The Anthrax Letters: The Attacks That Shocked America (34 page)

Then in February 1998 two men were arrested in Las Vegas, on suspicion of possessing vials of anthrax. One of them, Larry Wayne Harris, had been found guilty of mail fraud in 1995 after ordering bubonic plague bacteria from a microbiology supply company. They were rumored to be traveling east to release the germs in the New York City subway. The story later proved false, and the vials turned out to contain a harmless veterinary anthrax vaccine, but articles about bioterrorism and the public’s vulnerability were rampant. Later, other officials, including President Clinton, were issuing their own alarming pronouncements. While saying he did not want to cause “unnecessary panic,” Clinton told a reporter that more than any other threat the possibility of a germ attack “keeps me awake at night.”

The hyperbolic statements were intended to rouse people, especially other decision makers, from complacency about the threat of biological weapons. But the statements created another risk. They heightened the chances that unsavory people would get ideas they would not otherwise have had. The drumbeat of publicity about anthrax hoaxes, coupled with official warnings, appears to have had that unpleasant effect. The dramatic increase in the number of hoax incidents seemed to parallel the increased media attention to the subject.

We are left with a difficult paradox. Until the 1997 B’nai B’rith anthrax hoax, bioterrorism threats by mail had been almost unheard of. But subsequent copycats threats, and the disruptions they prompted, were widely reported. Along with well-intended warnings by government leaders, they generated an epidemic of false threats. Could the idea for the real anthrax letters in 2001 have been seeded by the spate of hoax letters and the publicity about them? The possibility poses an agonizing dilemma. It challenges the treasured ideal of unfettered reporting in the face of life-threatening consequences.

Just who was making those hoax threats?

Bloomington is the home of Indiana University, the state’s flagship institution of higher education. The town also gained notoriety on November 10, 1998, when Bloomington High School South’s 1,800 students were evacuated from the school building. The order came after the principal, Jim Rose, opened a note containing powder and a message that he had been exposed to anthrax. The threat turned out to be a prank by two 16-year-old boys. Convicted in juvenile court of conspiring to make a false report, the boys were put on probation and ordered to perform 80 hours of public restitution work. (In the days before the prank, highly publicized anthrax threats had been received at a Catholic church and an abortion clinic in Indianapolis.)

Five weeks later, on Friday morning, December 18, 1998, an anonymous telephone call to the Bankruptcy Court in Woodland Hills, California, warned that anthrax had been released in the building’s air-conditioning system. About 150 firefighters, police, medical responders, and federal agents arrived on the scene and evacuated the building. Some 90 courthouse employees were quarantined in the parking lot for 8 hours until the building was deemed safe.

One of the canceled court hearings that day involved charges that Harvey Craig Spelkin had failed to attend earlier proceedings brought by a former employer. Spelkin, 53, was an accountant from Calabasas, outside Los Angeles. The employer alleged that Spelkin had embezzled $100,000 from him. In the course of an interview by the FBI, a court staffer mentioned Spelkin’s past absences and, when confronted, Spelkin admitted making the telephone call.

Following his conviction in early 1999 for threatening to use a weapon of mass destruction, Spelkin was sentenced in July to one night in jail and 400 hours of community service. He was also ordered to pay more than $600,000 to cover the costs of the police and fire department operations. Spelkin’s effort had taken place amid a rash of anthrax hoaxes in the Los Angeles area that had received heavy newspaper and television coverage.

Newark, California is on the east side of San Francisco Bay, across from the better-known Palo Alto. About 1:30 p.m. on December 29, eleven days after Spelkin’s publicized phone call, a 911 call was made to the Newark police station. “There are 400 people in this building and anthrax has been released,” the anonymous caller said. The call was traced to WorldPac, a Newark auto parts shipping company. HAZMAT crews responded immediately but could find no evidence of anthrax. When police and FBI agents played a tape of the conversation to the company’s supervisors, they recognized the voice as belonging to an employee, Robert Alinea Peterson.

During an interview with the FBI, Peterson admitted to making the call. His reason? He wanted to leave work early but was concerned about losing his job because of his past absenteeism. Months later, in a plea bargain, Peterson was placed on probation. According to court documents, he had been inspired to make the anthrax threat by the extensive coverage of recent anthrax hoaxes, especially in California. In a February 8, 2001, article in the Toronto
Globe and Mail
, Gary Ackerman and Jeffrey Allan noted that anthrax hoaxes in the United States seemed to be coming in waves. “This suggests,” they wrote, “that the media’s reporting of an initial event may lead to copycat hoaxes.”

While these hoaxers made one-time threats, others have been responsible for multiple scares. On January 12, 2000, the
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
reported on a spate of incidents:

The targeted establishments were as varied as those in the rest of the nation. One was Bullen Middle School in Kenosha, where 800 students were evacuated. Another was the Community Adoption Agency in Manitowoc, where a letter warned: “This is anthrax—you will die.” Yet another was to the Affiliated Pregnancy Counseling Service in Racine, which was described in the
Journal Sentinel
as “an all-volunteer, non-profit Christian agency that opposes abortion.”

FBI special agent Brian Manganello, who was based in Milwaukee, was frustrated. “It’s running the gamut just like last year, abortion clinics, schools, hospitals, health care providers, pro-life agencies. It doesn’t seem to be a sensible pattern,” he said. Then came a break in the Milwaukee-area cases. Toward the end of the month, police announced they had arrested Mickey Sauer, 25, a resident of Kenosha. He was charged with mailing 17 anthrax threats to area targets. He later pled guilty to sending the letters between January 5 and 18, 2000. In September he was sentenced to 21 months in prison. His motive was not reported. A Kenosha police officer described him to me simply as “a local nut.”

Anthrax hoax threats continued apace into the fall of 2001. Despite periodic announcements that a perpetrator had been apprehended, most cases remain unsolved. Out of some 40 indictments there had been only 20 convictions. Moreover, the nature of the targets continued to vary. Although abortion clinics were disproportionately targeted, they were a minority in the overall pool that included antiabortion groups, nightclubs, churches, schools, stores, hospitals, post offices, courthouses, news media offices, even FBI offices.

The precise number of anthrax hoaxes between the time of the B’nai B’rith incident in 1997 and the anthrax letters in the fall of 2001 was unclear. After mid-1999, when an FBI spokesperson reported a rate of a couple hundred a year, the bureau did not release specific figures. Subsequently, media coverage of hoaxes also declined, in part because they were no longer “news.” But after October 2001 the situation changed. With the discovery of actual spores in the mail, bioterrorism threats of all sorts were receiving heightened attention. Newspapers again were giving widespread coverage to anthrax hoaxes. Indeed, there were many more of them to cover. On November 8, 2001, Senator Joe Biden announced that in the previous 8 weeks the FBI had responded to more than 7,000 suspicious anthrax letters.

Jason Pate, an analyst with the Monterey Institute of International Studies, believes the actual number of anthrax hoaxes has been far fewer than the FBI’s figures. He heads a project that monitors reports of terrorism incidents and says that in the wake of the anthrax letters there may have been tens of thousands of false alarms. But among them were “perhaps only 1,000 actual anthrax hoaxes/threats worldwide.” He explained the discrepancy:

Whether the number is many thousands, as the FBI suggests, or about 1,000, as Pate believes, it is clear that the number of hoaxes mushroomed after the anthrax letters in 2001.

Generalizations about the hoax perpetrators according to motive or personality are elusive. But the characteristics of at least one hoaxer seem oddly similar to those of other notorious terrorists.

Among the hoax culprits who have been found, Clayton Lee Waagner is distinctive and not only for the huge quantity of threat letters he sent. Unlike the mix of pranksters and ne’er-do-wells who sought aggrandizement for themselves, he terrorized in the name of a larger purpose. Waagner holds a world view that justifies killing people for a deeply held cause—to save the “unborn.” His motivation resembles others who murdered for an ostensibly higher purpose. Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, killed with mailed bombs as a statement against modern technology. Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, destroyed a federal building and its occupants because he despised the U.S. government. Mohammed Atta led the airline attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in opposition to democratic and Western values.

Soon after September 11, 2001, Dr. Jerrold Post interviewed Atta’s professors at the University of Hamburg. Post is an expert on political psychology at George Washington University. Atta’s teachers told Post that until Atta visited Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, he had been “dedicated to his studies, was polite, engaged, bright.” Like Kaczynski and McVeigh, a middle-class intelligent young man became a murderous zealot.

Clayton Waagner proudly labeled himself a terrorist on the Web site of the Army of God in June 2001, five months before he sent the letters. Moreover, he threatened death to people who failed to respond to his admonition to cease abortion activities. Dennis Roddy, a reporter for the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
, has interviewed and corresponded with Waagner. In an e-mail to me, Roddy spoke of Waagner with awe: “Clayton is very smart, very clever, selfeducated and if I were going to steal a car, I would want him along for the advice. His capacity for staying hidden and keeping himself afloat on the run is utterly amazing.”

Roddy is not alone in his reaction. A government attorney who has worked with Waagner found him no less compelling. The attorney had spoken about him with his previous lawyer and with judges who presided over his case. “They all found him impressive,” said the attorney, who requested anonymity. The attorney described Waagner to me as “an extremely nice man in terms of his conduct, extremely polite. He is a gentleman to work with.” As the attorney warmed to his subject, he became even more effusive: “Waagner is very clear about what he has done. In that sense it’s refreshing. He truly believes in his cause. Look, I consider myself very liberal and I don’t believe what he believes in. But after you talk to him for a while and hear his sincerity, you almost question yourself.”