Amerithrax (39 page)
Criminal profilers concluded on the basis of emerging patterns that the wording of the anthrax messages appeared to be the work of a native English speaker trying to throw suspicion on Islamic terrorists in an effort to disguise his identity. This antisocial loner had some odd mannerisms in his speech and handwriting. The writer may have been a Muslim terrorist like the 9-11 hijackers. “Allah is great” is not a common expression. It was more common for a Mus- lim to say “Allahu akbar,” which means “God is great.”
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December 3, 2001, surviving Brentwood postal em- ployee Leroy Richmond was coming up against a stone wall. The USPS, though “deeply troubled” by the two deaths and lingering illnesses at the Washington mail facility, rejected Richmond’s $100 million damage claim. They said the agency could not “legally compensate him” beyond the workman’s compensation payments he was already receiv- ing. Richmond began legal action, telling the
Washington Post
that the Postal Service’s action was consistent with the indifference he and other postal workers had encountered since the attack.
By December 5, 2001, the day the Leahy letter was opened, Van Harp had learned so much about anthrax, he might qualify for degrees in microbiology. Instead, he con- tinued leading the FBI investigative team in the manhunt for Amerithrax. Trace amounts of anthrax spores had been found at the Federal Reserve Bank Building that same morn- ing, another cross-contamination. At least the Leahy letter would give the FBI a whole series of new leads. The letters were all written by the same person, possibly a lone disaf- fected American scientist trained in biochemistry and with access to a U.S government lab.
Harp explained on the FBI website that the bureau had “enlisted some of the best minds available” to create the methodology involved in locating and opening the Leahy letter safely. “But the science really drives the investigation and the analysis,” he said, “and we can’t hurry that. But, we also wanted to be careful to be able to maximize our ability to examine both the letter and the contents of the letter. But, also this has never been accomplished or been required to be performed before and on top of all the other considera- tions, both the safety and health and the science, we have one other, that is the forensic and investigative. Ultimately, the results of what we do have to be admissible in court.
“There were a number of precautions that were taken very deliberately, and that was to maximize again our ability to analyze and benefit from this letter. It was opened under a controlled secure sterile environment in which we con- trolled motion and air. Again in an abundance of caution for the safety, the health, and to maximize whatever may be in
partment.”
As the Leahy letter was being slit open, two leading bioweapons experts, Richard Spertzel and Ken Alibek, were speaking before the House International Relations Commit- tee. Spertzel now lived just outside Frederick, Maryland, and a few minutes’ drive from the Institute. The two experts disagreed about the level of expertise required to make the letter anthrax, but agreed that it had probably not been ob- tained by using the production techniques of either the for- mer Soviet Union or the defunct American germ weapons program.
Dr. Spertzel dismissed the FBI Amerithrax profile as “a lot of hokum.” The letter anthrax was “not the kind of thing you mess around with in a university lab unless you don’t like your fellow students. This is not the work of a graduate student in microbiology. I don’t think that an individual is capable of doing it.” Preparing anthrax particles so small and concentrated, he added, would endanger people nearby and perhaps expose the culprit himself. Dr. Alibek, who said he had seen Polaroids of the anthrax from one or two of the letters, thought it could have been homegrown. He assumed those who had produced it could have been a terrorist band of “not very highly trained professionals.”
On the same day two agents paid Joseph Farchaus a visit at his home about fifteen minutes outside Trenton, New Jer- sey. Farchaus had once worked for the Institute in Maryland. The last paper he published just before he left the infectious diseases institute was about converting anthrax into aerosol form. The FBI questioned him, gave him a lie test (which he aced), and spoke with his New York attorney, Donald Buchwald. They never got back to him again. Not so with other suspects on their domestic list.
Four days later, the press broke the story that the U.S. military had recently developed anthrax in a highly lethal powder form although they claimed to have kept track of every bit of it. The FBI was investigating government and private contractor labs possessing the Ames strain of anthrax as well as individuals who had access to them.
As the FBI considered the Leahy spores, the most una- dulterated evidence they had, they tried to determine their age. Under a microscope older spores, naturally, “look wrin- kled.” However, varying the drying methods could make newer spores appear old. The dating of the spores was re- portedly done with the same radiocarbon analysis commonly used by archaeologists to determine the age of ancient ar- tifacts. Biologist Jennie Hunter-Cevera, president of the Uni- versity of Maryland’s Biotechnology Institute, later told the
Washington Post
that the FBI analysts didn’t necessarily have to use the radioactive carbon 14 isotope, which decays in organic materials.
“Instead,” she said “isotopic analysis could compare the radioactivity ratios from the isotopes of several elements to get an age. Carbon 14 dating is sometimes suspect for recent
The Ames strain anthrax spores mailed to Capitol Hill were no more than two years old. The age of the spores cast doubt on the hypothesis that the spores could have been stolen from a lab decades earlier, saved in dry storage, and used in September and October. Amerithrax had a recent or current connection to a sophisticated modern lab and could make a new batch anytime he wanted. In its dried spore form, a bacterium can lie dormant for years.
“The secret of spore longevity is to package it in the absence of humidity,” said biological defense consultant Bill Patrick. “When the agents pick up moisture, the particle size grows, the powder deteriorates, and the agent loses the qual- ities that make it a potent weapon.” When the spores are kept dry they are remarkably resilient.
Investigators now focused on determining the rate of ge- netic mutation across generations of bacteria, hoping to backtrack the mailed spores to their lab of origin. This method, though, was not immediately producing results, be- cause the genetic variations might not be dramatic enough. Since the FBI now believed that Amerithrax was a disgrun- tled domestic scientist with the high level of expertise needed to culture, mill, and weaponize the spores, they be- gan to reinterview and give polygraph tests to any scientists with sophisticated knowledge of anthrax.
On December 17, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said it was increasingly “looking like it could be a domestic source.” Two days later, ABC News reported that a scientist who was fired twice from Battelle was the focus of an FBI investigation. On December 20, the FBI emphatically de- clared that the fired scientist was not the focus of any in- vestigation. Meanwhile something had to be done about the anthrax spores inside the Hart office building. There was
talk of installing high-density particle filters in the building’s ventilation systems.
While the experts disagreed on the level of expertise re- quired to have made such material, there were a lot of nuts out there, who not only had access to bioweapons like an- thrax but had tried to use them domestically.
In 1972, the Order of the Rising Sun, an American fascist group, obtained eighty pounds of typhoid bacteria cultures they planned to feed into the water supplies of several Mid- western cities.
In 1984, Antelope, Oregon, was hometown to a free-love commune headed by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, an Indian guru. To influence a local election in a private zoning dis- pute, the religious cult committed a crude form of bioter- rorism on September 9. This first bioweapon attack in the
U.S. struck a stable community of ten thousand in the spec- tacular Columbia River Gorge, near Mount Hood. Seven hundred and fifty-one people in The Dalles, the county seat of Wasco County, mysteriously began suffering from nau- sea, severe diarrhea, chills, fever, and dizziness. No one died, but forty-five were hospitalized. Bill Patrick, flown out from the Institute, examined the cult’s compound and dis- covered a germ incubator there. Growing germs was as easy as brewing beer.
The cultists had contaminated ten restaurant salad bars, including Shakey’s Pizza, with salmonella. Patrick knew sal- monella well, having once investigated the bug as a weapon at the Institute. The same company that sold the Rajneeshees their salmonella had also sold the University of Baghdad and the Iraqi Ministry of Trade three types of anthrax, five strains of botulinum, and other pathogens as part of legal global commerce.
In 1985, a small group of American neo-Nazis was ar- rested with thirty gallons of cyanide they were hoping to use to poison the water in New York and Washington, D.C. Thousands of people would have died, but the group did not “cross the line” and use the weapons.
Getting anthrax to kill is considerably harder than it looks. Turning pathogens into weapons of mass destruction is hugely difficult. Many technical roadblocks stand in the way. A cult in Japan had come closest to getting anthrax to work in a domestic inhalational anthrax attack.
Anthrax Neighborhood
OVER
four straight days in June 1993, a foul stench de- scended on an eastern Tokyo neighborhood. Residents who had survived World War II described it as “the smell of burning flesh.” Small birds dropped from the sky. Plants wilted. Pets grew ill. Neighbors lost their appetites. Clouds of steam settled on their cars and left stains with the same noxious smell. Residents complained to the local ward office that a “horrible odor” was coming from a tower atop a nearby eight-story building. Inspectors went to the Aum In- corporated building. They got few answers. “The smell is from a mixture of soybean oil and Chanel No. 5,” members of a sect who used the building told them. “It is burned to purify the premises.” The matter was not pressed.
The sect’s leader, Shoko Asahara, was a stocky, bearded, icy-eyed guru with flowing black hair that came down to his shoulders. Half-blind, all mad, he claimed to possess supernatural powers. Six years earlier, Asahara had used his fortune (amassed from a chain of meditation centers) to es- tablish a doomsday cult—Aum Shinrikyo (“Shining Truth”). In the spring of 1992, he recruited disciples from the ranks of biologists, doctors, and high-tech computer experts. Us- ing a combination of brainwashing, electroshock, and de- signer drugs (LSD, truth serum, and methamphetamine), he manipulated some of Japan’s brightest students and scien- tists into joining his billion-dollar battalion of New Age zealots. Asahara professed “a paranoid combination of East- ern beliefs and the Judeo-Christian idea of Armageddon” that appealed to his ten thousand followers.