Amerithrax (55 page)
The FBI had located Hatfill’s 198-page draft manuscript in his computer hard drive during its June and August
searches. Though the novel,
Emergence
, had never been published, it was on file at the U.S. Copyright Office at the Library of Congress. Roger Akers, a friend of Hatfill’s, had registered it in 1998. He had proofread it for Hatfill and, with his permission, copyrighted it in both their names. A law enforcement official characterized the work as an “in- teresting coincidence at this point.”
The novel still raised suspicions even after the plot was shown to differ from the actual attacks by mail.
Emergence
was about a biological attack that involved neither anthrax nor toxins by mail. The bioweapon used in the attacks was a bacterium,
Yersinia pestis
, which causes bubonic plague and pneumonic plague. The major symptoms of pneumonic plague are a fever and lung infection that becomes pneumonia-like after two to four days. The plague has a 50 to 90 percent mortality rate. Antibiotics such as streptomy- cin, tetracycline, and doxycycline are ineffective against it.
Yersinia
bacteria are one of the pathogens that terrorists might most effectively use to rapidly infect large numbers and with large loss of life. Plague was usually delivered via contaminated vectors such as fleas. Vaccines exist, but would have little effectiveness against aerosolized plague.
Hatfill’s unpublished draft novel centered on epidemiolo- gists attempting to uncover the origin of mysterious illnesses in Antarctica and then in Washington. The story opens in Antarctica, where ten members of a South African research team die from a strange disease. “Eight years later,” Hatfill wrote in his opening synopsis, “a similar disease sweeps with explosive effect through the members of the U.S. Congres- sional House and Senate. The nation’s leadership is paralyzed and panic ensues as members of the Executive Office begin to show symptoms.” The novel’s villain is Ismail Abu Asifa, a Palestinian terrorist paid by Iraq to carry out a biological at- tack on Washington. Asifa flies into the U.S. from England, planning “to strike terror deep into the heart of the most pow- erful nation on earth.”
Once in Washington, Asifa buys supplies for $387 to grow bubonic plague bacteria. That was “not a high price to strike terror in the government of a country this large.” Hatfill’s villain infects the White House with a homegrown
But Asifa also infects himself and ultimately stumbles into the path of a car; he dies six days later in a hospital. “For all its wealth and power, the United States... was ac- tually an incredibly easy target for biological terrorism,” Hatfill wrote. Hatfill’s villain “would probably have only enough time to perform one attack and observe its early effects... It was unlikely with his present resources, that he would be able to kill more than a few hundred people at most.”
The hero is Steven J. Roberts, who has a background similar to Steven J. Hatfill’s and who had visited the same places he had. Hatfill made on-target observations about how the country would react to a bioterror attack. “Even if only a single person died in the attack, the sensationalistic- seeking news media could be trusted to whip the American public into a state of near total hysteria.”
Taking a leaf from Patrick’s book, Hatfill wrote that “[Asifa] wanted a facility small enough so that the people inside could be exposed to a high concentration of airborne bacilli, yet important enough so that this act could hurt the United States. Only in foolish America could this be so eas- ily accomplished.”
At the book’s conclusion, the United States retaliated with a nuclear strike against Iraq. But the lone terrorist in the novel used plague (like Maclean’s Satan Bug), not an- thrax, and dispersed it with a sprayer, not by mail. “There’s nothing similar to what has happened,” said Hatfill’s friend Roger Akers, who edited the manuscript. Roger Akers in- dicated that the book dealt with a biological attack on Con- gress and how the perpetrator covered his tracks.
* * *
DR.
Hatfill’s criminal defense attorney, Jonathan Shapiro of Alexandria, Virginia, had represented Brian P. Regan, a re- tired Air Force master sergeant charged with trying to sell American secrets to foreign countries. Hatfill’s civil attor- ney, retained after government inquiries about him intensi- fied to an impossible degree, was Victor M. Glasberg. Glasberg told the press, “Dr. Hatfill was voluntarily de- briefed and polygraphed, and voluntarily agreed to have his home, car and other property subjected to lengthy and com- prehensive search by the FBI. He... was told that the re- sults were all favorable and that he was not a suspect in the case.”
A number of rumors (possibly as fictional as Hatfill’s novel) swept through the scientific family: that Dr. Hatfill had removed cabinets from Fort Detrick that could be used to culture anthrax; that he had been inoculated against an- thrax and gotten booster shots; that he had unfettered access to the bioresearch labs at the Institute after his grant ended in 1999.
He claimed to have been a member of Rhodesian special forces which were later blamed for an anthrax outbreak that killed 182 during the Rhodesian civil war. For five years Hatfill lived in Harare, Zimbabwe, near a suburb called Greendale. A “Greendale School”—the same name given as a return address on anthrax letters—was located there, near Hatfill’s medical school.
And finally, there were whispers that he had an “isolated residence” described as a “remote cabin,” which was in truth a safe house operated by “American intelligence” and in which he kept quantities of Cipro to protect his friends from anthrax infection. Hatfill’s friends asked, “How could such stories develop a life of their own?” His closest friend, Pat Clawson, thought he knew. In mid-October 2001, both he and Hatfill attended a skeet-shooting party in George Bor- sari’s three-story vacation house in the Virginia mountains. Clawson had previously opened a letter filled with white powder and asked Hatfill if he should take Cipro. Clawson was already taking tetracycline for jaw pain and Hatfill re- plied that would be effective enough. The other eight party guests naturally began talking about protection from an-
On Sunday, August 4, Senator Daschle, who had come out against FBI polygraph tests for senators, spoke on ABC. “Do you think the investigation into the anthrax letters that came to you and others is going fast enough?” asked Cokie Roberts.
“Well, I wish it were going faster, frankly,” Daschle re- plied. “I’m concerned about whether or not we’re going to have the opportunity to see evidence that may have been destroyed, but I know the FBI is working on it. They’ve been informing me as they’ve gone along. I just hope we can bring this to a close sometime real soon.”
On Monday, August 5, Robert Kramer, president of BioPort, reported finances of the Lansing, Michigan, com- pany were shaky. BioPort, the nation’s only anthrax vaccine maker, was under the gun. The Bush administration was treading water. It had not yet been able to decide how much vaccine it intended to buy. Several civilian agencies had not yet given the military budget commitments to pay for the vaccine they wanted. This kept BioPort from selling to for- eign and private customers, including large multinational corporations that would now pay more than one hundred dollars a dose.
“BioPort,” said Kramer, “could not sell them until it had fulfilled its contract with the military, an estimated 3.4 mil- lion doses.” The Pentagon permitted BioPort to sell up to 20 percent of its annual production after it produced the military doses it agreed to buy in 1999. In July, BioPort had tossed out about 180,000 doses of vaccine, two weeks’ pro- duction, deemed below-standard.
All this turmoil came at a time when Bush was vowing to oust Saddam Hussein. The U.S. believed he had stored thousands of gallons of anthrax that could be used as bio- weapons. So far Amerithrax’s anthrax letters had led to more than twenty thousand people taking antibiotics.
Meanwhile the hunt went on. “We’re still a long way
Loomings
RICHARD
Jewell was never far from their minds, as agents showed a photo of one man, Steven Hatfill, their “person of interest,” around Princeton. Sometimes they could almost see the plump, affable guard lolling against a mailbox and shyly watching them. Richard Jewell got a raw deal. A quiet Atlanta security guard who lived with his mother, he had been a bona fide hero. FBI leaks snatched that brief glory from him. To this day many still associate him with a crime he had nothing to do with perpetrating. The FBI was not anxious to repeat that experience. “Richard Jewell looms large around here,” remarked one FBI official. “We’ve got to be very careful.”
On July 27, 1996, startled and shaken spectators dove for cover as a pipe bomb exploded at Centennial Olympic Park during the Atlanta summer games. One person was killed and 111 were injured. The FBI swiftly targeted Jewell, a former sheriff’s officer in north Georgia and a hero of the night. The round-faced, mustached young man, working se- curity at the A&T light and sound tower, alerted police at 12:57 a.m. to a suspicious abandoned green backpack. Twenty-three minutes later, the backpack exploded. For a
while he was praised as a hero for helping to evacuate the area before the blast.
The FBI prematurely singled out the pudgy guard. Some- times those who claim to be heroes at the scene are the actual perpetrators. They used the examples of a fireman who starts fires in order to heroically put them out or a mother suffering from Munchausen-by-proxy syndrome who sickens her baby so she can nurse it back to health.
Three days after the bombing, the
Atlanta Journal- Constitution
, citing unnamed sources, printed an article (based on bad FBI news leaks) saying Jewell was a suspect in the FBI investigation. The FBI had never formally ac- knowledged that Jewell was a suspect. Publication of the story forced the Bureau to speed up interviews with Jewell. Agents Don Johnson and Diader Rosario drove to the apart- ment Jewell shared with his mother. They found it already surrounded by reporters. The agents asked Jewell to come to the field office. He hesitated. Johnson said that, with his permission, they would be videotaping the interview for “training purposes” as it contained “sound bites from a first responder.” “You’ll be a superstar,” Johnson said.
An hour and a half into the interview, they were still going over Jewell’s background when FBI Director Freeh rang David W. “Woody” Johnson Jr., the SAC in Atlanta. Johnson, averaging an hour of sleep each night, had been working eighteen-hour days since the bombing. With him, in an office down the hall from Jewell, were U.S. Attorney Kent B. Alexander and other SACs. Freeh discussed the case over the speakerphone, saying he’d thought Jewell was go- ing to be questioned at home. He then ordered Jewell’s in- terrogators to read him his Miranda rights (as is the case when a suspect is in custody or about to be arrested). “There’s no legal requirement to read him his rights,” Al- exander said; “Jewell isn’t in custody. Under those circum- stances, there’s no need to read him his rights.” By Freeh’s order, made “in an excess of caution,” Johnson had the agents read Jewell his rights. After that, Jewell clammed up. Publicity about Jewell mounted. The more he insisted he was innocent, the more a media circus fueled by anonymous government leaks convicted him in the press. Freeh gave
Jewell sued for damages and eventually settled his com- plaint against CNN over the network’s coverage of the at- tack. “CNN continues to believe that its coverage was a fair and accurate review of the events that unfolded following the Centennial Olympic Park explosion,” the Atlanta-based network said. The settlement came the same day Jewell sued the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
and the college where he once worked as a guard. Of the lawsuit, Jewell said he was “doing it so this won’t happen to anybody else. I want them to get the story 100 percent before they put it out.”