Amerithrax (31 page)

Doctors diagnosed influenza or mild gastroenteritis, but cooked sausage sold by vendors near their railway station workplace proved to be the source of a meat-borne anthrax infection. The same bacterium will behave differently de- pending on how it enters the system. Spores entering the digestive tract through contaminated, undercooked meat cause intestinal anthrax, which has an incubation period of one to seven days.

Anthrax of the gastrointestinal tract strikes the gut as bac- teria and toxins eat away at the intestinal lining, spread to nearby tissue, and prompt an immune-cell attack. From in- testines, immune cells carry microbes to lymph nodes, which in turn become inflamed. Fatality rate is from 25 to 60 per- cent, but GI anthrax is so rare that the effect of early anti- biotic treatment on the case-fatality rate has yet to be established. The Soviet government insisted that intestinal anthrax from natural causes (contaminated soil) had oc- curred in Russia 159 times between 1936 and 1968.

Thus, tainted meat was always the common hypothesis for Russian anthrax outbreaks. It was Russia’s “national dis- ease,” so prevalent in Siberia that Soviets called the cuta- neous form the “Siberian ulcer.” The sprawling rural areas of czarist Russia and the former Soviet Union had among the world’s highest levels of recorded anthrax incidents. In czarist times, outbreaks of Russian anthrax hovered around fifty thousand animal deaths per year, twelve thousand hu- man skin infections, and over three thousand human deaths per year.

There had been major outbreaks in Germany in the four- teenth century and in central Europe and Russia in the sev- enteenth century. The modern history of anthrax contains accounts of “wedding banquet” scenarios in Iran, Kazakh- stan, Siberia, and various African countries. In these cases, meat not cooked enough to kill anthrax bacteria is shared by a large group. Soviet history made an intestinal anthrax outbreak seem logical. The cover-up fooled the West for years.

But contaminated feed could never have been the cause of the 1979 outbreak. There was no meat-processing factory near Sverdlovsk. And, in fact, on May 27, 1992, Boris Yelt- sin, president after the Soviet Union ceased to exist on De- cember 31, 1991, acknowledged in an interview with a Russian paper that the 1979 Sverdlovsk outbreak had stemmed from an accident at a military facility.

One fact did seem puzzling, however: Sverdlovsk’s epi- demic had occurred over seven weeks. How to explain the long duration of the outbreak? If it had resulted from an accidental release of deadly aerosolized spores into the wind from Compound 19, wouldn’t the deaths show a single spike, a common point of exposure? After developing the disease, shouldn’t the victims have perished within two to seven days? The long duration of the epidemic might lie in the capacity of anthrax spores to remain dormant in the lungs for extended periods.

“We couldn’t understand why people continued to die,” said General Yevstigneyev. “We assumed that this was a quick, onetime exposure and that our mopping-up would be completed in a few days, but there were deaths for a month and a half after the release.”

According to Ken Alibek, a leading Soviet plague expert, “The cover-up was responsible for turning what began as a medical emergency into a small epidemic.” He added that antibiotics promptly administered would have saved lives if the thousands of Sverdlovsk residents had been given anti- biotics and vaccinated immediately after the first cases were reported. The first two weeks had been the worst, with two- thirds of the victims falling sick and dying by April 16. Yet after a week the anthrax deaths still continued. New victims

arrived at the hospital covered with black ulcerous swellings under the skin. The deaths of the remaining third were spread thinly over the next month—suggesting a second ep- izootic in Syserskiy
rayon.

As fresh fields were plowed and new gravel pits dug, animal outbreaks flared as if from nowhere. Decontamina- tion raised invisible clouds of dust that still retained the tough, virulent spores. The action of spring floods spread spores that had settled after the initial release. Cleanups spread the re-aerosolized anthrax spores further through “secondary aerosols,” raising them into the air to be re- breathed by new victims. That explained the long duration of the outbreak.

Of the three Soviet centers for anthrax production, Perza, Kurgan, and Sverdlovsk, Compound 19 had been the only one active. In the spring of 1988, scientists from Sverdlovsk were ordered to dispose of Compound 19’s legacy: tons of anthrax bacteria, enough to destroy the world’s people many times over. They set out to destroy the anthrax, but how? They had made the anthrax spores too hardy, too nearly indestructible. The anthrax, stainless-steel canisters of lethal pink powder, was packed onto two dozen rail cars and trans- ported in secret. America had not heard the last of Strain 836. The final result would make Amerithrax look like a piker.

Cipro Fever

ON
Wednesday, October 31, 2001, the same day Kathy Nguyen died, the U.S. rejected a UN resolution offered by France to condemn the anthrax attacks on grounds it could have been domestic terrorism. The French were skittish

about any questions of Iraq’s involvement in the anthrax mailings. Not only had France supplied fermenters and an- thrax cultures from the Pasteur Institute to Al Hakam, but in 1980 had built an animal vaccine plant, Al Manal, on the out- skirts of Baghdad. Constructed of bomb-resistant concrete, Al Manal was actually a BSL-3 virus and toxin factory. It produced nine thousand cubic yards of weapons-grade botu- linum toxin, enough to kill every person on earth a thousand times over. After the Gulf War all of it vanished. The toxin has never been recovered.

Investigators established that the bacterium that killed Nguyen was virtually identical to germs found in letters to the New York media and Senator Daschle. The following day, the Florida anthrax was publicly confirmed to be of the same origin—a variant of the so-called Ames strain. This made officials at Iowa State University (where the Ames strain had been perfected) very nervous. Their collection numbered over a hundred vials of anthrax, spanning seven decades. Their oldest strain was from 1928. The academi- cians notified the FBI that, for security reasons, they planned to destroy the university’s huge bank of spores. When the FBI neither approved nor explicitly objected, the cultures were destroyed on October 10 and October 11. With their loss went potential genetic clues to Amerithrax’s identity. A dispute arose later among biologists. They argued that the rush to destroy the spores probably eliminated crucial evi- dence about the anthrax in the letters. Martin Hugh-Jones, an anthrax expert aiding the federal investigation, said, “If those cultures were still alive, they could have helped in clearing up the muddy history.” Dr. James A. Roth added, “Now we’ll never know.”

Wisdom told the searchers they were dealing with a “nut- case” who could only be caught through good old-fashioned policework and shoe leather. But Amerithrax had left the FBI with scant clues. All of the letters were photocopies. None contained any fingerprints. The plastic tape on the envelopes was a mass-marketed variety. FBI laboratory an- alysts matched the serrated ends of the strips of cellophane tape used to seal the anthrax letters. That meant that who- ever had sealed the letters had torn off successive strips of

tape from the same roll without leaving any fingerprints. The paper on which the letters were written was an average size, though folded and trimmed. The marks left by the photocop- ier were carefully studied. The envelopes were prestamped and widely available at any post office.

Agents poured over scientific literature to learn who had the knowledge to make anthrax. They questioned manufac- turers and marketers of biochemistry equipment Amerithrax might have used. They sought out places that sold special- ized machinery needed to make anthrax. They compiled lengthy lists of anyone who might have manufactured, tested, transported, stored, or thought about anthrax.

President George W. Bush and his advisors reached out to Hollywood directors for ideas since their outlandish movie thrillers were coming true.

The newest flashpoint in the hunt for Amerithrax was the examination of government research institutions and con- tractors that had the Ames strain and know-how to turn it into lethal powder form. The wrinkle in this was that these were the same scientists the FBI had counted on for scien- tific advice from the earliest days of the investigation. “It puts us in a difficult position,” a senior law enforcement official said. “We’re working with these people and looking at them as potential suspects.”

On November 1, Postal Inspector Weaver complained that managers and employees alike were “becoming increas- ingly nervous because they aren’t getting timely follow-up information, or in some cases, no information at all, about suspicious mailpieces that postal inspectors are removing from postal facilities.” The same day
USPS NEWS Talk
re- ported:

The masks are coming... In testing, the slightest instan- taneous filter penetration is measured. The respirators are certified with the intent that particles as small as 0.3 mi- crons will be captured. They are nearly 100 percent ef- ficient at capturing the smallest of particles including anthrax spores in the micron range. Employees supplied with either FFP [filtering face piece] have been advised on proper fit and use to ensure maximum efficiency. A

video airing every fifteen minutes on PSTN also teaches employees how to properly apply and fit the FFP to your face. It is important to know that neither respirator is intended for use in a suspected or known hazardous sub- stance release situation.

“The removal is part of our ongoing investigation as we search for clues as to who is sending anthrax through the mail,” Weaver says. Weaver wants to reassure em- ployees that none of the letters and parcels checked by the Inspection Service or FBI hazmat teams so far have contained anthrax. They have either been hoaxes or mail- pieces containing some benign substance. On many oc- casions, when the mail is removed it is cleared and returned to the mailstream relatively quickly.

The first of November was a busy day. Agents were in- terviewing and polygraphing hundreds who had access to anthrax stored at the Institute, while agents were storming the home of Aziz Kazi, a Pakistani-born budget official for the city of Chester, Pennsylvania. “They hauled away doz- ens of boxes of his belongings and questioned him for hours about a mysterious liquid he had been seen carrying out of the house,”
Newsweek
wrote. “It turned out the family dish- washer had backed up and Kazi was bailing out his kitchen.” Another lead had fizzled.

Agents in Texas were watching an Egyptian man fin- gered by a jailhouse snitch, who had overheard the man talking with associates about delivering the contents of a “brown envelope.” When the agents followed him to the airport and covertly searched his luggage, all that was inside the “brown envelope” were insurance papers. One hundred and fifty British consulate staff members were evacuated in New York after a woman in the visa department opened an envelope with white powder. It had been mailed from Glas- gow on October 17 and addressed in black felt-tip pen to the British Consulate General.

The next day FBI Director Mueller admitted the govern- ment had no idea who was behind the attacks. He asked the public’s help to analyze the handwriting samples on the an- thrax letters. Gov. Gray Davis warned California citizens

that the state’s six biggest bridges might be destroyed by terrorists during rush hour between November 2 and No- vember 7. Around San Francisco Bay, commuters left early as they tried to beat the rush-hour bombs. Tom Ridge told senators that he hoped eventually to be able to grade alerts— like smog alerts in the summer. But it is difficult to measure raw tips from unreliable sources.

The Postal Service increased its reward for information leading to the arrest of those responsible for the anthrax attacks. A direct-mail advertising company, Advo, donated

$250,000 to the reward fund, which had now reached $1.25 million dollars. Amerithrax had single-handedly almost crip- pled the direct-mail business. People were afraid to touch their mail. A federal judged ordered a mail-processing center in Bellmawr, New Jersey, to stay closed until he could study a complaint by the postal workers’ union. The union be- lieved that the facility might not be free of anthrax. Who could blame them?

Jake Wagman of the
Philadelphia Inquirer
reported that the Bellmawr processing facility had opened and shut down multiple times and that “Several government agencies con- verged on the facility.” Wagman also wrote of the mistakes they made—“from cleaning the wrong machine to miscal- culating by several million pieces the amount of mail de- layed by the scare.” The wrong mail sorter was decontaminated, leaving actual anthrax-tainted equipment in operation for three days. Dozens of employees used it to sort millions of pieces of mail.

On November 3, Postmaster General John Potter finally said what everyone had been thinking. “There are no guar- antees that the mail is safe.” Within hours of Potter’s state- ment other officials and experts followed in agreement. The next day more traces of anthrax were discovered in New York and Washington, followed later by more and more findings as cross-contamination spread the invisible anthrax. Scientists admitted that while they knew bacteriology, they knew nothing about how mail is handled or the size of en- velope pores. The administration’s crisis management team stepped in, but didn’t do much to clarify matters.