Amerithrax (48 page)

More and more, the agency agreed with the view that the culprit was probably a domestic biological expert worried enough about the nation’s vulnerability to germ weapons to send anthrax spores to the media, not to kill, but to alert the nation to a looming threat.

The big, muscular, and mustached virus expert was known around Washington as an outspoken advocate of bol- stering germ defenses and as an opponent to the Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention. He publicly demonstrated how easily bioweapons could be created. Terrorists were the biggest threat, he suggested, not secret CIA projects. Several days after Dr. Rosenberg met with the FBI, agents ap- proached him again and asked if they could examine his apartment and “swab the walls for anthrax spores.” Hatfill showed surprise at the request, but consented to the brief search.

Agents said Hatfill had been straightforward answering questions but investigators were unwilling to declare him cleared of any suspicion because of intriguing circumstances of his past. A spokesman for the FBI, Peter Christopher Murray, said, “We are unaware of any FBI employee who has named a suspect in the anthrax deaths investigation.”

According to FBI sources, Hatfill had failed questions on a polygraph examination he took the previous August at the Washington field office while applying for a job with the CIA. Hatfill seemed to fancy himself a James Bond. The post required a high-level security clearance and he must have known that it would reveal any padding of his military and academic career. The CIA lie detector test generated ambiguous results about his time in Africa and led the CIA to refuse him top secret clearance for certain projects. His security badges were lifted and he was assigned a low-level security clearance on one project. On August 23, 2001, just before the first anthrax mailings, the government formally suspended Dr. Hatfill’s security clearance. Pending review, his basic-level secret clearance had also been suspended. This made agents wonder. Had he become embittered enough to do something against his own country?

But the FBI underscored both publicly and in private meetings that Hatfill was not a suspect in the case. The term

“suspect” carried special legal meaning among FBI agents and federal prosecutors. Dr. Hatfill was to them just a “per- son of interest.”

TV news crews flew above the Detrick Plaza Apartments in Frederick, Maryland. Below they saw green lawns and three-story redbrick complexes. The area was also the home of the American Type Culture Collection and the Institute, the Army’s biodefense laboratories. Two investigators in Hazmat suits with respirators were at the front door of an apartment washing some equipment in a basin full of deter- gent. One female agent was traipsing in and out with a mask over her nose and mouth. She had been conducting anthrax swab tests on the apartment. In front of the complex, the feds had cordoned off the street abutting the Institute, where Hatfill used to work.

They stopped residents returning to their apartments and asked for ID before permitting them any further. Agents carted out videotapes, and six full black plastic garbage bags of other items. “I don’t know what all the results of the search were,” one agent said, “but I can tell you there were no hazardous materials found in the apartment. I don’t know how much in advance he knew about the search, but he has been cooperating with us fully all along.” Because the bags were plastic there was probably no anthrax inside. “You would never put anything biological in a plastic bag,” said Candice DeLong, “because the heat could change the chem- icals.” The agents packed their treasures in the truck and left.

Hatfill had invited agents to search his Frederick apart- ment without a warrant and so they did. No traces of anthrax were detected. But in recent weeks, investigators’ interest in Hatfill had heightened. They wouldn’t say why.

“We’re obviously doing things related to him that we’re not doing with others,” one law enforcement official said. “He is obviously of more interest to us than others on the list at this point.”

Dr. Hatfill had early on been identified as one of twenty to thirty scientists with the knowledge and opportunity to be Amerithrax. The FBI first contacted Hatfill in October. The first voluntary search had been in February when agents

used a high-tech vacuum on his car. As in this search, they rooted out no trace of anthrax, but unlike this search there had been no media attention.

When agents had interviewed Hatfill briefly then, they had told him that the agency was offering polygraph tests to a number of other scientists. Lie detector tests were being conducted at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah where re- searchers had been developing a powdered form of anthrax for testing biological defense systems. Small quantities of anthrax were routinely produced at Dugway, then shipped to the Institute in paste form for irradiation and returned. Though Hatfill had worked at the Institute only from Sep- tember 1997 until September 1999, he had retained access to labs there and at Dugway until March 2001.

He had already been doing related research on contract at Science Applications International Corp., a private-sector lab defense contractor in McLean, Virginia, when his Insti- tute grant expired. At SAIC he worked to detail the risks of biological and chemical attacks and gave presentations to employees of the U.S. military, intelligence, and other agen- cies.

SAIC laid Dr. Hatfill off on March 2 after reporters pur- sued him and because he was being investigated by the FBI. Hatfill formally left the Department of Defense–contracted firm two days later. SAIC officials would only say Hatfill was let go because of matters unrelated to anthrax. “Agents questioned targets at their places of employment to intimi- date their employers and get them to fire them,” wrote FBI expert Ronald Kessler. Kessler compared such harassment tactics—including phone calls, threats, and rumors—to those used by the KGB in Russia and the Stasi in East Ger- many.

Meanwhile, Hatfill denied any role in the anthrax mail- ings and expressed contempt for those who raised questions publicly linking him to the mailings. At the time he com- plained by phone to the
Baltimore Sun
that he had been fired from his job as a federal contractor because of incessant questioning by reporters and after a reporter questioned se- nior managers about him. “I’ve been in this field for a num- ber of years,” he said, “working until three o’clock in the

morning, trying to counter this type of weapon of mass de- struction, and, sir, my career is over at this time.”

Hatfill had spoken with
New York Times
reporters in late May. “I’ve got a letter from the FBI that says I’m not a sus- pect and never was,” he said. “I just got caught up in the normal screening they were doing, because of the nature of my job.” Protesting his innocence, he rankled at the private experts who had pursued him as a suspect and castigated the FBI as having little or no “idea what they were doing.” In early June, before his name emerged publicly in the Ameri- thrax case, he refused to show a
Times
reporter the FBI let- ter. “Why should I?” he snapped. “My reputation is intact. I was caught up in the first round of the investigation—so what?”

On June 26, the day after they searched his apartment, agents located and searched a mini storage unit Hatfill had rented downtown in the north-central Florida city of Ocala. An NBC affiliate and the
Hartford Courant
reported the unit was refrigerated. Hatfill had stored some of his belongings there after his parents, Norman and Shirley Hatfill, sold their thoroughbred horse stud farm, Mekamy Oaks, in 1999. The farm was about 12 miles west of Ocala and about 230 miles northwest of the Atlantic Coast city of Boca Raton. Ocala policemen assisted the FBI.

“They gave us a call and told me they were going to be serving a search warrant there,” said Ocala police chief Andy Krietemeyer. Four cars, including a Chevy Suburban with tinted windows, pulled up to the storage unit. Several workers in Hazmat gear piled out and spent the day search- ing the unit. A Marion County sheriff’s bomb squad helped agents transfer two suitcases and at least two boxes to the van. As they had at the Detrick Plaza, probers swabbed air ducts for anthrax spores. No trace of anthrax was found at either site.

Later in the day, Senator Daschle said, “I have asked for another briefing by the FBI on the anthrax investigation. I don’t know if one has actually been set yet. I hope it has, because I have a lot of questions.” Law enforcement officials again insisted that Dr. Hatfill wasn’t a suspect in the anthrax killings.

Six days earlier, the FBI had obtained a copy of a top secret report from a defense contractor. Just after a series of hoax anthrax mailings in February 1999, Hatfill commis- sioned a classified report on how anthrax might be sent through the mail. At the time Hatfill was still an SAIC contract-worker, making $150,000 a year, three times what the Institute had paid him.

Under instructions from the CIA, Hatfill and another re- search scientist, Joseph Soukup, detailed the possible con- sequences of a hypothetical anthrax attack by mail. The study told how such attacks could be carried out. The details included an anthrax-by-mail scenario—2.5 grams of
Bacil- lus globigii
, a simulated form of anthrax, sent through the mail in a standard business envelope to be opened in an office environment. The account suggested a spoonful in an envelope—about 2.5 grams of anthrax—the amount used in the actual anthrax mailings. That had really raised eyebrows at the FBI and fueled widespread speculation among sci- entists that Hatfill fit the Amerithrax profile.

Hatfill did not work on the intelligence and wasn’t alone in authorizing the study. According to Ben Haddad, a spokesman for SAIC, the work was done by bioterrorism expert Bill Patrick, whom Hatfill listed under personal and scientific references on his resume. Patrick was the “father” of a process for making a sophisticated form of anthrax. Haddad told the press that the study had been “miscon- strued” and was “not about sending anthrax through the mail.” Most of the report dealt with decontamination after large attacks.

The day after the highly publicized searches of Hatfill’s apartment and Florida storage unit, the
Baltimore Sun
re- vealed more information about the report that spookily fore- shadowed the mailborne attacks. Haddad confirmed that commissioning a study on the consequences of a hypothet- ical anthrax attack “in general, would not be an out-of-the- norm sort of request.” Hatfill and Soukup commissioned the report internally. Hatfill’s collaborator, Soukup, still worked at SAIC.

One item that pointed to Dr. Hatfill as
not
being the FBI’s man was that he worked with viruses, not bacteria. Viruses

are small infectious organisms that need a living cell in order to reproduce. They are usually fragments of RNA (ribonu- cleic acid) with no metabolism of their own. After multi- plying and killing cells of a living animal, they escape through body fluids, water, or air to the cells of other hosts. The viruses of influenza are known for incessantly changing. Viruses cause AIDS, food poisoning, and the common cold and do not respond to antibiotics.

On Thursday, June 27, the FBI reported it was now fo- cusing on roughly thirty U.S. biological warfare experts. They had searched twenty-five homes and apartments of re- searchers and scientists in April, May, and June. All, in- cluding Dr. Hatfill’s, had been done with the owner’s consent. The FBI was still administering polygraphs to more than two hundred current and former employees of the In- stitute and of Dugway Proving Ground. In its search for a domestic terrorist, the FBI had also questioned scientists with biological knowledge at Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas and the Salk Center in Swiftwater, Pennsylvania. Law en- forcement agents had issued hundreds of subpoenas nation- wide and had only begun sifting through thousands of documents.

Meanwhile the spotlight remained on the “person of in- terest.” Apparently Hatfill had some enemies in the biowar- fare family. He also had some powerful friends. Bill Patrick was his mentor. Hatfill had been highly recommended to Louisiana State University by two very highly placed friends, David Franz and David Huxsoll, former command- ers of the Institute. Within three days LSU would hire him as the new associate director of its National Center for Bi- omedical Research and Training.

Huxsoll was currently director of Plum Island Animal Disease Center, a U.S. Department of Agriculture research facility off the coast of North Fork in Long Island Sound. In December 2001, there had been a three-hour power fail- ure on the site, popularly known as “Anthrax Island,” and all three backup generators had failed. There had been con- cern over escaping pathogens. Right after the blackout, the facility was run by replacement workers during a five-month strike.

Anthrax Island had for decades figured in Soviet intelli- gence reports. Dr. Alibek knew all about it. During World War II, Plum Island was used to test biological agents. It was eventually turned into a quarantine center for imported animals and food products, accessible only by ferry. The secluded island was supposedly used to study exotic animal illnesses, including foot-and-mouth disease. No animals leave the island alive.

Officials deny that they have ever studied anthrax on An- thrax Island in spite of the popular nickname. FBI agents asked Dr. Hatfill, a former infectious-disease center special- ist, if he had ever been there or worked there and he said no.

However, there was in existence a bona fide “Anthrax Island,” an isle more fearsome than Plum Island or the U.K.’s Gruinard Island, still seething with anthrax after fifty years. The Soviets’ Anthrax Island was a hot zone of the deadly anthrax from Compound 19 that had been tested un- knowingly by the dead of Sverdlovsk. It was arguably the most deadly spot in the world and refining a product that would make Amerithrax’s anthrax look tame by comparison.