anthrax.”
This ominous commentary was accompanied
by a photograph of Hatfill at home, in his kitchen, wearing garbage bags,
gloves, and an army-supply gas mask, illustrating how a bioterrorist might
cook up bubonic plague in a private laboratory and cause havoc using a
homemade spray disseminator such as the one Hatfill had designed himself.
All of which seemed, to me, an unusual hobby for a virologist then employed
by the National Institutes of Health.
Then I found another interesting
news item. Shortly after Insight published its ghoulish photograph
of Hatfill in his home laboratory, a white male, wearing a gas mask, deposited
a bottle outside the U.S. Treasury Building. An anonymous call was then
placed alerting the U.S. Secret Service that it contained “liquid chemical
warfare agent.” The bottle, though found, was not preserved -- it was,
after all, just a “hoax.”
In its interview with Hatfill,
Insight reported that he had worked in Zimbabwe in the late 1970s when
“an epidemic of anthrax from natural causes affected 10,000 people.” In
fact, Hatfill had been in apartheid Rhodesia from 1978 to 1980 (the year
it was renamed Zimbabwe), and witnessed the worst outbreak of anthrax ever
recorded -- in a part of Africa where anthrax was rarely encountered. During
the civil war to topple the apartheid government, the southern Tribal Trust
Lands were ravaged by an epidemic that caused 10,738 recorded human infections
in about two years. Today, black Zimbabweans and their livestock are still
becoming ill and dying from the biological fallout.
That the outbreak was “natural”
is debatable. In 1992, Dr. Meryl Nass, an American physician, and Jeremy
Brickhill, a Zimbabwean journalist, published separate reports supporting
what was already suspected: that the Rhodesian anthrax epidemic was deliberate,
a biowarfare attack on the black townships, probably carried out by Rhodesia’s
notorious government-backed Selous Scouts militia.
In January 2002, while compiling
documents by and about Hatfill, including his unclassified scientific publications,
I found a brief autobiography. In it, Hatfill, though American, boasted
of having served in the late 1970s with the Selous Scouts in Rhodesia.
In that same brief bio, Dr. Hatfill indicated that he had taken his medical
degree from the Godfrey Huggins School of Medicine in Harare, Rhodesia,
which he attended from 1978 to '84. Next I searched the Internet
for a Greendale School somewhere in Africa and discovered the Courteney
Selous School, situated in the wealthy, white Harare suburb of Greendale,
a mile from the medical school where Hatfill spent six years obtaining
his M.D. while serving, by his own unconfirmed account, with the Selous
Scouts.
Steven Hatfill was now looking
to me like a suspect, or at least, as the F.B.I. would denote him eight
months later, “a person of interest.” When I lined up Hatfill’s known movements
with the postmark locations of reported biothreats, those hoax anthrax
attacks appeared to trail him like a vapor cloud. But in February
2002, shortly after I advanced his candidacy to my contact at F.B.I. headquarters,
I was told that Mr. Hatfill had a good alibi. A month later, when I pressed
the issue, I was told, “Look, Don, maybe you’re spending too much time
on this.” Good people in the Department of Defense, C.I.A., and State
Department, not to mention Bill Patrick, had vouched for Hatfill. I decided
to give it a rest. But first, I faxed a comparative-handwriting sample
to F.B.I. headquarters, with examples of Hatfill’s printing on the left
and printing by the anthrax offender on the right. I am not a handwriting
expert, so I supplied the document without comment. A week later, I got
a thank-you call.
In 1999, Hatfill was fired by
USAMRIID. He was then hired at Science Applications International Corporation
(S.A.I.C.), a contractor for the Department of Defense and the C.I.A.,
but he departed S.A.I.C. in March 2002, a month after he took a polygraph
concerning the anthrax matter that he says he passed. Hatfill at the time
was building a mobile germ lab out of an old truck chassis, and after S.A.I.C.
fired him he continued work on it using his own money. When the F.B.I.
wanted to confiscate the mobile lab to test it for anthrax spores, the
army resisted, moving the trailer to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where
it was used to train Special Forces in preparation for the war on Iraq.
The classes were taught by Steve Hatfill and Bill Patrick.
In March 2002, as the F.B.I. continued
to investigate, Hatfill moved on to a $150,000- a-year job in Louisiana,
funded by a grant from the Department of Justice. That same month, from
Louisiana, came a fresh batch of hoax anthrax letters. L.S.U.’s Martin
Hugh-Jones, a World Health Organization director, examined the powder they
contained and found it to be nontoxic. The letters were then put into a
zero file without their language being examined by a trained professional.
On the night of March 12, Ayaad
Assaad received a call from a person representing himself as a Louisiana
F.B.I. agent. The caller demanded to know if Assaad had been told who wrote
the Quantico letter. To prove his credentials, the caller rattled off personal
information from as far back as Assaad’s Egyptian high school -- the Arabic
name of which he pronounced correctly. Assaad believes he recognized
the caller’s source of information: he was likely reading from Assaad’s
confidential SF-171, a U.S.-government employment application form that
had been on file at USAMRIID.
Frightened, Dr. Assaad hung up,
then called me at home at 10 P.M. to tell me of the incident. I assured
him the call was fraudulent. The F.B.I. does not conduct its business in
that way.
There were, in my opinion, a few
people whose recorded voices should be played back to Assaad to see if
he recognized one of them as his anonymous caller. Though it is a felony
to impersonate an F.B.I. agent, the task force decided not to investigate.
According to Assaad, when he finally called the F.B.I., he was told to
get caller ID.
In December 2001, Dr. Barbara
Hatch Rosenberg, a noted bioweapons expert, delivered a paper contending
that the perpetrator of the anthrax crimes was an American microbiologist
whose training and possession of Ames-strain powder pointed to a government
insider with experience in a U.S. military lab. In March 2002, she
told the BBC that the anthrax deaths may have resulted from a secret project
to examine the practicability of sending real anthrax through the mail
-- an experiment that misfired despite such precautions as taped envelope
seals. That surprising hypothesis made Rosenberg a target for knee-jerk
criticism, but competent sources within the biowarfare
establishment thought she might
well be right.
In April, I met Rosenberg for
lunch at an Indian restaurant in Brewster, New York, and compared notes.
We found that our evidence had led us in the same direction, though by
different routes and for different reasons.
The weeks dragged on. Prodded
publicly by Rosenberg and privately by myself, the F.B.I.’s anthrax task
force nevertheless seemed stubbornly unwilling to consider the evidence
pointing toward a military insider or to examine the Quantico letter or
those few “hoax” biothreats that I believed, and still believe, may shed
light on the anthrax murders. The additional documents that I had been
expecting from the F.B.I. never arrived. S.S.A. Fitzgerald, the F.B.I.’s
top in-house text analyst, asked to examine the same set of documents and
received the same answer: no. I'm not an insider, nor an old hand.
I have worked with the F.B.I. for only six years, on no more than 20 investigations.
But never have I encountered such reluctance to examine potentially critical
documents.
Meanwhile, friends of Fort Detrick
were leaking to the press new pieces of disinformation indicating that
the mailed anthrax probably came from Iraq. The leaks included false allegations
that the Daschle anthrax included additives distinctive to the Iraqi arms
program and that it had been dried using an atomizer spray dryer sold by
Denmark to Iraq.
Her patience exhausted, Dr. Rosenberg
met with the Senate Judiciary Committee staff on June 18, 2002, and laid
out the evidence, such as it was, hers and mine. Van Harp, head of the
Amerithrax Task Force, sat in on the briefing. The senators were attentive.
So, too, evidently, was Harp: exactly one week after Rosenberg’s meeting
with the Judiciary Committee staff, the F.B.I. searched Hatfill’s residence.
A bureau spokesman described it to The Washington Times as a “voluntary
search” without a warrant, “requested” by Dr. Hatfill to clear his name.
Suddenly I was being flooded with
documents from reporters and concerned scientists: letters, e-mails, curricula
vitae, handwriting samples, and original .fiction by Steve Hatfill. I learned
from one document that Hatfill had audited a Super Terrorism seminar in
Washington, D.C., on April 24, 1997, the day of the B’nai B’rith incident.
The next day, in a letter to the seminar’s organizer, Edgar Brenner, he
wrote that he was “tremendously interested in becoming more involved in
this area” and noted that the petri-dish scare, so soon after the seminar,
showed that “this topic is vital to the security of the United States.”
Hatfill’s original fiction included a cut-and-paste forgery of a diploma
for a Ph.D. from Rhodes University, which he used to obtain his jobs at
the N.I.H., USAMRIID, and S.A.I.C.
No less interesting to me, as
a professor of English literature, was Hatfill’s unpublished novel, Emergence,
which I examined in Washington at the U.S. Copyright Office. In the book,
an Iraqi virologist launches a bioterror attack on behalf of an unnamed
sponsor, using an identity acquired from the Irish Republican Army and
a homemade sprayer like the one Steven J. Hatfill demonstrated for The
Washington Times. A fictional scientist named Steven J. Roberts comes to
the rescue, tracing the outbreak to Iraq. The Strangelovean novel
ends with America nuking Baghdad. As the warheads fall, the pilot remarks,
“Beautiful . . . just beautiful. Welcome to Fuck City, Ragheads! Let”s
get the hell out of Dodge.”
I was reminded of Bill Patrick’s
words in his talk at Maxwell Air Force Base: “The beauty of biological
warfare, good people, is that you can pick an agent with a short period
of incubation, or a moderate period of incubation, or a long period. And
this, I think, would be very attractive to terrorists, because they can
do their dirty work and get out of Dodge City, and you won’t know that
you”re infected till they’re long gone.”
Hatfill’s novel, however, has
a surprise ending. In a three-page epilogue, the narrator, a Russian mobster,
reveals that his own organization, not Iraq, is responsible for the bioterror
attack:
“The reaction
was as great as we had hoped for the entire focus of the American F.B.I.
has now shifted towards combating chemical/ biological terrorism and this
is allowing us to formulate the unprecedented expansion of our organization.”
Biowarfare fiction was no mere
lark for Steven Hatfill. It was his specialty. His responsibilities at
USAMRIID included the writing of bioterror scenarios, at least one of which
actually happened. Hatfill envisioned someone spreading a pathogen throughout
several floors of a public office building. It would take only one reported
illness, he predicted, “to shut down the entire building, especially if
the bug had been sprayed on several .floors. Then the call comes: “Let
our man loose, or we’ll do a school.”“ In August 1998, in Wichita, Kansas,
40 miles southeast of Southwestern College, Hatfill’s alma mater, powder
was spread throughout several floors of the Finney State Office Building.
Then came “the call,” in the form of a letter from a team of Christian
Identity extremists and a group calling itself Brothers for Freedom of
Americans.
A few days later, Hatfill and
Bill Patrick arrived in San Diego for the Worldwide Conference on Antiterrorism,
sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense. I asked my F.B.I. contact
for the Wichita documents. Again, my requests were denied.
The ink was hardly dry on Emergence
when the government hired Hatfill, now working for S.A.I.C., to commission
a paper from Bill Patrick focusing on how to respond to a biological terror
event.
I have read Patrick’s 1999 report
“Risk Assessment.” Though it’s a classified document, it contains little
that he hasn’t said before elsewhere. I did, however, find in it something
that surprised me: Patrick describes a hypothetical incident in which an
attacker uses the U.S. mail service to deliver a business envelope containing
no more than 2.5 grams of aerosolized anthrax, refined to a trillion spores
per gram, in particles smaller than five microns. Patrick explains that
2.5 grams is the amount that can be placed into a standard envelope without
detection. “More powder makes the envelope bulge and draws attention.”
As prophecies go, that one’s right
on the money. The “DEATH TO AMERICA” letters sent two years later
to Senators Daschle and Leahy contained about a gram of aerosolized anthrax,
particle size one to three microns, refined to a trillion spores per gram.
Bill Patrick plus the Dugway scientists make up Richard Spertzel’s short
list of four U.S. experts who know how to make such a fine dry powder.
The anthrax killer, whoever he may be, represents a fifth expert with Patrick’s
bench skills. But until the Daschle powder appeared, every quoted expert
I had seen except Patrick said it couldn’t be done at all.
After rumors broke that Bill Patrick,
in a classified paper, had foreseen a bioterror attack using the mail service,
a transcript of his paper was leaked to the press. The leaked version represents
Patrick’s original text for S.A.I.C., typos and all, but with one critical
omission: a footnote in which Patrick claims that the U.S. has refined
“weaponized” powder to a trillion spores per gram has disappeared.
By midsummer 2002, the F.B.I.
and even Attorney General John Ashcroft were obliged to call Steve Hatfill
a “person of interest,” despite diehard assurances from other government
sources that he wasn’t. That August, the F.B.I. returned to Hatfill’s Maryland
apartment. Searching his refrigerator, agents found a canister of Bacillus
thuringiensis, or B.t. -- a mostly harmless pesticide widely used on caterpillars
-- which USAMRIID adopted for study in 1995, after UNSCOM discovered that
B.t. was Iraq’s favored anthrax simulant.
On August 25, in a second dramatic
press conference, Hatfill, having shaved his mustache of 20 years, protested
his persecution. This was the first I had seen of my suspect. He
was five feet eleven and 210 pounds, with pale-blue eyes and a downturned
mouth. He would not mind being investigated, he said, except that Attorney
General Ashcroft “has broken the Ninth Commandment: Thou shalt not bear
false witness.” With these words, Hatfill’s voice cracked and his eyes
welled up with tears. His emotional display won over many hearts,
even among the usually cynical Washington press corps.
The American press seems to enjoy
dumping on the F.B.I. For the first nine months of the investigation, it
was said that the F.B.I. was spinning its wheels. Ever since, it’s been
said that the F.B.I. has ruined a man’s life -- that Steve Hatfill is a
second Richard Jewell, the long-suffering suspect in the Centennial Olympic
Park bombing. In May, one F.B.I. team trailed Hatfill so closely that its
S.U.V. ran over his foot. Then the Washington police ticketed him for “walking
to create a hazard.”
I know something about the Centennial
Olympic Park serial bomber, because I helped -- using linguistic evidence
gleaned from the Army of God letters -- to direct investigative attention
on to Eric Robert Rudolph. And it is my opinion, based on the documents
I have examined, that Hatfill is no Richard Jewell. The F.B.I.”s early
Centennial Olympic Park bombing suspect was said to fit a behavior profile
of domestic bombers, but I found nothing in Jewell’s use of language to
implicate him as a terrorist. As for Hatfill, it was the F.B.I.”s
best team of trained bloodhounds, not an offender profile nor my text analysis,
that finally persuaded the Amerithrax Task Force in July 2002 to associate
Hatfill with the anthrax letters and put him under 24-hour surveillance.
The bureau’s description of him as a “person of interest” is neither inaccurate
nor unfair. (Through his lawyer, Hatfill maintained his innocence and declined
to comment for this article.)
One thing I’ve learned about the
F.B.I. in my years as a civilian consultant is that the bureau is a compartmentalized
house of secrets. Each field office and task force guards its information
and documents like a treasure trove, and no one office, not even F.B.I.
headquarters, has direct access to the whole picture. But the F.B.I. is
an open book compared with our biowarfare establishment. The Pentagon has
a long history of clandestine experimentation on human guinea pigs that
bears looking into. In 1952, for example, the army conducted open-air
tests at Fort McClellan, Alabama, with bioweapons simulants that, though
bacterial, were supposedly harmless. When local respiratory illness skyrocketed
and dozens of civilians died, the army quietly discontinued use of the
problem simulant and carried on with another.
Then there’s the 1965 simulated
attack on the New York City subway. On June 8 of that year, under Bill
Patrick’s direction, the subway was targeted with the anthrax simulant
B.g. Lightbulbs, each containing 87 trillion spores, were dropped onto
the tracks. Trains then sucked the clouds of live bacteria into the
subway system. C.I.A. and military scientists, bearing fake ID”s, were
on location to count the spores. More than a million riders were exposed
to B.g. that day; many inhaled more than a million spores per minute. Patrick,
when telling this story, still chuckles about how “we clobbered the Lexington
line with B.g.” What he doesn’t say is that, during a similar test in San
Francisco in 1950, one person died from B.g. complications and many others
fell ill. The cause of the fatality was not discovered until 1977, when
the U.S. Army, in Senate subcommittee hearings, finally disclosed its mock
biological attack on San Francisco. (“We clobbered downtown San Francisco
with Bacillus globigii,” Bill Patrick told his Maxwell Air Force Base audience
in February 1999. “This was very successful.”) No one knows how many
riders may have become sick from the 1965 New York” subway test. The experiment
was kept secret for 20 years. By then, the statute of limitations for lawsuits
was long past and contemporary medical records were hard to come by.
It’s also a matter of record that
in 1965 military scientists gassed Washington National Airport and a Greyhound
bus terminal, using B.g. Most Americans would like to think that our government
doesn’t do that kind of thing anymore. I’d like to report, for example,
that our military had nothing to do with those three gas incidents at Baltimore-
Washington and Washington National airports in 1997. Though the F.B.I.
won’t confirm it, I’ve been told at least one of those three events involved
the dissemination not of B.g. but of B.t., the same substance the F.B.I.
discovered in Hatfill’s refrigerator in August 2002.
It is not my job to indict or
to try my own suspect for the anthrax murders. And even if the F.B.I. should
find hard evidence linking Hatfill to a crime, he will remain innocent
until proved guilty. But all Americans have a right to know more about
the system that allowed Steven Hatfill to become one of the nation’s leading
bioterror experts. Here is a fellow with a fake Ph.D. who posed for The
Washington Times as a bioterrorist with a homemade plague disseminator,
and who boasted as recently as last year of having served with the apartheid
government’s notorious Selous Scouts during the Rhodesian anthrax epidemic.
I have three different editions of his curriculum vitae, each one a tissue
of lies. How did such a rascal come to be instructing the C.I.A.,
F.B.I., Defense Intelligence Agency, army, navy, Marines, U.S. marshals,
and State Department on such matters as the handling of deadly pathogens
and of bioterror incidents” How did he happen to acquire, to quote from
his résumé, a “working knowledge of the former U.S. and foreign
BW [biowarfare] programs, wet and dry BW agents, largescale production
of bacterial, rickettsial, and viral BW pathogens and toxins, stabilizers
and other additives, former BG simulant production methods, open air testing
and vulnerability trials, single and 2 fluid nozzle dissemination, [and]
bomblet design?” How did he obtain clearance to operate in top military
labs on exotic viral pathogens, such as Ebola, and on Level 3 pathogens
such as bubonic plague and anthrax?
In August 2000, Hatfill trained
forces at MacDill Air Force Base, in Tampa, using a makeshift bioterror
“kitchen” lab that he built himself out of scavenged parts, as well as
biosafety cabinets taken from USAMRIID. The borrowed cabinets, suitable
for turning germs into weapons, are still missing and are said to have
been destroyed. Hatfill, a certified scuba diver, once spoke of how
to use a pond in the Frederick Municipal Forest”a few miles from his former
residence in Maryland” to dispose of toxins. On that information, the F.B.I.
searched Whiskey Springs Pond and found a
homemade biosafety cabinet. The
pond, when later drained, disclosed a rusty bicycle and a street sign but
no new evidence.
This summer, The New York Times,
The Washington Post, and the Associated Press ran stories on Hatfill’s
activities as a designer of simulated bioterror labs. None mentioned that
Hatfill sprayed his trainees with samples of aerosolized B.g. When questioned
about these activities, Hatfill, in apparent contradiction of his 2002
résumé, denied having knowledge of how to refine a dry bacterial
powder to the level achieved by army scientists.
The most curious piece of fieldwork
noted on Steven Hatfill’s most recent C.V. is that of “open air testing
and vulnerability trials.” In a 2001 paper, “Biological WarfareScenarios,”
Bill Patrick called the 1965 simulated attack on the New York subway “one
of the most important vulnerability studies” of the 70 he conducted. In
1969, when the army’s biowarfare program was officially terminated, Steven
Hatfill was still in fifth grade. By 1998, Hatfill was Patrick’s sidekick
in what one colleague has described as a “Batman and Robin” team. But it
is from USAMRIID that Hatfill claims to have acquired his working knowledge
of army-sponsored “vulnerability” trials.
Several of America’s bioweaponeers
have said, for the record, that the anthrax attack has an upside. The killings
have forced long-awaited F.D.A. approval of the Bioport anthrax vaccine
facility and prompted increased federal spending on biodefense -- by $6
billion in 2003 alone. But the anthrax offender also diverted law-enforcement
resources when we needed them most and wreaked havoc on the U.S. Postal
Service. He has shown the world how to disrupt the American economy
with minimal expense, and how to kill with minimal risk of being caught.
Now that it”s been done once,
it seems likely to happen again. Bill Patrick -- whose expertise, in the
wrong hands, may be deadly -- even though he is not --has advised our military
to be prepared for something far worse: “People say to me, ‘BW”s not effective.’
Ladies and gentlemen, I”m here to tell you, you look at atomic energy,
you look at chemical method of infection -- nothing, I mean nothing, produces
what biological warfare does when you do your planning, and you have the
right agent and the right dissemination-and-delivery system. Any questions?” |