The Anthrax Letters: The Attacks That Shocked America (35 page)
Read The Anthrax Letters: The Attacks That Shocked America Online
Authors: Leonard A. Cole
Tags: #History, #Nonfiction, #Retail
Was this attorney overlooking the terror that Waagner had inflicted? Does he believe that Waagner’s charm and sincerity can mitigate his illegal conduct? Before I raised these questions, the attorney hauled himself back to hard reality. He chuckled, “Then when you’re away from him and you think about what he’s done, you realize, ‘No, no.’ He’s very clever, but very misguided.”
In March 2003, responding to my mailed request, Clayton Lee Waagner, 46, phoned me from the Lewisburg Penitentiary. “Please call me ‘Clay,’” he began, in an airy, friendly voice. His mature use of language was all the more notable for his having dropped out of school before reaching the 10th grade. After altercations with his family, at age 16 he moved out of his Georgia home and began to live on his own. The next year he joined the Coast Guard for a short stint—“I did well in their test to get in.” He worked for the Christian Broadcasting Network as an engineer and chauffeur but left because “I got tired of it.” He became a computer programmer but quit because “I didn’t like it.” He moved to Alaska and ran a commercial boat, “but that didn’t work out.”
Waagner, who has been married since he was 20, eventually made his way with his wife and eight of their nine children to western Pennsylvania. In 1999 they moved into a house in Kennerdell, a rural community about 50 miles north of Pittsburgh. Around that time, his oldest daughter, Emily, who was married and the mother of a child, suffered a miscarriage. Until then he said, “I was against abortion but thought it was wrong for me to tell others what to do.” But seeing the 5-month-old fetus ignited something in him to “take up weapons against abortionists.”
Before we spoke by phone, I had received answers from him to several questions I posed in a letter. Waagner’s natural intelligence comes through in his handwritten responses, dated February 27, 2003. Excerpts:
Q: Where did you get the idea of making anthrax threats by mail? Was it from publicity about the actual anthrax letters sent in the fall of 2001 or from publicity about anthrax hoax letters before then?
Waagner: The idea came to me the minute it was announced that the fellow with American Media died from mailed anthrax. At that time I had not heard of fake anthrax threat letters. Ironically, I thought using the fake powder against abortion clinics was original. Eighty such letters had been sent to clinics in previous years.
Q: What exactly was the powder you were using as a mock anthrax agent? Where did you get the powder?
Waagner: On the first mailing (10/12/01, 498 sent—280 received) I used white flour purchased from an Atlanta area Kroger. Those were sent via U.S. mail. Those closed the clinics for a week as in October, few local areas had anthrax field test [kits].
The second Federal Express mailing in November (11/8/01, 298 sent—298 received) I used bacillus thuringiensis (BT), which is a Monsanto product used to kill bole [sic] worms off cotton. BT is harmless to humans, but identical in every other way to anthrax. At this time most areas had anthrax field test [kits] in place. When the BT caused a positive response for anthrax the clinics were again closed for a week. It took CDC a week to tell the difference. BT even grows a culture like anthrax, but after 5 or 6 days the difference is manifest.
BT in powder form is hard to find. Generally it is applied by aircraft so it’s sold in liquid form. Finally I found it powdered at a small feed store in rural South Carolina. I bought 2 four pound bags for $2.66 each. When I asked to make sure the stuff was harmless, the old fellow replied, “You could make biscuits out of the stuff and eat it.”
Q: When you were apprehended at the Kinko’s, were you in the store? What services were you using in the store?
Waagner: I had been inside the Kinko’s using the computer. I was looking up the fax numbers of abortion clinics on the Internet for my next attack. When I saw two police officers . . . walk in the store I left. One of them followed me out and asked me for id [identification]. She was 5’2”, 110 pounds. They had no idea who I was (FBI 10 Most Wanted) and I was arrested without a gun being drawn.
Waagner’s answers are impressively phrased, if not always factually accurate. But the nonchalance with which he describes his activities and his plans for another attack is chilling. Moreover, his reference to making sure “the stuff was harmless” is at odds with the intent he expressed elsewhere. During his taped conversation with Neal Horsley, just before he was apprehended in December 2001, Waagner said: “This anthrax scare that I did to the abortion clinics . . . I didn’t do the real anthrax. I don’t have real anthrax. If I did it would have been in those letters.”
Horsley responded: “Right, you would’ve killed—.”
“Oh, without a doubt.”
Of what relevance are Waagner’s motives and actions to the real anthrax letters? Waagner is not even remotely suspected of having a connection to the killer letters. But as he readily proclaims, he is a terrorist nonetheless. Perhaps the most unnerving part of his performance was the demonstrated ease with which he sent at least 550 letters (778 by his count) laced with bogus anthrax. Had the letters contained
Bacillus anthracis
rather than
Bacillus thuringiensis
, the consequences could have been catastrophic. Instead of the 22 cases of anthrax, including five deaths that resulted from the poison letters, extrapolations would raise the toll to 2,200 victims and 500 deaths. In fact, Waagner’s persona and motivation seem to have less in common with most fellow hoaxers than with killer terrorists.
M is restless with anticipation. It is Monday, September 17, and the day has been carefully planned. Late in the afternoon, in his small makeshift laboratory, he takes an 8-ounce jar containing a light tan powder from the shelf above the workbench. Composed of microscopic particles, the powder resembles exceedingly fine flour. Even though he has been vaccinated against anthrax, M is very cautious. Wearing gloves, jumpsuit, and face mask, he gingerly unscrews the cap.
He taps some material into a small plastic receptacle perched on an electrically calibrated scale. The scale is hooded to avoid spilling. When the scale registers 1 gram, he stops. He sifts the weighed powder into a transparent plastic test tube. The powder is so light that he must hold the tube still for several minutes as the material slowly settles into it. He repeats the exercise with a second test tube.
Each tube now contains billions of particles. The particles are anthrax spores, some clinging to each other in clusters of 20 or 30 because of electrostatic attraction. But the spores have been treated with a silica-based material that minimizes the electrostatic effect, and many particles are individual free-floating spores. A single spore, about 1 to 3 microns in length, is so tiny that 10,000 could fit on the head of a pin.
Days earlier M knew he would send identical terror messages to the editor of the New York Post and to Tom Brokaw at NBC in New York City. In preparation, he purchased 34-cent prestamped envelopes produced by the U.S. Postal Service and printed their addresses on them in block letters. He also printed a message on a single piece of paper and made copies of it on a copy-machine:
09-11-01
THIS IS NEXT
TAKE PENACILIN NOW
DEATH TO AMERICA
DEATH TO ISRAEL
ALLAH IS GREAT
As evening approaches he folds a copy of the message into each envelope. Then he slowly empties the powder from the first test tube into one envelope and from the second tube into the other envelope. Careful not to spill any material on the outer surfaces, he seals the envelopes with tape. He places them in a plastic Ziploc bag, then in a brown paper bag, and rests the bag on the workbench. He sits silently through the evening.
By midnight the streets in downtown Princeton are quiet. The night sky is clear, the temperature a comfortable 50°. As rehearsed during previous evenings, M drives at deliberate speed south on Nassau Street. The Princeton University campus is on the left as he crosses Witherspoon Street and then John Square. Three short blocks later he makes a right on to Bank Street, pulls over and parks. Before leaving the car, M draws on a pair of latex gloves and reaches for the Ziploc bag next to him. He glances about, the bag firmly in hand, and he walks several yards back to Nassau Street where three blue mailboxes stand near the curb. They are opposite the American Express travel office on the corner.
No one else is near. Good. September 11 comes to mind and M thinks: “That day was the first step. Anthrax will be the second.” Standing in front of the boxes, he unzips the plastic bag and pulls out the two powder-filled letters. He deposits them in the middle box, quickly returns to the car, and drives off.
At 11 a.m. the next morning a postal carrier removes a white plastic tub of mail from each mailbox and replaces each one with an empty tub. After picking up mail from other boxes along his route, the carrier brings his collection to the local post office in Princeton. In the afternoon the accumulated batches are transported to the sorting and distribution center in nearby Hamilton. Meanwhile, spores have begun to leak from the anthrax letters onto other mail. The cross-contamination is intensified at the Hamilton facility by the turbulence of the sorting machines. As the letters are routed to their destinations, they continue to leak spores along the way. Some time later they are delivered to the offices of the addressed parties. The anthrax attack is under way.
I
devised this vignette, purposely ignoring the presumed motives of the perpetrator, and asked some experts if they thought it plausible. The presumed presence of silica material with the spores was questioned by some. It is an issue of continuing disagreement among scientists. Further, Barbara Hatch Rosenberg said, “I do find an implausibility.” Responding by e-mail, she wrote: “Insufficient containment (unless you are making the case that the first mailing was not easily aerosolizable, unlike the second). The Daschle anthrax jumped off the microscope slide when they tried to look at it.” “Otherwise,” she said, “OK.”
Her observation about the aerosol characteristic is important. The quality of anthrax in the letters sent to NBC and the
New York Post
apparently was different from that in the letters sent to Senators Daschle and Leahy. The first two letters, which were postmarked September 18, 2001, reportedly contained dead vegetative anthrax organisms and other debris mixed with spores. The second two, postmarked October 9, contained a pure preparation of spores that more readily became aerosolized. That is, they easily floated in the air—“jumped off the microscope slide,” as Rosenberg said. (In a letter to the
New York Times
on May 18, 2002, Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI] spokesman John Collingwood confirmed the difference in potency between the two pairs of letters.) Thus, my scenario would seem appropriate for the September mailing, which is the one I depict, but not for the October mailing.
When I asked Rosenberg to elaborate on what she thought sufficient containment would entail, she responded that the perpetrator either “had access to a containment lab or he improvised one on his own.” He had to be “completely protected,” she said. The material somehow had to be isolated “or else he had to be working where contamination would never be found.”
Rosenberg, a professor of environmental science at the State University of New York in Purchase, has been working on biological weapons issues since the early 1980s. For her, as for many in both the law enforcement and scientific communities, available information suggested a lone perpetrator who had worked in a U.S. government laboratory.
In January 2002, Tom Ridge, director of homeland security, acknowledged that immediately after the initial anthrax incidents “our natural inclination was to look to external terrorists.” But now, he said, the “primary direction of the investigation is turned inward.” In fact, as early as October 25, 2001, George Tenet, director of central intelligence, and Robert Mueller, FBI director, told senators they were not ruling out any possibilities, but that an Iraqi connection seemed unlikely.
Days later news reports suggested the focus had become domestic. The area around Trenton and Princeton, from which the anthrax letters were mailed, appeared to be of particular interest. On October 31, the
Wall Street Journal
reported that investigators were interviewing laboratory researchers in the Princeton area, asking about “specific equipment and whether any such specialized machinery has disappeared.” Then, on November 9, the FBI posted a profile on the Internet that strongly suggested a domestic perpetrator. The message was unusually specific about the characteristics of the presumed culprit. Tracey Silberling, a spokeswoman for the bureau, acknowledged that the FBI had never before made public such extensive material on an unsolved case. She said that the information would educate people about the threat and perhaps “ring a bell with someone” who might then contact the bureau.
Under the heading “Amerithrax Press Briefing” (Amerithrax was the FBI’s name for the investigation), the bureau offered “linguistic and behavioral assessments” of the anthrax mailer. The notice asked the public “to study these assessments and reflect on whether someone of their acquaintance might fit the profile.” The anthrax mailer, according to the notice, was likely an adult male with a scientific background “or at least a strong interest in science.” He has access to a source of anthrax and knows how to refine it, and he is familiar with the Trenton, New Jersey, area. (Princeton is 10 miles north of Trenton.) Further, the perpetrator is “a non-confrontational person, at least in his public life.” But he “may hold grudges for a long time vowing that he will get even with ‘them’ one day.” And he “prefers being by himself more often than not.”
The personality characteristics resembled those of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Between 1978 and the time of his capture in 1996, Kaczynski was responsible for 16 bomb attacks, most of them by mail, that killed three people. The experience was still fresh in people’s minds. James Fitzgerald, an FBI profiler, told the
Los Angeles Times
that the Unabomber’s profile helped inspire the bureau’s description of the presumed anthrax mailer.
Three days after the FBI notice, on November 12, Barbara Hatch Rosenberg posted her own assessment of the anthrax perpetrator. It appeared on the Web site of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), an organization of 3,000 scientists whose focus is on science policy. Rosenberg chairs the federation’s working group on biological weapons. Her message, and others that she posted in subsequent months, catapulted her into public visibility. In April 2002 an admiring article by Lois Ember in
Chemical and Engineering News
characterized her as an “intellectual provocateur.” At the same time, for David Tell, opinion editor of the
Weekly Standard
, she was “Miss Marple” with a “crackpot theory.”
Rosenberg’s message moved the FBI’s presumptions into new territory. She asserted that the perpetrator was an American scientist with access to U.S. “weaponized” anthrax or had been taught by an expert how to make it. And she speculated that if the bureau believed “the anthrax was an ‘inside’ job, it would probably want to cover it up.” Failure by the FBI to identify the perpetrator, she wrote, might have arisen from a desire to protect politically embarrassing information.
Barbara Rosenberg is a demure enthusiast. Fashionably dressed, behind dark-rimmed glasses, her appearance hardly suggests that of an impassioned crusader. But she is intensely devoted to keeping the world free of biological weapons. She received a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Cornell University Medical School in 1962. Not until the 1980s, while working at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, did she turn to biological warfare issues. During that time, she authored a blistering environmental critique of a proposed biological research laboratory at the Army’s Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. She also began to lead FAS efforts to enhance the effectiveness of the Biological Weapons Convention.
Now, with her Internet posting in November, she turned her attention to the anthrax letters. What was the basis for her assessments? I asked her. “I had inside sources,” she answered. “I heard from people in the biodefense community who thought a specific person was the most likely one who did it.” There was no proof at the time, just strong suspicions. She emphasized that her analysis was not based on the FBI’s profile but on her own sources and deductions.
Rosenberg refined her assessments and posted them on December 10, 2001. Now she suggested that the government had “undoubtedly known for some time that the anthrax terrorism was an inside job.” A month later, on January 17, another posting: “By now the FBI must have a good idea of who the perpetrator is.” And she introduced an ideological component: “The choice of Senators Daschle and Leahy [as targets] suggests that the perpetrator may lean to the political right and may have some specific grudges against those Senators.” This conjecture does not, of course, explain why anthrax letters were sent to the American Media tabloids or to the right-leaning
New York Post
.
Rosenberg’s January notice included a section titled “Possible Portrait of the Anthrax Perpetrator.” The perpetrator, she wrote, has a “doctoral degree in a relevant branch of biology”; he “works for a CIA contractor in [the] Washington, DC area”; he “knows Bill Patrick [the former U.S. chief bioweaponeer] and has probably learned a thing or two about weaponizing from him”; he “has had a dispute with a government agency.” While not embracing Rosenberg’s specificity, the FBI also remained fixed on the domestic loner theory. At the end of January, Van Harp, assistant director of the bureau’s Washington field office, sent an extraordinary letter to the 32,000 U.S. members of the nation’s leading organization of microbiologists:
