Amerithrax (53 page)

itary there in 1978, and had “combat experience” during the guerrilla war against white rule.

In 1978, Rhodesia may have been used as a human lab for anthrax. LSU anthrax expert Martin Hugh-Jones doubted that. “There’s just no evidence whatsoever,” he said. In 1979, an outbreak of the skin form of anthrax sickened some ten thousand people, mostly black farmers. Many in Zim- babwe today still believe it was a bioattack by the white government.

They suspected the whites had distributed anthrax spores among cattle of the Rhodesian Tribal Trust Lands, where most Africans lived, even seeded cholera into the rivers. The intent was to kill food sources of Rhodesian guerrillas while the white farms remained untouched. Before 1978, there were 13 human cases a year in Rhodesia. From 1979 through 1980, there were 10,778 human cases a year. Of these 182 died. In the entire world, about 7,000 cases were reported annually. Thousands of Rhodesian cattle were slaughtered. Anthrax spread into six of eight provinces. A drought followed by heavy rain consistently preceded an outbreak of anthrax.

“It became obvious that anthrax spores were transported over large distances—across areas where no cattle sickness had occurred,” wrote experts. “No one ever learned how anthrax was delivered—the strain came from the United Kingdom. But the war is still in the earth. Spores know no side and kill with impunity. The anthrax zone is red dust and thorny scrub... and the stuff lasts forever. That is the evil of biological warfare.”

Hatfill remained in Rhodesia after blacks won majority rule and the country was renamed Zimbabwe. Hatfill has never been connected to the Rhodesian anthrax outbreak, but it made the FBI take a closer look at his “murky back- ground in Africa.” Graduating in April 1984 from the God- frey Huggins School of Medicine in Harare, with the British equivalent of an M.D. degree (Certificate No. 376-621-9), Hatfill went to work in South Africa. At Cape Town he obtained several master’s degrees and a doctorate, before joining apartheid South Africa’s military medical corps on a one-year tour of duty. He was a member of a 1986 Ant-

arctic exploration team on the Fimbul Coastal Ice Shelf of Queen Maud Land. In a snapshot of Hatfill and thirteen other members, he is in the last row, withdrawn, hands in his pockets, sunglasses covering his eyes. He is a thin and rather romantic figure against an icy landscape, standing out against the red tryworks of a trawler. In a medical school photograph he is posed almost primly, with fingers laced. He wears a droopy mustache. His dark blue eyes are intense and probing, his dark brown hair short and feathered across his brow. Hatfill seems closed up within himself. His col- leagues described him as “brilliant” and “short-tempered.”

AFTER
serving his clinical internship, Dr. Hatfill began his postgraduate work in Cape Town. A professor in South Af- rica recalled Hatfill as “very intelligent. Very driven. And very unconventional... He talked a lot about guns when he would go out to the pub.” He boasted of military exploits in places like Vietnam, although public records show only short military stints. He earned three master of science de- grees: in microbial genetics and recombinant DNA at the University of Cape Town (September 1988); medical bio- chemistry/radiation biology in a research fellowship at the University of Stellenbosch Medical School (December 1990); and hematological pathology, as a three-year resi- dency (June 1993). Lothar Bohm, professor of oncology at Stellenbosch, said he was unpopular because “he just did not respect other peoples’ lives or work or their needs in the lab. He was the kind of person who would go into the labs late at night and take pieces of equipment without asking.”

Female colleagues especially disliked Hatfill “because he used to invite them to ‘poke and puke’ parties.”

Hatfill’s rotating internship was at the Paul Kruger Hos- pital, where the apartheid-era government had an infamous offensive bioweapons program. Lt. Col. Wouter Basson, known as “Dr. Death,” had single-handedly founded, de- veloped, and led South Africa’s top secret apartheid germ program.

A military doctor with a master’s in chemistry and a top cardiologist, Dr. Death was project manager of “Project Coast.” This was the code name for a chemical and biolog- ical program to manufacture germ weapons to cripple or kill apartheid foes. Blue-eyed, handsome, charismatic, Dr. Death answered to no one, referring to his superiors as “chicken- heads.” Basson infiltrated Porton Down, the top secret bio- weapons defense plant in Wiltshire, and went to Fort Detrick. Basson said the FBI contacted him about Hatfill and he told them Hatfill had no contact with South African special forces or intelligence.

Project Coast, hidden by a maze of front companies and covert science labs, had a staff of two hundred and a budget of $4.5 million. The Roodeplaat Research Laboratories (dis- solved in 1993), a front for Project Coast, performed ef- fectiveness tests to determine LD50 for more than forty-five strains of anthrax. Responsibility for the project fell to Neils Knobel, a former professor of anatomy at the University of Pretoria Medical School.

Project Coast’s offensive weapons included an arsenal packed with anthrax, botulinum toxin, Ebola, Marburg, and human immunodeficiency virus, a grotesque jumble of bio- agents and delivery systems for the commission of murders. Their top program was geared to manipulate the fertility of people in South Africa on an ethnic basis. Russia had stud- ied such ethnic weapons. Project Coast was unsuccessful in creating a blacks-only infertility virus. Science someday might be able to find a subtle combination of markers com- mon to particular races. That might work as an ethnic weapon, but why bother? Racial mixing and an inherent ambiguity over definitions of ethnicity meant that no single genetic marker would give an attacker sufficient leverage.

There were much easier ways to use germ weapons against particular ethnic groups. Anthrax or other traditional killers would be effective in spreading death. Anthrax was one of their favorites, though allegations that South African anthrax was released in Zimbabwe during 1979 and 1980 during its independence struggles have never been confirmed.

At a local game park, Project Coast collected forty-four strains of anthrax, tested for antibiotic resistance, in order to produce an antibiotic-resistant anthrax. They considered using anthrax to cripple antiapartheid leader Nelson Man- dela. According to testimony before South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Basson’s germ program claimed many lives and was even considered for use against Mandela in jail.

Three hundred assassinations, geared to small amounts of bacteria, were alleged to have been committed by them with snake venom, plague, and Ebola and Marburg viruses. They planted anthrax in the gum of envelopes and dusted filters of Camel cigarettes with spores. They laced peppermint-flavored chocolates with anthrax, tainted beer with botulinum toxin and sugar with salmonella. They in- jected germs into whisky and paraquat bleach, put paraty- phoid in deodorant, and fitted walking sticks and umbrellas with secret spring syringes that could inject an untraceable polycarbonate ball containing ricin straight into victims. Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov, stabbed in the thigh by an umbrella tip, had been assassinated in London in just such a manner. Project Coast operatives soaked organo- phosphate into the clothes of an antiapartheid activist to turn it into a burning cloak.

Colleagues recalled Hatfill wore a 9-mm side arm, even when making his rounds. As a medical doctor, he published more than a dozen scientific papers focused on leukemia, HIV, and the Ebola virus. Ebola is “an incurable hemor- rhagic fever, drives blood and guts from every orifice of the victim’s ravaged body.” Medical men first diagnosed the disease in 1980 after watching it kill nine out of ten infected villagers in Zaire. The most deadly strain was named after the Ebola River, which flowed alongside the villages where it struck.

At times Hatfill listed on his resume that he had a Ph.D. in molecular cell biology from Rhodes University in South Africa. Stephen Fourie, the university’s registrar, said, “Rhodes did not—repeat, did not—award a Ph.D. to Hat- fill.”

The Rhodesian Civil War ended in 1980, but anthrax was still in its soil, slumbering and waking and then reinfecting. Thirteen years after Zimbabwe’s independence, a former se- nior white member of the Rhodesian Security forces admit- ted the use of anthrax in the war by the military. “It is true that anthrax was used in an experimental role and the idea came from the Army Psychological Operations,” he said. The strategy was to blame the guerillas for cattle deaths and also deprive them of food. Allegations that South African anthrax was released in Zimbabwe during its independence struggles have never been conclusively proved. Symington moved to South Africa, where he died of a heart attack a year after joining the University of Cape Town.

The RRL was dissolved in 1993. The apartheid regime in South Africa collapsed and white minority rule ended the next year. Mandela became president. Later, Western intel- ligence learned that the Libyan leader, Muammar Qadaffi, was trying to hire South African scientists, including Bas- son, who had made trips to Libya. U.S. officials, fearing he might leave South Africa permanently, launched a politically delicate covert operation to block Basson’s emigration. Now unemployed, Dr. Death could disappear at any time.

And the problem went beyond Libya. As the creator of South Africa’s germ arsenal, Basson had developed a global network of covert and overt contacts. British and American representatives met with Mandela, and persuaded the pres- ident to return Basson to government service. There his ac- tions could more easily be tracked. On January 29, 1997, Dr. Basson was arrested in possession of a thousand tablets of Ecstasy. Charged with drug dealing and several crimes in connection with Project Coast, including twenty-nine counts of murder and conspiracy to murder more than two hundred victims, he was acquitted in April 2002 of all charges by a single judge. The state, he said, had failed to

prove its case. Relaxed and smiling, Basson denied all crimes.

UN reports charged that South Africa backed “dirty wars,” estimating one and a half million deaths and sixty billion dollars in losses in Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Angola, and Namibia. By 1995, all evidence of South Africa’s Proj- ect Coast and all dangerous substances related to it were destroyed.

Steve Hatfill left Africa in the summer of 1994 and moved to England in September. According to his resume, he spent a year doing clinical research at an Oxford Uni- versity hospital as a clinical research scientist. He returned to the U.S. in 1995 where he received a fellowship for bi- omedical research at the National Institutes of Health at Be- thesda, Maryland, and other civilian federal labs. Beginning in September 1997 Hatfill took a two-year senior research fellowship from the National Research Council (NRC) at the Institute. He had respiratory and medical clearance to con- duct research on Biosafety Level 3. He worked with path- ogens such as plague, anthrax, and monkeypox. In October 1997, he had taken a full course for “medical and incident consequence management of personnel exposure to anthrax, tularemia, plague, VEE, orthopoxvirus, filovirus and the SEB, BOTOX and ricin biological toxins.”

He also had clearance to operate in a Biosafety Level 4 environment for research on exotic viral pathogens. His work was done in a maximum confinement lab reached through an air-lock door and decon shower. He wore a bright blue Chemturion space suit, a pressurized, heavy-duty biological space suit.

Dr. Hatfill’s specialty was viral illnesses. He investigated therapeutic responses to filoviridae. Filovirus is a family that comprises only the Ebola and Marburg primate-borne trop- ical thread viruses. Under a microscope filoviruses show as long and stringy as befits their name, filamentous. His initial research had been on the deadly Ebola hemorrhagic fever and Marburg filovirus infection in rhesus primates. Marburg had been the first filovirus discovered. In 1967 in Marburg, Germany, and Belgrade, Yugoslavia, lab workers were in- fected with hemorrhagic fever after handling tissues from

African green monkeys. Thirty-one cases and seven deaths resulted, but Marburg disappeared as mysteriously as it ap- peared, only to reappear in Zimbabwe in 1975 with the in- fection of a traveler. In 1976 Ebola (in four strains) came along as the only other member of the filovirus family. Dr. Stephen L. Guillot, director of the biomedical research cen- ter at LSU, later said Hatfill had impressed him as a “tech- nically very competent individual,” but not in anthrax. “Steve’s expertise is Ebola,” Dr. Guillot said.

Of his two years at the Institute, Hatfill’s resume stated that he had gained “a working knowledge” of wet and dry biological warfare agents and their chemical additives, spray disseminators, and designs for germ weapons. His resume listed “working knowledge... of wet and dry BW [biolog- ical warfare] agents, large-scale production of bacterial, rickettsial, and viral BW pathogens and toxins, stabilizers and other additives, former BG simulant production meth- ods.” Anyone who knows how to grow
Bacillus globigii
and turn it into a simulant powder could do the same with an- thrax. Such expertise would lend itself to the preparation of the dry anthrax powder.