The Anthrax Letters: The Attacks That Shocked America (11 page)

In consultation with the CDC, the health department performed nasal swabs on more than 400 NBC employees. The “Nightly News” studio was closed. People who had visited the NBC offices between September 19 and 25 were urged to be tested and to begin taking an antibiotic.

New Yorkers were in for more bad news. On Monday, October 15, the health department announced the second case of cutaneous anthrax. Then on Thursday a third case and on Friday a fourth. The second case was especially heartbreaking. At 2 p.m. on Friday, September 28, a producer at ABC’s World News Tonight had taken her 7-month-old baby for a visit to the company studio. By the time a babysitter took him home 2 hours later, several colleagues had cuddled and held him.

The next day, a red sore the size of a half-dollar appeared on the back of the infant’s left arm. Thinking the lesion was caused by a spider bite, a doctor prescribed Benadryl, an antihistamine. The child’s condition worsened, and on October 1 he was admitted to the New York University Medical Center. After 6 days of antibiotics, his arm started to heal, but his red blood cell count dropped and his kidneys began to fail. “He was in deep trouble,” his mother said. With continued antibiotics and blood transfusions, after 6 days, the child’s condition began to improve. A week later he was released from the hospital. Meanwhile, as stories of anthrax filled the airwaves, the child’s doctor realized that his symptoms seemed consistent with the disease. The doctor notified the health department, and on October 13 a skin biopsy was sent to the CDC. Five days later the diagnosis was confirmed.

The third case was that of Claire Fletcher, 27, an assistant to Dan Rather at CBS News. She had developed facial lesions and a headache on October 1, was placed on antibiotics, and was doing well by the time of the diagnosis.

The fourth case, Johanna Huden, 30, was a
New York Post
employee who began to display symptoms on September 21, earlier than any of the other victims. Her finger lesion was treated with antibiotics, which started her recovery. Her belated diagnosis was confirmed on October 18 by tests of a skin sample. She had somehow been infected by spores from an unopened threat letter that had been stashed in a bin with other suspicious mail. The letter was later retrieved and found to test positive for anthrax. Besides the letter to Tom Brokaw, it was the only other piece of mail in New York that was identified as an anthrax letter. Like the Brokaw letter, it was postmarked September 18 from Trenton and was written in block capitals:

The letter, which was a copy of an original, was identical to the one sent to Brokaw.

Amid the outbreak in New York City, on October 15 the Florida Department of Health announced that anthrax had been found in the Boca Raton post office. Spores were located in an area where mail was sorted for pickup by American Media and nearby buildings. This finding was another indication that the anthrax that infected the American Media building had been delivered by mail.

Peoples’ worries about their own safety drew a guarded comment from Mayor Giuliani: “A balance has to be struck here between sufficient precautions and making people so frightened and so upset that they’re not going to be able to conduct their lives, which means having people walking around in spacesuits all over New York.” By the time the wave of cutaneous anthrax infections ended, seven people in New York City had been diagnosed with the disease. All recovered.

By October 25 nasal swabs had been taken on 2,580 people in New York City, and preventive antibiotics had been given to 1,306. All seven cases were connected to the media—two at NBC, three at the
New York Post
, one each at ABC and CBS. A letter to Tom Brokaw and one to the
Post
with the same postmark—September 18, Trenton, NJ—were recovered and found to have contained anthrax. While the cause of infections in the other New York offices was never found, the supposition is that mail laced with spores had been sent to them as well.

The anxiety generated by the anthrax cases in New York was intensified by news of anthrax outbreaks elsewhere. Erin O’Connor’s skin anthrax, the first to be identified in New York City, was confirmed on October 12. That was just 8 days after anthrax was first identified in Florida. Then, 3 days later, spores were found in Washington, D.C.

At 7:30 a.m. on Monday, October 15, Dr. John Eisold climbed the steps of the U.S. Capitol’s south entrance. As he had done every morning since he began working there in 1994, he headed down the corridor to his office. Along the way Eisold passed several statues—on his left, one of Harrison Schmidt, a former astronaut and senator from New Mexico; on his right, Philo Farnsworth, the inventor of television, and Father Damian, who ministered to lepers in Africa. (They are among 100 statues in the building, two chosen by each state.) Two hundred feet from the entrance, Eisold turned left into a quiet alcove. A sign on the wall identifies a cluster of offices as the medical clinic. It is at this location that Dr. Eisold, the Capitol’s chief physician, oversees a staff of three doctors, 15 nurses, and 15 corpsmen. Their potential clientele numbers 35,000, including the members of congress, employees, and visitors who might be on Capitol Hill on any day. Eisold and his staff routinely handle heart attacks, seizures, colds, fractures, sprains, abrasions.

He was at his desk at 10 a.m. when the emergency alarm sounded in the clinic. Eisold reached to his left for the phone. The call was from Senator Tom Daschle’s office in the Hart Senate Office Building: “We have a letter here claiming to contain anthrax. There’s powder in it.” Six months after the call, Dr. Eisold leaned back in his chair and reviewed the unfolding events. He glanced toward a decorous fireplace beneath a large mirror on the far wall, emblematic of the building’s 19th-century elegance. On a table behind him, just a swivel away, is his computer. “Since this was a biohazard event,” he said, “we used a standard team of five people—a doctor and four others.”

Dr. Norman Lee, whose office was across the hall from Eisold’s, was dispatched as team leader. It was a drill he and the rest of the staff had rehearsed many times. Lee, like the other physicians in the clinic, is a naval officer, a lieutenant commander. Unlike Eisold, whose take-charge demeanor seems as much a reflection of personality as rank—Eisold is a vice-admiral—Lee is soft-spoken, diffident. “Before we left the office, when they said it was anthrax, I grabbed a big bottle of Cipro. We also brought doxycycline and enough culturettes for the swabs,” said Lee. In two minutes an ambulance delivered the team five blocks away to the Hart Building on Constitution Avenue.

An intern had opened the threat letter in the sixth-floor mailroom of the senator’s suite—the fifth and sixth floors are connected by an internal staircase. Like the letters to NBC and the
New York Post
, this one was also postmarked from Trenton, though stamped October 9, not September 18. In block capitals, the envelope was addressed to:

Unlike the other two, it contained a return address:

Under the date, “09-11-01,” the letter contained seven lines:

“When we got to his office, I was the only one from the team to go in the room because I’d already been vaccinated against anthrax,” said Lee. The Capitol Hill Police’s hazardous materials squad was already there, some in masks and protective outerwear. Their preliminary test showed that the powder could be anthrax. When Lee arrived, 13 of Daschle’s staff members were in the room where the letter had been opened. The senator himself was at a meeting elsewhere. Lee ordered everyone out of the room and into the hallway. “I proceeded to test them with the nasal swabs. We told them to wash their hands and take their first dose of Cipro. They were clearly scared.”

After the room was emptied, Lee turned to a masked HAZMAT worker. “I saw him standing over the bag containing the anthrax material that he had just wrapped. He showed me it was a small amount of powder, about this much.” Lee curled his pointer finger into his thumb to make a small circle. “About the size of a grape,” he said. The staff people began to pepper Dr. Lee with questions. “Do we need to go to the hospital?”

“Not unless you’re having symptoms,” Lee answered.

“What should we look out for?”

“Are you having any fever, any concurrent illnesses?” Lee responded to the group. No one indicated feeling sick, so he said: “Look, everybody’s feeling fine. There’s nothing to worry about. Take the antibiotic immediately. Your test results should come back within 48 hours or so.”

A few people from Senator Russell Feingold’s office, which adjoins Daschle’s, may have been in their common hallway when the letter was discovered. The sixth-floor mailrooms of the two offices were separated by only a single wall, and the HAZMAT people realized that the staffs of both senators might need attention. They were all herded up to the ninth floor of the Hart Building.

There, in a large atrium, about 70 people stood waiting—members of Daschle’s and Feingold’s staffs, and a few others who had been in either senator’s office. Dr. Lee and his team continued swabbing and distributing antibiotics, while police field tested samples of clothing. The anxiety and the questions continued. “Do I need a blood test? Should I tell my private physician?” Lee responded that, again, no blood test was called for in the absence of symptoms. There was no need at this time to call a private physician. He warned, however, that “we need to see every single one of you tomorrow to follow up.” Each person had received only a couple of pills, and Lee reminded them, “We need to give you more antibiotics.” Still, several people said they wanted to go to the hospital. Some were crying. The young woman intern who had opened the letter seemed especially distressed. Lee tried to help:

The letter was brought to the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Maryland where microbiologist John Ezzell later confirmed that the powder was indeed anthrax.

Meanwhile, Senator Feingold, who had been in Wisconsin for the weekend, was en route by car to Chicago’s O’Hare Airport when his cell phone rang. Mary Murphy, his chief of staff, was calling from Washington with news about the anthrax. “They’re quarantining our people with Senator Daschle’s people up on the ninth floor of the Hart Building,” she said. Feingold was shocked. He had just seen a television report that Tom Brokaw’s office had received an anthrax letter. Now this. He felt as though he were under a dark cloud: “To be honest, I really felt then more afraid and concerned than I had at any point. I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is really expanding.’ I really felt concerned and sort of depressed about what was going on and worried about everybody.” When Feingold landed at Washington National Airport that afternoon, he went straight to the U.S. Capitol where he had been scheduled to preside at a Senate session. He would not be able to return to his office in the Hart Building for 3 months.

A senior member of Senator Feingold’s staff, who requested anonymity, reflected on that day. When she was notified about the suspicious letter her reaction was, “Jeez, I’ve got to deal with this. I hope nobody is going to be hurt or sick.” Months later, she expressed “incredible pride” in the professional way the staff handled the situation. But she also witnessed unsettling glitches. She was among the people isolated on the ninth floor for swabbing, antibiotics, and a briefing. Expressing incredulity, she said, “But that afternoon, we were back in the office.” Not until the next day, Tuesday, was the Hart Building ordered closed. What did Feingold’s staff do that Monday afternoon? The tension was heavy, “so we tried to get people to relax.” Feingold’s old campaign ads were notoriously funny. “We crowded into the senator’s office—he was away. We replayed his ads and kept everyone laughing.”