Amerithrax (7 page)

No anthrax-tainted letter was found in Stevens’s office though they tore the place apart. “We still don’t have a letter,” one fed said bitterly. “We still have a death, and a lot of anthrax that was there.” Spores should have been found at points leading out of the building. AMI burned its own trash and stockpiled paper for burning. No trail of spores led to the disposal bin. Had more than one “weird” letter been sent to AMI? The mystery of the misaddressed J-Lo letter had to be solved. Since the letter was not recov- ered and since no trail showed it leaving the building, it might still be somewhere inside the AMI plant.

The EPA’s first findings had suggested a less-dangerous anthrax preparation: one with spores that fell where they were released, not airy spores that hung in the air waiting for victims. No one appreciated that anthrax powder could act like an aerosol, floating long distances or being carried on a person to infect others hundreds of feet away. After testing, they were surprised by how far the material had spread throughout the three-story AMI building.

Spores fell not just in the mailroom, but also in such

remote places as atop a room divider, in a nook between banks of shelves, and on computer monitors. Even as HHS Secretary Thompson was assuring Americans that Stevens probably caught anthrax while traveling in the North Caro- lina countryside, some in the CDC were arguing that it was possible that U.S. mail facilities might be contaminated. Few at first believed that lethal anthrax spores could leak from sealed envelopes.

Some CDC investigators urged their bosses to close the local Boca Raton post offices that would have processed the anthrax letter. But CDC officials decided not to act. This decision was not made without a great deal of debate. “My immediate instinct was to close the Boca Raton post office,” said one. “If we had closed the post office in Florida, it would have set a precedent to immediately close post offices elsewhere if anthrax-laced letters began turning up later.”

As yet the public knew nothing of the vastness of the conspiracy. Anthrax had become an active agent of biolog- ical terrorism. New York was still reeling and licking its wounds, America’s wounds. “Frankly, when I heard the news [of 9-11],” said Stan Bedlington, a retired CIA coun- terterrorism analyst, “I thought, ‘It’s got to be biochemical.’ This is frightening enough and yet, you could take a small plane and sprinkle anthrax over New York City and wipe out half the population.” In the nation’s capital, the new president was anxious to nail the anthrax killer.

Was there a connection between the now-dead terrorists and the anthrax mailing? Following leads, the FBI began checking where the 9-11 terrorists had lived. During the summer the skyjackers had been sighted all around the Boca Raton area. Reports that the hijackers had inquired about renting crop dusters resulted in one hundred panicked calls about suspicious powders. They had even had dealings with AMI.

The First Suspect

“WE
know Mohammad Atta was within three miles of the building,” American Media Inc.’s Steve Coz said later. And it was true that Atta, suspected mastermind of the 9-11 atrocities, and two other skyjackers had attended the same flight school near AMI’s Boca Raton headquarters. In fact he had trained all over Florida.

Atta had first gotten flying lessons on the Sun Coast at Jones Aviation in Sarasota, but had been asked to leave after three weeks. Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, saying they were cousins who wanted to be pilots, then trained at Huffman Aviation in Venice, south of Sarasota. The pair paid ten thousand dollars in cash for four months’ instruction. Their flight teacher, Rudi Dekkers, remembered that the two men “spoke quite good English.” They took another six months of lessons from another Venice school, the Florida Flight Training Center. During that time they lived in a pink house just to the north.

In December 2000, Atta and al-Shehhi trained on a jet airline simulator at SimCenter Aviation in Opa-Locka, near North Miami Beach on the Gold Coast. On December 27, they abandoned their broken private plane on a taxiway at Miami International Airport. In spite of this the pair earned a certification for single-engine planes in July 2001. On Au- gust 16, 17, and 19, Atta and three other hijackers rented a single-engine, four-seat Piper Archer at eighty-eight dollars an hour from the Palm Beach County Park Airport in Lan- tana. Not only did fifteen of the nineteen hijackers have Florida connections, but five of the terrorists who crashed

United Airlines Flight 175 into the WTC had spent consid- erable time in Florida. Four days before 9-11, Atta was liv- ing at 3389 Sheridan Street in Hollywood, Florida, just south of Boca Raton and Fort Lauderdale. Atta and al-Shehhi fre- quented Bud’s Lounge in Delray Beach and had drinks at Shuckums Oyster Pub and Seafood Grill that night.

“We know [Atta] was within a mile of Bob Stevens’s house,” Coz said. “We know that the FBI is now going to local pharmacies to see if he did in fact get Cipro. We know he showed up at a pharmacy with red hands.”

After Stevens’s death from anthrax, the White House had been ringing the FBI every two hours. They too had heard the rumors that Atta had visited Huber Drugs, a Delray Beach pharmacy north of Boca Raton, a few miles from the AMI building, asking for an antibiotic to fight anthrax. In truth Atta had asked for medication to soothe an inflam- mation of his hands, a redness that stretched from the wrists down. “My hands burn,” he said. “They are itchy.” The pharmacist, Gregg Chatterton, sold him acid mantle, a cream. The irritation appeared to have been caused by bleach or detergent. Detergent effectively breaks up clumps of anthrax spores into smaller, more lethal particles. Atta’s irritated hands raised fears that Atta had been using caustic chemicals in a bioterror experiment.

“There are people in this area who have very direct rec- ollection of seeing [Atta],” Coz continued. “He worked out in a gym [the Delray Beach gym] where some of our em- ployees were.” Other terrorists trained in Boynton Beach, which adjoins Boca Raton, a few miles north of AMI and even closer to Bob Stevens’s home.

AMI chief executive David Pecker speculated that AMI had been targeted because of its name. American was also the name of American Airlines. United Airlines may have been a symbol for the United States. “I think this is an at- tack against America. The World Trade Center was at- tacked, the Pentagon was attacked, and American Media was attacked and I think this was the first bioterrorism at- tack in the United States. If you just look at the incredible coincidences, you cannot arrive at any other conclusion in my mind other than this is a bioterrorist attack.” A photo of

Osama bin Laden had been emblazoned on the front page of the
Globe
with the headline wanted dead or alive. The word alive had been crossed out. Two weeks later Bob Stevens was dead.

The wife of
Sun
editor Mike Irish was a Florida real estate agent. Gloria Irish had helped two of the 9-11 terror- ists, al-Shehhi and Hamza Alghamdi, find apartments in the Hamlet Country Club. She recalled al-Shehhi as friendly and smiling. He told Mrs. Irish that he was doing pilot training and wanted only a three-month lease.

Ziad al-Jarrah, twenty-six, and Ahmed Ilbrahim Alhaz- nawi, twenty, had entered the U.S. on June 8, 2001. A week later Alhaznawi and Jarrah moved into a two-hundred- dollar-a-week flat attached to a private home on Bougain- villea Drive in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, twenty miles south of Boca Raton and the AMI office. In July, Jarrah extended his membership in the U.S.-1 Fitness Club in Dania, Florida. The clean-shaven, horse-faced young man passed his pilot’s certification test at the end of the month. Jarrah had been born in 1975 in the Bekaa Valley of eastern Lebanon. His father was a government official and his mother a school- teacher.

Both men spoke little English so it was their neighbor and landlord, Charles Lisa, they sought out on June 25 to ask advice about a “gash” on Alhaznawi’s left calf. Lisa applied peroxide, wrapped the leg, and directed his two tenants to Holy Cross Hospital in Fort Lauderdale. Alhaznawi and Jar- rah came into the hospital emergency room that evening. Using their own names, not aliases, the pair identified them- selves as pilots. Alhaznawi wore a wide black mustache and had large staring eyes.

“I got it from bumping into a suitcase two months ago,” Alhaznawi explained of his wound to emergency room phy- sician Dr. Christos Tsonas.

“That’s a curious injury,” Dr. Tsonas replied.

He studied the inch-long blackish lesion on Alhaznawi’s lower left leg. It had red, raised edges and was a little less than an inch wide. Dr. Tsonas recalled that the man ap- peared to be in good health, and that he denied having an illness like diabetes that might predispose him to such le-

sions. “They were well-dressed foreigners,” he said. “I as- sumed they were tourists.” One of Jarrah’s neighbors, Nancy Adams, recalled the young man with close-cropped hair al- ways carried a briefcase.

Dr. Tsonas concluded the man had a minor infection, an encrusted boil or infected scrape. He removed the dry scab over the wound, cleansed it, and prescribed Keflex, an an- tibiotic that is widely used to combat bacterial infections. Keflex is ineffective against cutaneous anthrax. Dr. Tsonas took no cultures and had no thoughts of anthrax. At that time it was an unheard-of disease in the United States and unfamiliar to most doctors. Anthrax was “regarded as an obscure, rarely seen disease that had caused only a few deaths.” Cutaneous anthrax has a low fatality rate. Without treatment victims might heal on their own.

Dr. Tsonas’s encounter with the two men had lasted per- haps ten minutes. By October, he had entirely forgotten about them until federal agents showed up after Bob Ste- vens died. They showed the physician pictures of Alhaz- nawi and Jarrah. The FBI had discovered Dr. Tsonas’s prescription among possessions Alhaznawi left behind when he moved out in late August. The agents gave Dr. Tsonas a copy of his own notes from the emergency room visit on June 25 and he read them over. Amid news reports about the first anthrax victims, Dr. Tsonas, like other doc- tors, had thrown himself into learning more about the dis- ease. He wanted to be prepared. His hospital was relatively near AMI, so victims there might come to Holy Cross for treatment.

As he examined his notes, he said, “Oh, my God, my written description is consistent with cutaneous anthrax.” He was astonished and discussed the disease and its symptoms with the agents, explaining that it could possibly explain the leg wound. A spider bite was unlikely, he said. As for the hijacker’s explanation, a suitcase bump: “That’s a little un- usual for a healthy guy, but not impossible,” he said.

Both men were suspected of participating in the hijacking of United Airlines Flight 93 on 9-11. Jarrah died along with Alhaznawi on the Boeing 757, which crashed into a Somer- set County, Pennsylvania, field after passengers on the

plane fought back. Jarrah was thought to have taken the controls. When the wreckage was fine-combed no anthrax spores were found. Nor were any ferreted out in the two terrorists’ condominium.

Upon closer scrutiny, another question arose. Alhaznawi was examined only days after he entered the U.S., an indi- cation that the infection developed before his arrival. And Lisa recalled it as a “gash.” There was simply not enough intelligence to draw a specific conclusion. Thomas W. Mc- Govern, the leading authority on anthrax for the American Academy of Dermatology’s bioterrorism task force, said it was “highly unlikely” for someone to contract cutaneous anthrax on his lower leg.

“So there’s just no there there,” said one investigator. “But it sure is intriguing.” After his meetings with the FBI, Dr. Tsonas was contacted again by a senior federal medical expert, who asked him detailed questions about his tentative diagnosis. Experts at Johns Hopkins also called Dr. Tsonas, saying they, too, were studying the evidence. Much later, the FBI asked Tara O’Toole and Thomas V. Inglesby, who head the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies, to evaluate Tsonas’s diagnosis. They prepared a two-page memo, which was circulated among senior gov- ernment officials. They concluded that Tsonas’s diagnosis of cutaneous anthrax was “the most probable and coherent interpretation of the data available.” After the memo became public later that conclusion was endorsed by D. A. Hender- son, the top bioterrorism official at the Department of Health and Human Services, and plain-speaking Richard Spertzel, former head of the UN’s biological weapons inspections in Iraq.

Dr. O’Toole said that after consulting with other medical experts on the Alhaznawi case, she was “more persuaded than ever” that the diagnosis of cutaneous anthrax was cor- rect. “This is a unique investigation that has many highly technical aspects,” she said. “There’s legitimate concern that the FBI may not have access to the kinds of expertise that could be essential in putting all these pieces together.” John

E. Collingwood, an FBI spokesman, said the possibility of a connection between the hijackers and the anthrax attacks

had been deeply explored. “This was fully investigated and widely vetted among multiple agencies several months ago,” he said in March 2002. “Exhaustive testing did not support that anthrax was present anywhere the hijackers had been. While we always welcome new information, nothing new has in fact developed.”