Amerithrax (52 page)

Just as the decontamination had begun, in New York City reporters and editors for the
Wall Street Journal
went back to work at the World Financial Center for the first time since September 11. They’d been toiling at scattered offices around the city since evacuation from their offices when the World Trade Center towers crashed down. Wall Street was coming back.

At Ground Zero in New York the air was as gas-filled as the inside of the anthrax tent. It was the same all over the area. For many months after the collapse, hundreds of aromatic hydrocarbons and volatile organic compounds re- leased into the atmosphere had been making people sick. One was extremely toxic benzene, a colorless, sweet- smelling liquid that evaporates very quickly.

A woman who lived in a small apartment in Chinatown a mile north of Ground Zero complained of acrid air seeping into her apartment. “It gets so bad you can’t even sleep,” she told writer Juan Gonzalez. “It’s a burning smell and it stays in your apartment. I had two months of bronchitis. I was coughing so badly that all the muscles on my rib cage hurt. On one occasion, I had to go to the emergency room, so my doctor suggested I get out of there.”

Almost a year after the World Trade Center collapse coated much of lower Manhattan in asbestos-laced dust, fed- eral environmental officials announced plans to clean up and test up to thirty-eight thousand homes. EPA and other gov- ernment agencies downplayed any health risk from the dust.

Tests, they said, showed the asbestos did not reach hazard- ous levels.

A thirty-five-year-old firefighter named Bobby Stanlewicz was suffering from respiratory disease. His exposure to disease-causing chemicals hadn’t ended when he left Ground Zero. He learned that, for many months, he had been work- ing on a contaminated truck. Asbestos concentrations were as high as five times the 1 percent safety limit set by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). NYFD signed a $2 million-plus contract to pay for decon- tamination of hundreds of dust-tainted Ground Zero fire en- gines.

The FBI had tested 561 mailboxes in Trenton, New Jer- sey, looking for bacteria that would mark one as being the box Amerithrax had used in his deadly mailings. So far they had had no positive results.

In mid-August, the FBI in New Jersey began showing merchants the photograph of a man and asking if they had seen him in the area the previous fall. The identity of the man, Steven Hatfill, was not revealed to the merchants, but Hatfill was only one of about thirty “persons of interest” in the investigation of the mailed attacks, although no other names had surfaced in the media, at least not with such relentless vehemence.

Dr. Hatfill

ON
Wednesday, July 31, 2002, the day before the FBI served a warrant on Dr. Steven J. Hatfill’s Maryland apart- ment, a reporter called his father and advised him that some- thing big was going to happen the next day.

The next morning agents were back and rolling up their protective gloves for another search. The federal warrant served represented an escalation over the voluntary search conducted June 25. It signaled an increasingly aggressive strategy on behalf of the FBI. Shortly after 10:00 a.m., they blockaded the entrances with unmarked cars and began to search Hatfill’s apartment anew. Hatfill, after saying he knew nothing about the anthrax murders, left the apartment. He was not questioned.

Agents watching his apartment earlier had seen him “pitching loads of his belongings into a Dumpster behind his apartment.” They thought it might be evidence. Agents who dove into the green Dumpster found only his personal belongings, an unusual type of glove, and “other items as- sociated with laboratory paraphernalia.” Hatfill’s former neighbors had reportedly already rooted through his garbage looking for artifacts to sell on eBay. The FBI bagged items in red evidence bags, filled white cardboard boxes stacked next to the trash bins, and stored it all in a silver van. But when tested for anthrax, the items would prove negative.

But Dr. Hatfill knew he was being watched and had com- plained to friends about it. “I’m throwing things into a Dumpster,” he said later, “because I’ve recently accepted a job at Louisiana State University and I’m cleaning out my apartment before the move.” At LSU he would design hands-on training programs for emergency personnel facing bioterrorist attacks. When Hatfill went to a Baton Rouge mall to pick up shaving supplies, he was shocked when folks asked for his autograph. He was obviously the object of a whispering campaign as an undeclared suspect in the mail- ing of deadly letters.

The FBI was aware that Hatfill had written a novel about a bio-attack on the White House and Congress and went right for his computer. In the afternoon neighbors saw agents carrying more cardboard boxes, plastic bags, and computer parts from the residence. The back doors of a dark blue van parked nearby were flung open and the boxes stored inside. A Ryder rental truck was backed up to the door of Hatfill’s apartment. The search continued for several

hours. Agents began leaving at 3:30 p.m. and by 5:00 p.m.

all had left.

The neighbors weren’t very surprised at the search, though Hatfill had not been living in the apartment recently, only keeping it as a residence. They had been aware of surveillance on his apartment for days and that was the way the FBI worked to apply pressure. Circulating rumors and assigning agents to keep “lockstep” surveillance had been a favorite technique of former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. In the 1950s he had waged little wars of rumor and innuendo to intimidate “persons of interest.”

Hoover launched a program code-named COINTELPRO [Counter Intelligence Program] to discredit the Klan and the Communist Party over a dozen years. Under COINTEL- PRO, the Bureau engaged in illegal surveillance practices, operated unsanctioned wiretaps, and committed “black bag jobs” (illegal break-ins). Rough treatment during the serving of a search warrant was another of Hoover’s ploys. COIN- TELPRO had harassed targets by placing anonymous calls, applying pressure on the investigative targets’ loved ones, and leaking information to the media.

Federal law enforcement sources told CBS News that Dr. Hatfill was “the chief guy we’re looking at” in the Ameri- thrax probe. Visions of Richard Jewell dancing in their heads, the officials were cautious not to use the term “sus- pect.” They said they were “zeroing in on the guy” and that he was “the focus of the investigation.” FBI Director Mueller was more cautious. He said only, “We’re making progress in the case, but I can’t comment on ongoing aspects of the investigation.” Yet, a number of things did not fit. Dr. Hatfill was not the “loner” that the FBI profile said that Amerithrax must be. Scientists who took the UN course with him at Porton Down described Hatfill as “well-rounded” and “energetic and outgoing, a super lab worker.” Others said Hatfill was “arrogant and wild-tempered.” This was hardly the nonassertive individual the FBI profile had conjured up. Author Richard Preston described Hatfill as a “blue-suit cowboy,” because he thrived in Biosafety Level 4 and was so comfortable there he ate candy bars inside his space suit as he worked with Ebola-infected monkey blood. “He kept

a strip of reflective tape on the roof of his car,” reported Preston, “so that in the event of a biomedical emergency the state-police helicopters could find him.”

Using investigative techniques developed in spy cases, the FBI compiled a minute-by-minute time line of Dr. Hat- fill’s whereabouts on days when the anthrax-tainted letters were dropped into a Trenton mailbox. Agents returned to the rented storage unit in Florida and searched again. If they found anything, they weren’t saying.

The FBI continued giving current workers at the Institute polygraph tests, and that wasn’t the only government or con- tractor lab being fine-combed. At this time there were fifty people on its “persons of interest” list, but so many fell off it was constantly evolving as leads were followed, worn out, or dead-ended. The FBI said the list had to be periodically updated.

So far the FBI had been repulsed in its hunt to find a domestic suspect with scientific expertise. “Obviously, Dr. Hatfill is somebody who had access to anthrax and scientific capability,” said an FBI official. “That is why we want to look at him—to either remove him from a list of potentials or add him to a list of potentials... Are we saying he’s the guy... No, we’re not.”

But Dr. Hatfill was a virologist. “Hatfill did not work with anthrax,” they once more admitted, “although like other employees, he might have had access to anthrax and other hazardous substances.” The Ames strain was available at LSU, but though Hatfill had just gotten a job there, he hadn’t started yet. And Hatfill’s history was full of gaps and in- consistencies. His resume was “riddled with gaps where classified projects presumably belong.” They looked closer.

STEVEN
J. Hatfill, born St. Louis, Missouri, October 24, 1953, grew up in Illinois and attended high school in Mat- toon. His classmates nicknamed him “Dr. Science” because of his all-consuming interest in the sciences. He was “nerdy” but funny, and an outrageous wisecracker in class. In June 1975, he graduated Southwestern College in Winfield, Kan- sas, where he had studied biology. During his college un-

dergraduate years, he interrupted his degree program for eight months. At the behest of his Methodist minister, he went to work as a volunteer at an isolated mission hospital in Kapanga, Zaire.

Resumes Hatfill produced over the years asserted that he served with the Army Special Forces after college, from June 1975 to June 1977. However, an Army spokesman stated Hatfill “was never part of the Special Forces.” In Oc- tober 1976, he married Caroline Eschtruth, daughter of the chief medical missionary. Their marriage ended in less than two years.

In the spring of 1978, he moved to Africa, where he lived and worked for the next sixteen years. In 1979 and 1980, while he was in Rhodesia (which became Zimbabwe in 1980), thousands of black tribesmen became infected with anthrax. Some call it the first modern case of germ warfare. One of Hatfill’s later papers tracked untreated disease in rural Zimbabwe.

He spent six years in Harare, Zimbabwe (then called Sal- isbury, Rhodesia), earning his medical degree. Before join- ing the Godfrey Huggins School of Medicine (now the University of Zimbabwe), records show he did serve in the military in Rhodesia during the civil war of the late 1970s when the white government fought against black insurgents. Hatfill had supposedly served in Rhodesia’s Special Air Ser- vice (SAS). A later resume said this:

Active combat experience with C Squadron Special Air Service, Rhodesia [6/75–3/78... Assigned to the 2nd Medical Battalion (TA Reserve) SADF... Consultant Flight Surgeon to 30 Squadron Air/Sea rescue unit based at Yesterplatt Air Force Base, Cape Town...I served as Emergency Medical Officer for the Conradie General Hospital, Cape Town.

Dr. Hatfill also claimed to have worked with a Rhodesian commando unit, but Michael John “Mac” McGuinness, who ran the Rhodesian government’s counterterrorisim opera- tions, said he had a minor civilian role. McGuinness said they wouldn’t have welcomed an American’s help anyway.

“We didn’t trust foreigners with that sort of thing,” he said. Hatfill, “cultivating a flamboyant, swashbuckling manner,” was “a good person to suspect because he’s off the wall,” said Ed Rybicki, a biologist at the University of Cape Town. “[He] would talk about running around in the bush and throwing grenades in Zimbabwe... boast about shooting up the ANC’s offices.”

On a college biography and resume he boasted of having fought with the Selous Scouts, an elite white mercenary force that tracked and killed black rebels in the backcountry in an unsuccessful effort to maintain white rule in Rhodesia. The infamous Selous Scouts, named for F. Courtney Selous, an explorer and hunter, fought for white rule and inspired the South African special forces units. A school in Green- dale, a suburb of Zimbabwe’s capital city, Harare, was also named for Selous—leading to later speculation about the “Greendale School” appearing in the return addresses of the two senators’ anthrax letters.

A classmate of Hatfill’s recalled that, “He carried a lot of weapons around at the time, rocket-propelled grenades and stuff like that. On the weekends he’d go with the army and they would do Special Forces kinds of stuff.” “He al- ways carried a 9-mm pistol and constantly boasted about his military past,” said a former colleague. Another of Hatfill’s classmates, Mark Hanly, had always doubted Hatfill’s claims.

Professor Robert Burns Symington, head of the Anatomy Department of the University of Rhodesia, was “the father of Rhodesia’s biowarfare expertise.” According to a recent story by Innocent Chofamba-Sithole and Norman Miambo, Dr. Hatfill was his student. “Symington, whom former col- leagues at the then Godfrey Huggins School of Medicine have described as a ‘little white supremacist,’” they claimed, “allegedly facilitated the entry into Medical School of Steven J. Hatfill, the man the FBI has now targeted as the prime suspect in the U.S. anthrax attacks last year.” Hat- fill used the Milnerton Shooting Association’s shooting range in Table View, Cape Town. According to later reports by the
Johannesburg Mail & Guardian
, he boasted that he was a weapons trainer in the Western Cape, joining the mil-