Amerithrax (54 page)
During the same period, Hatfill had become focused on the dangers of a potential bioweapons attack in the U.S. He believed the nation wasn’t prepared or doing enough to be prepared. In August 1997, Hatfill provided a
Washington Times
columnist scenarios for a biological attack that in- cluded “anthrax spores put into the ventilation system of a movie theater.” He also mentioned a recent anthrax hoax at B’nai B’rith in Washington, D.C. He appeared on a cable TV news show, warning that anthrax could be sent through the mail. On the
Armstrong Williams Show
he discussed “The Emerging Threat of Biological and Chemical Terror- ism.” “He was so sure this was going to happen,” Williams said. “He was emphatic.” The host later commented further, “There’s no doubt in my mind that he had knowledge about anthrax,” adding that the FBI had questioned him about Hat- fill’s appearance. At a June 1998 bioterrorism conference in Washington, Hatfill showed slides of anthrax victims. In De- cember, at Temple Beth Ami in Rockville, he enumerated the problems encountered with developing anthrax as a
On January 26, 1998, Hatfill appeared in an
Insight
mag- azine photo spread depicting him whipping up toxins in the kitchen. The kitchen was modern, but his bio-suit was as old-fashioned as the early anthrax suits used in Britain. Looming on the counter was a big bottle of Clorox. The article, “Cooking Up the Plague at Home,” by Tiffany Dan- itz, began:
National Institutes of Health researcher Steven Hatfill demonstrates how a determined terrorist could cook up a batch of plague in his or her own kitchen using com- mon household ingredients and protective equipment from the supermarket. A homemade broth culture, based on recipes published by Louis Pasteur in the late 1800s, could be incubated in an ordinary electric oven set at a low temperature. An Army surplus gas mask, garbage bags, duct tape and dishwashing gloves complete the chemical chef’s fashion ensemble. Household bleach de- contaminates working surfaces.
Hatfill left out one secret ingredient for the photo story: the plague bacterium. He explained that an imaginative ter- rorist could collect that from a prairie-dog habitat in the American Southwest, where it is endemic. Hatfill “weapon- ized” his batch by pouring it into a hiker’s water bag at- tached to a homemade sprayer. He laid out a hypothetical situation in which a terrorist in a wheelchair, highly inocu- lated with antibiotics, could conceal the water bag under a tracksuit and wheel through a crowded area, dispersing as he went. Hatfill had used this idea in a novel he was writing. He told
Insight
that fumes reported at Baltimore-Washington International Airport “could be a form of testing for a pos- sible future terrorist attack—perhaps next time using anthrax.”
Dr. Hatfill left the Institute for a job at SAIC. There he worked to detail the risks of biological and chemical attacks and gave presentations to employees of the U.S. military,
He was preparing to move there when on August 1, the FBI executed a court-issued search warrant.
ON
Friday, August 2, 2002, the day after his Frederick, Maryland, apartment had been searched, Dr. Hatfill was on every news show: “a man who may be linked to the anthrax mail attacks,” said Frank Somerville on Channel 2’s
Morn- ing Show
. “For the second time this summer the FBI has searched the apartment of Maryland biologist Steven Hatfill, a former Army researcher who once worked for the Army Institute of Infectious Diseases. The center studies biological warfare. Hatfill gave his permission for the search yesterday. Agents, however, showed up with a search warrant.” ... “I do know about him,” former UN weapons inspector Richard Spertzel said. “Basically he’s an Ebola virus expert and his two stints from 1997 to 1999 were to work on Ebola virus.” “We are also learning this morning,” Somerville contin- ued, “that Hatfill is on a short list of Americans authorized to go to Iraq to look for chemical weapons there and he also once commissioned a study about a fictional terrorist attack where an envelope containing anthrax is opened in an of-
fice.”
FBI Director Robert Mueller declined to comment on the
Stephen Guillot, Hatfill’s supervisor at LSU, announced through spokesman Gene Sands that Dr. Hatfill had been suspended with pay from his job as associate director of LSU’s National Center for Biomedical Research and Train- ing (NCBRT) at the Academy of Counter-Terrorist Educa- tion. Hatfill was placed on thirty days paid administrative leave of absence. Sands said his status would be reevaluated at the end of that period. Hatfill was to teach emergency personnel (police, firefighters, health professionals, and fed- eral agents) how to handle germ attacks. The Army re- searcher specialized in helping the government devise responses to possible bioterrorism incidents such as anthrax attacks.
Friends and colleagues described Hatfill as “strange” and “charming.” One called him the “Warren Beatty of science.” He drove fast and piled up traffic tickets and ran through girlfriends as speedily. He made wild claims. He told one pal he had been a fighter pilot in Vietnam and had been shot down over the China Sea. He was also brilliant. “Once when we were chatting I grabbed a thick medical reference book from the library and said to him, ‘Hey, Steve, can I test you?’” one former colleague recalled to
Newsweek
. “It didn’t matter what I asked him: he repeated the answer as if reading the book to me.” In May, Esteban Rodriguez, a supervisor at the Defense Intelligence Agency, had com- posed a letter lauding Hatfill’s “unsurpassed technical ex- pertise, unique resourcefulness, total dedication and consummate professionalism” in aiding the Army prepare for potential biowarfare in Afghanistan.
Dr. Hatfill was obviously highly imaginative as well. Someone leaked that he had written a novel about a bio- terrorist attack on Washington. A portion of Hatfill’s man- uscript was obtained by ABC affiliate WJLA in Washington. “His novel was leaked,” said former FBI profiler Candice DeLong. “If that leak had anything to do with anyone who
Everyone was anxious to see what Hatfill had written and if it had any bearing on the Amerithrax case. It was not hard to see why Hatfill had wanted to write a biological thriller. A number of them had been bestsellers. Some had become popular motion pictures like
Outbreak
. Robin Cook had been successful with medical suspense novels like
Coma
. In Cook’s 1999 novel,
Vector
, a New York City cabbie, a dis- illusioned Russian e´migre´ and former technician at Sverd- lovsk, mails anthrax in envelopes that explode in a puff of white powder, much as the Daschle letter did.
Over lunch one day,
New Yorker
contributor Richard Preston sketched out the plot for a novel in which a terrorist has dispersed anthrax into a metropolis. An FBI source begged him to have second thoughts and stick to nonfiction. Cook’s “terrifying true story” about Ebola,
Hot Zone
, had been published in 1994 to instant success. The threat from anthrax was too real, the agent cautioned him, and it would be a disservice to the public to so graphically demonstrate its powers in print. Preston revised his story line to focus on a less plausible germ: a biologically engineered superbug. In Preston’s 1997 book,
The Cobra Event
, a CDC pa- thologist tracks “Archimedes,” a madman who plans to det- onate virus glass bombs in New York’s subway. The Institute’s report on the “Vulnerability of Subway Passen- gers in New York City to Covert Action with Biological Agents” had inspired the fictional plot. Archimedes chooses the Second Avenue subway tunnel near Chinatown, one of the routes Ms. Kathy Nguyen traveled before she became mysteriously infected with pulmonary anthrax. “One kilo- gram of glass shattered and dispersed in a fine cloud the size of a city block,” Archimedes theorizes, “would plume out
nicely in the city.”
The biokiller in
The Satan Bug
, Alistair MacLean’s 1962 thriller, is a derivative of the botulinus toxin. In his novel eight ampoules of deadly virus are stolen from Porton Down, fictionalized as Mordon Research Establishment, near Alfringham, Wiltshire. The villain, Dr. Gregori, has
“We have refined this toxin into a fantastic and shocking weapon,” says Dr. Gregori, “compared to which even the mightiest hydrogen bomb is a child’s toy. Six ounces of this toxin, gentlemen, distributed fairly evenly throughout the world, would destroy every man, woman and child alive on this planet today... This is a simple fact. Give me an air- plane and let me fly over London on a windless summer afternoon with no more than a gram of botulinus toxin to scatter, and by evening seven million Londoners would be dead. A thimbleful in its water reservoirs, and London would become one vast charnel house.”
Gregori says that in Russia and Canada scientists are working to produce such deadly bioweapons. Four thousand scientists at Fort Detrick, he claims, are working on so hur- ried a crash program that scientists have died and “eight hundred of them have fallen ill over the last few years.” Mordon scientists also have the germs for causing plague, smallpox, typhus, rabbit, and undulant fever in man; fowl pest, hog choleras, Newcastle disease, rinderpest, foot-and- mouth, glanders and anthrax in livestock.
“The Americans have calculated that even a full-scale Soviet nuclear attack on their country, with
all
the resources at Russia’s disposal, would cause no more than seventy mil- lion deaths—no more, I say!—with possibly several million others as a result of radiation. But half the nation would survive, and in a generation or two that nation would rise again. But a nation attacked by the Satan Bug would never rise again, for there would be no survivors.”
In its present form, Gregori claims, the Satan Bug is an extremely refined powder, like weaponized anthrax, and more terrible than the Black Death. Should he spill a salt- spoon of it outside, refined to its purest and most lethal form, in a week to ten days all life would have ceased to exist in Britain. Wind, ships, planes, birds, or the waters of the North Sea would carry the Satan Bug to Europe, Gregori predicts,
Over at the FBI, Van Harp and his agents were fascinated by a thriller about an anthrax-by-mail attack on America. The revelation that one of the thirty or so “persons of in- terest” they had under scrutiny had supposedly written it was astounding. The plot had even raised eyebrows at the CIA. Hatfill, a biowarfare expert, was a prote´ge´ of famed micro- biologist Bill Patrick. Patrick could have offered plenty of imaginative plot ideas from real life.
In 1995, at a three-day conference in Bethesda, Mary- land, Patrick demonstrated “how a terrorist could mount a germ attack on the World Trade Center using a blender, cheesecloth, a garden sprayer and some widely available hospital supplies.” According to Patrick a terrorist could grow enough bacteria on one thousand agar plates to pro- duce five liters of material within thirty-six hours. All he had to do was Waring-blend the mixture and filter it through cheesecloth. The resulting home brew would be swarming with germs, about five hundred million cells per milliliter. A terrorist who aimed an infectious dose of the bacteria, about fifty cells per milliliter, through a garden sprayer at the building’s air intakes would disseminate enough agent in a few minutes to infect half the people in the WTC.
Several of Patrick’s scenarios dealt with an attack by
Francisella tularensis
, a germ that the Rajneeshees had or- dered. Patrick had been advisor on that real-life case up in Oregon.
As for Hatfill’s novel, the idea for that had been hatched several years earlier at a dinner party. A group of journalists and former military men had been standing around and the conversation had turned to bioterrorism. Pat Clawson was there. The conservative commentator was Hatfill’s close friend. “We started kicking it around,” said Clawson, “that it would be a cool novel to write. ‘Let’s have a bioterrorism attack on Washington and Congress.’” In the summer of 2001, Hatfill asked for Clawson’s help finding an agent or publisher but nothing came of it.