The Annals of Unsolved Crime (6 page)

On appeal, however, that verdict was thrown out because no motive had been established and no murder weapon had been found. The court found inconsistencies in Mrs. Palme’s testimony. Pettersson was subsequently acquitted on all charges, released, and died in 2004 from a head injury. No gun was ever found, although, in 2006, a Smith & Wesson .357 revolver, consistent with the type of gun used to kill Palme, was recovered from a lake. But the Swedish National Laboratory of Forensic Science was unable to match it through ballistics to the bullets fired in the assassination. No one else has ever been arrested. Even a $7 million reward failed to produce any further evidence or credible witnesses. So, although the Palme
investigation generated some 700,000 pages of documents and cost over $45 million, the case remains unresolved.

There have been many theories offered to explain this unsolved crime. Even after the acquittal of Christer Pettersson, police tended to stick to the loner theory. A gunman saw an unprotected Palme as a target of opportunity, and he simply walked up to him, shot him, shot his wife, and disposed of the weapon. Another theory claimed that the Kurdish militant organization “PKK” had organized the assassination because Palme was cutting off their sources of finance. After receiving a number of tips, Swedish police arrested a number of Kurdish refugees in Stockholm. As there was no evidence placing them at the scene of the crime, and because most of them had alibis, they were released. Fifteen years later, Kurdish PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan was questioned by Swedish investigators in prison in Turkey, but he denied any Kurdish involvement.

Finally, there is the theory that the South African intelligence service killed Palme because he was about to make a deal with its archenemy, the outlawed African National Congress. This theory grew out of the testimony of Eugene de Kock in 1996 to the South African Supreme Court in Pretoria. De Kock, a former high-ranking South African police officer during the apartheid era, said that Craig Williamson, a former police colleague, had organized the plot and hired Anthony White, a former Rhodesian Selous Scout, as the triggerman. The code name for the covert action, according to de Kock, was Operation Longreach.

My assessment is that the assassin was not a spur-of-the-moment amateur. All the evidence points to a professional killer who had carefully stalked his prey and then chose a time and place in which there were no witnesses. He had also planned to kill Lisbet Palme. If she had not survived, no one would have known what had happened. The fact that the weapon was not found, and that the bullets were never traced, are also the
marks of a professional hitman. It is also likely he had the false documentation and other support necessary to escape Sweden. We have such a candidate in “Operation Longreach.” So I find plausible Eugene de Kock’s testimony to the South African Supreme Court that a South African covert-action unit sent a professional assassin to kill Palme. It had a motive in Palme’s dealings with the African National Congress. It had the means to get an assassin in and out of Sweden under a false identity. And it had an opportunity in Palme’s lack of security. Since de Kock had been granted immunity and had no obvious reason to lie, I believe that Palme was killed by an assassin dispatched from South Africa.

The lesson of this case is that absence of evidence is evidence of absence, which Sherlock Holmes famously referred to as “the dog that did not bark in the night-time” in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s story “Silver Blaze.” After the Palme murder, Swedish police searched high and low for the murder weapon for more than a quarter century without success, including tracking down all the reported stolen Magnum revolvers and test-firing more than 400 other weapons. The absence of a weapon, as well as the absence of any clues at the crime scene, is part of the modus operandi of a professional hitman, who, if successful in his work, commits unsolved crimes.

CHAPTER 5
THE ANTHRAX ATTACK ON AMERICA

The anthrax attack in September 2001 was an act of biological warfare involving the first use of a weapon of mass destruction. It came less than three weeks after the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Accompanying the lethal biological agent were photocopies of two handwritten notes dated 09/11/2001. The first note was sent along with anthrax to NBC and to the
New York Post
. The note read: “THIS IS NEXT. TAKE PENACILIN [sic] NOW. DEATH TO AMERICA DEATH TO ISRAEL ALLAH IS GREAT.” The second note was sent to U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, and to Senate majority leader Tom Daschle. This note read: “YOU CANNOT STOP US. WE HAVE THIS ANTHRAX. YOU DIE NOW. ARE YOU AFRAID. DEATH TO AMERICA DEATH TO ISRAEL ALLAH IS GREAT.” The anthrax in the envelopes was the most virulent of all anthrax, the deadly Ames strain. Even though the secret technology for turning anthrax spores, which tend to clump together, into an aerosol remains a closely guarded state secret, the letters contained a powdered anthrax that, once they were opened, transformed into a cloud of billions of spores of anthrax. This anthrax in aerosol so thoroughly contaminated the Senate Office Building that it had to be closed down for nearly three months. The anthrax also was not pure. It contained a signature of silicon—the anthrax in the
New York Post
letter was 10 percent silicon when the bulk material was measured
by mass—and also contained traces of tin. The anthrax powder had been packed in standard, pre-stamped, 3 ½-inch-by-6 ¼ inch white envelopes. They were postmarked “Trenton, New Jersey,” and a test of mailboxes in that postal zone indicated that at least one had been sent from Princeton.

The victims provided no further clues. There were five deaths from the inhalation of the anthrax, and seventeen other people were hospitalized. But most appeared to be random exposures caused by anthrax leakage in the postal system.

In the midst of the panic that ensued in the fall of 2001, the government, which had information that it declined to make public, also became uneasy. The CIA had learned that in 1999, al-Qaeda had employed a Malaysian scientist, Yazid Sufaat, to build an anthrax lab near the Kandahar airport in Afghanistan. Had al-Qaeda used anthrax, as the letters themselves suggested? This possibility could not be neglected by the Defense Department, since most of its military personnel had not yet been vaccinated against anthrax. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld therefore dispatched a top deputy to FBI headquarters to ascertain if the anthrax put U.S. troops at risk. The FBI considered the subject so sensitive at the time that the deputy was not allowed to bring any of his aides to the meeting. He later described the secret briefing as an eye-opener into the FBI’s approach to this biological attack. The FBI assistant director reassured the deputy that it was only a matter of time before they identified the perpetrator. Based on the psychological profile it had already assembled, the view of the FBI task force was that a “lone wolf” American scientist, acting alone, had perpetrated all the attacks. The FBI had narrowed the list down to between 150 and 200 scientists who both had access to lab samples of the Ames strain of anthrax and were located within range of the postal district from which the letters were mailed. The deputy assured the Defense Department executive that all were under surveillance, so there was little danger
of another attack. He expressed confidence that they would quickly determine the guilty party by giving each one of the suspects a polygraph examination. When the Defense Department executive then asked him if the FBI was also investigating and polygraphing foreigners who had access to anthrax (since the Ames strain had been sent to several labs abroad), the FBI assistant director told him that they were focusing on the American scientists, and that he expected that the guilty party would soon reveal himself. That was in 2001.

But the FBI polygraph effort, which went on for another seven years, never produced a culprit. No suspect ever broke. Although the FBI investigation code-named “Amerithrax” consumed “hundreds of thousands of investigator work hours,” making it the most massive inquest in the history of American law enforcement, it produced no further actual evidence identifying the party behind the attack.

The FBI did not find a single witness to the theft, preparation, or mailing of the anthrax. It did not find any of the equipment used to make the powdered anthrax or any growth media that added silicon, tin, or any other of the trace elements found in the envelopes containing the killer anthrax. It did not find anthrax in the homes, automobiles, personal effects, or even garbage of any of the scientists it was investigating. It did not find the original letter from which the photocopies were made, or the photocopy machine on which it was made (although it examined tens of thousands of such devices). On the four letters and envelopes, or tape sealing them closed, it found no fingerprints, hairs, fibers, or DNA, nor could it identify the handwriting, other than to ascertain that four letters—A, T, T, and A—had been emphasized. Nor did surveillance cameras in the vicinity of the mailbox in Princeton show any of the suspected scientists. The perpetrator had effectively erased any evidence of his or her involvement in the crime.

The first fatality of the attack was Robert Stevens, a photo
editor at American Media in Boca Raton, Florida. There was a prior possible anthrax exposure in Florida. Dr. Christos Tsonas, a doctor at the Holy Cross Hospital in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, informed the FBI after Stevens’ death that two months earlier he had prescribed an antibiotic for an emergency-room patient named Ahmed Alhaznawi, who had a suspicious black lesion on his leg. At the time, Dr. Tsonas was unfamiliar with anthrax. When he was shown pictures of anthrax lesions in October 2001, he then described Alhaznawi’s lesion as “consistent with cutaneous (skin) anthrax.” Alhaznawi was a pilot, one of the four hijackers of United Airlines Flight 93 on September 11. Since he was incinerated in the crash, the FBI could not pursue this lead.

Without any direct evidence, other than the attack anthrax itself, the FBI tightened the surveillance on American scientists. One such scientist was microbiologist Perry Mikesell, who had access to anthrax in 1999 when he worked at the Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio. The FBI scrutiny of Mikesell became so intense that, according to family members, he began to drink heavily. Although he died from a heart attack in October 2002, family members said that he drank himself to death. The FBI then turned its attention to Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, a virologist who in 1999 worked at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Fort Detrick, Maryland, which was experimenting with the Ames strain of anthrax. Hatfill showed stress on a polygraph exam, and he had taken the antibiotic Cipro, which protects against anthrax infection, prior to the attack, and he attracted the attention of a bloodhound trained to react to the anthrax letters. The FBI surveillance agents followed him so closely that one FBI tail car actually ran over his foot. The FBI searched his home, property, girlfriend’s apartment, and workplaces, after the media was alerted. As a result, Hatfill lost his job, consulting contracts, and contact with many associates. Even isolated,
Hatfill did not break under the pressure. Instead, he sued the government. A federal judge expressed outrage that the FBI had pursued him for five years without a “scintilla of evidence,” leading the Department of Justice to exonerate him and pay him $5.82 million in August 2008.

Meanwhile, the FBI had contracted with The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) for an analysis of the DNA of the anthrax that could more closely pinpoint its origins. It used the DNA of minute changes, or “morphs,” in the spores as “genetic fingerprints.” Of all the samples the FBI had collected from different labs using the Ames strain, only one matched the “fingerprints” of the killer anthrax in the letters. It was from flask RMR-1029 in Dr. Bruce Ivins’ lab. This anthrax had been created in 1997 at the Dugway Proving Ground and sent to Ivins at USAMRIID for vaccine tests. If the match was correct, the FBI finally had the “murder weapon.” The custodian for this flask had been Ivins, a microbiologist researcher working on anthrax vaccines. It was part of his job to dispense anthrax to other scientists in the world doing approved research.

Even though Ivins had passed his polygraph exam, he now replaced Hatfill as the prime suspect. The FBI then worked to eliminate all the other scientists to whom Ivins had given access to RMR-1029, for one of three reasons: a scientist had not worked solo in a lab and therefore lacked the privacy needed to process the wet spores into dry powder; a scientist lacked the skill set to do the job; a scientist was located too far away from Princeton to mail the letters. Through this Sherlock Holmes process of elimination, the FBI narrowed the list to one man: Ivins. He worked alone in his lab, he had the skill set, and he could have made the nine-hour round-trip drive to Princeton.

The FBI now needed to break Ivins or find evidence that would hold up in court. It spared no effort. It even attempted to trace back to him the 6 ¾-inch “Federal Eagle” pre-franked 34-cent envelopes in which the anthrax was mailed, even
though nearly 70 million of these virtually identical envelopes had been manufactured for the U.S. Postal Service. To narrow this Augean task, an FBI task force attempted an exotic technique called “microscopic print defect analysis.” The idea is that each time a manufacturer prints a new order of envelopes for an area of the country, at some point in the printing process, errors occur. The strategy used was to compare the microscopic errors in the anthrax envelopes to a sample of envelopes collected from different areas of the county. From this analysis, the task force determined that those envelopes were likely received by the Dulles Stamp Distribution Office, which distributed to post offices inside the Capital Beltway and southern Maryland. This was undoubtedly great forensic work. The problem was that this area included the employees of a large number of bio-technology facilities that dealt with anthrax. It also covered areas where many employees of intelligence services, foreign embassies, and defense contractors reside. To tie the envelopes, the FBI sought to find them in the search of Ivins’ home, office, and past mailings, but came up with no matches. The envelopes could not even be definitely traced to his local post office in Frederick, Maryland, because the office had returned all its stamped envelopes when postal rates changed.