Amerithrax (13 page)
U.S. to check the identity of all prospective buyers. Weeks later, Congress passed a law that imposed tough require- ments on the domestic disbursement of pathogens and made it a crime to threaten a biological attack. The two hundred
U.S. labs that kept germ collections would now have to reg- ister and submit to federal inspections. By the time the law was passed, it was already too late. Lethal anthrax was al- ready in the hands of terrorists.
In late 1997 and continuing into the next year, anthrax
By the spring of 1999, reports of anthrax hoaxes to the FBI reached two to three per day. Approximately 180 of them were anthrax threats. Over the last two years white powders had been mailed to courthouses, schools, various Florida magazine publishers, churches, and abortion clinics. Phony anthrax was dispersed among shoppers in California. Those threatened showered vigorously and took antibiotics. In Mill Valley, California, a powder was left in a teacher’s mailbox at Tamalpais High along with a threatening note. Toxicology tests came back negative for anthrax. However, these false alarms triggered civil defense responses involv- ing the police, paramedics, emergency care physicians, and firefighters. Anthrax hoaxes shut down post offices and stores and sent Hazmat teams scrambling. They created such widespread panic that one expert remarked, “There is no reason that the hoaxes may not be the strategy of a terrorist.” In January 2001, twenty-five anthrax threats were re- ceived across the U.S. and Canada. A typical case occurred at a Wal-Mart in Victoria, British Columbia, where a letter was received that was claimed to contain anthrax. The clerk who opened it was given a precautionary dose of Cipro, but
testing determined the powder was not anthrax.
Also that year two office buildings in Trenton, New Jer- sey, were evacuated after workers opened packages contain- ing a white powder—another false alarm. There were no traces of any actual pathogens. An Internal Revenue office in Covington, Kentucky, was sealed off and two hundred employees quarantined because of a harmless powder. Brown powder in an envelope was sent to a state agency in Ohio. A Halloween card filled with yellow powder arrived
at the
Columbus Dispatch.
Yellow powder in an envelope opened by an Ohio couple in October 2001 was accompa- nied by a note that read: “You are now infected with an- thrax.”
In the midst of a national anthrax panic, Kamal Dawood, a Palestinian construction worker, tossed fistfuls of yellowish-brownish powder into a Brooklyn mailbox outside an elementary school. Although tests proved the powder was not anthrax, the charge against him was threatening to use a weapon of mass destruction—the anthrax that people thought he had tossed on the mail. If convicted, he could face life in prison.
On the same day, a Maine woman mailed a taped en- velope addressed in block letters to her friend Janice at the post office in Somersworth, New Hampshire, as a joke. “I specifically chose [table] salt,” she said later, “because it was granular, and I thought it would be impossible to mistake it for anything else, certainly nothing that would hang in the air and get into someone’s lungs. It was very spur of the moment.” The envelope (which was alleged to have leaked onto a postal worker) contained no threatening communi- cation. Thus, the first trial of a person charged with com- mitting an anthrax hoax would end in acquittal.
A Los Angeles fire captain mailed a letter containing a check impregnated with powder to his ex-wife’s divorce lawyer. The draft was inscribed with the words “choke on it.” He had allegedly mailed similar envelopes before 9-11, but those acts went unnoticed and unpunished. But now the nation was in a panic. He struck a deal with the government that reduced his crime from a felony to a misdemeanor.
Also in October 2001, while AMI employees were still being inoculated, a first wave of anthrax hoax letters were sent to almost 280 Midwestern abortion clinics and women’s reproductive health clinics. They were delivered through the
U.S. Postal Service on October 15, with the return addresses of “US Marshall Service” and “US Secret Service.” A sec- ond wave the following month traveled by Federal Express. All were from a common source and signed “the Army of God.” According to the letter writer, a father of nine, God had told him to kill abortion doctors. The envelopes for the
October letters were marked
time sensitive
and
urgent security notice enclosed
. The text read: “You have cho- sen a profession which profits from the senseless murder of millions of innocent children each year... we are going to kill you. This is your notice. Stop now or die.”
The FBI lab analyzed all but seventy-four of the letters and determined the envelopes had been prepared using four- color ink-jet printing. Chemistry Unit personnel examined the powders—flour and chalk dust. They tested negative for anthrax. However, fingerprints recovered from a Federal Ex- press receipt from the second wave of letters sent three weeks later turned out to belong to a self-described “anti- abortion warrior” already on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives List. The previous February, while awaiting sen- tencing for a 1999 federal firearms violation, Clayton Lee Waagner had escaped from an Illinois jail. During a ten- month crime spree of carjacking and robbing banks, the forty-five-year-old fugitive took a break. He visited a onetime friend, Neal Horsley, in Georgia the day after Thanksgiving. Waagner told him he had mailed the threat- ening letters, targeting forty-two abortion clinics.
Waagner was rearrested in December near Cincinnati, Ohio, after being recognized by a sharp-eyed Kinko’s clerk. Waagner now claimed responsibility for mailing more than 550 letters filled with powder. U.S. District Judge Susan Dlott would sentence Waagner to nineteen years and seven months in prison on firearms and theft charges. She ordered him to serve the term after completing a thirty-year sentence in Illinois on escape and other charges. Waagner said he would appeal. “I’m not remorseful,” Waagner told Dlott. “I’m not begging for forgiveness for what I did, because I thought it was right.” On the same day, Attorney General John Ashcroft ordered Justice Department lawyers to get tough and prosecute all alleged anthrax hoaxers.
“The anthrax killings are exactly the kind of crime that screams ‘copycats,’” former FBI profiler Candice DeLong said. “I worked the Tylenol murders back in the eighties. In thirty days there were one hundred verified copycats and some of them serious enough to kill people. This is the same kind of crime. You’ve got a whole lot of weirdos in this
Most perpetrators of copycat threats have been Ameri- cans: individual scientists or physicians with grudges against colleagues, former spouses, or employers; or white suprem- acists acting alone or in small groups. One case even in- volved a Massachusetts grandmother who had mailed eighteen threatening letters to the Massachusetts state attor- ney general. Six of them held white powder. The Postal Service aggressively investigated more than eighty such hoaxes a year. Fifty-seven people had been charged with state and federal crimes for allegedly committing bioterror- ism hoaxes—but not one had ever sent actual anthrax through the mail—until now.
But what of the missing New York letter? Perhaps, since there is a Division of Dead Letters, there should be a divi- sion of deadly letters, of anthrax letters not yet found.
ON
Friday, October 19, 2001, a
New York Post
entertain- ment writer, Joanna Huden, thirty-one, was confirmed with cutaneous anthrax. At the beginning of the month she had gone to NYU Medical Center with a blister on the knuckle above her right middle finger. She thought it might be a spider bite. However, photos of O’Connor’s anthrax wound, shown on the news, alerted her. The FBI rushed to the
Post
to see if they could learn where she had contracted the dis- ease. On the same day, a male coworker of Huden’s began showing visible signs of cutaneous anthrax. Now investi- gators, certain they had narrowed the site of the contagion, launched an intensive search of the
Post
’s mailroom and offices. They already had a good idea of the timeline. Huden had shown her first symptoms on September 22, shortly after Amerithrax had mailed the Brokaw letter. The male co- worker had been infected much later. His cutaneous anthrax infection would be positively confirmed three days later,
proof that the letter might still be on the premises. A
Post
memo a week earlier had asked employees to hunt through their work areas for any suspicious mail and place it in a bin for later testing. Huden’s coworker might have been infected during one of those searches.
A
Post
employee also recalled opening an envelope filled with powder, but believed that letter had been thrown out sometime earlier. The search for the lethal envelope trailed into the afternoon. Police found the envelope Friday evening in the
Post
mailroom. It was another of those prestamped post office envelopes, postmarked “Trenton, NJ 09/18/2001 (Tues.)” and processed at the mail processing center in Ham- ilton Township. It was addressed in the same style of block- printing as the Brokaw envelope, but said:
E
DITOR,
N
EW
Y
ORK
P
OST 1211
A
VE. OF THE
A
MERICAS
N
EW
Y
ORK
NY
10036
+
6701
The letter was still unopened after its delivery. This was because people had been warned not to open letters without return addresses. In any case, anthrax spores had gotten out of the sealed envelope. While hunting down the discarded anthrax letter, another employee at the
Post
contracted an- thrax. The active search may have disturbed spores from their resting place and spread them throughout the office. They may have leaked from a split in the office mailbag. Mark Cunningham, thirty-eight, another of the newspaper’s employees, would see the onset of cutaneous anthrax symp- toms on October 23, and have that confirmed five days later. Yet the FBI conducted no interviews with people who cleaned the mailrooms where loose anthrax had been tossed into trash baskets or spoke with people who had handled that trash. Before being discovered, the letter had gotten damp or wet somehow. The envelope showed a water stain in the upper left-hand corner. Had it rained the day it was mailed or had it been kept inside a plastic bag where water droplets might have sweated against the plastic? It might have been kept in a refrigerator or packed with dry ice dur- ing transit. Whatever the reason, the “relatively crude” pow-
09-11-01
T
HIS IS NEXT
T
AKE PENACILIN NOW
D
EATH TO AMERICA
D
EATH TO ISRAEL
A
LLAH IS GREAT
It was a Xerox copy of the Brokaw letter, which had been a copy of an original that had probably been destroyed by now. The
Post
letter had not been flat when copied. Amerithrax had held it at a slightly different angle. And the Xeroxes differed in one other aspect. The
Post
letter had been trimmed with scissors to a slightly different size. The investigators could tell from the irregular edges. This letter measured 165 millimeters wide and 230 millimeters long. The one-page handprinted Brokaw letter had been cut prac- tically square. This letter had 50 millimeters cut from the side and bottom.
Both letters had been trimmed from standard copy paper 215 millimeters wide by 279 millimeters long. Why? And what was the purpose of the four odd folds on each page? And why the
New York Post
? Wouldn’t the
New York Times
, a venerable, respected institution, be a more fitting symbol of America as a terrorist target? Why was a hoax letter sent to Miller and not one laced with anthrax? Did Amerithrax read the
Post
, a workingman’s paper with a big circulation? It seemed Amerithrax was after a larger audi- ence. He wanted his actions reported, but his letters had been too subtle. He had neglected to mention anthrax by name.
He would remedy that.
“We are in the middle of a war,” the
New York Post
editorialized. But who was waging it against America? Agents drove the
Post
letter, containing a small damp amount of a powdery substance, to the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
