The Demon in the Freezer (18 page)

THE CIA
had a secret program called Bacchus, in which a group of researchers with the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), working at the U.S. Army’s Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, built a miniature anthrax bioproduction plant using inexpensive, off-the-shelf equipment. The idea of the experiment was to see if it would be possible for terrorists to buy ordinary equipment, make anthrax with it, and not be noticed. In January and February 2001, roughly ten months before the anthrax terror event, the Bacchus team succeeded in making a powdered anthrax surrogate, BT, but it was crude. Now the FBI investigators focused a lot of attention on scientists who had access to Dugway, where the U.S. military tests various biosensor systems and where there are stocks of anthrax.

The Amerithrax squads seemed to have a case that was cooling off. The FBI was letting it be known—whether accurately or not—that the list of potential suspects had never gone below about eight individuals and was really more like twenty to thirty people.

There were mysteries and loose ends that seemed to baffle the FBI, including hints that the anthrax might have been part of an al-Qaeda terror operation. In January 2001, several of the men who would later hijack the four airplanes involved in the September 11th attacks rented apartments near Boca Raton, Florida. The real-estate agent the men dealt with was the wife of an editor at American Media, where Robert Stevens, the first man to die of the anthrax, worked—but the real-estate agent felt that the hijackers could not possibly have known that her husband worked there. Mohammad Atta, who was believed to be the operational leader of the hijackers, made inquiries at airports in Florida about renting crop-dusting airplanes: he obviously had it in mind to spray something from the air. In June 2001, two men, Ahmed al-Haznawi and Ziad al-Jarrah, who would later be among the hijackers of United Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania, went to the emergency room of the Holy Cross Hospital in Fort Lauderdale. Al-Haznawi was complaining of an infection on his leg, and an emergency-room doctor named Christos Tsonas examined him. The man had a blackened sore on his leg that he told Dr. Tsonas he had gotten from bumping into a suitcase. The doctor didn’t think that sounded likely. He prescribed antibiotics to al-Haznawi and never heard from the men again. Tsonas contacted the FBI in October and told agents that the sore had been consistent with cutaneous anthrax. Agents apparently went through the hijacker’s possessions and swabbed them for anthrax spores, and found none. “We’ve debated that one informally a lot around our shop,” an FBI source at Quantico told me. “Everything I’ve heard basically discounts it.”

In Trenton, FBI investigators became interested in various people living in an apartment complex called Greenwood Village. They arrested a man, Mohammad Aslam Pervez, who was listed in the phone book as living there. Pervez was thirty-seven years old, a naturalized American citizen born in Pakistan, and he had recently worked at a newsstand in the Trenton train station and also at a newsstand in the Newark train station with Mohammad Jaweed Azmath and Ayub Ali Khan, who were arrested on September 12th on an Amtrak train in Fort Worth, Texas, carrying box cutters, five thousand dollars in cash, and hair dye. The FBI evidently suspected that they were al-Qaeda hijackers who had not been able to get on a plane. Pervez had lived with them in an apartment in Jersey City, while listing his address as Greenwood Village, and he was allegedly moving large amounts of money around. The FBI charged Pervez with lying to federal investigators about the nature of more than $110,000 in checks and money orders. The neighbors in Greenwood Village told reporters that they had noticed unusual numbers of Arabic-speaking men congregating in Pervez’s apartment during the summer, in the months before September 11th. A reporter from
The Wall Street Journal
managed to get inside the Jersey City apartment, where he found articles clipped from
Time
and
Newsweek
on the use of sarin nerve gas and biowarfare agents. On October 29th, FBI agents raided another apartment at Greenwood Village. Eight to ten agents carted away many trash bags full of evidence. An FBI spokesperson, Sandra Carroll, told reporters that the September 11th and anthrax investigations were “not necessarily separate.”

But it just didn’t seem to go anywhere.

A few months before the first anniversary of the anthrax attacks, I visited the Amerithrax squads in the Washington field office. The two squad supervisors, Jack Hess and David Wilson, had offices side by side, facing an open floor of cubicles. The CDC doctor on the squad, Cindy Friedman, was meeting with two FBI agents, talking about something in low voices. They asked me to stand out of hearing when there were any discussions about the case. Large posterboards leaned against filing cabinets, covered up from view.

David Wilson led me to his office, where we ate salads from the FBI canteen for lunch. The Capitol’s dome and the top of the Hart Senate Office Building were visible from the window. His office was almost bare. Three heavy briefcases sat on a desktop, and a table had a full in-box. “Until we have someone under arrest and charged with a crime, we literally can’t rule anything out,” he said to me. The Amerithrax case held many dimensions of crime, but at bottom it was murder. “I don’t give a rat’s tail for what they thought they were doing when they mailed the letters. People died,” Wilson said. “Damaged facilities can either be repaired or replaced. The Brentwood building can be fixed. But the deaths can’t be fixed.”

ONE DAY,
I spoke with a scientist who is an expert in forensic evidence, knows a lot about biology, and until recently was an influential executive in the FBI. “The Unabomber took seventeen years to solve,” he said. “We just don’t know who these perpetrators are, and it could be years before we get a break. I’m saying ‘they.’ I personally find it hard to believe that it was done by only one person. That’s just gut. I don’t know why, I can’t put my finger on it, but if I wanted to keep tight operational security I would send a package of anthrax to someone else with instructions for how to load the envelope and mail it—you know, ‘Don’t lick the envelope, do this, do that.’ I would do it with opsec.”

“Opsec?”

“Opsec—operational security. It’s a standard security approach for making yourself as invisible as possible. There’s a leader who organizes and directs an operation, and a different person carries it out.” The person who does the operation is expendable. The September 11th attacks were done with opsec, and the Palestinian suicide bombings feature opsec. He went on: “I have a feeling that, in the end, it’s going to be like one of our fugitive cases, where a girlfriend rats on the guy or someone talks. I’m a forensic scientist, but unfortunately I have a feeling that traditional investigation is going to solve this case in the end, not science.”

Ebola in the Afternoon

BARBARA HATCH ROSENBERG,
the chair of the Federation of American Scientists’ Biological Arms Control Program and a professor of environmental science at the State University of New York at Purchase, believed that the anthrax terrorist was an American scientist. She began speculating, in speeches and on a website, that the terrorist was a white male who had worked in classified programs for the government. She wondered publicly if the terrorist had once worked for U
SAMRIID
or another government laboratory. She felt that the terrorist might have been a contractor working for the CIA, with access to secret information about government involvement with offensive biowarfare programs. Rosenberg is a trim, middle-aged woman with a forceful manner, and she is not afraid to speak her mind. Her web site got a lot of traffic, and in late June 2002, Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy asked her to come meet with them. She was very happy to oblige them.

A few days later, the FBI searched the apartment of Dr. Steven Hatfill, in Frederick. Hatfill, the colorful Ebola researcher who had trained Lisa Hensley in blue-suit work and who liked to eat candy bars in his space suit, had left U
SAMRIID
in 1999 and gone to work for Science Applications International Corporation, the defense contractor that conducted the CIA’s Bacchus program. Hatfill was divorced and had continued to live in Frederick after he left
USAMRIID.
He lived by himself in the Detrick Plaza apartments, a brick complex right next to the gate of Fort Detrick, a stone’s throw from the Abrams tank. From his apartment unit, he could look over a fence and across a lawn, where he could see the FBI helicopters coming and going next to U
SAMRIID,
ferrying evidence from the Amerithrax case. FBI agents arrived at Hatfill’s apartment with a rented Ryder truck. (The apartment manager told a reporter that Hatfill was “traveling abroad” when the FBI came.) They put on bioprotective suits and searched the apartment, and then removed some computer devices and plastic bags of Hatfill’s possessions, which they loaded into the truck and took away. Hatfill had consented to the search. He had a storage facility in Ocala, Florida, two hundred and fifty miles from Boca Raton. He also had access to a cabin in a remote part of Maryland. It was reported that he had asked visitors to take Cipro before entering it. The storage facility was not far from a ranch in Ocala called Mekamy Oaks, where Hatfill’s parents, Norman and Shirley Hatfill, raised Thoroughbred horses.

The FBI said that Steve Hatfill was not a suspect in the case. He told journalists that he was cooperating with the authorities in an effort to clear his name, and he insisted that he had absolutely no involvement with the anthrax attacks. In February 2002, Scott Shane, a reporter for the Baltimore
Sun,
became interested in Hatfill. Shane spoke with Hatfill on the phone and asked him some questions, and then talked with some people who knew Hatfill. A month later, Hatfill lost his job at SAIC. Soon afterward, he telephoned the Baltimore
Sun
and left a message with the paper’s ombudsman. “I’ve been in this field for a number of years, working until three o’clock in the morning, trying to counter this type of weapon of mass destruction, and, sir, my career is over at this time,” he said. The FBI interviewed Hatfill several times, but there was nothing particularly unusual in this; the Amerithrax investigators had interviewed a number of American scientists more than once. FBI agents gave a polygraph test to Tom Geisbert.

Nonetheless, Hatfill’s background attracted investigators’ attention. “The Bacchus program suffered from a lack of adult supervision,” a scientist said to me. (It didn’t, however, produce anthrax that was anywhere near as pure as the Daschle anthrax.) Hatfill had a secret-level security clearance, and he knew Ken Alibek and Bill Patrick. Soon after he went to work at SAIC, Hatfill and a colleague commissioned Patrick to write a study on the effects of anthrax mailed in letters. Patrick, who had done many studies of this sort for the government, worked out a scenario in which a letter containing two grams of dry anthrax spores was opened inside an office building. The anthrax in Patrick’s study was pure spores. Bill Patrick had imagined key elements of the Amerithrax attacks at the request of SAIC and Steve Hatfill.

Hatfill’s résumé said that he had served with the Rhodesian Special Air Squadron (SAS) and with the Selous Scouts, the white antiguerrilla forces. In 1979 and 1980, during and after the Rhodesian civil war, an anthrax outbreak occurred in livestock in Rhodesia that killed large numbers of cattle, gave ten thousand people cutaneous anthrax, and killed a hundred and eighty people. The U.S. government was said to have had suspicions, and perhaps evidence, that this anthrax outbreak might have been an act of biowarfare caused by the SAS or by agents working for the clandestine South African internal-security service, the Civil Co-operation Board (the CCB). During those years, CCB people had been using biowarfare agents for assassination attempts. When he was studying medicine in Zimbabwe, Hatfill had reportedly lived a few miles from a neighborhood called Greendale. The return address of the letter to Senator Daschle was the fourth grade of the Greendale School.

After the FBI searched his apartment again, this time with a criminal search warrant, one of Hatfill’s lawyers, Victor Glasberg, wrote an angry letter to Kenneth Kohl, the assistant U.S. attorney working with Amerithrax, saying that “improper decisions” had been made in the FBI’s treatment of Hatfill, and that Hatfill was doing everything he could to cooperate fully with the FBI. He said he was “working with Dr. Hatfill on how to address a flurry of defamatory publicity about him which has appeared in the press, on TV, and on the Internet.” Shortly afterward, Steve Hatfill read a statement to the press in front of his lawyer’s office, in which he forcefully defended himself, and said he was a loyal American who loves his country, and he assailed “calculated leaks to the media” concerning him. “Does any of this get us to the anthrax killers?” he said. “If I am a subject of interest, I’m also a human being. I have a life. I have, or I had, a job. I need to earn a living. I have a family, and until recently, I had a reputation, a career, and a bright professional future.”

I BECAME ACQUAINTED WITH
Dr. Steven Hatfill and interviewed him in 1999, a few months before he left
USAMRIID.
He worked in the virology division, and he was closely connected with Peter Jahrling’s research group. He was doing research in Ebola and monkeypox. Hatfill had a tiny office, with no windows, white walls, and little in the way of decoration, but he filled the room with his physical and intellectual presence. He was a vital, engaging man, with a sharp mind and a sense of humor. He was forty-five years old, with a good-looking face, brown hair, and a neatly trimmed brown mustache. He was heavy-set but looked fit, and he had dark blue eyes. I sat on top of a counter in a corner of the room, and he sat in the center of the room, in a chair at his desk, leaning back and looking up at me, and he told me a little about his life.

“I was in the Army for twenty years,” he said. “I was a captain in the U.S. Special Forces, and I was in Rhodesia—Zim—but I can’t say what I was doing there. I went to medical school in Rhodesia and graduated in 1984. I have two C.V.s, the classified one and the unclassified one. I’ve seen a lot of diseases. There was an outbreak of anthrax in Rhodesia when I was there.” He went on to say that the South African CCB had been blamed for the anthrax, but he didn’t think it was likely. “It was not a weapon. It was a natural outbreak that happened because there was a harsh terrorist war going on and a breakdown of veterinary health.”

He was having a great time doing research at
USAMRIID.
“Where else can you work with monkeypox in the morning and Ebola in the afternoon?” he said. He explained that he was working to develop antiviral drugs for smallpox. His quest was similar to Lisa Hensley’s and Peter Jahrling’s. Like them, he regarded smallpox as the number one threat. He wanted to find some way to test and develop drugs that would work on smallpox. He had an idea that smallpox and drugs could be tested directly on human tissue with the help of machines.

Hatfill’s office had small pieces of equipment sitting in it, of types that I did not recognize. Hatfill was a gadgeteer. He picked up a glass cylinder about the size of a soda can, with metal ends, and handed it to me. “Take a look at that.”

I held it, but I had no idea what it was.

“It’s a bioreactor. It’s called an STLV. It was developed at NASA. You can grow human tissues in it and then infect them.” He explained that using a device of this sort, you could test new drugs against smallpox and other exotic diseases that could not be tested ethically in people. In other words, you didn’t necessarily have to test smallpox in animals—you might be able to test the virus in a machine. He was optimistic that there would be drugs to cure smallpox, and he felt that machines would speed up the discoveries. “You can put a bit of tonsil tissue in this thing, and it actually grows a tonsil,” he said.

“The bioreactor grows a tonsil?”

He grinned. “You get a tonsil. The architecture of the tissue is preserved.”

“Could you grow a finger?”

Hatfill started laughing, and explained that someday we might actually be growing spare body parts in bioreactors. He explained how it worked. “What you do is, you collect tissue from the body, and you chop it up. You can use prostate tissue, lung-cancer tissue, liver, lymph, spleen. You put the tissue pieces in the reactor, and you fill it with growth medium. The bioreactor turns around on a motor.” He demonstrated by turning the device in his hands. “As it turns around, you get excellent perfusion of the tissues, and the blood vessels start to go everywhere. Then you add Ebola, and then you can do tests of drugs. I’ve got four of these units running in BL-4 right now.” He added that he had another device in the hot lab that looked like “something out of
Star Trek.
” He was using it to run tests on monkey blood infected with monkeypox.

Hatfill felt strongly that a bioterror event could happen one day, and he feared it could be very bad. He took me down the hall to see a bioterrorism-emergency storeroom. The room was full of racks holding boxes of safety gear and face masks and portable Racal space suits. “If there’s an attack on a city with a large area of coverage,” he said, “one third of the population will try to flee, and so you won’t be able to get into the city by road. We can stockpile emergency supplies on trains. The system we envision has twenty-seven trains, to address what to do with twenty thousand casualties. Do you know what this is?” He showed me another gadget, a big one, a kind of motor with tubes, sitting next to a biohazard stretcher. “That’s a mobile embalming pump.” He explained that U
SAMRIID
’s emergency planners kept one on hand for disinfecting the bodies of the victims. “Once you’ve got the formalin in you, you’re no longer infective, and we can give you some semblance of a Judeo-Christian burial,” he said.

SOME OF STEVEN HATFILL’S CLAIMS
about himself didn’t check out: the Army said he had not served in the U.S. Special Forces. On at least one of his résumés, he had claimed to have a Ph.D. in cell biology from Rhodes University in South Africa; officials there insisted he had never been awarded a Ph.D from that institution. He was given a secret-level national-security clearance in 1999, around the time he went to work for SAIC. Then, in 2001, he had applied for a higher-level clearance, and so he was given another background check. The government suddenly removed all of his security clearances in August of 2001, two months before the anthrax letters were mailed.

Microbiologists are naturalists, and like naturalists everywhere, they like to collect examples of interesting creatures. They can amass large and varied collections of microscopic life-forms, and often they have their own freezers and their own private labeling systems for vials. When a researcher retires, dies, or moves on, his or her freezer typically hangs around. As long as a freezer is plugged in and running, whatever is inside it will continue to exist. Once the freezer’s owner is gone, the freezer can just sit there unnoticed, a mystery freezer. One day in August 2002, somebody noticed such a freezer sitting in hot suite AA5 at U
SAMRIID
—the Ebola suite. The freezer had been used by Dr. Steven Hatfill when he worked as a postdoc there. It contained many vials and samples of pathogens with which Hatfill had been working. An FBI HMRU team put on space suits, entered AA5, put evidence tape around Hatfill’s freezer, and brought it out of the hot zone and transported it inside a sealed biohazard container to the CDC, where it was placed in the Maximum Containment Lab.