Amerithrax (23 page)

On October 22, just as the House and Senate reopened a day early, the unnamed Brentwood worker showed signs of worsening respiratory distress. Inhalational anthrax was con- firmed. The next day, like Leroy Richmond, he had bloody pleural fluid drawn from his chest to relieve his worsening respiratory distress. With the fluid removal, his condition improved, but later he required a second thoracentesis.

Linda Burch, the postal maintenance employee, saw her eyelid and half her face swell up. The doctors performed a biopsy, diagnosed anthrax, and gave her the prescribed cure. She began to recover. On October 25, 2001, the
Washington Post
reported that Brentwood employees, working out of a tent in the parking lot, had discontinued mail delivery to residential area codes in D.C. because those codes were con- taminated. Fourteen of twenty-nine mail-sorting areas at Brentwood were “quarantined” for high exposure to anthrax. On October 28, Leroy Richmond was still struggling. He had anemia from the serious destruction of red blood cells by infection and a deficiency of platelets involved in clot- ting. Physicians drained the poison from his system and re- placed it with clean blood in a plasma exchange. Plasma is the liquid part of the blood that remains after all the cells are removed. This effectively halted the destruction of red blood cells. His blood values swiftly improved. Richmond, a deeply religious man, remained hospitalized in stable con- dition and wondering what sort of monster had inflicted such

agony on him.

Meanwhile a tireless search for the source of the anthrax continued in the hunt for Amerithrax. FBI Director Mueller

allowed the Washington field office to direct the anthrax investigation under agent Van Harp, who would lead the investigation. As the inquest into the airplane attacks wound down, Harp had practically the entire office of 659 agents working on the letters. In Washington, Van Harp pursued three theories:

1. Amerithrax was from Al Qaeda. That first possibility was becoming more remote by the day. On Thursday, Oc- tober 18, President Bush, while vowing to uncover the per- son behind the mailings, reported that there was no evidence that the anthrax letters were linked to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
   

2. Amerithrax was not one person, but a domestic ex- tremist terrorist group.
   

3. Amerithrax was a lone domestic suspect like the Una- bomber. Informal policies and lax security at U.S. biological labs could have provided an opening for someone with a grudge or a desire to make money on the black market to steal bacteria.
   

A fourth possibility arose—a foreign country waging war by mail. There were a number of suspect countries that had squirreled samples away in universities and private collec- tions. Six countries had been able to produce anthrax in an easily inhaled aerosol and make it hardy enough to survive bomb blasts. The Soviet Union had continued to develop biological weapons into the 1990s, “seeding” Cold War al- lies such as North Korea with bioweapons know-how.

Scientists in Pyongyang, Korea, had placed an order with a Japanese firm for large quantities of plague bacteria, chol- era, and anthrax in 1970 and traveled to Soviet facilities several times in 1992 and by 2001 reportedly had all three types available for use. Syria and Algeria might still be con- ducting bioweapons research. China was suspected of main- taining an offensive-bioweapons program and Egypt had developed biological warfare agents. Even the U.S. had nu- merous biological agents to be used to develop defense strat- egies for biological attacks.

Some experts thought they knew not only what country had been behind the anthrax mailing, but where they had gotten their anthrax spores. Dr. Richard Spertzel said that

while it was not known whether Iraq had obtained the com- mon Ames strain of anthrax, Iraqi weapons scientists had repeatedly tried to acquire it.

Spertzel also said a top Iraqi scientist had directed his team to evaluate mobile laboratories, facilities in which germ stocks could quickly be moved and hidden from in- spectors. And while Soviet weapons scientists had used mill- ing to make smaller particles, Iraq did not; Dr. Ken Alibek testified that the anthrax from the letters that he had seen had shown no signs of milling. Milling created a static charge that made the small particles clump together.

And what of the coating that circumvents the material’s tendency to clump together? Shortly after the first anthrax victim died in October, the Bush administration began an intense effort to explore any possible link between Iraq and the attacks. The focus on Iraq was based on its record of developing a germ arsenal and also on what some officials said was a desire on the part of the administration to find a reason to attack Iraq in the war on terrorism. “I know there are a number of people who would love an excuse to get after Iraq” said a top federal scientist involved in the inves- tigation. The President was among them.

The CIA had long assumed Iraq’s agent of choice to be anthrax. In Mideast history anthrax had always been a pres- ence. The Bible called it the “fifth plague” of nine terrible plagues that afflicted the hapless Egyptians after the Pharaoh refused to free the Israelites. Anthrax was the curse of blight which fell upon the Egyptians in the Book of Exodus, the sooty “morain” that killed livestock and affected people with black spots.

But biological terrorism has been around since ancient times. Persian and Roman warriors stuffed rotting animal carcasses into the drinking wells of their enemies. Maraud- ing Tartars ended a long siege of the port of Kaffa on the Black Sea by catapulting bodies of bubonic plague victims over the city walls in 1346. The ensuing disease victims’ flight may have carried the plague to Western Europe.

The modern history of anthrax contains accounts of an- thrax feasts or “wedding banquet” scenarios in Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Siberia, and various African countries. In these

cases, contaminated meat not cooked enough to kill anthrax bacteria was shared by a large group. For millennia hide workers in the Middle East used dog feces in tanning hides. This practice made tanners and shoemakers prey to echi- nococcosis, a helminthic disease often passed from dogs to humans.

Research on anthrax as a bioweapon began more than eighty years ago during World War I. Anthrax bacteria were used by the German army to contaminate animal feed, poi- son horses of the opposing cavalries, and infect livestock. An infected sugar cube laced with anthrax by a German spy is still teeming with deadly spores. The Soviet biowarfare program, launched before World War II, geared up during the Cold War. By the 1980s the Soviets could manufacture thousands of tons of weaponized anthrax in twenty- and fifty-ton reactors annually.

Russia pretended to halt bioweapons work in the 1980s— just as Iraq started. Iraq acquired anthrax technology from “rogue” former Soviet Union scientists. “These were people I knew very well who were in Iraq or Iran and other Muslim countries,” former Soviet bioweapons scientist Sergei Popov told
Newsweek.

Wrongly, the U.S. believed that Iraq had not yet wea- ponized its virulent biological materials. Iraq, though a sig- natory to the 1972 treaty banning biological weapons like the Soviets, had conducted drying studies for anthrax so that it could be spread by air. As early as 1974, Iraq began to develop drying technologies to extend the shelf life of bio- weapons like anthrax. Elisa D. Harris, who was not a weap- ons expert, but had served for eight years on the National Security Council, said that if a foreign state was involved, Iraq was a likely candidate.

Iraq not only had anthrax, but the U.S. had provided it with samples of the Institute’s Vollum strain for thirty dol- lars. One couldn’t help but think of thirty pieces of silver.

At a 2002 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Sen. Robert Byrd, a Democrat from West Virginia, asked Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld about the germ trans- fers to Iraq. Government invoices “read like shopping lists for biological weapons.”

“Are we, in fact,” said Byrd, “now facing the possibility of reaping what we have sown?”

The Second Suspect

MOHAMMAD
Atta and his fellow terrorists basking in the Florida sunshine hadn’t been the only ones interested in ac- quiring and adapting crop dusters. Atta had met with Iraqi intelligence before 9-11. He knew Saddam Hussein consid- ered crop dusters essential for the airborne spread of anthrax germs. In August 1988, Saddam’s biowarfare program had successfully tested and sprayed an anthrax simulant, field- testing it in simple aerosol sprayers attached to slow-moving fixed-wing crop dusters. A converted crop sprayer, normally used for dry chemical pesticides, could be used with Iraq’s new Zubaidy sprayers.

Zubaidy sprayers (named after their developer, Dr. Tariq Saleh Mohammed Zubaidy) were actually just converted crop sprayers. Dr. Zubaidy had adapted this type of sprayer, used for laying down dry chemical pesticides, and linked it to a low-volume tank to take small-particle aerosols. In spring 1990, Iraq purchased forty top-of-the-line agricultural aerosol generators from an Italian company. The Italian gen- erators were each capable of dispersing eight hundred gal- lons per hour. They were compact enough to fit on the back of a small boat, pickup truck, or single-engine aircraft and could spread either liquid or dry anthrax.

In early August 1990, the Iraqi germ team modified aerial pesticide sprayers with special two-thousand-liter tanks filled with bacterial agents. Anthrax could be dispersed from a canister strapped to the wing of an Iraqi warplane, from aerial bombs, or from smaller unmanned “death drones.”

Later, Iraq modified the Zubaidy spraying device to fit a drone aircraft.

“I’ll tell you that RPVs [Remotely Piloted Vehicles] carrying biological warfare drop-tanks filled with anthrax, now that’s an effective weapon,” said Hamish Killip, a United Kingdom inspector. “Incredibly simple and incredi- bly awful. Once you have a drone up and running, it would be the most ghastly weapon, like the Nazis’ V1 buzz bombs.”

In October 1989, Vladimir Pasechnik, a top Soviet bi- ologist and former director of the Institute for Ultra-Pure Biological Preparations in Leningrad, had four hundred sci- entists doing research on modifying cruise missiles and sleek, low-flying robotic craft. Because a light, short-range drone was unstable, a spraying device attached to the bottom of the fuselage had to be compact and vibration free, capable of withstanding buffeting in high desert winds. Iraq located the perfect device in 1988 from Niro Atomizer in Denmark for ten thousand dollars each. However, Iraq was blocked from importing those special spray dryers.

Iraq’s most effective anthrax platform was a helicopter- borne aerosol generator that worked like an insecticide dis- seminator. Any commercial helicopter fitted with a standard hook device to its belly could take up to ten of these sprayers to lay down a huge amount of “line source” biological agent, dry or wet, over a vast area. The Zubaidy device was tested from helicopters at Khan Bani Sa’ad, an airplane engine testing facility north of Baghdad. An anthrax simulant, suc- cessfully field-tested in crop-dusting sprayers, helicopters, and fighter aircraft, was now adapted to speedboats.

The Iraqis could slip aerosol-generator-equipped speed- boats into the Gulf at night and unfurl a path of lethal aer- osol. According to experts, such a cloud “could kill ninety percent of the U.S. troops there.” During fall nights in the Persian Gulf region an oppressive layer of overheated air crouches atop cool air near the ground, trapping and sus- pending dust and any stray particles. Depending on prevail- ing winds and the pressure of the inversion layer, the consequences of an anthrax cloud would be “horrendous.”

It was easier to buy anthrax than large experimental an-

imals, as Iraq found out when they attempted and failed to purchase rhesus monkeys from the United Kingdom in 1978. When they tried to buy chimps from Britain’s Chipperfield’s Circus, they were turned away. During the 1980s lethal strains of anthrax were available from more than fifteen hun- dred microbe banks around the world.

Most prominent was the U.S. germ bank, the American Type Culture Collection in Maryland near the Institute. The ATCC was the largest lending library of microorganisms on the globe. In 1985, Saddam initiated a crash five-year bio- weapons production program, “the Double-Edged Sword of the Cousin of the Project.” Iraqi scientists began concen- trated, targeted research on anthrax and botulinum toxin. Since the U.S. Department of Commerce had authorized sales of anthrax to Iraq, the rogue country purchased starter germs from the ATCC, which housed “particularly virulent variants of anthrax.”

In April 1986, the Iraqi Minister of Trade’s Technical and Scientific Materials Import Division (TSMID) legally bought thirty-six strains of ten different pathogens from ATCC for thirty-five dollars. They included tularemia, Ve- nezuelan equine encephalitis once targeted for weaponiza- tion at Fort Detrick, and seven strains of anthrax. Those seven included three types of deadly anthrax strains isolated at the Institute, including a Lederle Labs strain and the so- called Vollum 1B strain. Vollum 1B was then still being perfected from the dried blood of microbiologist William A. Boyles, an anthrax casualty. None of the strains were of the Ames variety.