The Anthrax Letters: The Attacks That Shocked America (10 page)

“Mrs. Irish, did you rent an apartment to Hamza Alghamdi?”

“Yes, I did.” Gloria was not entirely surprised by the question. When she heard earlier in the day that some of the suspected Arab hijackers had been living in South Florida, she thought about the two men to whom she had shown apartments. “And I also rented another apartment to his friend, Marwan Al-Shehhi. Marwan told me he was a pilot and that he was taking flying lessons.”

“Well, we’d really like to talk to you now.”

“Now?”

“Yes. Can we meet you at your office?”

Gloria and Mike dressed, drove a few blocks to Federal Highway, and turned left. Three minutes later they were in front of Pelican Properties, Gloria’s real estate company on South East 6th Avenue. She unlocked the door, turned on the lights, and waited for the agents.

The FBI had identified several of the apparent hijackers from their airplane tickets. The bureau was now looking for people who might have been in contact with them. Gloria’s name came up because records in the local homeowners association indicated she had been the rental agent for Alghamdi.

“How did you come to meet them?” one of the two agents asked. “They just walked in,” Gloria replied. “It must have been in May.” The men wanted to rent apartments near each other for June and July. During the next couple of weeks Gloria showed them dozens of places before they found any to their liking. The apartments they settled on were in Delray Beach, Alghamdi’s at the Delray Racquet Club and Al-Shehhi’s at the Hamlet, an attractive golf course community. The apartments each rented for about $1,000 a month. The men paid the full amount in cash plus a security deposit of $1,000 for each apartment. Later, Al-Shehhi’s lease was extended to August 12, Alghamdi’s to August 30.

“What were they like?” the agents asked.

“Well, Marwan Al-Shehhi always came in with a smile. If they were going to be 2 minutes late, he’d call. He was very considerate,” she said.

“And Hamza Alghamdi?”

“He was weird,” Gloria answered. “Hamza just stared and never spoke to me. Marwan said it was because he didn’t speak English.” Alghamdi’s fixed gaze made Gloria uncomfortable. Later, it dawned on her that Marwan never translated anything for him and that he must have understood what was being said.

“Did they indicate why they wanted to live here?” Al-Shehhi told Gloria they had been living elsewhere in Florida—on the west coast and later south in Coral Gables. He was now taking flying lessons in the Delray area and wanted to live nearby. “He said he was doing hours so he could get his commercial license,” Gloria recalled. When she heard about the flying, she told Al-Shehhi that her husband, Mike, held a private pilot’s license. She had many conversations with Al-Shehhi, although mostly about his eagerness to find the apartments. “I mean, Marwan called me all the time.”

After the FBI agents finished questioning her, they asked for copies of everything in her files related to the two rentals. She pulled out the lease agreements, payment records, and copies of the two men’s driver’s licenses. She found a copy of a blank check, which she recopied for the agents. She first saw the check when Al-Shehhi had asked how the security deposit would be refunded after they vacated the apartments. Gloria said, “If you give me a deposit ticket for your bank account, when I get your refund, I’ll deposit it to your account for you.” Al-Shehhi replied, “I don’t have a deposit ticket with me, but I have a check.” She said, “That’s fine, I’ll make a copy of it so I’ll have your account number.”

Sometime after the visit from the FBI, after the names of the hijackers had been made public, she looked again at the blank check. The account was with the Sun Trust Bank, Gulf Coast Downtown Venice Office, and the owner’s address was 4890 Pompano Road, Venice, Florida. The name that followed Al-Shehhi’s on the check had previously meant nothing to her. Now, upon seeing it, she gasped. It was Mohammed Atta, the alleged leader of the September 11 attacks who piloted one of the planes into the World Trade Center. Marwan Al-Shehhi piloted the other. Atta was also among a group of Arab men who, the previous month, approached airplane mechanics in Florida to ask about cropduster specifications, including their carrying capacity. Cropdusters are considered potential weapons if used as vehicles to spread biological or chemical agents over large areas. Upon learning on September 23 about the men’s inquiry, the FBI ordered the temporary grounding of all cropdusters in the United States.

As distressing as September 11 was for Gloria and Mike Irish, the anthrax incidents in October turned their lives upside down. “It was awful. It was unbelievable,” said Mike Irish. Bob Stevens had died of anthrax from a letter apparently addressed to the
Sun
. Mike was editor-in-chief of the
Sun
. According to the FBI, as many as 15 of the 19 hijackers may have lived in Florida. Six of them had addresses in Delray Beach or Fort Lauderdale, a few miles from the AMI building where the
Sun
was published.

Mike’s wife was the real estate broker who rented to two of the hijackers. Was there a relationship between the airline terror and the anthrax terror that was somehow connected to the Irishes or to AMI? The media were certainly looking for one, Mike said. “In the course of a week after the anthrax attack, she and I handled 60 or 70 calls. We steadfastly were saying, ‘We have nothing to say. Goodbye.’” When a reporter wrote a story falsely claiming that he had an exclusive interview with Gloria, she was deeply hurt. “It crushed her. She couldn’t sleep,” Mike recalled. He also recognized the irony in his annoyance: “I have to say, since I’m part of the media, that I can’t blame them. I kind of hate them for it, but I can’t blame them for trying to build a story, but in fact there was none.”

Could Gloria Irish possibly have mentioned to her two clients that her husband worked for American Media or for the
Sun
? Doubtful, she said, because the two men were focused on looking for apartments. “They couldn’t care less about anything else.” Gloria acknowledged that she commonly talked about her husband with other clients, but she cannot recall doing so with the two Middle Eastern men. Yet at another point in her conversation she did concede telling them that Mike was a pilot.

Did Al-Shehhi know where she lived? “Normally, I never have any problems in giving my home phone number to a client, but I don’t think there would have been any reason I gave it to them.” So she did not give them her home phone number? “There is the possibility I did, but I don’t think so.” Gloria remembers that after they signed up for the Delray apartments, “I almost told them where I live, but I didn’t. I did tell them I live a couple of blocks from them, and if you need anything, tell me.”

Mike Irish is adamant that all the apparent dots are unconnected. “It was just a total coincidence,” he said. He may be correct. Still, as long as the identity of the perpetrators remains uncertain, perhaps Martha Moffett’s suspicions should not be dismissed. The AMI librarian was among the first to suspect a connection between the bin Laden terrorists and the anthrax terrorists.

Here’s another dot: the Delray-area phone directory carried only one listing of an “Irish” on Pelican Way, and the first initial is “M.” Gloria had told Al-Shehhi and Alghamdi that she lived and worked (at Pelican Properties) not far from their apartments. One look at the phone book would have pinpointed her home address, phone number, and husband’s first initial. What significance could an “M. Irish” have for anyone not familiar with the
Sun
? Probably none. But for someone who regularly read the newspaper, the name “Mike Irish, Editor-in-Chief,” could be seen every week. It was at the top of the masthead, just below David Pecker’s name. And for anyone interested, the masthead also displayed the paper’s address in Boca Raton.

On October 10, 2001, an article appeared in the
Miami Herald
with the headline, “Authorities Trace Anthrax that Killed Florida Man to Iowa Lab.” It contained an intriguing piece of news: “Investigators confirmed that two hijackers who died in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks had subscriptions to tabloid newspapers published in the Boca Raton headquarters of American Media, Inc., where photo editor Robert Stevens is believed to have contracted the fatal disease.” Nine months later, when asked about this report, the FBI would neither confirm nor deny that the hijackers had subscriptions to the tabloids. Nor would an AMI spokesman comment on the matter because, he said, the case was still under criminal investigation.

The
Sun
, with a national circulation of 226,000, is among the smallest of the AMI papers. Its Florida circulation is about 15,000, and almost all are single-copy sales. In 1999 subscriptions throughout the state numbered only 253. If any hijackers were among the subscribers, this would advance the notion of their connection to the anthrax perpetrators. It suggests a plausible explanation of why this relatively obscure tabloid might have been the target of an anthrax letter.

During the week after Bob Stevens died, the nasal swab tests conducted on the AMI employees found anthrax spores on one of them—Stephanie Dailey, 36, who had worked in the mailroom. By the time her exposure was confirmed, she, like the rest of the AMI staff, had already been on Cipro for 2 days. She never developed symptoms of the disease. Another bit of encouraging news was that by the end of that week Ernie Blanco began to improve. But the good news about Dailey and Blanco was quickly overshadowed by news of more anthrax horrors elsewhere in the country.

A
t 11:40 a.m. on October 10, 2001, work came to a halt at New Jersey’s Election Law Enforcement Commission in Trenton. A staff member had just opened a letter that contained a white powdery substance. A call to the state police brought a firm instruction: “Don’t anybody leave.” Within minutes more than 50 police, fire, emergency medical, and environmental staff began to arrive. The block in front of the building was sealed with yellow crime tape. Located on the thirteenth floor at 28 West State Street, three blocks from the state capitol, the commission administers New Jersey’s tangle of election laws and procedures. The 300 workers inside the 14-story structure were told to remain in their offices, to close their windows, and to not eat or drink anything.

Three hours later, after preliminary testing of the powder, state police spokesman John Hagerty announced: “It is not anthrax.” He did not yet know what the material was, only that it was “not chemicals that are life threatening. We have a hoax situation.” That week, similar scare scenarios were taking place elsewhere around the country. Disruptive threats, all false, had occurred in Burlington, Vermont, in Covington, Kentucky, in Darien, Connecticut, and as far away as Honolulu, Hawaii. The most jittery reactions, not surprisingly, were in South Florida, where anthrax had actually been found. “It gets me a little worried—spores flying in the air and all that,” said Steve Siebert, a carpenter who worked near the American Media building in Boca Raton. “My only fear is that I’ve got it and don’t know it.” Jan Schuman, manager of the Boca Pharmacy said: “It’s Cipro, Cipro, Cipro,” as he described the surge in demand for the primary antibiotic used to treat anthrax. His store, which usually dispensed 200 tablets a week, had just put in an order for 600. “It’s out of control. People are frantic.”

Acute frenzy was largely limited to South Florida. The rest of the country remained wary but hopeful that actual exposures to the bacteria had been limited to the Florida area. One week after Bob Stevens’s death, that hope proved to be in vain.

At 3 a.m. on Friday, October 12, a telephone call jolted Marcelle Layton out of her sleep. David Ashford was on the line from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. “Marci, I’m calling to give you a chance to wake up. I’ll be phoning back in 5 minutes. Jeff Koplan wants to talk to you and some others on a conference call.” Dr. Layton, New York City’s assistant health commissioner for communicable diseases, had gone to bed an hour earlier “with a smile on my face,” she recalled. She had left her office after midnight following a good-news phone call from the CDC. The PCR (polymerase chain reaction) results for a skin biopsy of an NBC employee were negative for anthrax. Happily, the CDC had confirmed the city’s own negative findings. But the Atlanta-based agency was still performing capsular and cell wall testing on the specimen—the same kind of tests Phil Lee had done in Florida a week earlier on Bob Stevens’s sample. Still, Layton felt optimistic.

Then came Ashford’s ominous middle-of-the-night call. When the phone rang again, Jeffrey Koplan, CDC’s director, came on to say that the immunohistochemical staining for the specimen was positive. (Capsular and cell wall tests both involve immunological and chemical staining, thus the shorthand term “immunohistochemical” testing.)

When Phil Lee had conducted these tests on Stevens’s sample, he had come away from his microscope knowing he had seen something momentous. Now, in Atlanta, Koplan and two other CDC officials—Sherif Zaki, the lead pathologist for the agency, and James Hughes, director of its infectious diseases center—looked through the microscope and experienced the same sense of gravity. Zaki, who had devised these anthrax-specific tests a few years earlier, told Koplan he was 90 percent certain that the results were positive. The anthrax outbreak, evidently, had not been confined to Florida. Still, Koplan seemed reluctant to make a definitive pronouncement. Later that morning he was on the phone with New York’s Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who asked, “Are you sure it’s anthrax?” “Well, we have a high degree of probability,” Koplan replied. Hughes recalls that moment vividly. A year later he told me: “We were reluctant to say ‘absolutely’ because there is always the chance of error. If we say ‘yes,’ and it turns out not to be anthrax, the consequences would be huge.”

“No, no, no, don’t give me that stuff,” the mayor responded to Koplan. Giuliani, whose decisive leadership in the wake of September 11 had become legendary, would not settle for probability. “Is it anthrax or is it not?” he insisted.

“Yes,” Dr. Koplan said.

“Fine, that’s all I need to hear.”

Months later Dr. Layton reflected on that day and the weeks leading to it. Her third-floor office on Worth Street in lower Manhattan is nine blocks north of the abyss where the Twin Towers had stood. Behind her desk are shelves of volumes that befit her specialty in epidemiology—texts on infectious diseases, vaccines, AIDS, a folder of CDC reports. The sound of classical music, the single feature in her office not directly related to her professional charge, is faintly audible. “I never met anyone who works as hard,” Tim Holtz, a staff physician, observed when Layton was out of earshot. “She is always here.”

Layton evinced a shy smile as she mentioned that her responsibilities include “disaster planning” for bioterrorism. But on September 11 everyone in the department was consumed with overseeing the city’s health response to the morning’s horror. The office phones were down, so communications went out erratically by cell phone, computer, and hand delivery. “I’m the chair of the surveillance committee,” Layton said. That day, from her small corner office, she directed the citywide surveillance of hospital emergency room activities, injuries, staff responses, and availability of equipment. By all accounts, the public health effort was remarkably successful. Doctors and hospital staff cared for the surge of patients with few hitches. Layton retrospectively sorted out her feelings:

During that day, Layton and Joel Ackelsberg, the city’s deputy commissioner responsible for coordinating a bioterrorism response, reminded each other that at some point they should talk about the threat of a germ attack. The first chance came in the early hours of the next morning. “At 2 a.m., four or five of us, including a couple of people from the CDC, met here in my office,” Layton said. “We started talking about what we needed to do to be on the alert for any bioterrorist event.” In cooperation with the CDC, they planned for heightened surveillance at the 29 hospital emergency departments in New York City and for getting the word to “our medical and laboratory communities to report any unusual cluster or disease manifestations.”

Then, 4 weeks later on October 12, came the 3 a.m. phone call from Jeffrey Koplan. The fact that someone in New York had contracted skin anthrax, apparently a victim of bioterrorism, further shocked the country. In truth, the city was better prepared to cope than many other communities. Local police, firefighters and medical people had all participated in mock attacks. Still, confirmation of a skin anthrax case came as a surprise. “All our efforts in the past several years had been focused on the expected covert release of an aerosolized agent, so we were focused on an inhalational outbreak,” Layton said. The manner of delivery was also a surprise. No one expected that the threat letters were a likely way to cause disease.

Later that day the city issued a statement under the heading: “Health Department Announces Anthrax Case in New York City.” The text explained that an NBC employee had contracted cutaneous anthrax. Although labeled an “alert,” the statement seemed almost reassuring: “The employee has been taking antibiotics since October 1 and is doing well.”

But the Florida anthrax incidents and the attack on the World Trade Center had just occurred and New Yorkers were shaken. Mayor Giuliani echoed the U.S. Postal Service’s warning that people should not open suspicious packages, such as those without return addresses. The NBC studios had been sealed, and internal mail delivery was halted at CBS, ABC, CNN, and the Associated Press. Judith Miller, a
New York Times
reporter, had received a threat letter containing powder. Although the powder proved to be harmless, it intensified the sense of siege. From the
Washington Post
:

The confirmed anthrax case was that of Erin O’Connor, a 38-year-old assistant to Tom Brokaw at NBC. She remembered first seeing a sore on her chest on September 25. By the time she visited her doctor on October 1, the oval-shaped lesion, about an inch long, had become ulcerative. The lymph nodes in her neck were swollen, and she was feeling weak and tired. Dr. Richard Fried, her Manhattan internist, initially thought she might have an infection from a spider bite. When O’Connor told him about having opened a threat letter containing powder, he considered anthrax a possibility. But he did not share his suspicion with her because “I just did not want to alarm her.” Nevertheless, he prescribed Cipro as a precaution, called the city health department, and sent a skin sample to the department’s laboratory.

Joel Ackelsberg, who took Fried’s call at the health department, doubted that the lesion was anthrax. When he heard about a suspicious letter, he thought about the scores of hoax letters the department had seen until that time. “All these events had been hoaxes, and my approach was that they were going to continue to be hoaxes.” Dr. Ackelsberg recounted his feelings from his compact office on the second floor of the health department building on Worth Street: “The lesion was on the left side of her chest below her shoulder. It was in an unlikely location. We thought it was a spider bite that was infected. So I said, ‘Let’s just test the letter.’”

The health department contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which managed to retrieve the suspected letter from a batch of hate mail that NBC had collected. The letter was postmarked September 25 from St. Petersburg, Florida, and said: “The unthinkable. See what happens next.” But the health department lab was unable to grow anthrax from either the biopsy or the letter, and, said Marci Layton, “We sort of moved on to other things.”

O’Connor’s lesion later turned into a coal-black crust. (Anthrax derives its name from the Greek word for coal,
anthracis
.) When O’Connor heard about the anthrax case in Florida, she searched the Internet, wondering if her own lesion might be anthrax. On October 9 she visited Dr. Marc Grossman, a dermatologist at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, who also thought it was anthrax. Her skin sample and the letter in question were sent to the CDC for testing. Then came the call from Koplan to Marci Layton on October 12. The letter did not contain anthrax, but the biopsy did. Health department staff prepared to go to NBC to take nasal swabs and other samples. Layton explained:

Postmarked September 18 from Trenton, New Jersey, the newly identified letter and envelope contained hand-printed capital lettering. The envelope, which contained no return address, was addressed to:

O’Connor did not remember seeing this letter before, but she must have come in contact with it between September 19 and 25. The message on the sheet inside was a copy of the original, which evidently had been kept by the mailer. Under “09-11-01,” the letter contained five lines, including the misspelling of “penicillin”: