The Anthrax Letters: The Attacks That Shocked America (17 page)

Months after the closing of the Brentwood mail processing center in northeast Washington, a security guard warded off a curious passerby, me, from approaching its front gate. “And no pictures,” he added after spotting the camera slung from my shoulder. Farther down the street, far from the guarded entry, one side of the singlestory building can be approached more closely. The long red brick wall is interrupted by only a metallic sheeting that covers every portal—windows, doors, delivery platforms. The rigid sheeting was placed in anticipation of decontamination efforts, then scheduled to begin in mid-2002.

Apart from its size, the most striking feature about the Brentwood facility was the sense of normal activity nearby. Unlike the Hamilton center, which is on a highway, the Brentwood building is in the middle of a residential area. Hundred-year-old attached homes line Rhode Island Avenue, a couple of blocks from the facility. Directly across the street, on Brentwood Road, a gas station stands on a corner adjacent to a row of stores: a delicatessen, a Social Security Administration office, the Happy Face Child Care Center, a dry cleaners. Fifty feet from the stores, a McDonald’s restaurant bustled with patrons. Like the people moving along the street, the diners appeared oblivious to the anthrax-contaminated colossus across the way.

Inside the Brentwood building, as in Hamilton, dozens of machines stood idle. Leroy Richmond thought about the machines, the mail that went through them, and how he might have become infected. Every morning at 3:00, before he became sick, he would begin his commute north on Interstate 95 from his home in Stafford, Virginia. An hour later, at Brentwood, he would board the mail truck for a 50-minute ride to Baltimore-Washington International Airport. There, he and eight co-workers would sort by hand express mail that had been flown in and then take it back to Brentwood. The job was completed by 10 a.m., after which he could help elsewhere as needed.

On Thursday morning, October 18, following his truck run to the airport, Richmond’s supervisor called him over. “Rich, I’d like you to help straighten up before Postmaster General Potter gets here.” Actually Richmond had been doing just that since the previous week—organizing boxes and bins and cleaning various areas of the building. In the wake of the discovery of the Daschle letter, Potter would be arriving that afternoon to assure the workers that they were not at risk. Although Richmond was feeling sluggish, he continued to work, never imagining his illness might be connected to that letter.

The anthrax in the letter sent to Senator Daschle was found to have been of an unusually fine grade. When the envelope was opened in the senator’s office on October 15, the powder floated out as if lighter than air. The material seemed to be a finer mix than in the previously located anthrax letters. Like the two earlier letters that had been recovered—those sent to Tom Brokaw and the
New York Post
—the Daschle letter bore a postmark from Trenton. But the postmarks on the New York-bound letters were dated September 18. The one on the letter to Daschle read October 9. An anthrax letter to Senator Patrick Leahy, also postmarked October 9, would later be found. From the Hamilton facility, the Daschle and Leahy letters were moved to Washington and processed at Brentwood on Thursday, October 11. “That Friday and that Saturday I was assigned to do some work behind the sorting machines,” Richmond recalled.

How might have the other three men been infected? Leroy Richmond had thought about this before. No one knows the answer with certainty, but his response was as informed and plausible as any. As for Qieth McQue’s exposure:

What about Joseph Curseen and Thomas Morris, the men who died?

And Mr. Morris?

The source of David Hose’s exposure is also unproven, though it almost certainly came from the State Department mail annex in Sterling, Virginia, where he worked. By the time Hose walked into the Winchester Hospital emergency room on Wednesday, October 24, he was convinced he had anthrax. Reports about the four infected Brentwood workers, including the two who had just died, were filling the airwaves. Hose recalled that in recent weeks, “we had handed over at least six suspicious letters to the sheriff’s department to deliver to the FBI to check out.” After the discovery of the Daschle letter, mail in several government agencies was set aside and eventually filled 280 55-gallon drums. On November 16, as investigators in respirator masks and protective suits were culling through the batches, they found an envelope that was addressed in handprinted capital letters to Senator Patrick Leahy. Like the Daschle letter, it was postmarked October 9, Trenton, New Jersey. The address was also in block letters: 433 Russell Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20510-4502. The bar-code machine had mistakenly read the fourth digit of the zip code as “2” instead of “1,” which resulted in misrouting the letter to the State Department. During the next 3 weeks, the letter was analyzed with exquisite care. At the laboratory of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infections Diseases in Fort Detrick, Maryland, a small hole was bored through the envelope and the powder drawn out by suction. On December 6 the army scientists confirmed that the envelope contained powdered anthrax of the type that was in the Daschle letter. The message sheet inside was also identical to the one sent to Daschle.

Months later, Hose reflected on what might have happened in his mailroom at the State Department annex:

The precise moment that the anthrax victims became infected will always remain uncertain. The likely time for the Brentwood and State Department inhalation victims can be narrowed only to a period of days. But the moment of exposure for the two New Jersey inhalation victims may have been when Norma Wallace believes it was, at 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday, October 9.

Norma was on the late shift at the Hamilton, New Jersey, postal center, from 3:30 p.m. to midnight. Two people usually operate the machine she was working on, but that day she was alone because “we were short on personnel.” Every 2 hours the machine operators get a 15-minute break. Shortly before her first break at 5:30, the machine jammed. “The electronic eye was covered with dust,” she recalled, “and the machine stopped. Paper dust accumulates if there is a high volume of mail and if the machine is not cleaned after the previous shift.” She notified a mechanic, who came over to blow the dust out of the machine. “There are coiled air hoses suspended from the ceiling,” she said. “He just pulls one down and blows the machine with compressed air.”

During the seconds the mechanic was blowing the air, Norma stood a few feet away with her back to the machine. At the same time, Jyotsna Patel approached her. “Hi, Norma. I’m ready to relieve you,” she said, knowing that Norma was about to take her break. “Jyotsna probably didn’t think about walking through a cloud of dust,” Norma recalled. “We both stood there and I told her what I was up to and where the mail was and for her to take over.”

Much of this story comes from Norma. Jyotsna’s memory loss is more severe, and she is also less comfortable about discussing the incident.

Joseph Sautello, the acting Postmaster of the Hamilton center, said that the precise time and location that Norma and Jyotsna were exposed remain uncertain. But he did confirm that computer records indicated the Leahy letter passed through a sorting machine at 4:57 p.m. and the Daschle letter at 5:15 p.m.

The total number of anthrax cases in New Jersey amounted to six—two inhalation and four cutaneous. Five of the six were postal employees, four of whom worked at the Hamilton center; the other was a letter carrier from the West Trenton post office. The sixth infected person, Linda Burch, was a bookkeeper at a Hamilton Township accounting firm that received mail directly from the postal center. None of the patients died, though a year later, among the five postal workers, Teresa Heller was the only one who felt well enough to return to work.

On Sunday, October 21, three days after the Hamilton center was closed for testing, the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services issued a press release. It included a stunning announcement by Dr. Eddy Bresnitz, the state epidemiologist: “At the Hamilton Township facility, 13 out of the 23 samples collected by the FBI tested preliminary [sic] positive for anthrax.” The worries expressed at the October 18 meeting by George DiFerdinando and others that the building might be contaminated indeed proved valid. Additional sampling in the following months by the state health department, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the CDC showed that anthrax was rampant throughout the facility. Moreover, testing of the 50 local post offices that fed into the Hamilton center later confirmed the presence of anthrax in five. But the early finding alone was unnerving and entirely unexpected.

For 20 years, during the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. Army conducted hundreds of germ warfare tests in populated areas throughout the United States. Mock biowarfare agents were released from boats, slow-flying airplanes, automobiles, germ-packed light-bulbs, perforated suitcases, and wind-generating machines. The test agents included the bacteria
Serratia marcescens
and
Bacillus subtilis
, and the chemical zinc cadmium sulfide. (Although less dangerous than real warfare agents, the test bacteria and chemicals posed risks in their own right.) Cities and states were blanketed, including San Francisco, Minneapolis, St. Louis, and parts of Illinois, Ohio, and Hawaii. Some attacks were more focused, such as those in which bacteria were released in the New York subway and on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. In each instance the spread and survivability of the bacteria were measured to assess the country’s vulnerability to a biological attack. Apparently the testers never considered the U.S. mail a possible vehicle.

A 1999 study by a defense-contractor did involve opening an envelope containing 2.5 grams of
Bacillus subtilis
in an office. Details are not available, but the test evidently did not foretell the massive cross-contamination that would occur with the anthrax letters. (The investigation was conducted by William Patrick, who, before the United States ended its biological warfare program in 1969, had helped develop the American germ arsenal. The 1999 study had been commissioned by Steven Hatfill, who was then an employee of the San Diego-based Scientific Applications International Corporation. Hatfill later became a much-publicized subject of the FBI’s search for the anthrax mailer.)

In October 2001 it was becoming clear that the mail might be a far more simple, inexpensive, and efficient means of germ dispersion than any of the previously tested methods. The most stunning realization was that spores could escape from tightly sealed letters, a fact that no one before seems to have contemplated. A 1- to 3-micron-sized anthrax particle could pass through a paper envelope, the pores of which can be 20 microns in size. Air currents could then whip the leaked spores in any number of directions. In a postal center, spores might settle not only in the nasal passages or on the skin of workers but also on sorting machines and other mail. Each newly infected piece of mail could in turn become a potential carrier to other mail and other people.