500 Days (24 page)

Three days later, El-Maati checked in with his lawyer.

“I’ve left several messages,” Galati said. “The guy never called back.”

El-Maati asked a few questions and then hung up, terrified. The Canadian government was after him, and there was nothing he could do about it.

•  •  •  

The news reports about the Kuwaiti man with the map appeared on the Internet and were published in newspapers worldwide. A day later, a Middle Eastern intelligence service wrote a letter to CSIS, asking for more information as well as for the name of the man being investigated.

The Canadian agency reported back, identifying El-Maati. The map he had been carrying, the response said, was about ten years old. But the Canadians
didn’t think that made any difference. El-Maati, they were convinced, was part of an al-Qaeda sleeper cell.

•  •  •  

On Monday, October 15, an intern in the office of Senator Tom Daschle picked up a letter from a pile of mail that had remained unsorted for days.

The lettering on the envelope was a scrawl of blue ink, the words hand-printed and uneven, as if written by a child—not surprisingly, since the return address was a fourth-grade class from Greendale School in Franklin Park, New Jersey, at zip code 08852. It was tightly sealed with an excessive amount of cellophane tape adhered to all sides.

Sitting in the sixth-floor mail room, the intern slit open the envelope and removed the letter. White powder floated out, curling upward like a wisp of smoke. The paper was an odd shape, with a trimmed edge. The intern unfolded it.

09-11-01

YOU CAN NOT STOP US.

WE HAVE THIS ANTHRAX.

YOU DIE NOW.

ARE YOU AFRAID?

DEATH TO AMERICA.

DEATH TO ISRAEL.

ALLAH IS GREAT.

The Daschle letter was not just deadly. It was baffling.

The return address on the envelope made no sense. There
was
a Greendale School, but it was in Wisconsin, not New Jersey. There
was
a Franklin Park, but not at zip code 08852; that number corresponded with Monmouth Junction, New Jersey. And why did the killer go to the trouble of identifying the sender as being the fourth grade?

The FBI would spend years trying to solve the puzzle.

•  •  •  

Investigators could have found the clues they needed in a clutter of magazines piled up in the “hot” suite used by Ivins at the military’s anthrax research lab.

Ivins subscribed to
American Family Association Journal
and stacked issues going back months and years in the lab. The October 1999 edition contained an article about a lawsuit filed by the association on behalf of the parents of a
fourth-grade student at Greendale Baptist Academy in Wisconsin. The litigation related to corporal punishment at the school, a hot-button issue that had engrossed Ivins for years, perhaps because of his own abuse as a child. He discussed the Greendale case with at least one colleague, and just one month after the article was published, he and his wife sent their first contribution to the association in about two years.

Franklin Park, the community listed in the return address, is about nine miles from Princeton, where the letter was mailed. Monmouth Junction, the unincorporated area designated by the zip code on the envelope, had distinct links to Ivins. His family’s American roots went back to seventeenth-century New Jersey; specifically, Ivins’s great-great-grandfather Thomas Ivins was born in Monmouth. Ivins knew this and considered it significant—stuffed away in a file where he kept his most important papers was an August 26, 1986, letter explaining the genealogical connection between him and Monmouth.

Moreover, Ivins obsessed on the word
Monmouth
for reasons having nothing to do with his family history—not only was Thomas Ivins born in a place called Monmouth, but so was Kappa Kappa Gamma, the focus of Ivins’s most intense and decades-long obsession. The sorority was founded at Monmouth College in Monmouth, Illinois, a fact mentioned by Ivins in some of his many diatribes about the group that he posted, using aliases, on the Internet.

For Ivins, an increasingly unhinged loner with a fixation for codes, the return address was virtually his signature.

•  •  •  

The same day as the Daschle letter was discovered, Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi arrived at the White House for a private meeting with Bush. Just a few days had passed since Admiral Battelli, the head of Italian military intelligence, had brushed aside a CIA appeal to support a plan to abduct a suspected terrorist in Milan. Such a request, he had said, would have to go through political authorities, perhaps even the prime minister himself.

Minutes before, Bush had done just that. Over a lunch in the Oval Office, Bush had described the multiple fronts in the war on terrorism. The prime minister agreed to share intelligence and help disrupt al-Qaeda’s financial network.

Then, Bush brought up the CIA’s request—would Berlusconi’s government allow American intelligence to snatch a suspected terrorist in Italy and take him out of the country? After asking a number of questions, Berlusconi said that he would consult with others but gave his tentative approval.

When their discussion ended, Bush and Berlusconi walked out on the colonnade that led to the Oval Office. Reporters were waiting outside. The two men stood side by side, each clasping his hands at his waist. Bush said that he was honored to host the prime minister, mentioning that they had eaten lunch together—one of the best meals, he said, since he had assumed the presidency.

“We had a long discussion about our mutual desire to rout out terrorism,” Bush said. “We’re making progress. One reason we’re making progress is because we’ve got good, strong friends such as the Italians.”

Berlusconi turned to thank Bush, then looked back at the reporters.

“I am here, first of all, to express our great pain and sadness for the attack on September the eleventh,” the Italian president said. “And also I’m here to express to you our desire to be as close as possible and to provide both moral and material support.”

Now, Bush said, they would answer a couple of questions.

“These anthrax attacks, sir, do you believe that there is any connection to bin Laden’s organization? Your vice president on Friday seemed to suggest there may be a possible link.”

“There may be some possible link,” Bush replied. “We have no hard data yet, but it’s clear that Mr. bin Laden is a man who is an evil man.”

With bin Laden bragging about inflicting more pain on the United States, Bush said, there was reason to closely monitor the evidence for a connection.

“We have to find out who’s doing this,” Bush said. “I wouldn’t put it past him.”

•  •  •  

Agents with the FBI’s Hazardous Materials Response Unit pulled into a parking lot near building 1425 at Fort Detrick. In the trunk, they carried the Daschle letter and envelope, sealed with evidence tape inside biohazard containers. The agents took them out and handed them off to John Ezzell, an anthrax specialist at the USAMRIID, the army’s infectious disease center.

Ezzell carried the containers to a BSL-3 lab—the second-highest biosafety level. After putting on surgical scrubs, gloves, and a respirator, he brought the containers inside the suite. He cut the evidence tape, opened the containers, and removed the bags and tinfoil holding the letter and envelope. He slid a metal spatula inside the envelope and removed some of the sample.

A small amount of powder floated away. It was light and airy; the spores had likely been purified, the kind that would be used in a biological weapon.

“Oh my God,” he said out loud.

•  •  •  

At about that same time, NSA analysts were listening in on a telephone call from Sarajevo that had been picked up from a Croatian listening post.

The discussion between the two men on the line focused on the bombing in Afghanistan. What should be the response in Bosnia? They bantered about American and British targets, then wrapped up their conversation.

“Tomorrow we will start,” one of the men said.

•  •  •  

The Daschle letter, the envelope, and the powder were processed over the next few hours. Multiple researchers worked with the material, and at least one scientist began to fear sloppy handling had contaminated the office. An investigator left a hot room wearing a single glove—it must have been carrying the microbes that cause anthrax, the scientist feared.

Seventeen people—all of them working on the anthrax attack project, code-named Operation Noble Eagle—had been exposed to the deadly bacteria. The researcher and his colleagues would need to be treated with the antibiotic ciprofloxacin as a precaution.

New orders went out strengthening the safety procedures for researchers at the infectious disease center. Afterward, the Daschle letter was turned over to another scientist for analysis. He was given the letter inside of two ziplock bags. He weighed an empty vial and then placed the Daschle letter through a pass box into the BSL-3 lab. He scraped some of the powder into the vial. Then, violating the rules, he passed the vial with the spores back out and took it for weighing to a BSL-2 lab. The room had a lower safety rating, but he considered the scale to be more accurate.

The next day, he wrote a report on his findings. “The nature of the spore preparation suggests very highly that professional manufacturing techniques were used in the preparation and production.”

Then at the bottom of the report, this scientist who had dangerously mishandled the sample typed his name.

Bruce E. Ivins.

•  •  •  

The next morning in Sarajevo, the American and British embassies closed. Between the intercepted telephone call from the previous day and earlier intelligence about plots to attack embassies and military bases from a nearby airfield, both countries concluded that their ambassadors and staff were in mortal danger.

Prime Minister Alija Behmen of the Federation government was deeply disappointed in the decision. Both embassies had never shut down during the Bosnian War, a time when buildings all over Sarajevo were being bombed. That certainly was a more threatening time. Closing them now could devastate the international reputation of his struggling country. If Bosnia-Herzegovina was perceived as incapable of guaranteeing the safety of its friends’ diplomatic representatives, other nations would certainly be hard-pressed to trust the government.

Worse, both the United States and Britain were key members of the United Nations’ military units inside Bosnia-Herzegovina that had been put in place at the end of the war. They had successfully kept control of the bubbling ethnic and nationalistic tensions that might fuel a resumption of hostilities. If the commitment of the Americans and the British waned, the very survival of Bosnia-Herzegovina could be in doubt.

Behmen agreed to an urgent meeting with officials from the American embassy. The senior representative at the meeting, Christopher Hoh, the deputy ambassador, took charge of the discussion.

There were five men who needed to be arrested, Hoh said. They were all Algerians and lived in or around Sarajevo. These people were behind the threats to the embassies, he said, and neither the Americans nor the British would feel secure until the Bosnians put them away.

Behmen assured Hoh that his government was eager to cooperate. If the Americans could just turn over some evidence, the Bosnians would arrest the men immediately.

“We have reasons for having justified suspicions regarding members of this Algerian group as perpetrators of these threats,” Hoh said. But he refused to explain why.

Evidence would help, Behmen said. The men could be arrested on suspicion, but couldn’t be held forever without proof. Was there
anything
the Americans could provide?

No, Hoh said. But the Federation government should not underestimate the level of American resolve on this issue.

“Unless the authorities arrest these men, the United States will withdraw all embassy personnel and stop any further U.S. support to this country,” Hoh said.

He fixed his eyes sternly on Behmen.

“And then let God protect Bosnia-Herzegovina,” he said.

1
Cheney was mistaken. While the document he is referencing, known as the Manchester Manual, includes information about the use of poisons, it describes only how to make simple toxins out of natural substances, like spoiled food. While the poisons mentioned, such as ricin, can be deadly, there is no discussion in the manual of anthrax or of how to “deploy and use” any bacterial agent. Moreover, contrary to the determinations of the American and British governments, the Manchester Manual was not an al-Qaeda document. See Notes and Sources for pages 193–195.

Brad Berenson was sitting on the couch in Gonzales’s office, briefing his bosses about the progress of the Prosper interagency group.

It was 6:00
P.M.
on October 18. Weeks had passed since the first meeting had been held at the State Department to devise a plan for trying captured terrorists. A large matrix of options was still under consideration—international war crimes tribunals sponsored by the United Nations, courts-martial, military commissions, federal criminal prosecution. Each choice presented a range of issues that needed to be resolved, such as the crimes that could be charged, standards of evidence, presidential authority to convene hearings, and the rights of suspects.