500 Days (23 page)

“You know,” one of the officials said, “we don’t think it’s anthrax. We think it’s a brown recluse spider. It has the same characteristics.”

“Well, do me an additional favor,” Brokaw replied. “If I can get a biopsy, will you test it for me?”

“That’s not the business we’re in. We work for the army.”

“I understand. But these are extraordinary circumstances and you’ll be protected.”

There was a moment’s pause. “Okay, get us a biopsy.”

The scientist provided some short instructions on how to perform two biopsies. That information was forwarded to a dermatologist, who conducted the procedure on O’Connor. The biopsies were sent to Brokaw, who arranged for them to be flown to Washington. A motorcycle courier met the plane at the Reagan National Airport and rushed the samples out to Fort Detrick.

From there, the biopsies were taken for testing to Building 1425, the work site for Dr. Bruce Ivins, the anthrax expert who was struggling with his deteriorating mental condition. When the O’Connor samples arrived, Ivins wasn’t there. He’d missed a lot of work the last two days. No one knew where he was or what he was doing.

•  •  •  

Brokaw heard the results the day after O’Connor’s biopsies reached Fort Detrick: No anthrax. His assistant was safe.

Relieved, Brokaw thanked the scientists. Not everything was finished yet, he was told. Samples had also gone to the CDC in Atlanta, but the lab there
hadn’t been able to conduct tests yet. The scientists at Fort Detrick had worked through the night.

O’Connor was not reassured by the news.

•  •  •  

A misting rain fell in Ottawa on the afternoon of October 12, sprinkling a light sheen on the Kamlo Plaza strip mall in the northeast section of the city. About four o’clock, Abdullah Almalki turned onto the parking lot and maneuvered his car into a space at the south end, near a carousel-shaped restaurant called Mango’s Café.

Almalki popped open the driver’s side door and headed down the sidewalk to the glass-enclosed eatery. He had been invited to meet at Mango’s by Maher Arar, a man he knew in passing. Both of their families were from Syria and had become part of that immigrant community in Canada. Arar obtained a master’s degree in computer engineering and had worked alongside one of Almalki’s brothers at a high-tech company. Because of his friendship with the brother, Arar crossed paths with Almalki occasionally; once, when the brother was unavailable, Almalki agreed to allow Arar to list him as an emergency contact on an apartment lease.

Earlier that year, Arar had opened a home-based technology consulting business. The company was thriving, leaving him burning rapidly through printer cartridges. Ink became one of his largest expenses.

Then he heard that Almalki might be able to get him a deal on cartridges through a contact at Future Shop, Canada’s largest consumer electronics retailer. So, the previous day, Arar had called, asking for help in obtaining a good price for printer ink. He offered to treat Almalki to a late lunch at Mango’s, which featured Middle Eastern delicacies.

They met inside the restaurant, where Arar shook Almalki’s hand. “It’s good to see you again,” he said.

Almalki ordered a large lunch of shawarma chicken and fruit cocktail, and the two spent an hour chitchatting. Arar mentioned that his wife was pregnant, Almalki recommended a midwife he knew; then the conversation veered into a wide-ranging discussion about everything from children to ink cartridges.

After an hour, they left the restaurant. It was still misting, but neither man got particularly wet; Almalki did not even have to remove his glasses. They walked to a local Islamic center for afternoon prayers, and from there to Future Shop, where Arar purchased ink supplies.

As the men parted ways, three surveillance teams—two from the Mounties and one from the Ottawa police—were watching. They had followed Almalki to the meeting at Mango’s, parking nearby as he dined with Arar.

The investigators came away deeply suspicious. Almalki was a terrorist, they were sure of that. But why was he meeting with Arar? Why had they walked outside together in the bad weather? That must be a sign that they were trying to hide something. And when an officer standing nearby tried to listen in on their conversation, he couldn’t hear them. Why were they leaning close to each other while talking? Perhaps Arar was a terrorist and had been plotting something with Almalki.

With the surveillance completed, the Mounties headed back to the office. They wrote their reports, specifically noting that their suspicions had been heightened because the two men walked in the pouring rain—an exaggeration of the weather that would prove critical in the years to come.

With that, the investigators believed the evidence had piled up—the meeting with Almalki, the rain walk, the soft speaking. They opened a formal inquiry of Maher Arar and his possible ties to terrorists.

•  •  •  

After the days of tension, Tom Brokaw was relaxing, jogging with his dogs and feeling pretty good about life. The fear of a biological attack at NBC had subsided. The nightmare that had upended the lives of his staff seemed finally to be over.

When he returned home, the phone rang. It was a colleague from the NBC news desk. The New York City police commissioner, the colleague said, is trying to find you.

The words from the day before shot through Brokaw’s mind. The CDC hadn’t done their tests. By now, they should have been completed.

Oh my God
, he thought.
It’s anthrax.

•  •  •  

The two intelligence officials met alone at the Rome headquarters of Italy’s military intelligence service, known as SISMI.

The older man, Admiral Gianfranco Battelli, had been appointed as SISMI’s director five years before and now was on the verge of retirement. Across from him sat Jeffrey Castelli, the CIA station chief in Rome. Since 9/11, the two had been in frequent contact; Castelli had been asking top officials at both SISMI and its domestic counterpart, SISDE, for any information they had on
al-Qaeda. But on this day, Castelli had arrived to sound out Battelli about assisting the CIA with one of its new initiatives.

“What would be your opinion of performing renditions in Italy?” he asked.

Battelli understood. He had already heard that Bush had granted the CIA greater powers to snatch terrorists around the world without seeking an extradition order or any of the other legal niceties. The authority was not new; the CIA had been rendering Islamic radicals and criminals for years, picking them up in one country and moving them elsewhere. But now the scale was larger, abductions could take place on the soil of allies, and the targets could be shipped to countries with reputations of brutalizing prisoners. No one would be officially informed of what had happened to the suspects. They would simply disappear.

The CIA had someone specific in mind whom it wanted to render, Castelli said. “We might be picking up a suspected terrorist, taking him to the airport, and sending him to a foreign country.”

Battelli leaned forward, elbows on the table, his face blank. This was an extraordinary and delicate moment. The Americans were planning to spirit an Italian resident—maybe even an Italian citizen—out of the country, and then do God-knows-what with him. And they wanted Battelli to give a thumbs-up.

“If you make a formal request for assistance,” Battelli said, “I would have to inform the prime minister or other political authorities.”

Plus, Battelli said, Italian intelligence would not give Castelli a go-ahead without first checking to be sure he wasn’t undertaking some autonomous cowboy operation. The request would have to come from George Tenet himself.

Still, Battelli thought, this wasn’t his problem. His retirement would begin in a few days. “I’ll also refer this conversation to my successor,” he said. “You’ll have to speak to him.”

Castelli thanked him and left the office. Battelli breathed a sigh of relief—he didn’t want anything to do with this new American initiative. But he had little doubt that, sometime soon, someone in Italy would be kidnapped.

•  •  •  

Panic set in at NBC headquarters. The results were definitive: Brokaw’s assistant had contracted anthrax. The newsroom had been a target of a biological attack.

An emergency meeting was called, held in a conference room on the fifty-second floor. Jeffrey Immelt, the newly appointed head of NBC’s parent company, General Electric, was the most senior executive taking part in the meeting,
followed by Bob Wright, the network’s president. Brokaw was there, and the head of the CDC was on the line from Atlanta.

Before discussions began, the door burst open, and Rudy Giuliani, the mayor of New York, stormed in. Until that day, he had not heard about the suspected case of anthrax at NBC. He was angry that he had been kept in the dark, and now he wanted to help manage what was sure to be a new episode of terror for the already battered city.

•  •  •  

News of the anthrax infection at NBC crackled throughout offices and homes around the country. Other terrifying developments poured in—more infections had appeared at American Media Incorporated, where Robert Stevens had worked. An envelope containing a suspicious powder had been mailed to the
New York Times,
requiring an evacuation of the building. Then the FBI came out with a public announcement—additional terrorist attacks might be unleashed over the next few days.

To confuse matters, Ashcroft seemed to promptly contradict the Bureau, announcing that there was no evidence yet linking the multiple cases to terrorism.

Cheney thought Ashcroft was being overly cautious. He had been bracing Bush and other senior members of the administration for the biological attack that he felt sure would be part of the second wave of assaults. Bin Laden had for years been trying to obtain weapons of mass destruction and had launched an anthrax development program. Saddam Hussein had been found with tons of poisonous bacterial agents after the first Gulf War, and some of that arsenal could easily have been sneaked to any of America’s enemies. The timing of the anthrax mailings, Cheney felt certain, was not happenstance.

He appeared on PBS television and delivered a very different message from Ashcroft. Bin Laden, he averred, might well be the culprit.

“We know that he’s trained people in his camps in Afghanistan. For example, we have copies of the manuals that they’ve actually used to train people with respect to how to deploy and use these kinds of substances.”
1

Could it be a coincidence? “I’m a skeptic,” Cheney said. The only responsible thing to do, he added, was to proceed on the basis that the anthrax and September 11 attacks were related.

The message coming from the administration to the American people was, at best, ambiguous.

•  •  •  

The president did not share any sense of uncertainty.

The anthrax attack was the second terrorist strike in a matter of weeks. Both occurred on his watch. From his first intelligence briefing as the Republican nominee for president, he had been warned that jihadists were seeking biological and chemical weapons and were prepared to use them. The CIA had since reported to him about the almost incomprehensible danger posed by weaponized viruses and bacteria—as well as about stockpiles of microbes that it believed were still held by Saddam, an arsenal that would undoubtedly attract terrorists hell-bent on killing Americans.

The assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had been searing for Bush. But it was the anthrax attack that shook him to his core. Years later, some of his aides would say that the delivery of those contaminated letters had a far greater impact on Bush than anyone outside the White House imagined. His resolve grew unshakable—he would do whatever it took to protect civilians from another anonymous attack. No more Americans would be killed, he swore, by the murderous plotting of the evildoers.

•  •  •  

On the afternoon of October 13, Ahmad El-Maati was at his Toronto apartment watching CTV Network news with his mother. He was listening to the anchor when he glanced at the news crawl running along the bottom of the screen.

He gasped.

Los Angeles Times reports 36-year-old Kuwaiti man caught crossing border with map of nuclear site.

“Oh my God!” El-Maati shrieked. “This is me!”

His mother blinked, her mouth agape. “Yes,” she said. “I think you’re right.”

El-Maati went out to search for a copy of the
Globe and Mail,
Toronto’s largest newspaper. He saw the story on the front page.

Kuwaiti Found with Papers on Sensitive Ottawa Sites

He dropped into a chair.

This is bad
, he thought.
This is very, very sinister.

His fears intensified as he read the article. American agents had been briefed about the man with the map. A spokesman for the Mounties stated that this was part of a criminal investigation. The document that had been discovered by customs agents identified an atomic energy building and a virus-and-disease control laboratory.

Suddenly everything made sense. He had suspected that he was being followed. At first, he had figured it was just his imagination, but now he was sure that his wariness had been justified.

El-Maati decided to call a lawyer. Since 9/11, one attorney, Rocco Galati, had been speaking with Muslims at local mosques, suggesting that they call him if they were contacted by Canadian intelligence or law enforcement. This was the person to hire, El-Maati decided.

He telephoned Galati, explained what was going on, and set up an appointment. El-Maati’s parents accompanied him to the law office, listening as he spilled out the story of the map and the recent articles.

“I think, one hundred percent, the newspapers are talking about me,” he sighed. “So, please, call them. Let’s make a meeting and see what they want.”

Holding up a hand, Galati signaled for El-Maati to be calm. “Okay, no problem, don’t worry,” he said. “I know the CSIS people. I know how to contact them. We’ll take care of this.”

Sometime after the meeting ended, Galati called a CSIS investigator, leaving a message that he represented El-Maati and wanted to arrange a meeting to clear things up. The investigator received the request, but decided he didn’t have the authority to return the call.