The Demon in the Freezer (16 page)

Skulls and Bones

OCTOBER 19, 2001

THE UNITED STATES
had been conducting air strikes in Afghanistan for nearly two weeks, and American special forces were operating inside the country. President George W. Bush and his advisers had indicated that the United States considered Iraq to be a sponsor of terrorism, and that Saddam Hussein led “a hostile regime” that the United States would likely target for destruction when it was finished with the Taliban. In the White House, there was extraordinary concern that the anthrax attacks might have been a clandestine operation sponsored by al-Qaeda or Iraq.

BEFORE DAWN
on Friday morning, four days after the Daschle letter was opened, Peter Jahrling put on a space suit and went into the Submarine and got a tiny sample of live, dry Daschle anthrax. He brought it out inside double tubes, for safety, and put the tubes in a radiation pile—a cobalt irradiator—which fried the DNA in the spores, rendering them sterile. He gave the sample to Tom Geisbert, so that Geisbert could look at the dry anthrax in a scanning electron microscope.

Geisbert carried the tube of dry anthrax into his microscope lab, set the tube in a tray, and turned his attention elsewhere. A minute later, he happened to glance at the tube. The anthrax was gone.

Yet the cap of the tube was closed.

“What the heck?” he said out loud.

He picked up the tube and stared at it. Empty. He tapped the cap with his finger, and the particles appeared and fell down to the bottom of the tube—they had gotten stuck underneath the cap, somehow.

He went back to work. A minute later, he glanced over at the tube. The anthrax was gone again. He tapped the cap, and the anthrax fell to the bottom. He stared at the bone-colored particles. Now he saw them climbing the walls of the tube, dancing along the plastic, heading upward.

His assistant, Denise Braun, was working nearby. “Denise, you’ll never believe this.”

The anthrax was like jumping beans; it seemed to have a life of its own.

He began preparing a sample for the scope. He opened the tube and tapped a little bit of the anthrax onto a piece of sticky black tape that would hold the powder in place. But the anthrax
bounced off the tape.
The particles wouldn’t stick. Eighty percent of the Daschle particles flittered away in air currents up into the hood. That was when he understood that the Hart Building was utterly contaminated.

He somehow managed to get some of the particles to stick to the tape. He hurried the sample into the scope room, put it under a scanning scope, and zoomed in. What he saw shocked him.

The spores were stuck together into chunks that looked like moon rocks. They reminded him of grinning jack-o’-lanterns, skeletons, hip sockets, and Halloween goblin faces. The anthrax particles had an eroded, pitted look, like meteorites fallen to earth. Most chunks were very tiny, sometimes just one or two spores, but there were also boulders. One boulder looked to him like a human skull, with eye sockets and a jaw hanging open and screaming. It was an anthrax skull.

The skulls were falling apart. He could see them crumbling into tiny clumps and individual spores, smaller and smaller as he watched. This was anthrax designed to fall apart in the air, to self-crumble, maybe when it encountered humidity or other conditions. He had a national-security clearance, and he knew something about anthrax, but he could not imagine how this weapon had been made. It looked extremely sinister. He started feeling shaky.

He called Jahrling. “Pete, I’m in the scope room. Can you come up here, like right now?”

Jahrling ran upstairs, closed the door, and stared at the skull anthrax for a long time. He didn’t say much. Geisbert’s security clearance was rated secret, and the details of how this material could have been made might be more highly classified.

A reference sample of pure anthrax spores, similar in character to the weapons-grade “skull anthrax” in the Daschle letter. The spores are about one micron (one millionth of a meter) across; roughly two hundred spores lined up in a row would span the thickness of a human hair. (Courtesy of Tom Geisbert, U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.)

Not long afterward, Jahrling apparently went to the Secure Room and had the classified safe opened. He studied a document or documents with red-slashed borders that would appear to contain exact technical formulas for various kinds of weapons-grade anthrax. In the papers, there were almost certainly secrets for making skull anthrax of the type he had just seen in the scope.

Jahrling refers to the secret of skull anthrax as the Anthrax Trick, although he won’t discuss it. Could this stuff have been made in Iraq? Could this be an
American
trick? Who knew the Anthrax Trick?

TOM GEISBERT
arrived home in Shepherdstown very late. He had been going on maybe three hours of sleep a night for days, but now he had insomnia. He was afraid that his findings about the skull quality of the anthrax meant that it had come from a military biowarfare lab. Finally, he woke up Joan. “I could start a war with Iraq,” he said to her. He seemed on the edge of tears. Joan reminded him that he was a scientist and that all he could do was find the truth and report it, wherever it led. “We just have to let the data play out however it plays out,” she said. “Other people are working on the anthrax, too.”

He did not sleep that night.

LATE ON SUNDAY,
October 21st to 22nd, Joseph P. Curseen, Jr., the Brentwood postal worker who thought he had the flu, felt really bad. He had not been to work since Tuesday night. He went to the emergency room at Southern Maryland Hospital Center, where doctors looked at him and sent him home. He was dying, but they didn’t see it. That same day, another Brentwood worker, Leroy Richmond, who had called in sick to work earlier in the week, was admitted to the Inova Fairfax Hospital with a presumptive diagnosis of inhalation anthrax, which had been made by an alert emergency room doctor named Thom Mayer. Richmond would eventually survive under the care of doctors at the Fairfax Hospital. That night, at about 11:00
P.M.,
Brentwood worker Thomas L. Morris, Jr., who had first begun to feel sick during a bowling league event some days before, called 911. He was feeling as if he was about to die, and he told the dispatcher he thought he had anthrax. An ambulance took him to the Greater Southeast Community Hospital, where before nine o’clock the next morning he was pronounced dead. Shortly after Morris died, the Brentwood mail-sorting facility was closed down by order of the postmaster general, and two thousand postal workers were told to start taking antibiotics. Joseph Curseen returned to the emergency room at Southern Maryland Hospital Center on Monday morning and died in the hospital in the early afternoon.

At the mail-sorting facility in Hamilton, New Jersey, a suburb of Trenton, postal workers had been exposed to anthrax, too, because the letters had all been mailed somewhere near Trenton. The Daschle letter had gone through the Hamilton facility en route to Brentwood. A tiny quantity of spores had ended up in the air at the Hamilton mail-sorting facility, and now three postal workers had become infected, as well, two with skin anthrax and one with the inhalation kind.

MEANWHILE IN WASHINGTON,
the FBI Laboratory was trying to evaluate the anthrax. On the same day that the two Brentwood workers died, a meeting was held at FBI headquarters involving the Laboratory, scientists from the Batelle Memorial Institute, and scientists from the Army. Batelle and the Army people were doing what scientists do best: disagreeing totally with one another. The Army scientists were telling the FBI that the powder was extremely refined and dangerous, while a Batelle scientist named Michael Kuhlman was allegedly saying that the anthrax was ten to fifty times less potent than the Army was claiming. Allyson Simons, the head of the Laboratory, was having trouble sorting through the disagreement, and she was apparently not telling the CDC leadership much about the powder, while waiting for more data to come in. One Army official is said to have blown up at Simons and Kuhlman at the meeting, saying to the Batelle man, “Goddamn it, you stuck your anthrax in an autoclave, and you turned it into hockey pucks.” He told Simons that she should “call the CDC and at least tell them there is a disagreement over this anthrax.” She apparently did not.

The Department of Health and Human Services was not get-ting briefed about the anthrax to its satisfaction by the FBI. An HHS official who was close to the situation but who did not want her name used had this to say about the Batelle analysis of the Daschle anthrax: “It was one of the most screwed-up situations I’ve ever heard of. The people at Batelle took the anthrax and heated it in an autoclave, and this caused the material to clump up, and then they told the FBI it looked like puppy chow. It was like a used-car dealer offering a car for sale that’s been in an accident and is covered with dents, and the dealer is trying to claim this is the way the car looked when it was new.”

THE FBI BEGAN
delivering about two hundred forensic samples a day to
USAMRIID,
frequently in Hueys. Choppers were coming in day and night on a pad near the building. HMRU agents and other FBI Laboratory people began to work inside suite AA3, which ended up being dedicated entirely to forensic analysis and processing samples. The work was done by U
SAMRIID
’s Diagnostic Systems Division, headed by an Army microbiologist, Lieutenant Colonel Erik Henchal. The samples were largely environmental swabs—from the Brentwood postal facility, from Capitol Hill, from postal facilities in New Jersey, and from New York City. Each sample was a piece of federal criminal evidence and had to be documented with green chain-of-custody forms. Institute scientists ran ten separate tests on each sample, and every sample ended up matched to an evidence-tracking folder with more than one hundred sheets of paper in it. The hallways of the Institute were jammed with filing boxes full of these folders. In the end, U
SAMRIID
scientists would analyze more than thirty thousand samples related to the anthrax terrorism—far more than any other lab, including the CDC.

One of the many samples was a little bit of anthrax from the letter that had arrived at the
New York Post.
The
Post
anthrax was almost pure spores, like the Daschle powder, but the spores had somehow gotten glued together into glassy chunks. It looked like a glued-together version of the Daschle anthrax.

White House

OCTOBER 24, 2001

EARLY IN THE MORNING,
nine days after the Daschle letter was opened, Major General John Parker got a call from Tommy Thompson at Health and Human Services. Thompson had been hearing rumors that the Daschle anthrax was really bad stuff, but he still hadn’t heard much about it from the FBI Laboratory. Thompson felt out of the loop, and he wanted Parker to fill him in. Parker agreed to come to Washington and brief Thompson personally. He called Peter Jahrling and asked him to come along.

Parker and Jahrling traveled to Washington in a green Ford Explorer driven by a sergeant wearing fatigues—this was the general’s staff car. They went to the sixth floor of HHS headquarters and met with Thompson, D. A. Henderson, and other senior members of the HHS staff in a large meeting room overlooking the Mall. They were surprised to find FBI officials there, including the director, Robert S. Mueller III. Also in the room were a number of obviously powerful dark-suited officials who introduced themselves in mumbling voices. They had names like John Roberts, and they said they were from some institute or other. That is, they were top management from the CIA. Their real names were classified.

Jahrling had brought Geisbert’s photographs of the anthrax particles, and he laid them out. Then he produced another something interesting for people to look at: a plastic bag containing six tubes of different orange-tan powders from the Al Hakm anthrax facility in Iraq. A friend of Jahrling’s had collected them there. The powders were anthrax surrogate—fake bioweapons. A surrogate is used for testing and development of a real bioweapon. Iraqi biowarfare scientists had been making anthrax surrogate out of
Bacillus thuringensis
(BT), which is closely related to anthrax but is harmless to people. (It is anthrax for insects, and it is used by gardeners to kill grubs. The Iraqis had claimed for a while that the Al Hakm facility had been built to deal with grubs in Iraq.)

He passed the bag around the room, assuring people that the vials weren’t dangerous. Everyone could see how different the Iraqi “anthrax” looked from the Daschle powder. It was heavy and crude, and contained large amounts of bentonite (a type of clay commonly used in the oil industry), and looked like lumps of dirt. It didn’t look like the Daschle powder at all. At least at the time Al Hakm was running, the Iraqi bioweaponeers had been using a different formula than what was used for the Daschle powder.

Afterward, Parker suggested to Jahrling that they brief the Pentagon on the anthrax, so they spent the rest of the day circling among the offices of assistant secretaries of defense. Toward the end of the day, they headed back up Interstate 270 to Fort Detrick. It was rush hour, and the traffic was moving like glue. Jahrling was sitting in the front seat, beside the driver, and the general was sitting in the back. On Wednesdays, Jahrling always picked up his daughter Bria at a dance class, and he was looking forward to a little bit of special time with her.

Just as the Explorer arrived at the entrance to Fort Detrick, the general’s cell phone rang. The person on the other end of the line issued some rapid instructions and added, “Where’s this guy Jahrling?”

“He’s in the car with me.” The general leaned forward to Jahrling. “We’re wanted at the White House. Right now.”

“Hey, General Parker—do we have time to stop and take a leak?”

“No.”

The sergeant whipped a U-turn around the Abrams tank at the entrance to Fort Detrick, and they sped back onto the interstate. The sergeant started popping the lights and sirens, weaving through traffic. This wasn’t helping Jahrling’s state of mind. Eventually, he remembered about Bria. He called Daria and said, “I’m not getting Bria.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“I can’t tell you.”

“What do you mean you can’t tell me? Where are you, Peter?”

“I can’t say where I am.”

The car was pulling onto Constitution Avenue, and he said he’d talk to her later.

“Peter, do you still have that stuff from Iraq in your pocket?” General Parker asked. “You might not want to bring it into the White House”—the Secret Service might not react well.

They were in the White House driveway, and Jahrling didn’t know what to do with his Iraqi “anthrax.” He rammed it down into the crack of the car seat.

In the foyer, cabinet officials, White House staff, members of the National Security Council, senior FBI, and top-level spooks were milling around. “Where’s the bathroom?” Jahrling muttered to the crowd. Someone directed him.

The meeting took place in the Roosevelt Room, which has ornate, high ceilings and oak doors decorated with brass fittings. There was a long table in the center of the room, with leather-upholstered armchairs placed around it. Many more chairs were placed around the walls.

A security official informed everyone that the meeting was secret. (The next morning, the meeting’s events were described in a front-page story in
The New York Times.
White House officials later concluded that the leak had come from a source in the FBI.) Attorney General John Ashcroft sat at the table, and Robert Mueller sat close to the center, accompanied by a cluster of FBI officials, including Allyson Simons. Tommy Thompson also sat near the center of the table. The meeting was chaired by Tom Ridge, who had recently been named director of homeland security.

Jahrling started to sit on one of the chairs against the wall, but someone took him by the arm, and he was shown to a chair at the center of the table, where he faced cabinet members wearing dark charcoal suits. Jahrling was wearing his gray suit with a candy-striped shirt and a snappy necktie. The doors were closed by the Secret Service.

TOM GEISBERT
had been looking for Jahrling around the Institute and couldn’t find him. He got worried and called Jahrling’s home, and got Daria. “Where is Peter?” she asked him. “He didn’t pick up Bria!” She let Geisbert have it.

“She was as mad as a hornet,” Geisbert recalled. He tried to reassure her, but he didn’t know where Jahrling was either.

Daria loved Peter. It was a strong marriage, but she thought that, national crisis or not, her husband owed it to the family to at least tell them where he was.

JOHN ASHCROFT
led off the meeting. He did not mince words. There was an obvious lack of communication between the Army, the FBI, and the CDC, he said, and the purpose of this meeting was to determine why the CDC hadn’t realized that the anthrax was weapons-grade material and hadn’t taken action faster on the Brentwood mail facility. There was a feeling that whoever had released the anthrax could do it again, perhaps with a massive release inside a landmark building or into the air of a city. This was an urgent national threat. Where did the communication break down? Had the Army given the information to the FBI? Had the FBI informed the CDC about the highly dangerous nature of the anthrax?

Ashcroft was Robert Mueller’s boss, and he looked straight at the FBI director. Mueller turned his gaze to General Parker. Mueller thanked the Army for bringing the nature of the anthrax to the FBI’s attention. He said that the FBI had received conflicting data on the anthrax. The FBI had been trying to sort this issue through, but Mueller now acknowledged that the Army had been right: the Daschle anthrax was a weapon.

Then twenty people around the table started arguing: what
is
a biological weapon?

John Ashcroft cut everyone off. “Okay, okay! All this discussion about what’s a biological weapon is angels dancing on the head of a pin. I want to hear what the professor has to say.” He pointed with his finger to someone seated behind Jahrling.

Jahrling, who is not a professor, turned around and looked. Then he realized the attorney general meant him. Jahrling cleared his throat and directed everyone’s attention to Geisbert’s pictures of the anthrax skulls. (Staffers had passed them around.) He pointed out the fried-egg goop flowing off the spores in some photographs. This, he said, was probably an additive.

Someone asked, Does the professor think this anthrax could be a product of Iraq?

The best Jahrling could say was that it
could
be Iraqi anthrax, but all the samples they’d seen from Iraq, so far, were entirely different. The Iraqi anthrax had been mixed with bentonite, and these spores didn’t have clay in them. He said that by tomorrow the Army would have a better idea of what the additive was.

The meeting raced off on the question of whether a “state actor” could have been behind the anthrax attacks. The atmosphere in the room started to feel like a war council deciding whether or not to attack Iraq.

Jahrling got scared. “Whoa!” he blurted. “This anthrax isn’t a compelling reason to go to war. It isn’t necessarily the product of a state actor.” He flushed and stopped talking: saying “Whoa!” to the Cabinet seemed flippant. Then he went on. He said that a few grams of highly pure anthrax could have been made in a little laboratory with some small pieces of equipment. “This anthrax could have come from a hospital lab or from any reasonably equipped college microbiology lab.” The FBI officials posed the question: how would investigators look for “signatures” of a small terrorist bioweapons lab? Jahrling answered that a small lab for making anthrax might go virtually unnoticed, and in any case would be hard to recognize.

Ashcroft closed the meeting by taking the FBI, the Army, and the HHS to the woodshed. He gave them a stern warning to get their acts together and start communicating with one another more effectively. He made it perfectly clear that those who serve at the pleasure of the president can cease to serve in an instant.

“Well, professor, you did okay,” Parker said to Jahrling on the way back to the Institute. Jahrling leaned back on the seat, and the night rushed by. He began to wonder more deeply about what he had said at the meeting—that the anthrax could have come from a small lab, a few pieces of tabletop equipment. What would it take to do the Anthrax Trick? It could be done by an individual, perhaps, or by two or three people. He started thinking about labs. There was a lab in the west. . . . There was also
USAMRIID.
Could that be possible? Could this be an inside job? Could it be terror coming from within the Institute? Peter Jahrling had the dizzying thought that the terror might just be coming from someone he knew or knew of.

HE GOT HOME
after midnight. Daria had retrieved Bria at the dance class and had put Kira to bed. She was sitting in the kitchen grading a pile of English papers. “Where have you been? I’m sure it was somewhere important.”

“I was at the White House.”

“Okayyy.”

“No, really.”

“And you couldn’t tell me.”

“No, really, I couldn’t.”

Some days later, the general’s driver stopped by Jahrling’s office with the bag of Iraqi “anthrax.” He said he had found it stuck in his car seat.